Stop Planning, Start Doing

Here's the problem with most AI advice: it's too big.

"Transform your business with AI." "Reimagine your customer experience." "Build an AI-first culture."

Great. But what do you actually do on Monday morning?

After working with dozens of businesses on AI implementation, I've found that the companies seeing real results aren't the ones with the grandest visions. They're the ones who picked one small thing, got it working, and built from there.

Here are five specific places where AI consistently delivers quick wins, often within days, not months.

1. Meeting Notes and Follow-ups

The problem: You spend 2 hours in meetings, then another hour writing up notes, action items, and follow-up emails. Half the time, important details get lost anyway.

The AI solution: Tools like Otter.ai, Fireflies, or even Claude can transcribe meetings in real-time and generate structured summaries with action items automatically extracted.

The ROI: Teams report saving 5-10 hours per week on meeting documentation alone. But the bigger win is accountability. When action items are automatically captured and assigned, things actually get done.

Start here: Pick your most important recurring meeting. Record it (with consent), run it through a transcription tool, and have AI generate the summary. Compare it to your manual notes. Most people are convinced within one meeting.

2. First-Draft Content Creation

The problem: Your team needs to produce content (emails, proposals, reports, social posts) but writing from scratch is slow. People stare at blank pages. Quality varies wildly.

The AI solution: Use AI to generate first drafts that humans then refine. This isn't about replacing writers. It's about eliminating the blank page problem.

The ROI: Content production speed typically increases 3-5x. A proposal that took 4 hours now takes 1. A blog post that took a day now takes 2 hours. And because humans still review everything, quality stays high.

Start here: Take a type of content you produce regularly: weekly reports, client emails, social posts. Create a simple prompt template with your usual structure and tone. Generate 5 drafts and time how long it takes to refine them versus writing from scratch.

3. Customer Question Triage

The problem: Your support team answers the same questions over and over. They're buried in volume, so complex issues get delayed. Customers wait too long for simple answers.

The AI solution: Implement AI triage that handles common questions instantly and routes complex issues to the right human. This isn't a chatbot that frustrates customers. It's intelligent routing that makes everyone's life easier.

The ROI: Companies typically see 30-50% of inquiries resolved without human intervention. Response times drop from hours to seconds for common questions. Your human team focuses on problems that actually need human judgment.

Start here: Analyze your last 100 support tickets. Categorize them. You'll likely find that 10-20 question types account for 60-70% of volume. Build AI responses for just those categories first.

4. Data Extraction and Entry

The problem: Someone on your team spends hours copying information from documents, emails, or forms into spreadsheets or systems. It's mind-numbing work that's also error-prone.

The AI solution: AI can read documents (invoices, contracts, forms, emails) and extract structured data automatically. What took hours now takes minutes.

The ROI: Data entry tasks that took 2 hours can often be completed in 5 minutes. Error rates drop significantly because AI doesn't get tired or distracted. Your team members can do work that actually uses their brains.

Start here: Identify your most repetitive data entry task. Gather 20 examples. Test an AI extraction tool (Claude, GPT-4, or specialized tools like Docsumo) on those examples. Measure accuracy and time saved.

5. Research and Competitive Intelligence

The problem: Staying informed about your market, competitors, and industry trends requires hours of reading. Most people fall behind because they simply don't have time.

The AI solution: AI can monitor sources, summarize articles, track competitor changes, and deliver briefings that would take hours to compile manually.

The ROI: What used to require a dedicated research role (or more commonly, just didn't happen) can now run automatically. Teams make better decisions because they're actually informed about market conditions.

Start here: List the 5 things you wish you knew more about: competitor pricing, industry news, technology trends, regulatory changes. Set up AI monitoring for just one of them. See how it changes your awareness in a month.

The Pattern: Small, Specific, Measurable

Notice what these five wins have in common:

Specific scope: Not "transform customer service" but "triage incoming questions"
Clear before/after: You can measure time saved, errors reduced, or output increased
Human oversight: AI does the heavy lifting, humans provide judgment
Low risk: If it doesn't work, you've lost a few hours of experimentation, not millions in failed transformation

This is the pattern that actually works. The companies seeing 10x returns on AI aren't smarter than everyone else. They're just better at picking small, winnable battles and stacking them up.

What About the Big Vision?

Eventually, yes, you want AI woven throughout your business. But you don't get there by planning the perfect AI strategy. You get there by building momentum.

Each quick win teaches you something:

What AI is actually good at (and bad at)
How your team reacts to AI tools
Where the integration challenges are
What training people need

That knowledge is worth more than any consultant's roadmap. It's specific to your business, your team, your workflows.

Your Move

Here's my challenge: Pick one of these five areas. Just one. Spend 2 hours this week testing whether AI can help. Measure the results.

If it works, you've found a quick win. If it doesn't, you've learned something valuable about where AI doesn't fit your business.

Either way, you're ahead of the 80% of companies still stuck in "planning to plan" mode.

The best time to start was last year. The second best time is this week.

Ready to find your AI quick wins? Book a free 30-minute call and let's identify where AI can move the needle fastest for your business.