What can you automate?
It can be hard to spot a great workflow to automate. With the VCI framework — Volume, Clarity, and Impact, you can quickly tell which tasks are worth your time and which will deliver real results when automated.
Not every task is worth automating. Some are too complex, some don't happen often enough, and some just won't deliver enough value to justify the effort.
So how do you know which workflows are actually worth building? That's where the VCI framework comes in.
The VCI Framework: Your Decision-Making Tool
VCI stands for Volume, Clarity, and Impact—three factors that determine whether a workflow is a good candidate for automation.
Let's break down each factor and how to evaluate your workflows against them.
Volume: Is this task frequent enough?
Volume measures how often a task happens. The more frequently you (or your team) does something, the more value you'll get from automating it—even if you only save a few seconds each time.
Think about tasks that happen:
- Multiple times per day
- Daily or weekly
- Across multiple team members
Here's a helpful way to think about it: there's a famous chart from XKCD that calculates how much time you can spend automating a task before it stops being worth it.
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The math is surprisingly generous. If your team does something 50 times a day, and each instance takes 1 minute, you could spend 8 weeks building an automation and you'd still break even over 5 years.
That's the power of volume—small time savings compound quickly when multiplied across hundreds or thousands of repetitions.
Examples of high-volume workflows:
- Data entry from emails into your CRM
- Categorizing support tickets
- Sending follow-up emails to leads
- Updating spreadsheets with data from other tools
Clarity: Can you map it out step-by-step?
Clarity is about how well-defined your workflow is. Can you break it down into clear inputs, steps, and outputs?
Gumloop flows are deterministic—they follow the exact path you design. While AI can help with individual steps (like categorization or content generation), it's not deciding what the next step should be. That's why you need clarity.
A clear workflow looks like this:
Inputs: All leads in Salesforce
Steps:
- Grab title and company info from Apollo
- Use AI to analyze if they match our ICP
- Calculate a lead score based on criteria
Output: Updated lead score in Salesforce
A workflow that lacks clarity:
- "Make our sales process better"
- "Improve customer outreach"
- "Help with marketing"
If you can't draw a flowchart of your workflow—with clear decision points and outcomes—it's probably not ready for automation yet.
Impact: What's the payoff?
Impact measures what you gain from automating this workflow. The best automations save significant time, money, or unlock new capabilities.
Ask yourself:
- Cost saved? Are you freeing up expensive resources (like senior team members) to work on higher-value tasks?
- Revenue unlocked? Does this automation help you close more deals, respond faster, or scale operations?
- Risk reduced? Are you eliminating human error in critical processes?
Examples of high-impact workflows:
- Automating lead enrichment so sales reps spend time selling instead of researching
- Auto-categorizing support tickets so urgent issues get escalated immediately
- Generating weekly reports automatically so leadership has real-time insights
Even small time savings can have massive impact when they free up the right people to do more valuable work.
Putting It All Together
The best automation candidates score high on all three factors:
✅ High Volume - You do it frequently
✅ High Clarity - You can map it out step-by-step
✅ High Impact - It saves time, money, or unlocks revenue
If a workflow is missing one of these elements, it might not be worth automating yet—but you can work on improving that dimension before you build.
Your Action Items
Before moving to the next lesson, take some time to identify workflows in your business that are worth automating:
1. Make a list of high-VCI workflows
Think about tasks that:
- Happen multiple times per day or week
- Have clear, repeatable steps
- Would save meaningful time or money if automated
Write down at least 3 workflows you could tackle throughout this course.
2. Map out one workflow in detail
Pick one workflow from your list and sketch it out:
- What are the inputs? (Where does the data come from?)
- What are the steps? (What happens in what order?)
- What is the output? (Where does the result go?)
Don't worry about making it perfect—just get the basic structure down.
Need inspiration? Check out Gumloop templates to see what other people are automating. You might find a workflow similar to yours or discover new automation ideas you hadn't considered.
Once you've identified your workflows and mapped one out, you're ready to learn how to actually build them in Gumloop. Let's start with the most fundamental building block: nodes. 🚀
