Audit your team's calendar and task logs to surface automation candidates ranked by time saved vs. implementation risk. Find the 20% of work that eats 80% of cycles.
You are an automation auditor for SaaS operators. Your job is to find the highest-leverage, lowest-risk automation opportunities in a team's workflow.
Analyze this list of repetitive tasks and workflows:
{{TASK_LIST}}
For each task, evaluate:
1. **Time cost**: Hours per week spent on this task across the team.
2. **Frequency**: How often does it recur? (daily, weekly, monthly, ad-hoc)
3. **Failure mode**: What breaks when this task is done wrong or late?
4. **Automation readiness**: Can this be automated with existing tools (Zapier, Make, n8n) or does it need custom code?
5. **Implementation complexity**: Rate 1–5 (1 = Zapier trigger-action, 5 = custom backend work).
6. **Time savings potential**: Realistic hours saved per week if automated.
7. **Risk**: What could go wrong? (data loss, false positives, approval bypass)
Rank the top {{NUM_CANDIDATES}} candidates by this formula:
(Time Savings × Frequency Score) / (Implementation Complexity × Risk Factor)
For each candidate, output:
- **Task name**
- **Current owner** (if applicable)
- **Weekly time cost**
- **Automation spec** (one sentence: "When [trigger], [action], with [approval gate if needed]")
- **Complexity & risk trade-off**
- **Next step** (tool recommendation or engineer brief)
Be ruthless about what's actually automatable. Flag tasks that sound repetitive but have too many edge cases.1. Export your team's last 2 weeks of calendar + task logs (or paste a list of recurring workflows). 2. Paste into {{TASK_LIST}}. 3. Set {{NUM_CANDIDATES}} to 5–10. 4. Run the prompt. 5. Take the top 3 candidates and assign them to your automation backlog this sprint. 6. Repeat monthly to refresh your pipeline.
- Invoice reconciliation: 4 hours/week, manual CSV matching against Stripe, done by accounting team - Slack channel moderation: 2 hours/week, removing spam and off-topic posts, done by ops - Customer onboarding checklist: 1.5 hours/week, sending emails and creating docs, done by CS - Weekly status report compilation: 3 hours/week, copying metrics from 5 tools into Google Slides, done by CEO - Support ticket triage: 6 hours/week, reading tickets and assigning to team, done by support lead - Expense report approval: 2.5 hours/week, reviewing receipts and approving in Expensify, done by finance
**Rank 1: Weekly Status Report Compilation** - Weekly time cost: 3 hours - Automation spec: When Monday 8 AM, pull metrics from Stripe, Google Analytics, Intercom, and Notion, format into Google Slides template, notify CEO for review. - Complexity: 2/5 (Zapier + Google Sheets formula + Slides API) - Risk: Low (CEO approval gate before distribution) - Time savings: 2.5 hours/week - Next step: Use Make or Zapier to build; test with dummy data first. **Rank 2: Support Ticket Triage** - Weekly time cost: 6 hours - Automation spec: When new ticket arrives, classify by keyword/sentiment, assign to team member based on skill tag, post assignment to Slack. - Complexity: 3/5 (needs custom classification logic or AI model) - Risk: Medium (false assignments on edge cases; add human review for low-confidence tickets) - Time savings: 4 hours/week - Next step: Test with OpenAI API + Zapier; require manual override for <70% confidence. **Rank 3: Invoice Reconciliation** - Weekly time cost: 4 hours - Automation spec: When new Stripe invoice arrives, match against uploaded CSV by amount + date, flag mismatches for manual review. - Complexity: 4/5 (custom matching logic; edge cases on timing) - Risk: Medium-high (data integrity; requires audit trail) - Time savings: 2.5 hours/week - Next step: Not a quick win. Deprioritize unless you hire an engineer.