Workflow Automation

Workflow automation is the unglamorous half of AI and usually the half that pays. It takes a process someone repeats every week, quote to invoice, lead intake, supplier document handling, weekly reporting, and rebuilds it so the software does the moving, the copying and the chasing. AI is used only at the steps where judgement is genuinely needed: reading a document, classifying an enquiry, drafting a message for a person to approve.

A workflow automation build is $6,500 to $15,000 and covers one to three workflows over three to six weeks. Common shapes: an accepted quote that creates the job, the invoice in Xero and the client folder without anyone retyping anything; an enquiry that lands in HubSpot already classified, enriched and assigned; supplier invoices read, coded and queued for a human to approve; a Shopify order that triggers fulfilment, accounting and a customer update in one pass; a Monday morning report that builds itself out of Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.

Every build starts by mapping the workflow as it runs today and writing acceptance criteria you sign off before code exists. The automation is then built against your real systems, with error handling, human review points at every step that touches money or reputation, monitoring and alerts so a failure is visible the same day, and a handover session with documentation your team can follow. Where the right workflows are not obvious yet, the $1,500 AI opportunity audit picks them and is credited toward the build.

This suits businesses where a known process is eating known hours: a quoting admin who spends a day a week retyping, an accounts person handling hundreds of supplier documents a month, an ops lead assembling the same report every Monday. It does not suit a process nobody has written down, or one that changes shape every month. Those get mapped in the audit first, because automating an unstable process only makes the mess faster.