I was in a conversation recently with a business leader – smart, experienced, running a successful operation – and they said something that stopped me in my tracks.
“We’ve already automated the low-hanging fruit.”
I hear this a lot. It is said with the quiet confidence of someone who has done the work, ticked the boxes, and moved on. Direct debits are set up. Payroll runs automatically. Maybe there is even a chatbot handling some customer queries. Job done.
Except it is not done. Not even close.
Because here is the thing: the tree has grown.
The Fruit is Lower Than You Think
Two years ago, automating an expense claim meant buying software, integrating it with your accounts package, training your team, and hoping everyone remembered to use it. It was a project. It had a budget, a timeline, and probably a disappointed project manager.
Today? Let me tell you what I did last month.
I have a confession to make first. Like many business owners, I am appalling at keeping on top of my expenses. Company invoices arrive in my personal email. I look at them, think “I’ll deal with that later,” and then proceed to not deal with it until late December when I am staring down a tax deadline with a shoebox full of digital guilt.
This year, I decided to do something about it. Not by being more disciplined – I have tried that, it does not work – but by getting AI to do it for me.
Within a couple of hours, I had built something that:
- Reads my email and identifies invoices that relate to my business
- Extracts the key details – supplier, amount, date, VAT
- Connects to my accounting system and checks for duplicates
- Uploads the expenses automatically, categorised and ready for review
A couple of hours. Not a couple of months. Not a five-figure software procurement. A Sunday afternoon and a cup of tea.
A task that used to steal an entire day from me at the end of the year – one of those tasks I dreaded so much I would put it off until it became genuinely stressful – is now something I do not even think about. It just happens.
That is not low-hanging fruit. That is fruit that has fallen on the ground and is rolling towards you.
The Definition Has Changed – And Most Businesses Have Not Noticed
Here is what is really going on. When people say “we have automated the low-hanging fruit,” they are using a definition of “low-hanging fruit” from 2020. They are thinking about the things that were easy to automate with the tools available three or four years ago: repetitive, rule-based, high-volume tasks with clean data inputs.
But AI has fundamentally changed what is easy.
Tasks that used to require expensive custom software, specialist developers, and months of integration work can now be accomplished in hours by someone with a clear understanding of the problem and access to the right AI tools. The boundary between “easy to automate” and “too complex to bother” has shifted dramatically.
The British Chambers of Commerce reported in September 2025 that 35 percent of UK SMEs are now actively using AI, up from 25 percent the previous year. That is a significant jump. But it also means that 65 percent are not. And of those who are, the majority – 54 percent – cite task automation as their primary use case. Not moonshot innovation. Not replacing their workforce with robots. Straightforward, practical automation of tasks that used to eat into their day.
The University of St Andrews research backing those findings suggested that AI adoption could deliver productivity gains of between 27 and 133 percent for SMEs. That is not a rounding error. That is a competitive advantage that will separate the businesses that adapt from those that do not.
The Hidden Cost of “We’ve Already Done That”
Let me put some numbers on the problem.
According to Sage, UK small businesses lose an average of 24 working days per year to financial administration alone. That is effectively working 13 months but only getting paid for 12. If you are a managing director looking at your cost base and wondering where the inefficiency is hiding, there is a good chance it is in the tasks your team considers “just part of the job.”
The broader picture is even more striking. SmallBusiness.co.uk found that small UK companies spend an average of 71 days and £35,600 per year on administrative tasks. Across the UK economy, if that lost productivity were recovered, it would add an estimated £33.9 billion to GDP annually. That is not my number. That is the scale of the opportunity sitting in the back offices of businesses who believe they have already picked the low-hanging fruit.
And the cost of getting things wrong manually? Spreadsheet errors alone cost UK businesses an estimated £16 billion per year. Every miskeyed number, every copy-paste error, every formula that someone broke six months ago and nobody noticed – it all adds up.
Meanwhile, the economics of automation have shifted dramatically. Manual invoice processing typically costs between £10 and £15 per invoice. Automated processing? £2 to £3. That is an 80 percent reduction. For a business processing 10,000 invoices a year, that is a saving of £65,000 to £100,000 – every year, compounding, while also reducing errors and freeing up your team.
“But My Business is Different”
No it is not. Not in this context.
I have worked with franchise networks, professional services firms, and mid-market businesses across a range of sectors. The administrative burden looks remarkably similar everywhere. Someone is spending time on data entry that could be automated. Someone is manually reconciling information between systems that should be talking to each other. Someone is creating reports by copying and pasting from three different sources into a spreadsheet that takes half a day to build and is out of date by the time it is finished.
