AI & Automation
Business Process Automation: What to Automate First
How to choose the first process to automate, what to leave alone, and how to tell whether it paid off.
A2S Venture team · November 1, 2026
Look for repeated, rule-based work
The best first candidates happen every day, follow the same steps and involve copying information between systems. Invoice entry, lead routing and status updates are common examples.
Ask your team which task they would happily never do again. They usually know exactly where the time goes.
Leave messy processes for later
Automation makes a process faster, not better. If people disagree on how a task should work, or the exceptions outnumber the normal cases, fix the process first.
Automating a broken process only produces the same mistakes more quickly.
Measure before and after
Write down how long the task takes today and how often it goes wrong. Measure the same two numbers a month after launch.
If they have not improved, you will know early, while it is still cheap to change course.