Routine Rethink: How AI Is Taking the Busywork Off Our Plates
The Big Picture
Remember when “automation” meant a dusty Excel macro that only Jim from Finance could debug? Fast‑forward to 2025: 92 % of companies say they’re upping their AI budgets, yet just 1 % feel they’ve hit maturity.1 Translation: we’re all still winging it—just with fancier tools.
Five Real‑World Use Cases You Can Steal (or at Least Brag About)
| # | Company | What the AI Does | Why It’s Cool |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Microsoft Copilot Studio | “Computer use” agents click, type, and tab through legacy apps—think RPA on espresso. | Automates data entry, invoice processing, and any UI that never got the memo about APIs.2 |
| 2 | Walmart – My Assistant | Associates whip up first drafts, summarize docs, and brainstorm via GenAI. | Rolled to 75 k+ employees, freeing staff for human retail moments instead of paperwork purgatory.3 |
| 3 | UPS – ORION | An agentic AI swarm that designs optimal delivery routes in real time. | Saved $300 M, cut 100 M miles, and shaved carbon like a hot knife through butter.4 |
| 4 | JPMorgan – LLM Suite | ChatGPT‑powered assistant drafts emails, summarizes docs, and even wrangles spreadsheets for 60 k employees. | Shows banks can move fast and wear pinstripes.5 |
| 5 | Your Org (Next?) | Glue these patterns together—LLMs for text, agents for clicks, analytics for feedback. | Shipping value > shipping slide decks. |
Three Patterns Behind the Magic
- Agentic Autopilot – If a human can click it, the bot can too.
- Contextual Brainpower – Domain‑tuned models beat vanilla chatbots because they speak your acronyms.
- Feedback Flywheel – UPS didn’t save $300 M overnight. ORION learns from daily telemetry, proving AI is a process, not a plug‑in.
How to Ride the Wave Without Wiping Out
- Start Small, Iterate Fast – Pilot one annoying task (expense coding, anyone?) before tackling the enterprise mothership.
- Design for the Edge Cases – UI buttons move; invoices arrive half‑scanned; legal says “no.” Build guardrails early.
- Measure What Matters – Minutes saved per task, error rate, employee NPS. If you can’t chart it, you can’t brag about it on LinkedIn.
TL;DR
AI isn’t about replacing humans; it’s about deleting the chores that make us feel like 🧟 after lunch. Companies already siphoning value from LLMs and agents are carving out time for creativity, strategy, and—dare I say—hockey. Your move.
References
Footnotes
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McKinsey & Company. Superagency in the Workplace: Empowering People to Unlock AI’s Full Potential, Jan 28 2025. ↩
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Tom Warren, “Microsoft lets Copilot Studio use a computer on its own,” The Verge, Apr 16 2025. ↩
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Walmart Press Center, “Walmart’s Expanding One‑Of‑A‑Kind Associate GenAI Tool,” Jan 9 2024. ↩
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Carsten Krause, “UPS and Agentic AI: A Case Study in Logistics Innovation,” CDO Times, Jan 6 2025. ↩
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Dominic Catacora, “JPMorgan Adopts AI to Streamline Tasks for 60,000 Employees,” Allwork.Space, Aug 9 2024. ↩