Find your first five AI wins
A one-week audit that turns "we should do something with AI" into a ranked list of five projects worth doing.
- Time
- One week, about 3 hours of your time
- You'll need
- A spreadsheet · Any AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini)
- You'll end up with
- A ranked list of five AI projects, each with the hours it should save and the first step to take.
The steps
- 01
Log the work for five days
Ask everyone on the team to jot down, once a day, the tasks that took more than 15 minutes and felt repetitive. One line each: what it was, how long it took, which tools it touched. Don't judge anything yet.
- 02
Group it into workflows
Paste the log into your AI assistant and ask it to group the entries into workflows, like "quoting", "scheduling" or "chasing invoices", with total hours per week for each.
Prompt Here is a week of task notes from my team. Group them into recurring workflows. For each workflow give: a short name, the tasks it includes, total hours per week, and which tools it touches. Sort by hours. [paste the log]
- 03
Score each workflow
Give every workflow three scores from 1 to 5: hours per week, how repeatable it is (same steps every time?) and how bad a mistake would be. Opportunity = hours × repeatability ÷ risk. High-volume, predictable, low-risk work goes first.
- 04
Pick five and write one sentence each
For the top five, write what "done" looks like in one sentence, for example: "Every quote request gets a draft quote within an hour, which I approve." If you can't write the sentence, the workflow isn't ready yet.
- 05
Start with the smallest of the five
Your first project should be live in two weeks. An early win builds the trust you need for the bigger ones.
What breaks
- Starting with the most exciting idea instead of the most repetitive one.
- Automating a workflow nobody agrees on. Fix the process on paper first.
- Skipping the log and guessing. Owners usually underestimate admin time by half.
Keep it safe
- Remove customer names and account numbers from the log before pasting it into an AI tool.
- Mark any workflow that touches money, contracts or health information as high risk, whatever its score.
How you'll know it worked
- Hours per week logged before and after each project.
- Whether the team still uses it after 30 days.
Do it with Blueprint
AI strategy and workflow automation, sized for small business.
We find where AI pays off in your business, then automate the workflows that eat your week.
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