The Most Expensive Work Is the Most Boring
Think about who does your admin. It isn’t an admin department, not really. It’s your finance lead formatting a report, your best manager writing up minutes, you at nine in the evening moving numbers into a spreadsheet. The invisible cost isn’t the task. It’s that your most capable people are the ones absorbing it.
This work almost never gets reviewed, because nobody owns it. It accumulated. A funder asked for a return, so a spreadsheet appeared. Two systems didn’t talk, so someone bridged them by hand. A report was useful once, so it’s produced monthly a decade later. Every one of those decisions made sense on the day it was made, and together they’ve built a quiet second job that sits on top of everyone’s real one.
Automate Admin Tasks First
The work AI takes over most reliably follows a simple test: could you write the instructions on a single page? If yes, it’s a candidate. In most organisations that means pulling information out of documents, summarising what came in, keeping trackers current, producing meeting notes and follow-ups, and drafting the routine correspondence that fills the gaps between everything else.
What fails the test is just as useful to know. Anything requiring a judgement call across conflicting information, anything where being wrong carries real consequence, anything that depends on context living only in someone’s head. Those stay with people, and they should. The aim isn’t to automate a job. It’s to strip out the mechanical layer wrapped around it so the judgement gets the time it deserves.
This Isn’t Theoretical
One consumer products company automated its content production, planning and reporting and got 25% to 40% of the time back, while doubling its speed to market (BCG, 2025). Across functions more broadly, a majority of organisations using AI now report falling costs where it’s deployed (McKinsey, 2025). The pattern repeats because the work repeats. That’s the whole point.
And the benefit compounds in a way a one-off saving doesn’t. A task done weekly by four people is a task automated once and saved every week thereafter, for everyone, without anyone needing to remember to do it. Speed matters here too. When a report takes minutes rather than days, people start asking for it when they actually need it, which changes how decisions get made rather than simply making the old process cheaper.
The Hours Come Back as Better Work
Here’s the finding worth holding onto: when organisations measure where the saved time goes, it most often goes into entirely new activity, not empty desks (McKinsey, 2025). The person freed from the tracker starts improving the process behind it. The manager who stops writing minutes starts running better meetings.
Automation doesn’t shrink the job. It gives people back the parts of it they wanted in the first place, and you’ll know it’s working long before it shows up in a report, because someone will tell you they got their Friday afternoon back.
