Start with your worst admin job

Last edition I made the case that AI has finally crossed the line from clever to trustworthy. The fair next question is the obvious one: alright then, what do I actually do with it?

Here's my honest answer. Don't start with anything ambitious. Start with the most boring job in your business.

Get Claude's Cowork app on your computer, connect your email, and point it at the admin you'd rather not do. That's the whole move. The magic isn't that the AI is clever. It's that the dull, repetitive data entry just stops happening.

Here are a few of the things it can do, and because I didn't want to just take the brochure's word for it, I sat down and actually ran each one. The clips below are those real runs.

Invoices and purchase orders. A supplier invoice lands, Claude reads the PDF, pulls out the supplier, the amounts and the line items, and drops them into a running spreadsheet. No retyping, no pile building up in the corner of the desk. I fed it a made-up invoice and the total even came out right to the cent.

Handwritten job dockets. This one's for the tradies, and it's the one I was sure would trip it up. Photograph the day's docket and Claude turns the scrawl into a tidy spreadsheet: job, site, hours, materials. It read mine without complaint, and even offered to log it straight into our system rather than just hand back a sheet.

Timesheets. Photos or PDFs of the week's timesheets become one clean, payroll-ready sheet.

The shoebox of receipts. Snap a photo of the fuel docket or the hardware receipt on your phone. It reads it and adds it to an expense sheet, sorted and ready for the bookkeeper. The shoebox disappears.

The Monday catch-up. Every Monday morning, a plain summary of what actually came in over the weekend: enquiries, bills, bookings. No logging into five different things to piece it together.

None of that is flashy. Nobody's putting it in a keynote. That's exactly why it's worth doing. These are the jobs that don't need your brain, they just need doing, every single day, and they quietly eat the hours you'd rather spend on the real work. Each of those clips was a few minutes, start to finish.

The reason it's suddenly within reach for a normal business owner, not a developer, is the thing I wrote about last time: the AI can now reach into your actual systems and do the work, not just tell you how. Connecting your email is the smallest possible version of that, and it's the easiest place to start.

So pick your worst admin task. The one you keep putting off. That's the one to hand over first. Have a play this week and hit reply to tell me how you go, I read every one.

Cheers,
Jez