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JOURNAL — 003 · AI & Automation

# AI Automation Playbook: 7 Workflows Small Teams Should Steal

MB Marcus Bennett, Automation Lead · May 28, 2026 · 9 min read

Forget moonshots. These are the seven automations that return 20+ hours a month to teams under 25 people — with the stack, the guardrails and the order to build them in.

The best AI automations are boring. Nobody screenshots them for launch posts; they just quietly return 20–30 hours a month to teams that were spending those hours as human middleware. After dozens of audits for teams under 25 people, these seven workflows pay back fastest — roughly in build order.

## The list

1. Lead enrichment & routing — inbound lead → firmographic enrichment → AI score against your closed-won history → routed to the right owner with a drafted research brief. Sales stops Googling, starts calling.
2. Support triage — classify incoming tickets, draft replies from your knowledge base, escalate below a confidence threshold. Human approves; response time collapses.
3. Meeting-to-action pipeline — call transcripts into structured summaries, owners and due dates, pushed to your project tool before you've hung up.
4. Reporting narratives — weekly metrics pulled from source, drafted into plain-English commentary for leadership and investors.
5. Content ops — one pillar article into briefs, socials, newsletter sections and sales snippets — with an editor, not a robot, holding the gate.
6. Invoice & quote follow-up — polite, scheduled, escalating chase sequences that nobody has to feel awkward about.
7. Knowledge-base Q&A — your docs, Notion and past tickets indexed into an internal assistant with sources cited. Onboarding stops depending on the one person who knows everything.

## The guardrails that matter

- Human-in-the-loop on anything external — AI drafts, people send. Full stop.
- Monitoring from day one — error alerts, run logs, prompt versioning. Untrusted automations become abandoned automations.
- PII hygiene — redact before model calls, use zero-retention API tiers, and mind GDPR for EU data.

> Automate the boring pipeline, keep the human judgment. The teams that get this backwards spend more than they save.ALIFY automation practice

Start with one workflow that costs you 5+ hours a week. Ship it in a fortnight, measure it for a month, and let the savings fund the next one. That's the whole playbook.

AI & Automation ALIFY Journal 9 min read
MB
Marcus Bennett
Automation Lead · ALIFY

Part of the senior team behind 250+ launches across the US, Canada, Europe and Australia. Writes from the field, not from other blogs.

Keep reading

## More from the journal.

AI & Automation July 19, 2026 4 min read AI Workflows for Marketing Teams: What's Actually Working Beyond the demo reels: the production AI workflows — brief generation, variant testing, research mining — that survived six months of real client use. Read article AI & Automation July 4, 2026 4 min read Chatbots vs Live Chat: The Conversion Data Nobody Shows You Vendors promise chat lifts conversion 40%. Across our client installs the truth is narrower: where bots beat humans, where they tank trust, and the hybrid that wins. Read article AI & Automation July 13, 2026 4 min read Zapier vs Make vs n8n: An Automation Engineer's Honest Take We build on all three every week. Pricing cliffs, error handling, self-hosting maths and which platform fits which team size — no affiliate links, just invoices. Read article
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