Find the hidden cost of repetitive work in your company — and the growth it's blocking.
1
Surface the Workflow
Pick one question below to help focus your thinking, then describe the workflow.
If you could clone one employee to just handle their most repetitive work, who would it be — and what would the clone do?
Who is the most expensive person on your team who regularly does work you could train a $20/hour employee to do?
Where are you losing deals or customers because something took too long?
What would you do more of — if it didn't cost you more headcount?
If I tripled your inbound leads tomorrow, where would your operation fall apart first?
What did you plan to do this year that got deprioritized because your team was too busy with day-to-day work?
What's the repetitive work? Who does it? What are the steps? Be specific.
2
How Strong Is This Opportunity?
The hiring test: If you hired a smart new employee tomorrow — no industry experience, but fast and great at following instructions — could you hand them a written procedure and have them produce something useful in their first week?
If yes, this is a strong AI agent candidate.
Check the signals that apply. The more that are true, the stronger the opportunity.
The work is mostly reading, writing, analyzing, or moving information
It happens on a predictable rhythm — daily, weekly, or monthly
You could write down the rough steps on one page
If the output was 80% right and a human polished it in 10 minutes, that would be useful
If this work didn't get done for a week, someone would notice
3
Reveal the Hidden Cost
Don't overthink it. Your gut is close enough. We're uncovering a cost you've never isolated.
per year — buried in payroll, invisible, untracked
Your Math
That's a salary's worth of budget consumed by one repetitive workflow that nobody tracks.
4
Calculate the Impact
Some of this workflow is pure processing — gathering, drafting, formatting, moving data. AI can handle that. The rest is judgment, relationships, nuance — that stays with your person.
Think: data gathering, drafting, formatting, copying/pasting, following steps
~75% processing
Mostly repetitive — AI does the heavy lifting, person reviews
~50% processing
Half & half — AI handles prep, person handles thinking
~30% processing
Mostly judgment — AI handles tedious parts, person does hard parts
Hours / week returned
0
to your team
Hours / year returned
0
redeployed toward growth
Your person walks in Monday morning and the processing is already done. What used to take hours takes minutes.
Setup (one-time)
$5k–$15k
Discovery, scoping, build, deploy
Monthly cost
$500–$2k/mo
No benefits. No PTO. Works 24/7. Improves every quarter.
Current
With AI Agent
Monthly workflow cost
—
—
Hours / month on this work
—
—
Monthly savings
—
5
The Compound Effect
You did this for one workflow. How many more like it exist across your departments — sales, operations, finance, delivery? Most companies find 5 to 15.
5 workflows
Total locked capacity per year
$0
across your organization
If you freed all of that capacity, what's the biggest thing your company could do that it can't today?
6
Your Opportunity
Here's what you discovered in the last few minutes.
One workflow costs you
$0
per year
↓
Across your company
$0
locked in repetitive work
↓
You said you'd use it to
"—"
Your Guiding Question
This is the question that helped you frame the workflow.
Qualification Assessment
Based on the signals you checked, this workflow is rated as:
—
— signals checked out of 5
Next step: Email yourself a copy so you can revisit this later (or forward it to a teammate).
Email Yourself a Copy
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Want to explore this further?
Most Vistage members find 3-5 workflows like this. A quick conversation can help you prioritize and build a plan. No pitch, just strategy.
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