Are You Automating Work That Should Not Exist?

Durban:

CAG Executive Question of the Week

Before you automate another task, have you asked whether that task should exist at all?

A Finance Manager spends three hours every Friday combining information from several spreadsheets.

Operations sends its figures in one format. Sales uses another. Someone manually checks the totals, corrects missing information and produces a management report.

Then somebody suggests AI.

“Can’t we automate this?”

Probably.

But that may be the wrong question.

If the process itself is unnecessary or badly designed, automation simply helps the business do the wrong work faster.

Arnold Muscat’s Comment

“I think businesses need to be careful that AI does not encourage us to automate everything simply because we can.

If somebody is spending three hours every Friday copying information between spreadsheets, my first question would not be, ‘Can AI do this faster?’

My first question would be: why are we still doing it?

Sometimes the biggest productivity improvement is not automating a task. It is removing the task completely.”

Automation Is Not the Same as Improvement

Business processes accumulate over time.

A spreadsheet is created to solve a temporary problem. A manager requests another report. An additional approval is introduced. Employees create manual checks because they no longer trust the information.

Years later, nobody remembers why some of these steps exist.

But employees continue performing them.

Common examples include:

Copying information between spreadsheets.
Re-entering information already available elsewhere.
Producing reports nobody actively uses.
Sending the same information to several managers.
Rewriting similar emails and documents.
Chasing unnecessary approvals.
Manually checking information that could have been validated earlier.

Before automating repetitive work, management should determine whether that work still creates business value.

Discover the Work Before Automating It

This is where Business Process Review and AI Workflow Discovery become important.

Instead of beginning with “Where can we use AI?”, examine how work actually moves through the organisation.

Ask:

Where does the process begin?
Who performs each step?
Where does work wait?
Where is information duplicated?
Which controls genuinely add value?
Which steps could disappear completely?

The objective is not to find as many opportunities as possible to use AI.

The objective is to identify where the business is losing time and determine the simplest way to fix it.

Sometimes Advanced Excel Is the Answer

Not every productivity problem requires AI.

A Finance team manually combining spreadsheets every month may simply need better workbook design, formulas, Power Query, PivotTables, data validation or automation.

This is why Advanced Microsoft Excel remains such an important business productivity skill.

Before purchasing another technology platform, organisations should ask whether employees are making effective use of the tools already available to them.

Better Excel skills can remove hours of repetitive work before AI even enters the conversation.

Then Look at ChatGPT

Once the workflow is understood, ChatGPT can assist with appropriate knowledge-based activities such as:

Drafting recurring communications.
Summarising information.
Preparing reports.
Research assistance.
Documenting business processes.
Analysing and restructuring information.

The important distinction is that ChatGPT is being applied to an identified business requirement rather than introduced simply because employees have access to AI.

And Microsoft Copilot

For organisations already working extensively within Microsoft 365, Microsoft Copilot can support employees within the applications where much of their work already happens.

That can include Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams.

But the same rule applies.

Microsoft Copilot should improve a business process — not become a reason to avoid fixing one.

The sequence therefore matters:

Understand the process. Remove unnecessary work. Strengthen workplace skills. Then apply AI.

AI Still Needs People

Faster does not automatically mean better.

AI-generated reports, summaries, analysis and recommendations can appear professional while still containing errors or incorrect assumptions.

Employees and managers remain responsible for validating important outputs.

At College Africa Group, we use a simple principle:

AI produces language. People remain responsible for decisions.

Human validation and appropriate AI governance must remain part of the workflow.

The Executive Productivity Test

Before approving another automation initiative, ask:

Should this task exist?
Can we remove a process step?
Can information be captured correctly once?
Could Advanced Excel solve the problem?
Could ChatGPT improve the knowledge work?
Could Microsoft Copilot improve the Microsoft 365 workflow?
Who will validate the result?
What measurable business outcome will improve?

If management cannot answer those questions, it may be too early to automate.

One Question for Your Next Management Meeting

Ask each manager to identify one repetitive task their team performs every week.

Then resist the temptation to ask:

“How can we automate this?”

Instead ask:

“Why are we still doing this?”

The answer may reveal a much larger productivity opportunity.

Because the goal is not to automate more work.

The goal is to eliminate unnecessary work, improve necessary work and automate only the work worth keeping.

Where Should Your Business Start?

Before investing in another AI solution, identify where employees are actually losing time and which business processes are worth improving.

College Africa Group helps organisations improve productivity through business process reviews and AI Workflow Discovery, Advanced Microsoft Excel training, ChatGPT for Business and Microsoft Copilot training and consulting.

The objective is not more technology.

It is better use of the right technology, by capable people, within better business processes.

Contact College Africa Group to discuss where your organisation is losing productive time and where Advanced Excel, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot can deliver measurable business value.

Better Business Processes.
Stronger Workplace Skills.
Smarter AI.
Greater Business Productivity.

College Africa Group (Pty) Ltd