Five Signals a Workflow Is Broken — and Ripe for AI
Published July 14, 2026
Series: News — Article Review Published: 2026-07-14 Source: Corey Ganim on X Author: Victor Salmon
The post
In a thread on X (July 14, 2026), Corey Ganim offers a bluntly practical method for finding broken workflows in a small business — the kind worth automating. His advice: ask the owner "Can you show me how this happens today?", then watch for five telltale signals:
- Tabs. How many tools do they open? Six tabs to finish one task means friction.
- Copy/paste. What gets moved by hand from one place to another? That's automation opportunity.
- Waiting. Where does work stall waiting on a reply, an approval, a missing file? That's a bottleneck.
- Rework. Where do people fix the same mistakes over and over? That's a process problem.
- Handoffs. Where does a task pass from one person to another? That's where things get lost.
He lists concrete examples: a bookkeeper's month-end close, logistics quote creation, recruiting candidate screening, agency client onboarding, school enrollment inquiries. The thesis, in his words: "simply watching how the work gets done today will show you exactly where AI belongs."
Our take
This is the part of automation that almost nobody writes about — and it's the part that determines whether an AI project succeeds. Most failure isn't in building the agent; it's in picking the wrong task to automate.
Ganim's five signals are a field-ready discovery checklist, and they line up almost perfectly with the layers we teach and build. Mapping them to what comes next:
- Copy/paste and Tabs are pure data-movement problems. Once you've spotted them, the fix is usually a single integration or a desktop agent moving data between tools — exactly what our Basic Agents and Agents Working for You tracks cover.
- Waiting is an orchestration problem — work idling for an approval or a missing input. This is where autonomous agent loops (that poll, remind, and fetch) earn their keep.
- Rework is a quality problem — usually a categorization or extraction step that an LLM can do once, correctly, instead of a human fixing it repeatedly.
- Handoffs are a coordination problem — and the most valuable to fix, because that's where errors compound and context gets lost between people.
One nuance worth adding: signals 1 and 2 (Tabs, Copy/paste) are the cheapest wins and the best place for a small business to start. Signals 4 and 5 (Rework, Handoffs) are higher-value but harder — they touch how people work, not just what tools they use. Start with the copy/paste, build trust, then tackle the handoffs.
Why it matters
If you're a small-business owner (or you help one), the highest-leverage hour you can spend this week is the one Ganim describes: sit down, pick one recurring task, and just watch how it gets done. The broken parts will announce themselves. Once you know where the friction is, the question of whether AI helps — and which kind — answers itself, and our Tutorials pick up right from there.
And if you'd rather have someone do that discovery with you, that's literally the first thing we do — book a consultation and we'll map your five signals together.