Hey Connective,
I spend a lot of time in conversations with customers and partners across pretty much every industry we work with, and there's one question that consistently gets the most interesting answers:
What's the next automation that you need to complete — and what would it unlock for your team or business?
Not the polished project that's already scoped, staffed, and on a roadmap slide. The next one — the one where you know exactly what's broken, you can describe it in a sentence, and it's been sitting on your list longer than it should be. And the part most teams under-talk: what does fixing it actually free up? Hours back? Headcount you can redeploy? A new channel or market you can finally serve? A close cycle that drops from days to hours?
A few examples to get the wheels turning:
"Order-to-fulfillment still has a person in the middle. Fixing it gives us back ~10 hours/week and lets us scale into a new channel without adding ops headcount."
"Returns flow breaks every Monday. Fixing it would cut customer escalations roughly in half and let support focus on real issues."
"HR-to-finance handoff still lives in a spreadsheet. Automating it would tighten month-end close by 2 days and kill a recurring reconciliation headache."
"Inventory sync across a new channel. Currently blocking a 2026 expansion. Fixing it = green-light for that revenue."
A few reasons it's worth dropping yours in:
The lists across this community are weirdly similar. Whatever you write down, there are probably teams here who've already solved it — or are wrestling with the same thing right now. Worth comparing notes before another sprint goes by.
The "what would it unlock" half is the part most teams skip when they're planning the next automation — and it's the half that gets the most leverage internally. Writing it out for someone else sharpens your own business case for free.
It's also the most useful prompt you can give AI right now. Ora, the AI teammate that launched in beta on April 1st, doesn't care if your description is messy. "Stop manually keying returns from Shopify into NetSuite so support can stop firefighting tickets" is a perfectly good starting point — and a much better one than "use AI for commerce."
And we'll be pulling the themes from this thread into the Q3 CX newsletter — and pointing Celigo resources (templates, Ora prompts) at the patterns that come up most. Your "next automation" might become someone else's playbook.
So what's next on your list, and what would it unlock? A sentence or two is enough.
— Jono