Half of the AI proposals landing in our inbox right now want to automate the wrong jobs. The bottleneck on most growth-stage channels isn’t the output. It’s the signal. Removing the human who was producing the signal because they were “slow” is how you accidentally automate yourself blind.
The test we run before we recommend an automation: if this job disappears, does the team still know what it needs to know to make the next decision? If yes, automate. If no, the job wasn’t slowness. It was upstream cognition disguised as throughput.
A worked example: replacing the human who watches every paid placement at launch saves four hours a week. Replacing the human who flags the campaigns that quietly break a week in saves you the campaign.