Who Is Your First AI Employee?

If you were hiring an AI employee tomorrow, what would you have them do?

Not the vague answers: “transform our operations” or “make us more efficient.”

The specific answer to: what is the actual task someone in your team does every day that takes too long, and probably doesn’t need a human doing every step by hand?

I’ve been running an AI readiness assessment with SMEs over the last few weeks, and this is the question that cuts through the noise faster than almost anything else.

People who’ve thought about it usually have a ready answer. People who haven’t tend to reach for the vague stuff first.

The most common real answers I hear are things like meeting notes and follow-up emails, first drafts of reports that follow the same structure every time, moving information from one system to another, chasing people for updates, and answering the same customer questions over and over.

None of these sound glamorous, but that’s exactly the point. The best first AI hire is usually the one doing something repetitive, well-defined, and annoying enough that nobody has got round to fixing it yet.

The harder question is why that task exists in the first place, and whether the process around it makes sense before you hand it to AI.

That’s usually where the interesting conversation starts.

So if you were adding AI to your team this week, what job would you give it first?