We're at 100 staff and admin headcount keeps growing faster than revenue. Where can AI actually cut that?

We're at 100 staff and admin headcount keeps growing faster than revenue. Where can AI actually cut that?

Admin is growing because every hire actually creates handoffs. And handoffs are manual, and that's where AI can come in. Look at where work changes hands. If it's being passed from one team to another, from sales to delivery, job details get re-entered. Data gets manually re-entered again. Reports are assembled by hand every week. Someone's chasing you for information that already exists in the system. None of that is anyone's real job. It's just the tax you pay for a growing company, and it compounds as you get bigger.

We ran this audit in a 25-person company recently. Four pools of manual work added up to about 150 days of manual work every year at 25 staff. At 100, the pools are bigger, more complex and better hidden. And it's rarely the clever stuff. It's not what you're hiring people for. It's the boring handoffs eating whole days.

Ask your ops lead to identify the three most re-entered pieces of information in the business. Each one of those is a workflow that AI can run. And each workflow is a headcount that you don't have to add next year.