The instinct when adopting AI is to automate existing processes. Take what you do today and make it faster. This is almost always the wrong first move. If you automate a broken process, you get a faster broken process. If you automate unnecessary steps, you get efficient waste. The first step is not automation. It is elimination.
Every organization accumulates process debt over time. Meetings that exist because they existed last quarter. Reports that no one reads but everyone produces. Approval chains that made sense when the company had fifty people but are now friction at five hundred. Before deploying any agentic system, we audit workflows with a single question: does this step create value, or does it create comfort?
The Elimination Pass
We call this the elimination pass. Walk through every step in a workflow and categorize it. Value-creating steps produce output that moves the business forward: a decision, a deliverable, a customer interaction. Comfort-creating steps produce a feeling of control without measurable impact: a status meeting, a redundant review, a formatting exercise.
In our experience, twenty to forty percent of steps in any established workflow are comfort steps. They exist because removing them feels risky, even though keeping them costs real time and attention. The elimination pass removes these before any technology is introduced. The result is a leaner workflow that is actually worth automating.
Then Automate What Remains
Once you have eliminated the unnecessary, what remains is the essential. These are the steps where agentic systems create genuine leverage. An agent handling a value-creating step faster and more consistently is a real gain. An agent handling a comfort step faster is just more efficient bureaucracy.
The sequence matters: delete first, then add. Organizations that follow this order consistently see higher ROI from their AI investments because every automated step is a step that needed to exist in the first place.