AI Audit of your company: where to start, in one hour

Many business leaders know AI could help them, without knowing where to start. The answer isn't found in lists of trendy tools. It's found in your week. This audit takes one hour, done alone or with a partner, using a sheet of paper or a spreadsheet. It leads to a concrete decision: the task you'll delegate first to an agent.

IThe One-Hour Breakdown

Block one hour on your calendar, away from your phone. A Tuesday morning works better than a Friday evening: the previous week is still fresh in your memory. Keep your calendar, your email inbox, and recent invoices handy: they're your best sources.

IIList your repetitive tasks

A repetitive task comes up at least once a week and is done roughly the same way each time. Don't limit yourself to what seems "technical". Answering the phone to give opening hours, copying an order into a table, writing the same confirmation email: it all counts.

To make sure you don't forget anything, review four families: what touches customers (requests, quotes, follow-ups, responses), suppliers (orders, complaints), administration (invoices, documents, deadlines) and communication (posts, reviews, newsletters). An accounting firm will quickly fill in the line "follow up with customers for missing documents"; a restaurant, "respond to group reservation requests".

IIINote time spent and frustration level

The time spent is counted per week. A five-minute task done ten times a week weighs as much as a fifty-minute task done once. Annoyance also counts, because it's often the task you put off that costs the most: the follow-up never sent, the quote that waits three days.

Keep a simple rating system. Beyond three levels of annoyance, you waste time hesitating between two ratings. The goal is not precision, but ranking: which tasks stand out clearly from the rest.

IVIdentify clear inputs and outputs

It's the most important sorting. An agent succeeds at a task when it knows what comes in and what must come out. Clear input is an email, a form, a table or a readable document. Clear output is a result you can verify at a glance: a draft email, a list, a quote according to a grid.

The right column is not forbidden forever. These tasks require judgment, a history and diplomacy. An agent can help later, by preparing a draft, but they make poor first attempts.

VChoose your first task

Go back to the tasks that passed the screening. Choose the one with the most time spent and annoyance, with low or medium risk. In case of a tie, take the most frequent one: you'll see faster if the agent works. Then describe it in three sentences, in your own words. This description will be the basis of your agent's mission.

Let's take a bakery. The audit brings out two lines: the Friday flour order and responses to cake orders. The second takes more time, but a wrong price or date upsets a customer. The manager therefore starts with the flour order, which comes from a sales table and can be verified in a minute.

Before launching the agent, note the time you spend on this task today. This will be your comparison point in four weeks.

VIHow ABYS's Free AI Audit Helps You

Your audit hour focuses on the inside of the company. ABYS's free AI audit looks at the other side, what your website shows to the outside: you enter your website address and you get a score and leads. It's a useful starting point to complete your table. If you want to go further, the full report costs 99 euros excl. VAT. When your first task is chosen, creating the agent follows a simple path: you describe the task, it asks its questions, proposes a plan and does a dry run before any deployment.