Discover five administrative tasks your can automate with AI and Microsoft 365, from meeting follow-up and reporting to ...
Discover five administrative tasks your can automate with AI and Microsoft 365, from meeting follow-up and reporting to employee onboarding and customer communications.
What task does someone on your team absolutely hate doing?
Not because it's especially difficult. Because they have to do it again. And again. And again.
Copy information from one system into another.
Send the same follow-up message every Tuesday.
Turn meeting notes into action items.
Build the same report at the end of every month.
Create another folder, another checklist, another email, another approval request.
For years, businesses have accepted these administrative tasks as the cost of getting work done. AI and modern workflow automation are starting to change that. And for many small and midsize businesses, this may ultimately be more valuable than asking an AI chatbot to write another email.
Here are five practical places to start.
1. Turn meetings into action instead of more administrative work
Think about what happens after a typical internal meeting.
Someone needs to:
- Capture the notes
- Summarize what was discussed
- Identify decisions
- Create follow-up tasks
- Assign owners
- Send a recap
- Schedule another meeting
That's a surprising amount of administrative work generated by a 30-minute conversation. AI tools can help summarize meeting transcripts and identify action items. Workflow automation can potentially take things further by using those outputs to create tasks, send notifications, update records, or trigger the next step in a process.Instead of spending another 20 minutes documenting the meeting, your team can spend that time actually completing the work.
2. Automate repetitive customer and employee communications
Businesses send hundreds of predictable messages. For example:
Customer communication
- Welcome emails
- Appointment reminders
- Follow-up messages
- Renewal reminders
- Satisfaction surveys
- Project status updates
Employee communication
- New-hire instructions
- Policy acknowledgements
- Training reminders
- Equipment instructions
- Benefits information
- Internal announcements
These don't necessarily need to be manually written and sent every time. The trigger might be:
A deal closes → send onboarding information.
A form is submitted → send confirmation and create a task.
A project reaches a milestone → notify the customer.
A new employee starts → begin an onboarding workflow.
AI can help personalize the content while automation handles when and where the communication happens.
3. Make employee onboarding less painful
Hiring someone often launches an avalanche of administrative work. HR needs information. IT needs to create accounts. Managers need to request equipment. Microsoft 365 licenses need to be assigned. Security groups need to be configured. Documents need signatures. Training needs to be scheduled. Someone needs to make sure all of it actually happened. A well-designed onboarding workflow can coordinate many of those activities automatically.
For example:
New employee form submitted- Create onboarding checklist- Notify manager- Create IT setup request- Assign required training- Send employee welcome information- Schedule follow-up tasks.
That doesn't necessarily mean AI makes every decision. Automation simply makes sure predictable steps happen predictably. AI can then assist with things such as generating instructions, summarizing employee information, answering routine questions, or preparing personalized onboarding content.
4. Stop building the same report every week
Here's another phrase that usually signals an automation opportunity: "Every Friday, I have to..." Maybe someone exports information from one system. Then opens Excel. Then reorganizes it. Then copies numbers into a report. Then emails that report to five people. And everyone considers this completely normal because that's how it's been done for years. It may not need to work that way.
Depending on the systems involved, automation may be able to:
- Gather information
- Update a spreadsheet or dashboard
- Summarize changes
- Identify exceptions
- Generate commentary
- Distribute the report
Instead of paying an employee to assemble information, you can have them spend their time interpreting it. That's a much better use of human attention.
5. Route requests without someone acting as traffic control
Many organizations have one person who quietly functions as a human router. Emails arrive. Forms arrive. Requests arrive. And that person figures out: Who needs this? A workflow can often handle that first step. For example, a request submitted through a form could be evaluated based on:
- Department
- Customer
- Location
- Request type
- Urgency
- Product
- Account owner
The workflow can then create a task, send a notification, update a CRM record, or route the request to the appropriate person.AI can potentially help classify less structured information where the request doesn't fit neatly into predefined categories. The employee who used to manually route everything can focus on the exceptions that actually require judgment.
Where should you start with AI automation?
Don't start by asking: "How can we use AI?" That's too broad. Instead ask your employees: "What repetitive task do you wish would disappear?"
Listen for phrases like:
- "I have to manually..."
- "Every week I..."
- "Then I copy this into..."
- "After that I email..."
- "Someone has to remember to..."
- "We always forget to..."
- "It takes me an hour every month..."
Those statements are clues. Not every process should be automated. Processes involving significant judgment, unusual exceptions, sensitive information, or complex decisions may still require a person in the loop. But many administrative processes are simply predictable sequences of events. Those are often excellent automation candidates.
You may already own many of the tools
One of the most overlooked parts of AI and workflow automation is that organizations may already have access to useful technology through platforms they're paying for. Microsoft 365 environments can include tools such as Power Automate, Forms, Teams, SharePoint, Power Apps, and Copilot capabilities depending on licensing and configuration. The challenge usually isn't finding another piece of software. It's understanding the process well enough to connect the right tools.
What could your team stop doing?
The best AI project may not be a giant transformation initiative. It might simply save five employees 30 minutes every week. That's more than 100 hours a year. Find several opportunities like that across your organization and the impact starts adding up quickly. So here's our challenge for this month:
Ask your team to identify one repetitive administrative task they would happily never do again.
Then send it to us.
Cloud Cover can help you determine whether AI, Microsoft 365 automation, or another workflow solution could make it disappear.
Have a process that makes your team groan every time it comes around? Tell Cloud Cover about it. We love finding better ways to get repetitive work off people's plates.