10 Time-Consuming Business Tasks That AI Can Automate Today
AI has rapidly become an integral component for thousands of businesses across the world for the day-to-day running of their operations. According to McKinsey, an astonishing 88% of businesses now use AI in some capacity, with 7% already fully-scaled when it comes to their AI integration.
Source: McKinsey
One of the main motivators behind using AI agents is to automate day-to-day high-friction, low-value work that would’ve previously taken a team of human workers a long time to complete. They are now sophisticated enough to be consistently moved from testing and pilot programmes and becoming fully-fledged productivity tools, often with complex goals and objectives.
This is great news for businesses looking to increase output and decrease costs.
In this article, we’ll be taking a look at ten of the most common use-cases for AI within business operations. We’ll highlight the reasons why we believe certain tasks are better suited to AI automation than others. And we’ll round off with some common mistakes to avoid when the time comes to implement your own AI agents.
What Makes a Task a Good Fit for An AI Agent?
With so much power and potential now so easily accessible, business leaders may be forgiven for believing that AI agents are already suitable for all types of business operations, regardless of volume or complexity.
However, this isn’t always the case. There are still a handful of shortcomings that AI isn’t able to fully address, particularly those related to more complex human emotions such as empathy and nuance. And if the datasets that AI is trained on are messy or incomplete, then the output is often skewed, which can have weighty consequences on a business.
So how can a business leader determine whether AI is suitable for a given task?
Best-Fit Characteristics
The types of jobs and operations where AI can be a huge benefit are tasks that feel like digital busywork for very little value. When making your decision, look for the following core traits for AI suitability:
- High-volume with repeatable steps: Processes that are well-documented with clear sequential workflows and need to be performed frequently throughout the day form the bulk of AI automation.
- Clearly defined: There should be no ambiguity about the purpose of the AI tool and for when the task is seen as finished.
- Information silos: Any task that involves transferring data from one source to another is a good candidate for AI agents and automation.
- Identifiable exceptions: Tasks where there is a clear entry point for human intervention (in the event of an issue) are suitable for agents.
Poor-Fit Characteristics
As mentioned, AI is not yet suitable for all operations within a business. If a task has an element with one of the following, it should remain in human hands:
- Ambiguous outcomes: A task where there are dozens of potential outcomes, where the solution relies on gut instinct or unwritten office policies, is not suitable for AI agents.
- High-stakes judgement: As the task becomes more embroiled in financial, legal, or ethical stakes, it becomes much more difficult to justify AI inclusion. Decisions that could have huge consequences on business integrity should remain with human leaders.
- A missing ‘Source of Truth’: If a task is having to rely on data that needs to be pulled from multiple sources, is not standardized, and often outdated, then the AI will not be able to guarantee optimal outcomes.
Top 10 Tasks for AI Agent Automation
Now that we’ve touched upon what tasks are (and are not) suitable for AI agents and automation, it’s time to take a look at ten of the most important tasks where AI can be of huge benefit. These are tasks that the vast majority of businesses, whether you’re a growing SME or an established enterprise, can deploy AI automation for.
- Inbox and Ticket Triage
What the agent does: The agent acts as the first point of call for all shared email inboxes and tickets for IT and support teams. It will read each inquiry to ascertain intent and priority, extract key data (such as a customer ID found within a CRM), send the inquiry to the appropriate department or individual, and suggest possible next steps.
Tools: Gmail/Outlook (or preferred email provider), Zendesk, Freshdesk, Jira, ServiceNow, internal knowledge databases and resources
Guardrails: Disable ‘auto-close’ for tickets, flag escalations for high-value accounts, facilitate human approval for high-priority incidents.
KPIs: Time-to-first response, backlog reduction, routing accuracy.
- Customer support escalation
What the agent does: In a similar vein to the previous task, the agent will assist human agents by pulling data from customer accounts, summarizing key friction points, and drafting a proposed resolution for the human support worker to offer the customer or client.
