If you've ever thought about where AI fits into your IT role, you've probably hit the same wall everyone does: Your job feels too big and too tangled to know where to start. A smaller, more useful place to start is to pick one workflow you run all the time, and break it into its individual steps. Once you can see the steps, you can see the AI opportunities.
You don't need a strategy deck or a new tool license to do this. You need 15 minutes and one workflow you already know well.
Step 1: Pick one recurring workflow
Not your whole job but one process. Something you or your team runs repeatedly: incident response, patch cycles, access reviews, new application onboarding, change management. Pick whichever one takes the most hours this month.
Step 2: List every step, in order
Write down the actual sequence, start to finish, as plainly as you'd explain it to a new hire. For incident response, that might look like:
- Alert comes in
- Triage and confirm it's real
- Investigate root cause
- Identify the fix
- Apply the fix
- Verify resolution
- Document what happened
Don't skip the obvious steps. They’re often the best AI candidates, precisely because they're repetitive and well-defined.
Step 3: Do a quick gut-check on each step
For each step, ask one simple question: Could AI draft it, watch it, or flag it?
- Draft it: AI could produce a first-pass output for a human to review. A summary, a documented postmortem, a suggested fix.
- Watch it: AI could monitor for a pattern and alert you before you'd notice yourself such as anomaly detection or log correlation.
- Flag it: AI could pre-sort or prioritize, so you spend less time on the parts that don't matter, including deduplicating alerts or ranking tickets by urgency.
Going back to the incident response example:
- Alert comes in: Watch it. AI correlates and de-duplicates before it hits your queue.
- Triage: Flag it. AI pre-sorts by likely severity.
- Root cause investigation: Draft it. AI pulls related logs and proposes a starting hypothesis.
- Apply the fix: Probably still you. This is where judgment and access control matter most.
- Documentation: Draft it. AI writes the first version of the postmortem for you to edit.
Notice that one step, applying the fix, didn't get an AI label at all. That's normal, and it's actually the point of this exercise. Some steps involve judgment calls or system access that should stay with a person, at least for now. Seeing which steps don't have a clear AI fit is just as useful as spotting the ones that do. It tells you where to focus, and where not to waste time with AI.
Step 4: Identify Your Starting Point
You'll usually end up with one or two steps that clearly stand out. These steps are repetitive, well-documented, and low-risk if AI gets the first draft wrong. That's your starting point. Not the whole workflow. Just that one step, tried once, this week.
Where this goes from here
This exercise works on any single workflow you choose, which is exactly why it's worth doing more than once. Once you've mapped one, you'll start noticing the same handful of patterns show up across everything else on your plate: onboarding, provisioning, reporting, reviews.
That's essentially the idea behind the full use-case framework we teach in AI for IT, except instead of doing this by hand for one workflow at a time, you'll use two purpose-built tools to unbundle your entire role and every recurring workflow you run, score each task's exposure to AI automatically, and stack it all into a prioritized action plan. It’s your own personal AI blueprint for the year ahead.
If mapping one workflow felt useful, imagine having your whole job mapped out that way.
Learn More at AI Academy
AI Academy offers the AI for IT Course Series. The AI for IT Professional Certificate is a comprehensive learning journey designed to transform how you approach IT work in the age of artificial intelligence. You will move from understanding the strategic imperative for AI adoption to building a complete, prioritized action plan for your specific role and organization.
The series is grounded in two representative roles that capture the full range of IT work: the System Administrator, who represents the frontline practitioner, and the Chief Information Officer, who represents the leadership perspective.
Across four courses, you will master frameworks for identifying and prioritizing AI opportunities, including the 3 A's Framework, the Use Case Model, and the Problem-Based Model. You will learn to navigate the AI technology landscape with confidence and develop the hands-on skills that put you ahead of the vast majority of IT professionals. Whether you keep systems, services, and users running every day or lead and govern the entire IT function, this series will equip you with the mindset, methodology, and practical capabilities to lead AI transformation.
