AI gets pitched as a fix for almost anything right now, which makes it harder to spot where it genuinely helps a business rather than just sounding impressive in a pitch deck.
It works well on tasks that are repetitive, rule-based, and currently done manually because nobody’s had time to automate them properly — sorting incoming enquiries, extracting structured data from documents, drafting first-pass responses a person reviews before sending, and flagging anomalies in data that would otherwise need someone scanning a spreadsheet.
It works poorly on tasks that require judgment calls with real consequences, situations with too little historical data to learn from, or anywhere an occasional confident-sounding wrong answer costs more than a slow correct one.
Start with the task someone on your team dreads doing every week, work out exactly what output that task produces, and ask whether AI can reliably produce that output with a human reviewing the result. If the honest answer is “most of the time,” it’s usually still worth building — as a first draft a person checks, not as something left to run alone.