Operator worksheet

Where AI actually pays in your business

Company ______________
Process ______________
Date ______________

Most AI spending goes to whatever looked impressive in a demo. This worksheet works the other direction: list the steps your team repeats, price the time they consume, then sort them by what's worth fixing first. Fill it in as you go — the totals and the matrix update themselves.

01

Set the frame

2 minutes
02

Inventory the steps

One row per repeated step
Step Who does it Where it happens Min
each		 Times
/week		 Annual
cost		 Impact
1–5		 Effort
1–5
Total annual cost of this process $0
Hours per year
0
Across all steps listed
Annual cost
$0
At the rate you entered above
Recoverable
$0
From steps scoring 4–5 on impact
03

Plot what you found

Scores from the table plot themselves
Impact →
Do firstHigh value, low lift
Plan forWorth it, needs a project
Do if cheapSmall wins, small cost
Leave aloneNot worth the lift
Score a step on impact and effort to place it here
Effort →
Start here Next 60 days Later or never
04

Decide what each step becomes

Be honest about the fourth one
Remove

The step shouldn't exist

It survives because an old system required it. Deleting it costs nothing and is almost always the fastest win on the page.

Automate

Rules, not judgment

Same inputs, same outputs, every time. Copying data between systems, routing, scheduling, reminders. No AI needed — this is plumbing.

Assist

Judgment, but a draft helps

A person still decides, but software reads, sorts, extracts, or writes the first version. This is where AI earns its keep.

Keep

Genuinely human

Relationships, negotiation, and rare exceptions. If nothing lands here, the list is wrong — go back and look again.

05

Your first three

Ranked automatically
    06

    Before you automate anything

    Answer these in writing

    Working through this alone gets you a map of one process. If you want the same view across your whole operation — prioritized, priced, and sequenced into a build plan — that's what we do in an AI Capability Baseline.

    Cynthetic Systems AI
    cyntheticsystemsai.com