I Got Hired to Automate an Entire Company
I Got Hired to Automate an Entire Company
The brief was simple - automate everything. The reality was anything but.
When you walk into a company with the mandate to automate their operations, the first instinct is to start with the most painful process. That instinct is wrong. The most painful process is usually painful because it is complex, undocumented, and full of edge cases. Automating it first means you will spend months on something that might fail.
Start with the Boring Stuff
The best automation targets are boring, repetitive, well-understood tasks that nobody wants to do. File organization. Report generation. Data entry between systems. These are not exciting. They are also the ones with the highest success rate and the fastest payback.
The Prioritization Framework
After automating three companies, a pattern emerged:
- High volume, low complexity - automate immediately
- High volume, high complexity - break into smaller automatable pieces
- Low volume, low complexity - automate when you have spare capacity
- Low volume, high complexity - do not automate, just document
Most companies try to start in quadrant four because that is where the CEO feels the most pain. Resist that pressure.
The Human Layer
Every automation needs an escape hatch. Someone has to handle the exceptions, review the edge cases, and fix the automation when it breaks. The companies that succeed at automation are the ones that plan for this from day one. The ones that fail are the ones that assume automation means zero human involvement.
Automation is not about replacing people. It is about giving them better work to do.
Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.