AI Playbooks · playbook
The first three workflows to automate
Automation pays back in a specific order. Here are the three workflows to take first, the guardrails each one needs, and the metric that proves it worked.
Key takeaways
- Automate high-frequency, low-variance, low-blast-radius work first — in that order.
- Every guest-facing automation needs a confidence threshold and a human fallback path.
- If you cannot name the metric that will move, you are automating for the feeling of progress.
The instinct is to automate the thing that annoys you most. The correct move is to automate the thing that happens most often with the least variation — because that is where a system beats a person consistently and where mistakes are cheapest to catch.
1. Guest question triage
Roughly two-thirds of guest messages are answerable from property knowledge you already have: wifi, parking, check-in, appliances, local basics. Drafting those answers from a verified property knowledge base removes the largest recurring interruption in the business.
- Guardrail: answer only from verified property facts; never infer.
- Guardrail: escalate anything involving money, safety or a complaint.
- Metric: median first-response time, and the share of messages resolved without a human edit.
2. Maintenance intake and classification
A photo and a sentence from a cleaner should become a classified, prioritised, assigned ticket without anyone retyping it. This is the workflow where automation most reliably prevents a guest-facing failure, because it compresses the gap between noticing and acting.
3. The morning decision brief
Aggregation is genuinely tedious and genuinely valuable: arrivals, exceptions, pacing gaps, open tickets over SLA, guest signal. Automating the assembly of the brief — not the decisions inside it — is what buys back the executive hour.
Prompts for all three
The prompt library ships production prompts for triage, classification and briefing, each with the expected outcome.
How do I know an automation is safe to leave unattended?
Run it in draft mode for two weeks and measure the edit rate. Below roughly 10% material edits, it is a candidate for autonomy within its guardrails.
COOChief Intelligence Desk
Executive research team
The Intelligence Desk studies how the best short-term rental operators make decisions — pricing, staffing, maintenance, guest recovery — and turns those patterns into operating standards you can run tomorrow morning.