Think about the last week of your work. Is there a task you did multiple times that felt boring and mechanical? Pulling data from one system into another. Copying a report into a slide. Sending the same kind of email with slightly different details. Updating a status field. Something like that.
Now think about how long it took. Probably 15 to 30 minutes each time. Maybe you did it three or four times in the week.
Now multiply by the number of people on the team who also do some version of it. Three other people. That is four people, four times a week, 20 minutes each. That is more than five hours a week of team time on one task. Over a year that is 260 hours. More than a full working month of one person, spent on a task that was never explicitly prioritised.
This is the hidden cost of unautomated repetitive work. The task itself feels small. The cumulative cost is enormous. And because no one is tracking it line by line, no one ever notices it.
The way to find these tasks is to literally ask. In a team meeting, ask every person what they did more than twice this week. Write the list on a whiteboard. Look for tasks that appear for multiple people. Those are the ones worth automating first, because the ROI scales with how many people have to stop doing it.
The other way to find them is to look at Slack messages and chat history. How many times did someone ask "can you send me the sheet for X." Every time that question is asked and answered, a task was probably triggered that did not need to be. The sheet could have been auto-generated and auto-sent, and nobody would have had to ask.
Automating one of these tasks is often a day of work. Automating ten of them is a couple of weeks. The return is hundreds of hours a year of team capacity unlocked, and team morale goes up because nobody likes doing boring repetitive work, and if you stop making them do it, they notice.
Most companies do not do this because nobody is assigned to do it. It does not fit neatly into any department's roadmap. That is exactly why it is undervalued, and exactly why the companies who do it end up with a durable advantage.