Pick Winners With a Transparent Score

Not every task deserves automation. The best candidates happen often, are expensive when delayed, and have a single business metric that can move. A transparent scoring model aligns finance, ops, and product around impact rather than novelty.

Score each candidate (1–5):

• Frequency and manual time cost.

• Variability and decision complexity.

• Integration effort and data readiness.

• Clarity of the success metric (e.g., response time < 5 minutes).

Prove value, then scale:

• Define the target before building; instrument for automatic measurement.

• Ship a production pilot with logging, rate limits, retries, and safe fallback.

• Publish the same weekly snapshot: baseline, current value, issues fixed.

• Kill ideas that don’t move the metric; double down on those that do.

Turn pilots into standards:

• Remove manual checkpoints; document ownership and SLAs.

• Expand integrations or channels one at a time.

• Capture playbooks so teams can run and recover without specialists.

• Budget by portfolio ROI, not isolated anecdotes.