ROI on AI workflow tools feels fake right now and i want to be wrong

been trying to automate a chunk of my customer onboarding process for my saas. nothing fancy, just reducing the back and forth emails that eat up like 2 hours a week. spent probably 6 hours across three evenings testing different AIassisted tools and prompt setups to make it work smoothly. the math on that is not great. and i keep running into this thing where the setup cost is real and upfront but the payoff is theoretical and later. which is fine in principle but when you're bootstrapped and wearing every hat, "later" feels very abstract. what i actually want to know is whether other people building small products are finding a point where AI genuinely clicks for operational stuff, or if we're all just in a weird middle period where the tools are impressive in demos and annoying in practice. not talking about coding assistants, those seem to work. more like the workflow automation layer where you're trying to get AI to handle judgment calls that are almost routine but not quite. curious if the costtosetup ratio has ever actually flipped positive for anyone doing real small business ops, or if i just keep picking the wrong tools.