Tools: Salesforce/Hubspot, Zendesk, Stripe (or preferred billing platform), Slack/Teams (or preferred communication platform).
Guardrails: Human-in-the-loop (HITL) oversight for all customer-facing communication, restricted access to raw payment data, full audit logging of agent actions.
KPIs: Average handle time (AHT), escalation-to-resolution rate, customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.
- Meeting Scheduling and Organization
What the agent does: The agent will manage back-and-forth scheduling arrangements between parties, providing timely alert reminders when necessary. It will build briefing docs and agendas for meetings and transcribe real-time meeting communication for later access and summation.
Tools: Google Calendar, Outlook, CRM-platform, Notion/Google Docs, Granola (or preferred transcription app)
Guardrails: No external invites without final approval from the host, strict filtering to ensure internal-only notes don’t leak to clients.
KPIs: Scheduling cycle time, ‘no-show’ rate, average prep hours saved, transcription accuracy rates.
- Sales Lead Qualification and Enrichment
What the agent does: The agent will verify and validate all potential customer and client leads to determine which are ‘hot’ leads by checking demographic data and intent signals. It will route these strong leads to sales representatives and draft personalized outreach emails based on recent activity (e.g. website visits).
Tools: HubSpot/Salesforce, ZoomInfo/Apollo, Marketo, LinkedIn
Guardrails: Strict compliance with outreach volume rules, human approval required for first touch emails, personally identifiable information (PII) protection.
KPIs: Speed-to-lead improvements, lead-to-opportunity conversion rate increase, sales representative reply rates.
- Proposal/Request for Proposal (RFP) Documentation
What the agent does: Agents will scan through RFP and invitation-to-tender (ITT) sources and match requirements against your existing knowledge bases. It will assemble a Draft 0 based on what the RFP is requesting and will ensure the language used matches legal standards.
Tools: Microsoft Word, Google Docs, SharePoint, and your preferred Deal Desk system.
Guardrails: Using only ‘gold-standard’ content libraries when drafting, mandatory human legal and compliance review process, strict version control.
KPIs: Turnaround time for first drafts, win-rate uplift.
- Employee Onboarding Coordination
What the agent does: Once a contract is signed, the agent will trigger IT to provision hardware ready for the start date of new employees. It will create payroll records, schedule induction meetings, and gather critical company policies and procedures. It will also notify managers in the event of the process stalling.
Tools: Workday/BambooHR, Ohta/Azure AD, Jira, Google Calendar.
Guardrails: Role-based access controls at each step, human approval for any high-level permission changes, clear escalation paths if workflow stalls.
KPIs: Onboarding task completion rates.
- Procurement Requests and Management
What the agent does: The agent will collect details for new purchase requests and will check them against existing company policies and standards. It will flag and query missing fields on requests, and route them to budget personnel and management once completed.
Tools: Coupa (or your preferred finance workflow app), Bitsight (vendor risk tool).
Guardrails: Hard spend threshold limits that require CFO intervention if challenged, exceptions automatically routed to a human procurement lead.
KPIs: Cycle time from request to procurement officer, percentage of clean requests sent for approval, policy compliance rates.
- Invoicing and Payment Reconciliation
What the agent does: The agent will ingest invoices, corroborate information across the invoice, purchase order, and goods received notification, and flag discrepancies. It will also update accounting systems for payment approval, carry out remittance checks on accounts, and send automated, scheduled payment reminders.
Tools: Oracle/NetSuite, QuickBooks (or preferred invoicing platform), OCR tools, and vendor portals.
Guardrails: No payment triggered to vendors without human approval, strict segmentation of duties with access permissions, exhaustive audit trails for every transaction and reconciliation.
KPIs: Cost-per-invoice processed, exception rates, Days Payable Outstanding (DPO) accuracy.
