Before you add an AI tool, do this instead

Same advice as buying any tool, just more important here, because AI touches more of the process than a simple app usually does.

Before you add an AI tool anywhere in your business, write down exactly how that task currently gets done, step by step, in plain language. Not how it is supposed to work. How it actually works, including the workarounds.

If you cannot write that down clearly, you are not ready to automate it yet. You would just be asking AI to guess at a process that is not actually defined, and it will guess wrong in ways that are hard to notice until a customer does.

This step feels slow. It is not. It is the difference between automating something that works and automating a mess, faster.