These are not niche problems. They are universal. And they are now universally solvable – not in theory, not with a six-month implementation project, but now, with tools that already exist.
Gartner predicts that by the end of this year, 90 percent of finance functions will have deployed at least one AI-enabled technology. They also predict that embedded AI in cloud ERP applications will drive a 30 percent faster financial close by 2028. The direction of travel is clear. The question is not whether this will happen in your business, but whether it will happen because you chose it or because your competitors forced your hand.
A New Way to Look at Your Cost Base
If you are an MD or business owner, I would encourage you to do something simple. Walk through your business – literally or figuratively – and ask one question at every step:
“If this task did not exist, would we invent it?”
Not “is this task necessary” – of course it feels necessary, it has always been done. But if you were starting from scratch today, with today’s tools, would you design a process that requires a human being to read an email, open a spreadsheet, type in some numbers, cross-reference them against another system, and then file the result somewhere?
Of course you would not. You would automate it. And the good news is that you now can, far more easily and cheaply than you think.
Here is a framework for rethinking your “already automated” assumptions:
1. Audit the Invisible Work
The most expensive processes in your business are often the ones nobody thinks of as processes. They are “just how we do things.” Expense management. Invoice matching. Report generation. Data reconciliation. Meeting scheduling. Follow-up emails. Each one individually seems trivial. Collectively, they are consuming days of productive time every week.
Ask your team: “What do you spend time on that feels like it should not need a person?” You will be surprised by the answers.
2. Challenge the Complexity Assumption
Two years ago, connecting your email to your accounting system required a developer and an API integration project. Today, AI tools can understand unstructured data – emails, PDFs, images of receipts – and route it intelligently without anyone writing a line of code. The things that were “too complex” last year are not too complex today.
3. Start With the Annoying Stuff
Forget the strategic transformation roadmap for a moment. What is the most annoying, repetitive, soul-destroying task in your business? The thing people complain about in every team meeting? Start there. Not because it is the highest-value target (although it might be), but because solving it will build momentum and demonstrate what is possible.
My expense claim automation was not a strategic initiative. It was me being fed up with a task I hated. But it opened my eyes to what else was possible – and it did the same for my team.
4. Measure the Real Cost
When evaluating whether something is worth automating, most businesses dramatically underestimate the true cost of manual processes. They look at the direct time involved – “it only takes an hour” – and ignore the context switching, the error correction, the management oversight, the opportunity cost, and the sheer psychological weight of having a growing list of tedious tasks hanging over your head.
Add it all up honestly. You will find that the “small” tasks are not small at all.
5. Accept That This is Ongoing
The most important mindset shift is this: automation is not a project with an end date. It is a capability. The tools are improving every quarter. What you cannot automate today, you probably will be able to automate in six months. The businesses that win will be the ones that build a habit of continuously asking “what else can we automate?” rather than declaring victory and moving on.
The Real Low-Hanging Fruit
Goldman Sachs’ CIO Marco Argenti put it well: “If you are an expert but want to stick to your old habits, you are going to be less effective than someone that might be slightly less of an expert but is actually willing to question their own day-to-day habits.”
That is the real competitive advantage. Not expertise. Not budget. Willingness to look at the work you have always done a certain way and ask whether there is a better way now.
Because there almost certainly is.
The low-hanging fruit has not been picked. The definition of low-hanging fruit has changed. The question is whether you are still looking at the same tree, or whether you have noticed that the orchard has expanded dramatically while you were busy congratulating yourself on the apples you picked three years ago.
NTT DATA’s 2026 Global AI Report found that AI leaders are 2.5 times more likely to achieve revenue growth of more than 10 percent and 3.6 times more likely to run at margins of 15 percent or more. The gap between businesses that embrace this shift and those that do not is not narrowing. It is accelerating.
What This Means for You
If you are looking at your cost base and wondering where the next wave of efficiency will come from, the answer is probably sitting in the tasks your team does every day without thinking about it. The emails, the data entry, the reconciliations, the reporting, the follow-ups, the filing.
These are not the glamorous applications of AI. Nobody is writing breathless LinkedIn posts about automating their expense claims. But they are where the real, measurable, immediate value sits for most businesses.
I spent a couple of hours one Sunday afternoon and eliminated a task that used to cost me a full day of misery every year. Multiply that across every person in your business, across every tedious task they perform, and you start to see the scale of the opportunity.
The low-hanging fruit is everywhere. You have just been looking too high.
Colin Rees is the founder of Xpera, where we help businesses cut through the technology noise and find practical, measurable value. If you would like to talk about where AI can make a genuine difference in your operation, get in touch.