- Internal Reporting
What the agent does: Instead of just sending a chart to managers, the agent will pull real-time and historical data from company sources to draft reports. It will carry out data validation as part of this reporting to make sure its final output is accurate. It will highlight anomalies and may recommend next steps based on the data.
Tools: Tableau/PowerBI (or your preferred analytics solution), Snowflake (or your preferred data cloud), Google Slides.
Guardrails: Use only certified data sets, flag all anomalies for human investigation, prevent ‘hallucinated’ explanations by mandating links to source data.
KPIs: Analyst hours saved, stakeholder satisfaction scores.
- IT Access Requests
What the agent does: When an employee needs access to a tool, the agent will verify their role and cross-reference employee data with access permissions, as well as checking security policies. They will route requests to the manager and will automatically provision access once approved.
Tools: Okta, Active Directory, HRIS
Guardrails: Least-privileged access levels by default, mandatory multi-factor authentication for any change and request, automated weekly audit reports (including potential unauthorized access incidents) as well as reports on all granted permissions.
KPIs: Time-to-access (TTA), reductions in manual IT tickets.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Automating Tasks
As with most changes in implementation across the business landscape, AI is something that needs to be introduced with proper planning and attention to detail if you want to make the most out of its capabilities. While there is no doubt that the tech is powerful, it isn’t infallible and will cause operational headaches without human and structural elements to keep things on track.
Some of the most common mistakes that businesses make when implementing automation and AI agents include:
- Non-standardized data inputs: Data is the lifeblood of AI and automation. If your CRM is littered with half-filled records and your ticketing system has no required fields from which to pull data, the AI will spend half its time guessing with what it’s got.
- Autonomy too early: There will be a temptation to relinquish control to the AI as soon as it’s been set up. But AI agents are active learners; they will improve over time and might not be fully optimal initially. It’s why a staggered permission model is often a good approach.
- Silent failure: AI is not always clear about announcing things when it starts to go wrong or if it encounters errors. If you have not set up some form of monitoring layer, your AI may end up silently doing the wrong things without you being aware of it happening.
- Lack of ownership: AI agents will begin to deteriorate over time as updates are installed and datasets change. Businesses will occasionally overlook this, and won’t have someone in place to take ownership of keeping the AI optimized.
Final Thoughts
The transition to AI agents and automation is one of the most fundamental shifts in business operations in decades. Their performance capabilities are growing broader with each passing year, with the move to robust agentic systems seemingly an inevitability.
By automating the ten tasks we’ve listed, you’ll be eliminating the dreaded coordination tax that has stifled business productivity for many years and slowed revenues. And when combined with appropriate guardrails informed by established business policies and compliance, you’ll have a reliable digital workforce to take your business into the future and beyond.
At Intersect AI, we help organizations bridge the gap between siloed systems and autonomous agents with expert consultations available from some of the brightest minds in the industry. The infrastructure to deploy these agents across existing tools is already here, and we’ll make it our mission to make it happen for you.
Get in touch to begin your AI integration journey today.
FAQs
Do AI agents replace employees?
AI agents are better served to replace tasks rather than employees outright. They are most effective when they augment a human worker, taking care of the mundane, busy-body jobs that drain a lot of time and energy from the employee. This often gives employees the chance to spend their time on more productive tasks.
What’s the difference between an agent and a chatbot?
A chatbot’s primary role is conversational and passive; it’s built to return information based on queries from customers and clients. An AI agent is proactive; it will take a customer query and action all of the steps necessary in order to reach a satisfactory resolution.
What should we automate first?
Start by keeping things simple when first bringing in AI agents. Look for high-volume, low-risk tasks where the employee’s main role is largely copying and pasting information from one source to another. Starting here will allow you to measure simple KPIs to gauge success and potential ROI.
How do we keep agents secure and compliant?
You will need to carefully manage your permission to make sure your agent remains as secure as possible. The principle of least privilege, audit trails, and consistent human-in-the-loop protocols are all great ways of making sure it doesn’t become compromised.