The n8n Masterclass 7 Steps to Automate Any Business With AI with Dave Ebbelaar
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Apr 1, 2026 Dave Ebbelaar, an AI engineer and agency owner who builds practical automation, shares a seven-step framework for bringing AI projects from idea to launch. He covers discovery, finding low-risk high-value automations, mapping current and desired processes, prototyping, adding safeguards, and measuring success. Short, structured steps for realistic, repeatable AI integration.
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Start With Discovery And Prioritize By Pain
- Do start every AI project with discovery and a prioritized backlog of ideas using interviews and a scorecard.
- Ask who complains, where errors happen, and rank by impact, hours, and complexity to pick 1–3 quick wins.
Prefer Deterministic Rules Over LLMs
- Do use as little AI as possible and prefer deterministic rules for decisions you can express as if-else or routing.
- Replace LLM decisions with simple routers when possible because language models are powerful but non-deterministic and unpredictable.
Shadowing Revealed Hundreds Of Manual Workarounds
- Shadow employees for a day or watch Zoom sessions to find hidden manual work like copying between Google Sheets and Notion.
- Dave's team discovered many daily manual tasks by observing people and then delivered five-minute automations.