Who is the step for?
Automation projects are usually scoped as a translation exercise: here is what the team does by hand, build a system that does the same thing faster. That framing quietly guarantees you pay to preserve every decision anyone has ever made about the process, including the bad ones.
Walk the process and ask one question at every step: does a customer, a regulator, or the money notice if this stops? If nobody does, the step exists because a former employee once did it that way, and the highest-return change available is to delete it. This is the first move in our AI for Small Business work, and it is the same order we use in AI workflow automation for small business: redesign first, automate second.
- In most engagements at least one step disappears without replacement
- Deleted steps cost nothing to run and nothing to maintain
- What remains is smaller, so the build is cheaper and lands sooner
What this looks like in practice
A team asked us to automate a weekly report that took four hours to assemble. Two of the six sections had not been read by anyone in over a year. We removed them, automated the rest, and the build was half the size originally quoted.