Most Tedious Work Is a Three-Step Workflow
Trigger, process, action. Once you map a manual routine that way, half the automation design is already done.
When someone says their job is mostly copy-paste, I ask what starts the work, what changes in the middle, and where the result needs to land. Almost always it is three steps.
A form gets submitted. Data gets cleaned or routed. A record updates or a message goes out. Email to spreadsheet to Slack. Webhook to function to database. Different tools, same shape.
The mistake is jumping straight to a complex AI agent when a deterministic pipeline would solve 90% of the pain. Automations should feel boring in the best way: same result, every time, no one babysitting the flow.
AI fits in the middle when the input is messy: classifying intent, summarizing a thread, drafting a reply. The trigger and the final action should still be explicit code you can test.