Three AI resolutions for the new year
None of these are buy a tool
New year, and the trade publications are full of AI trends your business supposedly cannot survive without. Most of it is shopping advice. Here is a different list: three commitments that cost almost nothing, fit a real operation, and leave you meaningfully further along by spring.
Resolution one: write down one process
Pick the process that lives entirely in one person's head, the one that would hurt most if they left, and get it onto paper. Every step, every exception, every judgment call. This is the least glamorous work in business and the foundation for everything AI will ever do for you, because machines run on what is written down.
One process, fully documented, by the end of January. That is the whole resolution.
Resolution two: baseline one task
For one week, tally the time your most repetitive task actually takes. No software, a sticky note is fine. The number will surprise you, and it becomes the yardstick every future automation gets measured against.
Without it, every AI decision you make this year is a guess dressed as a plan.
Resolution three: automate one thing that drafts
By March, have one automation running that produces drafts for a human to approve: email replies, a weekly summary, follow-up reminders. Draft-then-approve is the training-wheels pattern that returns real hours while keeping every mistake catchable.
Three resolutions, one quarter, no new subscriptions. A business that does these is ahead of most of the market by April, and if you want a partner for the third one, that is what we do.
The audit answers this for your business
Two weeks, $2,500 flat ($1,000 for the first three clients), and you get the map of your own automatable work with dollars on it.