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. That order is the lean move — delete waste before you automate what remains (further reading on muda, no borrowed numbers).
- In most engagements at least 1 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 4 hours to assemble. 2 of the 6 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. Deleting unread work first, then automating what remains, is the same discipline as the rest of the AI Agents & Automation lane.
