of operations team hours are automatable today

Where the benchmark comes from

The 40% figure used here is a conservative estimate for the repeatable, rule-based tasks in operations functions — customer onboarding, data entry, reporting, intake triage, compliance documentation, and invoice processing. It is deliberately more conservative than the broader finding from McKinsey Global Institute's November 2025 report 'Agents, robots, and us', which found that currently demonstrated technologies could automate activities accounting for approximately 57% of US work hours today — nearly double their 2023 estimate of 30% automation potential by 2030.

The McKinsey figure applies across all work categories, including creative, relationship, and judgment-intensive tasks that are harder to automate in practice. For operations teams specifically — where the work is disproportionately structured, repeatable, and triggered by events rather than judgment — 40% is a reasonable working assumption for the automatable proportion.

Why operations functions are high-exposure

Automatable tasks share specific characteristics: they are triggered by a defined event (a form submission, a date, a status change), they follow a repeatable decision pattern, they operate on structured data, and their output is a defined action rather than a judgment. Operations work — welcome emails, CRM updates, invoice creation, report compilation, data reconciliation — fits this profile consistently. Creative direction, relationship management, and novel problem-solving do not.

The scale of the shift is visible in labour market data. McKinsey's research found that demand for AI fluency — the ability to use and manage AI tools — grew sevenfold in US job postings between 2023 and 2025, faster than any other skill category. The organisations building that capability are the same ones closing the automation gap.

The gap between potential and actual

The more actionable question is not what is technically automatable but how much of it has actually been automated. Most operations teams we engage with have automated under 10% of their automatable tasks — often a single workflow or tool connection built in isolation and never extended. The 40% benchmark represents the addressable gap: the difference between what current tooling makes possible and what most teams have implemented.

Identifying which processes to automate first — and in what order — is what our Business Process Automation service addresses. A BPA engagement starts with a process audit that maps every automatable task, scores each by ROI and feasibility, and sequences builds to compound value over time.