How to Advance Your Brain's Efficiency and Automate Mundane Tasks AI and cognitive automation won't steal your job — they'll make it more interesting. Here's how.

Early last year, two economists and two large language models chatted on a panel about the future of cognitive automation. The non-humans, ChatGPT and Claude, held their own, contributing meaningful insight to the conversation. At one point in the discussion, Claude remarked: "I believe continued progress in AI and automation could take over most routine and even many non-routine cognitive tasks currently performed by humans, enabling unprecedented material abundance while liberating humanity from drudgery and toil."

As I read these lines, I found myself nodding. True enough, cognitive automation — automating mental tasks like administrative work, data analysis and content creation — has the potential to take human jobs. But if adopted conscientiously, it can also complement the work that only humans can do, and free us to pursue more meaningful tasks. The onus falls on leaders to ensure that employees receive the proper education and training to adapt to an increasingly AI-fueled workplace.

Related: Always Waiting for the Best Option Is Holding You Back. Here's Why.

As CEO of Jotform, I have long since adopted an automation-first mindset. I even wrote a book about it. I believe that streamlining everyday thought processes can create space for more complex challenges. It can enable us to work smarter, rather than harder. The key is gradual and thoughtful shifts, rather than dramatic workplace overhauls. If you're new to cognitive automation, here's how to get started. But first, a closer look at why cognitive automation is important for your brain.

Related: Smart Entrepreneurs Use Automation to Become More Efficient. Here Are 6 Ways to Adopt It.

Staying cognitively fit

When I was a kid, we had a family friend who loved learning languages. Well into his 80s, he was studying Spanish and perfecting his Italian. He was also a formidable debater on a range of topics, from world politics to the proper way to make baklava.

Later in life, our family friend made me realize that continued learning is an essential part of maintaining an engaged, creative brain. As Harvard Business Review points out, recent research shows that your mind can be just as competent at 60 as it was at 25. Our brains aren't crystallized once we become adults. We can improve (or worsen) their performance through behavior — for example, through continued learning.

The brain has two hemispheres: While the left hemisphere is the source of neural information for routine tasks, the right hemisphere is the more creative part of the brain and the side where novel information is processed. Engaging in novel activities essentially exercises the right hemisphere and supports neuroplasticity. In other words, the more you learn, the better you become at learning.

I've seen how continued learning has helped our company's bottom line. That's why I aim to practice a "beginner's mind" mentality — approaching the world with beginner's eyes, always ready to learn — and I look for the same when I'm making hiring decisions. At Jotform, here's how we use cognitive automation to make space for learning.

Identifying workflows

Cognitive tasks that are ripe for automation are often hidden in plain sight. They're the rote administrative or analytical activities that we tacitly accept as part of our daily routines. That's why one of the first steps in automation is taking a good hard look at how we spend our time. Break down daily, recurring tasks into discrete workflows.

You might be wondering: What's a workflow? It's a series of steps that leads to a specific result. Take baking cookies: gather all of your ingredients and kitchen tools; measure out the dry ingredients; measure out the wet ingredients; combine the ingredients; scoop them onto a baking sheet; and bake. You follow those same steps each time and are left with a predictable result: delicious homemade cookies.

I recommend grabbing a pen and sketching out the various steps of your workflows. Once you start visualizing them, you'll begin to see them everywhere. It becomes a new lens for viewing everyday routines. Then it's time to spot the cognitive automation opportunities.

Related: Automation Is Becoming a Business Imperative: Don't Wait Until It's Too Late

Spotting automation opportunities

Before you decide what to automate, it's essential to ask yourself these fundamental questions:

• What do I want to spend my time on?
• What do I want to spend less time on?

If it's not easy to answer these questions, don't worry — it shouldn't be. It will require some reflection to identify your most meaningful work — the tasks that get you into the "flow state" and fuel your brain, rather than deplete it. But I promise you, once you clarify your priorities, it will be easier to protect your time for them. The remaining tasks are your targets for automation — building systems and finding tools to take them off your plate.

To give a real-world example, consider travel requests. An HR professional — let's call him Zadig — is tasked with processing travel requests. It usually requires several back-and-forth emails with employees, their managers and the finance department. Zadig has to expend brain power composing replies and deciding how to proceed with the request. By the end of the day, Zadig is frazzled and struggles to focus on things he cares about, like developing new recruiting strategies.

Instead, Zadig could automate the travel request workflow. Employees could submit their travel request by completing a form that's routed to the appropriate people for approval and then recorded in the system. Zadig suddenly has an abundance of time to learn about the latest developments in his industry and develop new strategies for his department. Importantly, in this instance, an automated tool isn't replacing the HR professional — it's freeing him up to do work that he cares about and removing some of the mental drudgery from his job.

Related: Entrepreneurs Are Rushing to Use AI. Here Are 8 Questions You Should Ask First.

Final thoughts

You may think I'm biased because I founded a company that was founded on the premise of automation — automating a rote manual task (online form creation) to make our users' lives a little bit easier. But I believe in the capacity of AI and automation to make our work lives more enjoyable. It requires reframing our days as workflows and continually seeking out automation opportunities. Only then can we protect our mental energy for learning and other tasks that humans perform best.

In his introductory comments to the panel chat, economist Anton Korinek, Rubenstein Fellow at Brookings, noted:

"[A]lthough I believe they played impressive supporting roles, neither of the language models employed was a match for David Autor, in the sense that he clearly offered the most novel insights."

The machines aren't smarter or more eloquent than us — not yet, at least. But they can enrich the conversation. They might not be coming for your job, but they're here to make it more fulfilling.