What Should Companies Automate With AI Agents?

Ari Weinstein says companies should automate tedious workflows first, and the boring work is the opportunity. ERPs, CRMs, and every other system of record are the place to start.

Procurement is a clear example. A company orders lab equipment each year, and teams fill a giant spreadsheet with a thousand rows. An operations team moves the spreadsheet into internal procurement software, the order lines get finalized, and a procurement team then reaches out to vendors. Computers can automate the whole sequence.

Finance is the next category. A company keeps many ledgers, including ledgers for expenses, and the end of the month brings a lot of reconciliation. A lot of the financial software has no APIs for a quick data pull. Computer use can look through the ledgers, reconcile them, and flag anything interesting for a person or for further investigation.