If time is your scarcest resource, automation is how you buy it back. Companies are scaling automation and AI across functions, not just in IT. In 2024, processes using generative AI grew ~400% and endpoints 500%, with revenue ops and IT leading adoption; more than 50% of companies now run automations across four or more departments, and 44% of automations are built outside IT teams.

Below is a straightforward, high-signal list of automation ideas you can implement quickly, plus a simple prioritization and rollout plan.

How to prioritize (fast)

  • Score ideas by Impact x Confidence x Effort (ICE). Stack-rank, then pilot.
  • Measure from day one: cycle time, error rate, touches per task, SLA attainment, CSAT, ARR impact, cost-to-serve, and employee NPS.
  • Add guardrails: humans-in-the-loop for exceptions and approvals; audit trails; least-privilege access; PII handling.

Revenue and Growth

1 - Lead capture-to-routing

  • What: Capture form fills, enrich with Clearbit, score, route to SDR, alert in Slack, open account/opportunity in CRM.
  • Metric: Speed-to-lead; conversion to meeting; meeting-to-SQL.
  • Watch-out: Deduplicate leads; respect privacy preferences.

2- Inbound demo triage with AI

  • What: Classify intent with an LLM; auto-schedule high-intent demos; send nurture for low-intent.
  • Metric: Demo no-show rate; conversion to opportunity.
  • Watch-out: Keep humans in the loop for enterprise accounts.

3 - Quote-to-cash handoff

  • What: Close-won triggers provisioning, billing, welcome emails, and project kickoff.
  • Metric: Time from close to live; revenue leakage.
  • Watch-out: Sync product SKUs and pricing between CPQ and billing.

4 - Renewal and expansion nudges

  • What: 90/60/30-day renewal alerts; AI-generated outreach drafts based on usage and health.
  • Metric: Gross/Net revenue retention.
  • Watch-out: Don’t auto-send without AE review for strategic accounts.

5 - Marketing content repurposing

  • What: Turn webinars into blog posts, clips, and social; schedule posts; track UTMs.
  • Metric: Content output per hour; traffic; MQLs.
  • Watch-out: Human edit for brand and accuracy.

Product and Engineering

6 - Customer feedback triage

  • What: Aggregate Intercom/Zendesk/app reviews; auto-tag themes with NLP; route to the right squad.
  • Metric: Time-to-triage; % feedback tagged; cycle time to action.
  • Watch-out: Continuously retrain tags; avoid bias toward loud segments.

7 - Release notes and changelogs

  • What: Pull merged PRs and tickets; draft release notes; push to docs and in-app.
  • Metric: Time to publish; product understanding (help center views).
  • Watch-out: Security review for sensitive changes.

8 - Usage anomaly alerts

  • What: Trigger alerts for drops/spikes in core events; open an investigation ticket.
  • Metric: MTTA/MTTR for product issues.
  • Watch-out: Tune thresholds to minimize alert fatigue.

9 - Beta access and feature flags

  • What: Auto-enroll beta users based on segment; collect feedback; roll back on spike in errors.
  • Metric: Beta engagement; issue rate; rollout velocity.
  • Watch-out: Clear consent and easy opt-out.

10 - Backlog grooming helpers

  • What: Summarize duplicates; cluster related tickets; surface “small wins” with high impact.
  • Metric: Grooming time saved; throughput of small-but-impactful fixes.
  • Watch-out: PM makes final prioritization call.

Customer Success and Support

11 - Tiered ticket routing

  • What: Classify by topic and severity; route to the right team; attach KB suggestions.
  • Metric: First-response time; resolution time; deflection rate.
  • Watch-out: PHI/PII handling and redaction.

12 - Health scoring and playbooks

  • What: Combine product usage, support volume, NPS, and contract data; trigger plays (QBR, training).
  • Metric: Churn risk reduction; NRR.
  • Watch-out: Explainability of scores for CSM trust.

13 - Proactive outreach on usage risk

  • What: Detect declining engagement or stalled onboarding; send tailored guidance; notify CSM.
  • Metric: Time-to-value; activation rate.
  • Watch-out: Avoid over-automation; keep messages helpful.

