Most of what is written about AI is written for large companies, or by people selling something. This is the short version for a business with a handful of staff and a long list of things to do.
The useful question is not “what can AI do?” It is “which jobs in this business are done by hand, over and over, by someone who has better things to do?” Answer that first and the technology question mostly answers itself. Start the other way round and you end up with a tool looking for a problem, which is how most AI spending in small businesses is wasted.
Answering the same questions. Opening hours, prices, availability, what to bring, how to book. If the answer is on your website or in your head, it can be given within seconds, at any hour, in your words, and the enquiry passed to a person the moment it needs one.
Drafting. Replies, quotes, product descriptions, follow-ups, job adverts, the monthly newsletter. Not sent on its own: drafted, so that the person who used to write it from scratch now reads and approves it instead.
Reading and sorting. An inbox sorted before anyone opens it. Invoices read and the figures typed into the accounts. Forms checked for what is missing before they are filed. Documents compared against a checklist.
Moving information between systems. The booking that becomes a calendar entry, an invoice and a reminder without being typed three times. The enquiry that creates its own record. The sale that updates the stock.
Summarising. What came in this week, what is owed, what is overdue, what has gone quiet. One page, every Monday, instead of an hour with three spreadsheets.
Anything that depends on judgement you would not want to explain in writing. Anything where the relationship is the product: the conversation with a worried client, the phone call that keeps a good customer. Anything you cannot check: if nobody in the business can tell whether the output is right, it should not be running unattended. And anything built on records that are already wrong, because it will be confidently wrong faster.
Four questions sort most jobs. Is it repeated: the same thing, more than a few times a week? Does it follow a rule, even an unwritten one? Could a sensible new member of staff do it after being shown once? Could you check the result in a minute? Four yeses and it is probably worth counting the hours. A no on the first or the last and it is probably not.
Nobody is losing their job to the inbox sorting itself. In a small business the person doing the repetitive work is usually the person who also does the valuable work, and the repetitive work is what gets in the way. The gain is a shorter day and a business that runs the same whether or not that one person is in.
Count the hours. Our guide to counting what admin costs takes an afternoon, and the calculator on our home page does the arithmetic. If the number is worth acting on, a twenty-minute conversation will tell you which parts are.
Twenty minutes with Tom Williams, at no charge. Tell us how your business runs and where the days go, and we will tell you where the opportunities are likely to be, and whether an assessment is worth your money. If it is not, that is what you will hear.
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