Stop Looking for an AI Strategy. Start with Your Most Boring Task.

You don't need a 50-page AI plan. The best place to start with AI in your business is the boring, repetitive task you've been complaining about for months.

What's the one thing in your business you've been complaining about for months? The boring, repetitive, not-this-again workflow?

To me, that's your AI starting point.

Here's something I've noticed: most businesses already know exactly where to start with AI. They're just ignoring the answer.

The pattern I see on almost every first consulting visit

The conversation always races ahead. AI agents, automation, reporting, dashboards, digital transformation. Big words, big ambitions.

Then I ask one question:

"What's the one task you keep doing that you wish would just disappear?"

Every single time the answer comes immediately.

The monthly report that takes half a day. The spreadsheet that needs cleaning every week. The data export that somebody manually fixes before sending it to accounting.

Nobody hesitates or needs to think about it. The answer was sitting there all along! It just didn't look like "AI strategy," so it got ignored.

That process everyone complains about but nobody has touched? That's where you should start.

What this looks like in practice

Let me give you a real example.

A client came to me with a simple problem. Every month, he exports booking data from a site as a CSV. Then he cleans it manually before sending it to accounting. This flow happened every single month, without fail.

We built a process that takes the export and produces a clean Excel file in the exact format he needs. Drop in the new CSV, hit Refresh, done.

Halfway through the live implementation, he asked: "Can we also add the name column and sort by client alphabetically?"

Thirty minutes later, it was live and working.

His response "This will save me so much time, thank you!" was music to my ears.

Another one, because the pattern repeats

A property management client had a monthly finance ritual. Every month they had to:

• Export data from Airbnb

• Copy and paste it into Excel

• Reformat it

• Prepare it for their ledger

Now? They export the file, drop it into a folder, and with Applescript the ledger is updated automatically.

It probably saves them one to two hours every week. But honestly, the time isn't even the biggest win. The biggest win is fewer manual errors, and more time spent on work that actually requires thinking.

The wins aren't flashy — and that's the point!

When people think of AI consulting, they often imagine the "right" tools, or more training on software.

Sometimes, well, most times, it's much simpler than that.

The biggest wins usually aren't flashy AI agents. They're small automations that quietly save hundreds of hours over a year. A few hours spent setting up a process can remove hours of repetitive work every month, for years.

And here's the part that matters for smaller businesses: automation is NOT only for the big companies with big budgets. The examples above weren't enterprise projects. They were a few focused hours each.

You don't need a 50-page AI plan

Fix one problem. Make one process easier. Save a few hours. Take it from there.

That's it. That's the strategy.

You don't need a transformation roadmap. You need one practical win that makes Monday a little easier — and once you've felt that first win, the second one becomes obvious.

So here's the question I'll leave you with, the same one I ask my clients:

How many monthly tasks in your business still exist simply because nobody has automated them yet? And how much time are you wasting on them?

This is the type of work I'm increasingly doing through Forte Consultum — helping finance teams and business owners remove repetitive work so they can focus on higher-value decisions. If there's a task you've been complaining about for months, get in touch and let's make it disappear.