14 - AI-powered knowledge updates

  • What: After ticket closes, generate KB draft updates; route for review; publish.
  • Metric: KB freshness; deflection rate.
  • Watch-out: Human editorial review is non-negotiable.

Finance and Operations

15 - Invoice processing and 3-way match

  • What: OCR invoices; match to POs and receipts; auto-approve within thresholds.
  • Metric: Processing time; error rate; early payment discounts.
  • Watch-out: Vendor fraud checks.

16 - Expense compliance

  • What: Auto-flag out-of-policy spend; route for manager approval; sync to ERP.
  • Metric: Policy adherence; close time.
  • Watch-out: Transparent rules to avoid employee frustration.

17 - Dunning and collections

  • What: Payment reminders with smart timing; retry logic; escalate to human for key accounts.
  • Metric: DSO; recovery rate.
  • Watch-out: Tone and brand alignment.

18 - Forecast rollups

  • What: Pull pipeline, bookings, churn, and cash; generate forecast summaries; distribute.
  • Metric: Forecast accuracy; manual hours saved.
  • Watch-out: Single source of truth definitions.

HR and IT

19 - Onboarding/offboarding

  • What: Provisioning accounts and access; equipment requests; compliance training; deprovision on exit.
  • Metric: Time-to-productive; deprovisioning SLA.
  • Watch-out: Least privilege; audit logs.

20 - Recruiting pipeline hygiene

  • What: Move candidates based on triggers; schedule interviews; send updates; archive no-shows.
  • Metric: Time-to-hire; candidate NPS.
  • Watch-out: Bias mitigation and consistent messaging.

21 - Access reviews (IAM)

  • What: Quarterly reviews; flag toxic combos; route to managers; revoke stale permissions.
  • Metric: Review completion rate; risk reduction.
  • Watch-out: Evidence collection for audits.

22 - Device compliance

  • What: Auto-remediate OS/version drift; quarantine non-compliant devices; notify users.
  • Metric: Compliance rate; incident rate.
  • Watch-out: Clear comms to reduce disruption.

Data and Governance

23 - PII discovery and redaction

  • What: Detect PII in tickets, call transcripts, docs; auto-redact; log access.
  • Metric: PII exposure incidents; time-to-redact.
  • Watch-out: Regional regulations (GDPR/CCPA).

24 - Data quality checks

  • What: Daily schema validation; null spikes; referential integrity alerts; auto-open issues.
  • Metric: Data defect rate; time-to-detect.
  • Watch-out: Ownership and runbooks for fixes.

25 - AI guardrails and HIL

  • What: Human-in-the-loop for approvals; prompt libraries; evaluation pipelines; usage analytics.
  • Metric: Model error rate; approval cycle time.
  • Watch-out: Avoid shadow AI—centralize governance.

Quick 30/60/90 rollout plan

Days 1–30: Pick 3 “high-ROI, low-risk” automations (e.g., lead routing, onboarding, ticket triage). Define metrics and success thresholds. Ship MVPs with human approvals.

Days 31–60: Expand to Finance and CS (invoice processing, renewal nudges). Add monitoring, error handling, and audit trails. Begin a shared automation backlog and weekly office hours.

Days 61–90: Introduce AI where it’s safe and measurable (content drafts, classification, summarization). Formalize governance: data access, prompt standards, evaluation, incident response.

Tooling notes

Start with what you have: your CRM, help desk, data warehouse, and chat platform all have automation hooks.

For orchestration across apps: iPaaS/automation platforms (e.g., Workato, Zapier, Make, Mulesoft) can handle complexity and governance.

For document/data tasks: OCR, LLMs, and vector search enable reliable classification, extraction, and summarization—keep humans in the loop for anything customer-facing or financial.

What “good” looks like

Clear owners per automation, with SLAs and runbooks.

Monitoring and alerting on failures and drift.

Quarterly reviews to retire, consolidate, or upgrade automations.

Demonstrable impact: hours saved, cycle-time reductions, higher conversion, lower churn.