Automation by category

Operations work is the glue between teams: inboxes, requests, handovers, documents and the copying of data from one tool into another. It is the most automatable category in the Index because most of it is data collection and data processing, the two activity types McKinsey rates highest after predictable physical work.

Appointment setting covers everything between a lead raising a hand and a call happening: first response, qualification, booking, reminders and rescheduling. The admin is highly automatable. The persuasion is not. The best systems answer in seconds, book without back-and-forth, and hand the conversation to a person the moment judgement is needed.

Follow-up is where most revenue quietly leaks: leads who went cold, no-shows nobody chased, quotes left unanswered, happy customers never asked for a review. Timing and persistence are easy to automate. What to say to a specific person after a specific conversation is partly automatable now that AI can draft from call notes.

Sales admin is the non-selling work that, by Salesforce's own survey, takes about 70% of a sales rep's week: logging calls, updating stages, writing proposals, routing leads, chasing signatures and working out commission. Most of it is structured data work, so it automates well, provided the CRM is set up to receive it.

Onboarding covers new clients and new staff: collecting forms and documents, creating accounts, sending welcome material and scheduling the first sessions. The checklist is very automatable. The relationship is not. Done well, automation removes the dead time between a signature and a first real conversation, which is where buyer's remorse grows.

Reporting is collecting numbers from several tools, reconciling them and writing down what they mean. The collection and arithmetic are almost fully automatable today. The interpretation is partly automatable with AI summaries, but only if the underlying definitions are agreed first. Most failed reporting automations are definition problems, not tool problems.

Invoicing and payments covers creating and sending invoices, chasing overdue ones, recovering failed card payments, matching payments to invoices and preparing payroll and expenses. It is rules-based and well served by accounting software APIs, so a high share is automatable. The exceptions, disputes and approvals still need a person who owns the money.

CRM hygiene is keeping customer records accurate: merging duplicates, filling missing fields, tagging lead sources, closing dead deals and capturing form data cleanly. It is unglamorous and almost entirely automatable, and it decides whether every other automation in this Index works. Bad data in a CRM is automated into bad messages at scale.