An 8-question checklist for choosing your first process to automate with AI

On 2026-11-04, the AI section of DEV Community published a piece titled "Which Process to Automate First with AI: An 8-Question Checklist" (original title: "Quale processo automatizzare prima con l'IA: l'elenco di 8 domande"). The article opens with data from the Istat report Imprese e Ict 2025, which states that the share of Italian companies with at least 10 employees using artificial intelligence doubled in 2025, from 8.2% to 16.4%. The gap by company size remains wide: AI had reached 53.1% of businesses with at least 250 employees, compared with 15.7% of SMEs.

The piece then points to a more telling finding about adoption intent: a third of the companies adopting AI (33.4%) report having no business purpose at all, and 83.3% of these are small firms with 10 to 49 people. Against that backdrop, the article sets out 8 questions meant to help operations, finance, or IT leaders choose the first process worth automating, so that budget is not spent on pilots nobody uses. The questions themselves are not reproduced in the available report excerpt, and no follow-up coverage has appeared so far; the story currently stands at the publication of the checklist.