Unscary

An iPhone app by B43

a simple picker for first automations

The first automation your team watches decides how they feel about every automation after it. Choose something boring, frequent, and easy to verify.

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Coming soon to the App Store. We will email you the day it is ready.

The Unscary AI Learn tab: a greeting reading “Welcome back, Sarah”, a Monday-to-Friday week strip showing a self-chosen bar of three lessons a week, and a highlighted next lesson, “What is AI, really?”, with a Start button.

What the research says

“In 2022, 19% of American workers were in jobs that are the most exposed to AI, in which the most important activities may be either replaced or assisted by AI.”
Pew Research classifies jobs as most exposed to AI where the most important activities, like getting and analyzing information, can be replaced or assisted by AI. Source: www.pewresearch.org
“Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L.”
Fortune's coverage of MIT's GenAI Divide report found only a small share of AI pilots accelerate revenue while the vast majority stall without measurable impact. Source: finance.yahoo.com

Automate the wrong thing first and you do not just lose a pilot — you sour the room. Business research keeps finding that the vast majority of corporate AI pilots stall without measurable impact, and the postmortems rarely blame the model. They blame the pick: a task too fuzzy, too high-stakes, or too hard to check. Here is a simple picker that gets the first automation right.

The picker: tests a first automation must pass

Look for a task that is repetitive (it happens weekly or more), rule-based (you could write down how you do it), text- or data-heavy, low-stakes if it goes wrong, and easy to verify against a known good result. Formatting notes, drafting routine updates, summarizing long documents — this is the territory research keeps flagging as most amenable to AI: getting information and analyzing it.

Why the wrong first pick sours a team

First automations fail in public. Pick judgment-heavy work — pricing, hiring, anything with a client's name on it — and the failure is visible, memorable, and generalized into 'AI does not work here.' Studies of corporate pilots find most stall without measurable impact, usually because the task was wrong for the tool, not because the tool was weak. The first pick is the reputation of every pick after it.

A builder step in the Unscary AI app. The exercise reads “Now add the part that was missing,” showing a mock chat with a support-reply request and an empty Context slot, and a field below where the member writes the context to add.

Practice the picking skill in Unscary

Spotting automatable work is a learnable skill, and Unscary, the iOS app from B43, teaches it the way B43's in-person corporate training does: short lessons on what AI handles well, hands-on reps where you triage real tasks, and a personal progress report tracking your judgment getting sharper. Points and streaks keep the practice going.

FAQ

What makes a task a good first automation?

It is repetitive, rule-based, low-stakes, and easy to check against a known good result.

Should my first automation replace someone's job?

No — start with work people are glad to hand off, and keep a person reviewing the output.

How do I know it worked?

Compare the output with how the task was done before, and track the time you got back.

The bottom line

The first automation is not really about the time it saves — it is the proof that decides whether there is a second. Pick boring, pick checkable, and build the judgment that makes the next pick easier. That judgment is exactly what Unscary trains.

Choose the first win well — the skill behind it is learnable

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