This issue focusses on "Make AI Do the Work": practical, role-specific, and immediately useful. We are going past the hype and dive into the specifics.
What nobody admits
Nobody admits taking 3 hours a week sending one reminder email to your clients. Think: manually updating a CRM, copy-pasting data between tools, chasing approvals over email, compiling weekly status reports just to send one email that helps clients who forgot to reply with details for their event signup, pay an invoice, or get their Q1 VAT return sent in. But we have all been there.
Where AI saves the most time per role
Let's put real numbers on where the hours are actually coming back:
- Ops/admin: ~3–5 hours a week, mostly from reporting and inbox triage — teams using AI for reporting are cutting cycle time by at least a day a week, and inbox management alone tends to save roughly 3.5 hours a week.
- Sales: Follow-up sequencing, CRM updates, and proposal drafts are the biggest time sinks in the role — and the first things worth handing off, even without a clean per-hour figure yet.
- Marketing: Brief writing and performance summaries are the two tasks marketers most reliably delegate first.
- Founders/execs: The smallest, most inconsistent gains. Most executives report using AI themselves for under 2 hours a week — usually on meeting prep and inbox triage — while the bigger savings show up further down the org chart, not at the top.
Time savings from AI aren't evenly distributed. They're highest not in the real work itself, but in the coordination around it — the handoffs, updates, and check-ins that connect your work to everyone else's. The meeting recap nobody reads. The status update that eats 45 minutes. The reminder chasing someone for something they already agreed to do. That's where the ROI lives.
Tool: Zapier Agents + AI Actions
My honest verdict: Zapier isn't glamorous, but it's the workhorse that actually delivers. The AI layer lets you go beyond "if this → then that" into "summarise this, classify that, draft a reply." For a real workflow: a new lead fills in a form → AI drafts a personalized follow-up → it lands in drafts for one-click send. It takes maybe an afternoon to set up right, but it saves an afternoon every week after.
The move
Pick one recurring reminder: the signup nudge, the invoice chase, or the VAT reminder. The goal is to get AI to do the two boring parts — checking who still needs it, and writing the message — while you keep the final call on hitting send.
Route 1 — a dedicated AI agent (Zapier): Zapier's "Agents" feature lets you build a small AI assistant just by describing what you want in plain English — no coding involved. Point it at your tracker sheet, and tell it to check who's still missing, draft a personalized reminder for each, and update the sheet once it's sent. Set it up once, and it keeps running in the background from then on.
Route 2 — using Claude directly (Cowork mode): If you're already using Claude, its Cowork mode can do the same job without adding another tool. Connect it to the same file, then either ask it to run the check now, or set it up as a recurring task so it repeats on its own. It checks who's missing, drafts the reminders, updates your file, and lands the draft emails in your inbox — ready for you to review and send.
Both routes do the same job: AI handles the checking and the writing, you stay in control of what actually goes out.
Don't have an obvious reminder to automate? Spend one week tracking where your time goes, and look for the recurring task that takes more than 45 minutes and needs no real thinking. That's your first automation candidate.
From the field
Our own marketing runs on this exact split: content lives in Notion, a Zapier automation checks what's ready and posts it to LinkedIn on schedule. The time saved is almost beside the point. What changed is that LinkedIn stopped being the thing nagging at the back of my mind every week. No more "did I remember to post," no more copy-pasting between tabs. One less open loop.
One automated reminder is a start, not a strategy. If you're wondering where AI could actually move the needle across your whole business, start your free AI scan at consultancy.andrs.nu — that's where the real conversation starts.
Sources
- "AI is saving workers up to an hour a day—but Goldman Sachs says 80% of companies aren't using it yet"