The AI opportunity audit:find the work worth changing
Before anything is automated, someone has to decide what is worth automating. The audit looks at how your team actually spends its time, finds the repetitive work that costs the most, ranks it, and says plainly where AI is the wrong answer.
- For
- Businesses with repetitive manual work and no clear first step
- Result
- Ranked opportunities, with the reasoning shown
- Includes
- Where AI will not help, and why
- Price
- AI Audit indicative $400–$600 · see Offers
/The problem
Most businesses start with the tool, not the task
AI is easy to try and hard to put to work. Teams buy a subscription, run a few prompts, and the repetitive work that costs them a day a week carries on untouched, because nobody has looked at it closely enough to change it.
The audit starts at the other end: with the work itself.
- Information copied by hand between email, spreadsheets and other systems
- Reports and updates rebuilt from scratch every week or month
- Documents renamed, filed and chased manually
- Creative requests that arrive incomplete and loop through several rounds
- Decisions waiting on data nobody can find quickly
/How it works
How repetitive work is found, assessed and prioritised
- 01
Find
We look at where the hours go: how often each task happens, how long it takes, how many people touch it, and how much time is lost to waiting, searching and correcting errors.
- 02
Assess
Each candidate is checked against what makes automation work or fail: how rule-based the steps are, how many exceptions there are, whether the data it needs is reliable, and what happens if it goes wrong.
- 03
Prioritise
Opportunities are ranked by the value of the time and errors they remove against the effort and risk of changing them, so the first move is the one most likely to pay.
- 04
Advise
You get the ranking with the reasoning shown, including the tasks that should stay manual or need a simpler fix than AI.
/Fit
Who it fits, and when it doesn’t
A good fit when
- Your team repeats the same manual tasks every week
- You suspect AI could help but cannot say where first
- You want a decision you can act on, not a strategy deck
- You would rather hear that something is not worth automating before paying to build it
Not the right step when
- You already know exactly what to build and only need it built
- The process changes every time it runs, so there is no stable pattern to improve
- The data a task depends on is missing or unreliable, and fixing that comes first
- A mistake would be costly and there is no one available to review the output
/Your part
What we need from you
- Time with the people who do the work, not only the people who manage it
- A look at how the task runs today: the tools, the files, the hand-offs
- Honest numbers where you have them: how often, how long, how many errors
- One person who can make decisions about priorities
/Timing
What determines how long it takes
The audit is sized to the business. What moves the timing is how many teams and workflows are in scope, how quickly the people who do the work are available, and how much of the current process is written down. The scope and timing are agreed before work starts.
/Pricing
What it costs
The prices MonoGrain publishes are on the What we do page: a free discovery call; an AI Audit at an indicative $400–$600; a Discovery Session at $1,500, which comes off a later Strategy Workshop; and a Strategy Workshop at an indicative $4,000–$4,999, run as four sessions across a month.
The discovery call is free and is the place to check whether an audit is the right first step. The Discovery Session is a paid, deeper look at your answers and your business.
Anything beyond those sessions is scoped and quoted after a conversation, never from a price list. Under MonoGrain’s Terms, the proposal or statement of work sets the deliverables, timeline, fees, payment milestones, usage rights and any third-party expenses, and prices may exclude applicable taxes.
/Afterwards
What happens after the audit
The ranking is yours to act on with whoever you choose, including your own team. If you want MonoGrain to build the first change, that is scoped and quoted separately. There is no obligation to continue.
/Read next
Guides for this decision
The 8-hour audit
How to find the task eating your week.
Choosing the first workflow to automate
A scoring method for picking between candidates.
When not to use AI
The cases where another answer is better.
Testing value before a bigger commitment
Baselines, acceptance criteria and a go/no-go.
Common questions
Do we need to be technical?
No. The audit looks at the work, not the technology. You need people who know how the work is done today.
Will you tell us if AI is not the answer?
Yes. Saying where AI will not help, and why, is part of the result. Sometimes the right fix is a simpler change to the process or a tool you already own.
Is this the same as the free discovery call?
No. The discovery call is a free conversation to work out what you need. The audit is a paid piece of work that produces a ranked set of opportunities.
Can we use the findings with another provider?
Yes. The point is a decision you can act on with whoever you choose, including your own team.
Not sure this is the right first step?
Answer a few questions and see where MonoGrain would start, or book a free 15-minute call and ask. Prefer email? Write to hello@monograin.ai.