Less but Better: Using AI to Automate Repetitive Tasks
Less but Better Week 5
By Rick Aman onUsing AI to Automate Repetitive Tasks
"The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency." — Bill Gates
Last week, I wrote about the courage to stop, why stopping should become a regular part of strategy, not something reserved for crisis. There is a fair question that needs to be asked: what about the work that shouldn't stop? The recurring work that genuinely matters, but quietly consumes our people's days?
It is the right question, and it points to a third option most organizations miss. We tend to treat work as binary: keep it or kill it. But some work still needs to be done; it just no longer needs to consume as much human time as it has in the past. I have watched enormous capacity disappear into recurring administrative work, meeting summaries, routine correspondence, reports prepared and prepared again. None of it was waste. But almost none of it was the best use of talented people's judgment.
That is why this article comes fifth in the series, not first. We spent four weeks making the argument to stop what shouldn't exist because if you automate the clutter, you only magnify the confusion. Now, in an age of emerging AI, we can turn to what should remain, and ask: What work still needs to be done, but no longer needs to consume as much human time?
Where AI Can Create Capacity
When I talk with boards and executive teams about AI, I encourage them to start where the risk is lowest and the repetition is highest. Not with strategy. Not with judgment. With friction.
The best candidates for automation share three traits: they are repetitive, they are rules-based, and they are time-consuming. Meeting summaries, routine correspondence, first drafts of recurring communications, program review. Anyone who has ever prepared accreditation evidence knows this pain. The recurring communications that keep an institution running but rarely change its direction.
Higher education and nonprofits are full of massive-input work: large volumes of information that must be gathered, organized, and distilled before any human can usefully think about it: enrollment data, survey results, employer feedback. AI has immense ability here: not to decide what the data means, but to do the heavy lifting so human judgment can get to work faster. The value of AI in this role is not that it is impressive. It is that it removes friction. Every hour your people spend reformatting a report is an hour they are not spending with students, building partnerships, or thinking strategically. Automation should reduce organizational drag so that human energy flows toward the work that requires judgment, relationships, creativity, and mission knowledge, the work only people can do.
Automate the Task - Not the Responsibility
Here is where leadership must draw a bright line. AI can draft, organize, summarize, compare, and analyze. Accountability, however, remains entirely human. Automate the task, never the responsibility.
I learned this distinction in a cockpit. Flying large search and rescue aircraft, the crew divided tasks and automation lived mostly in the autopilot, the navigation systems, and the warning systems. That division was deliberate: it kept the crew's full attention on what could not be automated, the judgment calls, the weather decisions, the situational moments when lives depended on human discernment. The autopilot flew the routine. It never made the decision.
Boards should think the same way. There are domains where human review is not optional; personnel decisions. Sensitive student or client matters. Governance judgments. Legal and financial decisions. High-stakes communications. In these areas, AI may inform the work, but it must never own the outcome.
I frame it this way for the boards I advise: the Why is a purely human domain, purpose, values, identity. We should never ask AI our Why questions. But AI has immense abilities with the What and the How, and wise boards will depend on it there, for the repetitive, the mundane, and the massive-input tasks where summarizing and finding themes is the work itself.
The governing principle is simple: the more consequential the decision, the more important the human role becomes. And a companion test, drawn from my LinkedIn Second Outcome writing; after using AI to produce this, are we better thinkers or simply the owners of a better document? If automation is quietly diminishing your people's judgment, you have automated the wrong thing.
From Saved Time to Better Work
Which brings us to the point of the entire series. Automation only creates value if the capacity it frees is intentionally reinvested. Saved time is not the victory. Better-directed time is.
Here is the trap I have watched organizations fall into: they automate successfully, reclaim hundreds of hours, and let those hours dissolve back into clutter. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does an inbox. Without deliberate direction, reclaimed capacity fills with new low-value work, and the organization ends up where it started, only faster.
I ask boards and CEOs a direct question; if repetitive work consumed less of your people's days, what would you have them do more of? Spend time with students and clients. Think deeply about strategy instead of merely reacting to it. Build relationships with employers, donors, civic partners that no algorithm can build. Invest in professional development. Innovate. Improve service.
One practical discipline: keep a capacity ledger. For everything you automate, record what was automated, the capacity it released, and where that capacity was reinvested. What gets measured gets directed, and what gets directed compounds.
That sets up our final week. Across five articles, we have stopped what shouldn't exist and automated what should remain but need never have been manual. Capacity has been created in two ways; by ending low-value work and by reducing the human effort necessary work requires. Next week, we close the series with the question all of this has been building toward: What deserves the capacity we have just created?
---
If your board or executive team is ready to move from carrying weight to creating room to stop what no longer serves, automate what should remain, and reinvest the capacity in what matters most, Aman and Associates is ready to partner with you. We design futuring retreats and leadership sessions that help organizations find their focus and build their preferred future.
Rick Aman, PhD – Aman and Associates
rick@rickaman.com | rickaman.com/articles