# What to automate first, a scoring tool

Pick a task your team repeats every week and answer five quick questions. You get a plain answer on whether it is worth automating, what helps and what to watch. Score up to four tasks and it tells you where to start.

## Want a second opinion on this

Send it to me and I will reply with what I would start with and why. Nothing is sent until you press the button.

Your name

Work email  Anything I should know  Send this to Alexey

## How the score works

Each task gets points for five things. How much of the week it takes, whether it arrives in the same format each time, whether the rules are written down, whether you keep past examples to test against, and how easy a mistake is to catch. The most a task can score is 14.

The questions are the ones that decide whether a project works. Volume makes it worth doing. A regular format and written rules make it possible. Past examples make it testable. The cost of a mistake decides how much a person stays involved.

## What the answers mean

A strong place to start is frequent work that follows rules and has past examples to test against. Run it alongside the team first, so its work can be compared with theirs before it acts on anything.

Keep a person deciding means the work is mostly judgement. The AI gathers the facts and suggests, and a person makes the call.

Too small to be worth it means the task takes under two hours a week, so a form, a template or a simple script will fix it for less. Collect examples first means no past examples are kept, and without real ones there is no honest way to test what you build.

## Using it with an AI assistant

If you work with an AI assistant, it can ask you the same five questions in a chat. Assistants that connect to tools can use the free one at shurco.ai/mcp, which scores the task the same way and gives back a link.

The link opens your answer on this page, ready to send to me. Nothing reaches me until you press send yourself.

## What it leaves out

It is a first sort, not a design. It does not know your systems, how clean your data is or how the team feels about the work, and each of those can change the order. Use it to choose what to look at properly.

Nothing you choose leaves your browser unless you press send.

## Common questions

### What should a business automate first with AI?

Work that is frequent, follows rules someone could write down, arrives in a fairly regular form and has past examples to test against. Order entry, timesheet checking, quote preparation and report compilation are common first choices. Avoid starting with rare tasks or work that is mostly judgement.

### Which tasks should not be automated with AI?

Tasks that take very little time, tasks where nobody can state the rules, and decisions where a mistake is costly and hard to catch. For the last kind, use an agent to prepare the decision and keep a person making it.

### How do I know if a task is big enough to automate?

Measure it for one real week. If the team spends only an hour or two on it, a simpler fix such as a form or a script is usually better value. The ROI calculator on this site works out the payback for larger tasks.

### Is the scoring tool free?

Yes. It runs in your browser, and nothing is sent anywhere unless you choose to send the result to me.

## Useful next[PlaybookHow to build a business case for AI automationA finance director does not approve AI. They approve a measured task, an honest cost and a way to tell whether it worked. Here is the one page that gets a yes, and the numbers to put on it.](https://shurco.ai/guides/business-case-for-ai-automation/)[GuideAI agent pricing in 2026, what vendors actually chargeVendors now charge for agents by the conversation, the outcome, the action or the credit. Here are the published prices, what each unit really means, and how to compare them on your own workload.](https://shurco.ai/guides/ai-agent-pricing/)

## Field notes on this[OperationsRun a Manual Work Inventory in One Week and Know What to Automate First](https://shurco.ai/insights/run-a-manual-work-inventory-in-one-week-and-know-what-to-automate-first/)[StrategyYour First AI Win Should Be Boring and Repetitive](https://shurco.ai/insights/your-first-ai-win-should-be-boring-and-repetitive/)[StrategyWhen a Script Beats an Agent and You Should Say So](https://shurco.ai/insights/when-a-script-beats-an-agent-and-you-should-say-so/)[OperationsMap the Manual Work Before You Build the Agent](https://shurco.ai/insights/map-the-manual-work-before-you-build-the-agent/)

## More free tools[Free toolAI automation ROI calculatorPut in the hours a task takes, what an hour costs and what the system would cost to build and run. It shows the hours returned to the team and how long the automation takes to pay for itself.](https://shurco.ai/tools/ai-automation-roi-calculator/)[Free toolFlow efficiency and cycle time calculatorTwo numbers that show where time really goes. Flow efficiency shows how much of an item's life is waiting, and Little's Law turns work in progress into the time a new item takes to get through.](https://shurco.ai/tools/flow-efficiency-calculator/)[Free toolLLM API pricing compared, updated dailyWhat every major AI model costs per million tokens, checked every morning, with a calculator for your own monthly bill.](https://shurco.ai/tools/llm-api-pricing/)

## Want the real numbers for your process

I build and run production AI agents that take repetitive work off operational teams. [Send me the task and I will tell you honestly whether it is worth automating.](https://shurco.ai/#contact)

Web version https://shurco.ai/tools/what-to-automate-first/