You know the feeling. It is Tuesday afternoon and you have spent the last two hours copying data between spreadsheets, checking competitor websites, and drafting follow-up emails you should have sent yesterday. None of it is hard. All of it is slow. And the worst part: you will do the exact same thing next week. Most people who search for how to automate repetitive tasks have already tried the obvious solutions. Zapier, Make, Power Automate -- workflow builders that promise drag-and-drop magic but require hours of setup, break when a website changes, and still cannot handle anything that needs a browser or judgment. Hiring a VA helps, but costs $800-1,500/month and adds management overhead. What changed: you can now describe the task in plain English and an AI employee executes it. No triggers, no nodes, no code. Here are the five tasks businesses automate first -- and the exact commands that replace hours of manual work.
1. Competitive Research and Monitoring
The manual way
Open five competitor websites in separate tabs. Click through pricing pages, feature lists, and blog posts. Copy the data into a spreadsheet. Compare against last week. Write up a summary. Email it to the team. Time cost: 3-5 hours per week, every week, forever. Most teams stop doing it after month two because nobody has time.
The automated way
Check these 5 competitors every Monday at 8am. Compare pricing tiers, note any feature changes, and send a summary to the #intel Slack channel.
RIRD opens a real browser -- powered by OpenClaw, our agent framework with stealth capabilities that pass bot detection -- visits each site live, extracts current data, compares it against previous weeks, and posts a formatted summary. No scraper to maintain. No API to configure. If a competitor redesigns their pricing page, RIRD reads the new layout like a person would.
What you save
12-20 hours per month. More importantly, you actually get the intelligence consistently instead of letting it slip when things get busy. See the full breakdown in our market research automation guide.
2. Email Triage and Follow-ups
The manual way
Open your inbox. Scan 40-80 emails. Decide which are urgent. Flag them. Draft replies to the important ones. Move the rest to folders. Repeat tomorrow. Time cost: 45 minutes per day, five days a week. That is over 15 hours a month spent as a human email router.
The automated way
Go through my unread emails every morning at 7am. Flag anything urgent. Draft replies for messages that need a response today. Send me a summary on Telegram.
Your AI employee reads each email, understands context, flags time-sensitive items, and drafts replies in your voice. You review the drafts and hit send -- or let RIRD send them directly if you trust the pattern. The inbox goes from a black hole to a sorted, pre-drafted queue.
What you save
15+ hours per month. You also stop missing important emails that get buried under newsletters and notifications.
3. Data Entry and Spreadsheet Cleanup
The manual way
Export a CSV from one tool. Open it in a spreadsheet. Remove duplicates manually. Fix formatting -- phone numbers with dashes, dates in three different formats, company names with inconsistent capitalization. Merge it with another list. Spot-check for errors. Time cost: 2-4 hours per batch, and you dread every minute of it.
The automated way
Clean this CSV: deduplicate by email address, standardize phone numbers to E.164 format, normalize company names, remove rows with no email, and export as a new file.
RIRD processes the file programmatically -- it writes and runs code to handle the cleanup, which means it can process thousands of rows in seconds rather than clicking through cells. It handles edge cases that trip up simple find-and-replace: "IBM" vs "International Business Machines", "St." vs "Street", phone numbers with country codes mixed in.
What you save
8-16 hours per month depending on volume. The real win is accuracy -- no more fat-finger errors or missed duplicates.
4. Report Generation
The manual way
Log into three different platforms. Export data from each. Copy numbers into a template. Build charts. Write the narrative section. Format for the audience. Send it out. Time cost: 2-3 hours per report, and if it is weekly, that is a full workday per month just on reporting.
The automated way
Every Friday at 4pm, compile our weekly metrics: website traffic from Google Analytics, email open rates from our last 5 campaigns, and new signups from the dashboard. Format as a one-page summary and send to the #leadership Slack channel.
RIRD logs into each platform through its stealth browser, extracts the relevant numbers, compiles them into a structured report, and delivers it on schedule. The report is consistent every week -- same format, same metrics, no forgotten data sources. If you need a chart, it generates one. If you need a PDF, it creates one.
What you save
8-12 hours per month. Your team gets reports on time, every time, without anyone manually pulling data.
5. Vendor and Pricing Research
The manual way
You need a new CRM, project management tool, or vendor for a specific service. Open Google. Click through ten websites. Navigate pricing pages (half of which say "Contact Sales"). Copy features and pricing into a comparison spreadsheet. Read a few G2 reviews. Time cost: 3-5 hours per vendor evaluation, and you still feel like you missed something.
The automated way
Compare pricing and core features for 10 CRM tools: HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Close, Copper, Freshsales, Zoho, Monday Sales, Attio, and Folk. Include pricing tiers, user limits, and G2 ratings. Put results in a spreadsheet.
RIRD visits each vendor site, extracts live pricing (not cached training data), pulls review scores from G2 or Capterra, and drops a comparison table in your chat thread or as a downloadable spreadsheet. The whole process takes minutes instead of an afternoon.
What you save
3-5 hours per evaluation. You also get more consistent comparisons because every vendor is evaluated with the same criteria.
The Total: 46-68 Hours Per Month
Add it up. These five tasks alone consume 46-68 hours of manual work per month. That is more than a full work week -- every single month -- spent on work that does not require creativity, judgment, or human relationships. It just needs to get done. At $9/week, RIRD costs less than 1% of what a part-time hire would for the same output.
Why Plain Language Beats Workflow Builders
Workflow builders like Zapier and Make are powerful -- for developers who think in triggers, conditions, and API endpoints. For everyone else, they are another tool to learn, another thing to maintain, and another thing that breaks silently when a website updates its DOM structure.
The fundamental problem: traditional automation is brittle. It connects Point A to Point B through a rigid pipeline. Change anything -- a form field, an API version, a page layout -- and the pipeline breaks. You do not find out until the data stops flowing.
AI task automation works differently. You describe what you want in plain language. The AI employee figures out how to do it, adapts when things change, and tells you if something goes wrong. No nodes. No connectors. No debugging JSON payloads at 11pm. Just "do this thing" and it gets done. That is the core difference between task automation without coding and traditional workflow builders -- one requires you to think like a programmer, the other requires you to think like a manager.
Start Automating This Week
Pick the one task from this list that annoys you most. The one you keep saying "I should automate this" about but never do because setup always seemed harder than just doing it manually. Message RIRD with what you want done, how often, and where to deliver the results. That is the entire setup.
Plans start at $9/week with all tools included -- stealth browser, code execution, scheduling, file generation, and the full OpenClaw engine. $99/mo for daily workflows. $249/mo for high-volume ops. Read the setup guide to start in five minutes, or see the full documentation for advanced patterns.