The Job Nobody Was Hired For: Every Operations Team’s Hidden Chasing Role

Key takeaways

• Every operations team has a hidden job: chasing, following up, reminding and re-keying. It isn’t in anyone’s position description.
• It stays hidden because it’s spread across everyone, feels like part of the real job and only shows up when something fails.
• You can measure it in a week with a simple task log, and most teams are surprised by the total.
• Chasing is high volume, pattern-based and rewards persistence, which makes it an ideal first job for an AI employee.

Read the position descriptions for your operations team. You’ll see words like coordinate, manage, support and deliver. Now watch what the team actually does on a Tuesday afternoon.

They’re chasing. Following up the supplier who hasn’t confirmed. Reminding the client who hasn’t sent their documents. Asking the contractor for the invoice, again. Copying the answer from an email into the CRM. None of it is in anyone’s job description, and all of it has to happen.

We call this the chasing job. It’s the role nobody was hired for, and in most businesses it quietly takes up a meaningful share of the week.

A day in the life of the chasing job

Picture an account coordinator at a mid-sized business. Her real job is looking after clients. Here’s what a typical day actually contains:

• 8:30: works through overnight emails, half of which are replies to things she chased yesterday.
• 9:15: copies the answers into the CRM and updates three spreadsheets.
• 10:00: sends a second reminder to four clients who haven’t returned a form.
• 11:30: calls a supplier to confirm a delivery date that was promised by email last week.
• 1:30: a manager asks for the status of a job. She checks three places to find out.
• 3:00: finally gets to the client strategy call she’s been meaning to prepare for.
• 4:30: writes tomorrow’s follow-up list so nothing slips.

She’s good at her job and she’s busy all day. But a large part of that day is the same pattern repeated: ask, wait, remind, collect, record. The client work she was hired for gets squeezed into the gaps.

Why the chasing job stays hidden

• It’s spread thin. Nobody spends all day on it, so it never shows up as a role, just as ten minutes here and there across everyone.
• It feels like part of the real job. Following up on a renewal feels like broking. Chasing an invoice feels like account management.
• It only shows up when it fails. The missed renewal, the late file, the lead that went cold because nobody replied for three days.
• Systems don’t record it. Your CRM shows the outcome, not the five emails it took to get there. Timesheets rarely have a code for “chasing”.

What it looks like in different industries

The details differ, but the shape is the same everywhere. Someone owes you something. Someone on your team has to remember to ask, ask again, collect it and write it down.

The real cost of chasing

The obvious cost is time. The less obvious costs are often bigger:

• Your best people do your most repetitive work. Experienced staff often do their own chasing because it’s faster than delegating it.
• Speed suffers. When follow-ups happen “when someone gets to it”, clients, leads and suppliers wait.
• Consistency suffers. One person follows up on day 2, another on day 7, another forgets. The client experience depends on who’s having a busy week.
• Knowledge walks out the door. The chasing list often lives in one person’s head or notebook. When they’re on leave, it stops.
• People burn out. Nobody joined the business to send the same reminder fifty times a week.

How to measure yours in a week

You don’t need a consultant to find it. Try this with your team for one week:

1. List every repeated task that starts with chase, follow up, remind, request or update.
2. Ask each person to estimate the hours they spend on each one in a normal week.
3. Multiply the total hours by 48 working weeks and by the loaded hourly cost of the people doing it.
4. Note which tasks follow the same steps every time. Those are your first candidates.

Most teams underestimate this badly. Four people spending ten hours a week each on follow-ups is almost 2,000 hours a year, which is more than one full-time person doing nothing but chasing. We walk through the maths in what manual follow-ups really cost.

Questions to ask your team

• What do you send more than ten times a week that’s almost the same each time?
• Who are you waiting on right now, and how do you remember to follow up?
• What do you copy from an email into another system?
• What happens to your follow-ups when you’re on leave?
• If you had five extra hours a week, what would you do with them?

The last question matters most. The answer tells you what the business gets back when the chasing job moves somewhere else.

Why the usual fixes don’t stick

Most teams have tried something. Shared spreadsheets and task lists help for a while, then drift out of date. Email templates speed up the writing but someone still has to send them and track the replies. Reminder rules in the CRM fire on a date but can’t read the reply and decide what to do next. Hiring an admin person helps until volume grows again.

Each of these fixes one step. The chasing job is the whole loop: ask, wait, read the reply, decide, record, ask again. That’s why it needs something that can own the loop, not just speed up a step.

Give the chasing job to an employee who never forgets

Chasing is the perfect job for an AI employee. It’s high volume, it follows a pattern and it rewards persistence. An AI employee reads the work, sends the follow-up on day 2, 5 and 9, collects what comes back, updates the record and escalates the exceptions to a person, without ever forgetting.

It also makes the hidden job visible. Every request, reply and update is logged, so for the first time you can see how much chasing your business does, how long things take to come back and where they get stuck.

You don’t have to hand it all over at once. Many teams start with the AI employee drafting follow-ups for a person to approve, then let the routine ones run on their own as confidence grows. We explain that path in the four levels of AI employees.

Your team doesn’t lose a job. They lose the part of the job nobody hired them for, and get their week back for the work that needs a human.

Frequently asked questions

Isn’t chasing just part of good client service?

Following up is part of good service. Remembering to follow up, writing the same message again and copying the reply into a system isn’t. An AI employee handles the mechanics so your people can focus on the conversations that need them.

Will clients know they’re dealing with AI?

That’s your choice, and we recommend being open about it. In practice, clients mostly care that they get a clear, timely message and that a person steps in when something is complicated.

What if the reply needs a judgement call?

The AI employee escalates it to the right person with the full history attached, so they can pick it up in seconds instead of searching for context.