Start with what eats time, not what's "cool"
List the ten activities your team does weekly that take more than 30 minutes: sorting emails, qualifying leads, meeting summaries, translations, generating quotes, searching through documentation. That's where the value is, not in a generic homepage chatbot.
Three patterns that work
- Classification and routing. A model reads a message and decides where it goes (team, priority, reply template). Saves hours, not seconds.
- Structured extraction. From a PDF, email, or contract, pull specific fields (amounts, deadlines, clauses) directly into the CRM/ERP. Removes manual re-entry.
- Context-aware assistant. A chat connected to your data (products, orders, customers) answers the internal team or customers based on company reality, not the public internet.
What's NOT worth it yet
100% generated content for critical decisions, fully autonomous agents without supervision, and fine-tuned models for small volumes. Maintenance cost and hallucination risk outweigh the benefit at low scale. Properly integrating a standard model almost always beats training your own.
The three-month rule
Any automation that doesn't produce measurable value (hours saved, leads qualified faster, fewer errors) in three months — kill it. AI is good at things you can name, not at things you hope for.
Conclusion
Be pragmatic: remove one concrete activity from the team's flow, measure, then scale. A good implementation takes 2–4 weeks, not 6 months — if the process is clear upfront.