5 Repetitive Tasks AI Can Handle for Your Business Today
Every business has them — those tasks that eat up hours every week but don't actually require much thinking. Data entry, email sorting, report generation. Your team does them because they have to, not because they want to.
The good news? AI automation is no longer reserved for enterprises with six-figure budgets. Here are five tasks that small and medium businesses can automate today.
1. Invoice and Receipt Processing
If your team still manually extracts data from invoices and types it into your accounting software, you're wasting hours every week. AI-powered document processing can read invoices (even messy handwritten ones), extract the key fields — supplier name, amount, date, VAT — and push that data straight into Xero, QuickBooks, or whatever you use.
The accuracy is typically above 95%, and for the edge cases, the system flags them for human review instead of guessing.
2. Email Triage and Routing
A shared inbox can become a black hole. AI can categorise incoming emails by intent — new enquiry, support request, invoice, spam — and route them to the right person or folder automatically. It can even draft initial responses to common questions, ready for a human to review and send.
This alone can save a receptionist or office manager 5-10 hours a week.
3. Report Generation
If you're pulling numbers from three different spreadsheets every Monday morning to build a weekly report, that's a perfect automation candidate. Connect your data sources, define your template, and let the system generate the report on a schedule. It arrives in your inbox before you've finished your coffee.
4. Appointment Scheduling and Follow-ups
The back-and-forth of scheduling meetings is a notorious time sink. Beyond just using a booking tool like Cal.com, AI can handle the follow-up sequence — sending reminders, rescheduling no-shows, and updating your CRM with meeting outcomes based on your notes.
5. Data Entry Between Systems
The classic "copy from system A, paste into system B" problem. Whether it's updating your CRM when a deal closes, syncing customer details between platforms, or populating a project management tool from a form submission, these are all tasks that AI workflows handle brilliantly.
Where to Start
Pick the task that wastes the most time relative to its complexity. Usually that's data entry or email triage. Start small, prove it works, then expand. That's exactly the approach we take with our clients — quick wins first, then scale.
If you're curious what automation could look like for your specific situation, book a free call and we'll walk through it together.
