The five AI automations that pay back inside 90 days

The pattern\n\nThe AI projects that pay back in 90 days share three traits:\n\n1. They remove a repetitive, high-volume task.\n2. They sit on data you already have.\n3. A human can audit every output.\n\n## The five\n\n1. Lead qualification agents — engage every enquiry in seconds, qualify against your ICP, book the call.\n2. Customer support copilots — resolve the routine 60–80%, escalate the rest cleanly.\n3. Document processing pipelines — extract structured data from invoices, contracts, forms.\n4. CRM hygiene automations — deduplicate, enrich, route, summarise.\n5. Internal knowledge assistants — answer "how do we do X" in seconds across your wiki, Slack, drive.\n\n## What to avoid\n\n"Generative AI strategy". Hackathon-quality demos. Anything that sounds like a 2023 keynote.