Administration and support roles
Post, appointments, filing, forms: the tasks where AI relieves pressure immediately, and the rules that apply.
What this is about
| Task | Value | Automatic? |
|---|---|---|
| Classifying and routing incoming post | very high | yes |
| Filing documents | high | yes, with review |
| Proposing and coordinating appointments | high | yes |
| Preparing minutes and file notes | high | no, draft |
| Pre-filling a form | medium | no, draft |
| Capturing a deadline | medium | no, four-eyes |
A good first task
The inbox meets every condition: it arrives daily, has a checkable result, the correct destination is known, and an error is noticed at once and cheap to fix.
Introduction
- 01
Define the categories
Ten to twenty destinations, no more. A finer split lowers accuracy without raising value.
- 02
Run alongside for two weeks
The system proposes, the team decides. That phase produces the corrections that make quality measurable.
- 03
Set the threshold
Above a confidence threshold automatic, below it for review. The threshold comes from the corrections, not from a manual.
- 04
Name the exceptions
Certain senders or subjects always go to a person, whatever the confidence.
- Exclude personnel files, sick notes and works council correspondence from automation.
- Version the routing rules; they are a processing rule, not a setting.
- Track the correction rate per category, not as an overall figure.
The data protection point
An inbox is not a harmless data category. It routinely contains:
- Health data in sick notes and certificates, Art. 9 GDPR.
- Trade union membership in works council correspondence.
- Job applications with extensive personal detail.
- Correspondence from lawyers, subject to professional confidentiality.
A classifier that pushes every incoming document through a system processes all of that. The consequence is not to abandon it but to set exceptions technically: certain senders and mailboxes bypass the processing.
Legal basis and retention
| Task | Legal basis | Retention |
|---|---|---|
| Classifying business post | Art. 6(1)(f) | with the matter |
| Filing contract documents | Art. 6(1)(b) | commercial law |
| Coordinating appointments | Art. 6(1)(f) | short, a few months |
| File note from a meeting | Art. 6(1)(f), check co-determination | with the matter |
The classification itself creates metadata with its own retention: who forwarded which document to whom and when. That metadata is capable of supporting performance monitoring and therefore belongs expressly regulated.
Evidence
For every automatic routing: timestamp, category, confidence, rule version, recipient. That is enough to show later why a document ended up somewhere, and enough to reconstruct a misrouted delivery, which is the most common occasion in practice.
Choosing a task in administration
FREE ACCOUNT
Selection sheet and templates: administration
A sheet that picks the first task out of the ones administration actually has, with two tested templates and the review steps for them.
Worksheet3 items