If AI Can Only Automate Tasks 3% of the Time, What’s the Point?

PLUS: The UK’s micro-productivity crisis, how to claw back the time and producing great lead magnets fast

From the aibl team

Back in the autumn of 2023 a colleague conducted a study to look at where AI could contribute to marketing and to what degree. The key finding across 120 skill areas was that AI could help with a wide range of tasks, but it could only truly automate a few.

Fast forward across two years of breathless announcements and trillion$ thrown around in the name of AI-driven automation and that finding…hasn’t changed.

This week I was fascinated to read the Remote Labor Index Report, which pitted popular LLMs against each other to gauge their ability to automate real world projects. Jumping to the end, they couldn’t. The highest rate of success was a whopping 2.5% (from Manus, my current favourite LLM).

For those just following the tech and investment news this might be shocking, but it isn’t a surprise to anyone who is working with agents and LLMs themselves.

The RLI findings are a gift to the pragmatic SMB owner, confirming that full job replacement is not a short-term threat, but intelligent augmentation is the immediate opportunity:

1. Augmentation, Not Automation, is the Current Reality: The 2.5% success rate means that 97.5% of real-world project value still requires human oversight and judgment. Do not hire an agent to replace a full-time freelancer; hire one to make a current employee dramatically faster at repetitive sub-tasks.
2. Focus on Generative, Not Executional: Current AI excels at creating something from a simple prompt (e.g., a logo, a first draft, basic code). Use AI for “0 to 80% generation” (e.g., drafting emails, creating marketing copy, producing sound effects) and use your staff for “80% to 100% refinement, editing and quality control”.
3. Prioritise Tool Reliability Over Model IQ: The failures show AI struggles with the boring but crucial parts of business: file management, technical integrity, and consistency. When buying an agentic tool, ask vendors specifically about their file format handling, error-checking protocols and quality control systems, not just how smart the underlying LLM is.
4. Steady Improvement is Coming: While the absolute automation rate is low, the Elo scores (a relative measure) show that agents are steadily improving relative to each other. This means you should begin experimenting now to build organisational comfort, as the capability gap will narrow over the next few years.

It’s an interesting read. You can find the overview here or the full report – both are free w/o registration.

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Playbook of the week

dvantage, which is bad for the general quality of work, but good for those of us that take the few minutes In the intro we talked about how complete automation isn’t feasible for most use cases, yet AI is valuable in the majority of knowledge work tasks. This week’s playbook is a case in miniature of intelligent augmentation in marketing ops.

Leads! No matter how sophisticated we get, marketing ultimately comes back to getting an email address from the right person at the right time.

Doing that requires us to produce lead magnets that are powerful enough to attract a registration and integrated with the sales process.

This playbook is a chain of prompts that will help you quickly produce tailored lead magnets by breaking down the process into manageable steps that the AI can understand and augment to save you time…MORE

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NEWS

Before we get to this week’s news, a reminder that AiBL Live London ‘26 is launching soon, and we want your stories.

We want to hear about your massive wins and learn from the things didn’t go according to plan. We’ve all been there.

Maybe you have a case study that is ready for the spotlight?

Whatever your story, I can’t wait to hear it. Drop a line to John@AiBLmedia.com

1. UK SMBs face a growing micro-productivity crisis
   UK small businesses are losing valuable time to routine admin and it is slowing growth. New research shows that one in four small business owners are losing the equivalent of a full working week every month to financial paperwork. More than half are still managing their finances manually and 41% rely on basic spreadsheets to keep the numbers moving. Nearly a third do not use any external accountancy support at all. The issue is not ambition, but everyday capacity. Until admin is automated and data flows are simplified, productivity gains will remain out of reach for the businesses that need them most. One week a month feels about right, and it’s definitely not our favourite. Happily, this finding dovetails nicely with the next item.
2. AI boosts productivity by the equivalent of one workday per week, new report finds The report, Bridging the Generational AI Gap: Unlocking Productivity for All Generations, which surveyed nearly 3,000 workers and 240 executives globally, reveals that professionals using AI save an average of 7.5 hours per week – worth around £14,000 per employee per year in productivity gains or the equivalent of one workday.However, despite this significant potential, most employees (68%) have received no AI training in the past 12 months, leaving substantial efficiency gains unrealised.
3. A data-rich deep dive into the mid-market, marketing and AI If you’re a marketer or you think about marketing’s budget, there’s gold in this fulsome report from WARC, sponsored by MailChimp. It gets into the weeds of where marketing makes the most difference for <500 employee companies, what’s holding it back and how to think smartly about using AI to accelerate and complement the function.No registration required and in an easy to read slide format.

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PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT OF THE WEEK

This week we have joined the Notion party and we are loving it.

So far our use case is simple – to keep everything in one place, pulling together all of our documents across workspaces, emails, calendars and making them synced and searchable.

But that’s just the start. It’s a brilliant and elegantly integrated toolset that can be used in a variety of different ways from project management, to notetaking, call recording, simple data work, social post creation and a lot more.

We also attended their Make with Notion event this week and were blown away by the slate of new integrations and custom agent builder coming down the line.

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Quote of the week

“Agentic AI isn’t breaking apart – it’s dissipating energy, as every major technology wave does before it stabilizes. Innovation cycles follow the same rhythm: Invention → proliferation → disorder → standardization → maturity.”

Daniel Jaye