a wholesaler had one person retyping fifty email orders a day by hand. the fix left that person eight decisions instead of two hundred.

every order arrived as a freeform email, and someone on the team spent two to three hours a day reading each one and matching the lines against a two-thousand-item catalogue by hand. that is a capable person doing lookup work, and the cost is not the hours, it is what those hours were not spent on. the usual answer is to hire a second person for the inbox, or to paste the whole mess into a chatbot and trust whatever comes back, which trades a slow clerk for a fast one that guesses on the ambiguous lines and never tells you which ones. the move that worked was narrower: software reads the email, matches each line against the catalogue by meaning rather than exact spelling, and writes the order out automatically, with one rule bolted on: anything it is not sure about gets flagged for a person instead of guessed. the person stops doing the two hundred easy matches and does the eight hard ones, which was the only part that ever needed them. copy the shape, not the tool: find the daily task that is ninety percent lookup and ten percent judgment, automate the lookup, and make the machine hand back the judgment instead of faking it.