Most entrepreneurs have one company that consumes their life. I have four that run without me.

With the most repetitive and least important process. That is where you learn how a model behaves with your data and your people without risking a client. Starting with the critical process “because that is where it shows” is also where the first failure shows, and that failure kills internal adoption for a year. I go into it in AI for business: what works and what is hype.

Anything that is boring, repetitive and verifiable at the same time. Boring so nobody misses it, repetitive because if it happens twice a month the saving will not pay for the setup, and verifiable because you have to be able to tell in one second whether it went well. The third condition is the one almost everyone skips, and it is the one that decides whether you sleep at night. The method is in what to automate first and what not.

It comes down to a single number: how many hours a month it takes today. If a process eats sixteen hours a month, almost any setup pays for itself in weeks. If it eats two, it probably is not worth it and what you need is a calendar reminder, not a project.

Not your team — the tasks your team does reluctantly and without judgement, yes. In practice the same team handles more volume without new hires, and that is only good if you had already decided what you wanted them to do with the time freed up.

If the problem is that nobody fills in the CRM, no AI bolted on the outside will fix it: you need one that receives the data on its own. If the problem is that you want a summary, do not change CRM. The question that separates a product from a marketing layer is whether the AI writes to the CRM or only reads it. I go into it in CRM with AI: what actually changes.

It is a published scale, V0 to V6, for stating precisely how much autonomy an AI agent acting on your systems actually has. It is useful for two very practical things: demanding a specific level from a vendor in writing instead of a vague “it has AI”, and not fooling yourself about your own system. It lives at the Vergara Scale, with a DOI.