The 4-question framework that finds where AI saves your team the most time. Run this before you buy a single tool.
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List every repetitive task your team does. The complete audit takes 30 minutes.
MapRate each task across frequency, time saved, quality impact, and team frustration.
ScoreRank by total score. Start with the highest-impact, lowest-risk opportunity.
PrioritizeEnter your email for the complete scoring checklist.
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Before you buy a single AI tool, run this checklist. Find the workflows that are bleeding money, score them, and know exactly where to start.
95% of AI projects fail because teams open ChatGPT before understanding their business problem. They skip straight to prompts, get generic outputs, blame the tool, and move on. Six months later, someone else asks the same question and the cycle repeats.
The pattern that works is the opposite. Audit first, tool second. Understand the workflow, score the opportunity, then pick the tool that fits. Not the other way around.
"95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable impact on the P&L."
IKEA ran their AI audit before buying tools. They redeployed people, created new revenue streams, and built AI into workflows that already existed. The tool came last.
Buy the tool first. Assign it to a team. Expect cost savings. When the results are underwhelming, blame adoption. The problem was never the tool. It was skipping the audit.
Before you score anything, you need to understand what your team actually does every day. These three steps surface the workflows worth examining.
Walk through workflows step by step with the people who do them every day. Map every input, every output, and every handoff. The details matter. Ask "what happens next?" until you run out of answers.
Not just the process. Find who is resistant and find who is enthusiastic. Early adopters become your internal champions. Resistors reveal where training gaps are hiding. Both signals matter.
Where is the team spending time on work a machine handles better? Where are repetitive inputs creating repetitive outputs? The overlap between "high volume" and "low creativity" is where AI wins.
This is the core of the checklist. For every potential AI use case you identified, score it 1 to 5 on each of these four dimensions. The highest total scores are your best bets.
| Use Case | Frequency | Time Saved | Quality | Frustration | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | /5 | /5 | /5 | /5 | /20 |
| 2. | /5 | /5 | /5 | /5 | /20 |
| 3. | /5 | /5 | /5 | /5 | /20 |
| 4. | /5 | /5 | /5 | /5 | /20 |
| 5. | /5 | /5 | /5 | /5 | /20 |
Your top 3 use cases are the ones that score highest across all 4 dimensions. These are where AI will deliver the fastest, most measurable ROI. Start here. Ignore everything else until these are working.
A scored use case without a clear definition is just a wish. For each of your top priorities, fill in these four fields. If you cannot answer them, the use case is not ready to build.
What workflow is this? Be specific enough that anyone on the team would recognize it.
What does the user provide? Raw data, a brief, a transcript, a spreadsheet? Name it.
What does the AI deliver? A draft, a summary, a scored list? Define what "done" looks like.
How do you know it worked? A number, a threshold, a comparison. If you cannot measure it, rethink it.
These four mistakes turn promising AI use cases into wasted budget. If your use case description looks like the grey box, rewrite it until it looks like the green one.
Take your top 3 scored use cases and build them. Not all at once. Start with the one that scored highest and prove it works before moving to the next.
The framework you just completed is the same one behind the $300K Custom GPT Framework. The checklist finds the opportunity. The framework builds the solution.
When Ekwy ran this audit at The Economist, the answer was clear. A custom GPT trained on their own copy frameworks. Nine months later: $300K agency contract dropped. The checklist found the opportunity. The build delivered the result.
In the Claude Cowork workshop, you build something real for your actual workflow. Live, hands on, no theory slides.
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