Level 2: Set the air gap
Workflow Audit & AI Automation Planning
Know exactly what to build, in what order, and what it is worth
A structured look at how work actually moves through your business, ending in a costed, sequenced plan you can act on (with me or without me).
- Typical duration
- Two to three weeks
- Investment
- Fixed fee
- Scoped after a free discovery call. The plan is yours to keep and to take anywhere.
- Tier
- 2 of 4
The problem
Automating the wrong process is worse than automating nothing: you spend the budget, you burn the goodwill, and the bottleneck moves somewhere less visible. Most failed AI projects were doomed at the planning stage, not the building stage.
What you walk away with
A written plan showing every workflow worth automating, ranked by value against effort, with the ones you should not automate explicitly called out and explained.
Included
What you actually get
Process mapping
How work really moves — including the spreadsheets, group chats and workarounds that never appear on the official diagram.
Systems and data audit
What your tools can actually integrate with, where the data lives, and what is genuinely locked behind a vendor.
Ranked opportunity register
Every candidate scored on time recovered, error reduction, effort and risk, so the sequence is obvious.
Model and hosting recommendation
Frontier API, open-weight on your own hardware, or no model at all — decided per workflow, with the reasoning written down.
Costed implementation roadmap
What to build first, what it should cost, and what has to be true before it can start.
The do-not-automate list
The processes where automation would add risk or cost without returning anything. Knowing these saves more money than most builds.
Right for you if
- Businesses with more automation ideas than capacity to judge them
- Owners who have been quoted for a build and want an independent read before signing
- Teams where the same manual work keeps reappearing in different departments
How it runs
The shape of the engagement
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Interviews with the people doing the work
Week 1Not just management. The person who rebuilds the report every Monday knows more about the bottleneck than anyone above them.
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Systems and data review
Week 1–2What integrates, what does not, and what the license agreement actually permits.
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Scoring and sequencing
Week 2Every opportunity scored the same way, so the priority order is defensible rather than a matter of taste.
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Plan walkthrough
Week 3I walk you and your team through the plan line by line, and leave the document with you regardless of what you decide next.
PDF checklist
The Workflow Audit Checklist
The same structured checklist I use on paid audits: how to map what your team really does, how to score an opportunity on value against effort, and how to spot the processes that should never be automated. Run it yourself, or use it to judge whoever you hire.
- The eleven questions that surface the real bottleneck
- A scoring sheet for ranking opportunities without arguing about it
- The three tests a process must fail before you automate it
- A one-page summary template to take to your team
Questions about this tier
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That is a completely normal outcome and the audit is priced on that basis. The plan is a standalone document you own outright — take it to an internal team, another consultant, or leave it on a shelf until the timing is better.
I would rather you have a good plan you act on later than a rushed build you regret now.
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No. Every audit includes an explicit do-not-automate list, and it is usually one of the most valuable pages in the document. Some processes are too low volume to justify the effort, some carry risk that automation multiplies, and some are the part of the job people actually enjoy.
The natural next step
Custom-built In-house AI Automation Solutions
The plan tells you what to build. This is where it gets built — starting with the single highest-value workflow rather than all of them at once.