Automate With AI Archives

By Jodie Cook,

You bring on new clients and spend the next day buried in admin. You run experiments and forget to close them. You deliver excellent results and never collect the testimonial. Every task you do manually is a tax on your growth, and you pay it over and over without realizing the compound effect.

Running a social media agency for a decade taught me that the best operators remove themselves from the equation wherever possible. They know their energy is finite and their attention is valuable.

Most founders automate the wrong things. They start with the flashy stuff, the complicated tools and fancy dashboards, while ignoring the repetitive tasks quietly draining their hours. But you need faster, cleaner growth by removing friction from the activities that actually grow your business.

5 Simple Automations That Accelerate Your Business In 2026

Automate your analysis

Running experiments and leaving them open-ended is costing you. You need to know what success looks like before you start, and you need the measurement to happen without your involvement. When you automate the tracking and analysis of your metrics, you remove emotional attachment from the equation. You stop clinging to experiments that should have been killed weeks ago.

Do this with your social media posts, email campaigns, and product offerings. Set the success criteria upfront. Build dashboards that find bottlenecks and flag wins automatically. Or create a CustomGPT that automatically processes data. Human judgment gets clouded by hope. Let the data tell you when to quit and when to double down.

Automate your client onboarding

You shouldn’t embark on a day’s worth of admin tasks every time a new client says yes. It will only slow you down. Make it easy for them to pay, get a receipt, complete an onboarding form, and submit the required information. On your end, have the Google Drive folders, follow-up emails, and team briefings set up without you lifting a finger.

Question everything you currently do manually. There is no reason it couldn’t be an AI agent handling the sequence. All the tools you pay for already have integrations with each other; You’re just not using them. The goal is that you could sign client after client because onboarding takes minutes, not hours. Maybe you’re the founder who has a love-hate relationship with new sales because of what comes next. Build the system once and let it run.

Automate your testimonial collection

Social proof will grow your business fast. Robert Cialdini identified it as one of the six principles of influence, and every successful founder I know has weaponized it. People want to do what people like them have already done. They want to see that you have created success for people in their exact position with their exact challenge.

Identify the marker that shows someone is happy with your service. Then have an email automatically go to them requesting a testimonial. Task someone on your team with screenshotting positive comments and saving them to a dedicated folder. The more automatic you make this, the bigger your bank of social proof becomes. Deploy a tool like Senja to crank it up a level. Use the proof you collect on LinkedIn, your website, and even in your email signature. Make new client acquisition easier.

Automate great content creation

AI-generated content is awful when you use it wrong. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t involve AI in your content production process. Content still matters in marketing, whether long-form articles, videos, or social media visuals. You need to be part of the conversation, but only with relevant, authentic material.

You cannot outproduce everyone manually, so use automations and retain your human genius for the finishing touches. Create projects in your chosen LLM that contain detailed information about your ideal customer, your business, and your tone of voice. Feed it examples of your best work. Build your content creation machine without sacrificing your voice or your standards.

Automate your personal life

The more your life admin runs on autopilot, the more you free up time and energy for your business. Book your next hair appointment before you leave the salon. Automate paying suppliers and contractors. Hire a cleaner so you stop doing work below your hourly rate. Set up recurring subscriptions for gifts and cards for family members. Get your meal prep and groceries delivered on a schedule.

Whatever you can put on a subscription, do it. You shouldn’t be deciding mundane aspects of your life on a day-to-day basis. Those decisions zap energy away from where it’s needed. Every founder who achieves predictable revenue protects their focus by eliminating trivial choices from their days.

Cleaner, Faster Growth Through Smart Automation

Your most expensive resource is your time. Treat it that way. Automate your analysis, onboarding, testimonials, content, and personal life, then pour your reclaimed hours into running experiments that change everything. Shed everything that has been holding you back and make this the best year of your life.

Feature image credit: Getty