How much of your week is spent doing by hand what a machine should be doing?
Reports assembled in Excel, data carried between two systems, a website updated by hand, messages read and sorted every morning: work that repeats is work that can be automated, with AI doing the judgement wherever its output can be checked.
The problem
The usual pattern is a task that was never designed. It accumulated. Someone exports a report, reformats it in Excel, checks it against a second system, and forwards the result. Someone else reads every message in three channels to find the two that matter. Someone updates the website by editing files by hand. It works because those people know the exceptions, and it breaks when they are on leave. The hours add up quietly, and nobody has written down what the rules actually are.
How we approach it
We map the process as it is actually performed, not as the documentation describes it, and separate the deterministic parts from the parts that genuinely need judgement. Deterministic steps become ordinary code and scheduled workflows, because they have to be auditable. Judgement steps get a language model only where its output can be checked, and where a wrong answer is caught rather than filed. We build on open-source tools wherever we can, and where the data cannot leave your infrastructure the model runs on your own hardware. The measure of success is simple: hours that no longer need a person.
Worked example
A working day, mostly automated
We run our own day this way. Chat history is pulled with an open-source export tool and the issue tracker is read through its API, so nothing is copied by hand. A language model then triages what arrived overnight, drafts the responses and the routine changes, and lays out what actually needs a decision, so a person reviews that list instead of reading everything. Earlier workflows built on n8n did the same for notifications and approvals over Telegram. Most of what used to be a morning of reading and clicking now takes a few minutes of review, and the same pattern transfers directly to a client's reports, spreadsheets and website updates.
What you get
- A written map of the process, including the exceptions nobody had documented
- The running automation, built on open-source tools and deployed on infrastructure you control
- A review queue for everything the system should not decide alone
- Handover documentation, so the system is maintainable without us