Campo Labs

The Automation Audit

A 10-minute self-audit to find the one workflow in your business worth automating first — and an honest read on whether it's ready.

Best for Teams that run on inboxes, spreadsheets, and manual follow-up.

Use it in A 10-minute solo review, an ops meeting, or before a discovery call.

You'll leave with One workflow worth automating — and whether it's ready to move.

Part 1 — Find the candidate

The best automation hides in plain sight.

Walk through a normal week and look for these six signs. The process that shows the most of them is your candidate. Hold it in mind for Part 2.

It runs on inboxes and spreadsheets.

The source of truth is an email thread or a hand-updated sheet. Everyone is one copy-paste away from the wrong version.

It's the same steps every time.

Someone repeats a rule-based routine — chase, check, copy, format, send — daily or weekly. If you can write the steps down, software can run them.

It stalls when one person is out.

The process lives in someone's head or their inbox. Vacations and sick days quietly turn into dropped balls.

Things slip through.

Follow-ups get forgotten, deadlines slip, exceptions get caught late — or only once a customer complains.

You re-key the same data twice.

The same information gets typed from one system into another by hand. Every hop is a fresh chance to introduce an error.

The cost is real but nobody's measuring it.

The hours quietly add up, or a single miss is expensive — and there's no number on it yet.

Pick one. The process that hit the most signs is your candidate. Everything below is about that one workflow — not your whole operation.

Part 2 — Pressure-test it

Is it ready to automate?

Five questions decide whether your candidate is ready to move now, needs groundwork first, or should wait. Score one point for each honest "yes."

Can you describe the problem without saying "AI"?

What's slow, expensive, or inconsistent about this process? If the honest answer is "we should be doing something with AI," you don't have a candidate yet — you have a wish.

Ready: "We spend hours a week chasing vendor confirmations by email, and things still slip through."

Not ready: "We should be doing something with AI."

Do you have the data, and can you access it?

Where does the information live today? Can you export it? Is it clean enough to use, or scattered across emails, PDFs, and legacy systems? Who owns access?

"It's in the system somewhere" "We'd need to talk to IT" "It's in people's heads"

What's the first win — in 90 days?

Not "transform the business." One workflow running end-to-end. A week-long task down to an hour. Zero dropped orders. If you can't name a concrete milestone, scope will drift and the project will stall.

Who owns it internally?

A champion who has the authority to make decisions, the time to engage weekly (not monthly), and direct knowledge of the workflow. If the answer is "we'll figure that out," figure it out first.

Are you ready for it to work?

If it does its job, what changes? Will the team trust the output? Will compliance sign off? Do downstream systems need to plug in? The build is usually easier than the adoption.

Scoring

5/5 — Ready to build

The problem is clear, the data is accessible, and there's a credible owner and adoption path. This is a real candidate.

3–4/5 — Sequence the gaps

Worth pursuing, but close the missing data, ownership, or rollout gap before you expand scope.

0–2/5 — Groundwork first

Automation won't rescue an unclear workflow, absent data, or an unowned process. Fix the foundation, then revisit.

Found one that's ready?

That's exactly what the free 72-hour proof of concept is for. Send the workflow, watch it work in three days, decide from there.

Get a free 72-hour POC