Rank by verifiability, not by ambition
The right first job is one where a human can check the output in seconds and a mistake costs nothing. That single criterion produces a better ordering than any assessment of what the technology can theoretically do.
1. Summarising what already happened
Call notes, long email threads, handover summaries, weekly digests. The source material is right there, so correctness is obvious at a glance, and the time saved is immediate. Nobody’s job depends on it being perfect, which makes it the safest place to build trust.
2. Sorting and routing
Classifying inbound work and sending it to the right place is high-volume, invisible to customers, and self-correcting — every mis-route a human fixes is a labelled example. This is the same reasoning behind putting triage ahead of deflection in a support workflow.
Give it the job where being wrong is noticed immediately and costs nothing. Trust is built there, not claimed.
3. Drafting the reply a human sends
Draft-and-edit captures most of the speed benefit while a person stays accountable for what goes out. The edit distance between draft and sent message is also a free, continuous quality metric — the closest thing to an honest measure of whether it earns its seat.
What comes later, not first
Autonomous customer conversations, anything touching money, and anything irreversible belong after the first three are stable — by which point you have documented the tribal knowledge the system was missing and know where it needs a supported way to escalate.
Teams that invert this order don’t move faster. They spend the same months, just with an audience.