AI in a small business: start with one tedious task

“We should be doing something with AI.”

Someone says it in a meeting. Everyone has an idea. A sales assistant, a chatbot, a tool that organises the entire company. The discussion ends with plenty of possibilities and no starting point.

To find yours, look at last week. Which repetitive task took time away from someone who could have been more useful elsewhere?

Look for a task that is easy to check

A good first trial has a beginning, an end and a result someone knows how to verify.

Take a service business that receives enquiries by email. Before preparing a quote, someone needs to extract the request, location, preferred date and missing information.

The trial could involve AI drafting this summary, followed by a review from the person handling the case. The task stays limited. The summary can be compared with the original message.

By contrast, “manage customer relationships” contains too many different decisions to quickly understand what works.

Not every task needs AI

Forwarding a form to a colleague or sending a reminder on a fixed date can be handled with simple rules.

AI may help when the material varies: messages written in different ways, notes to summarise, enquiries to categorise. You then need to check how it performs on your own examples.

Anthropic also recommends starting with the simplest solution and adding complexity only when necessary.

Before choosing a tool, consider whether you can simplify the flow of information. A step you remove no longer needs automating.

Test ordinary days and awkward cases

Prepare a small set of representative enquiries: some straightforward, others incomplete, one with a corrected date, another that falls outside your services.

Define the expected result. In our example, absent information should be flagged as missing. It should never be guessed.

Keep human review before any reply reaches a customer during the pilot. Choose data you are authorised to use in the tool, and check its data handling terms before uploading customer records.

You want to understand the mistakes, how often they happen and how long they take to fix.

Count the time after the review

Imagine a summary takes eight minutes to prepare by hand. If assisted preparation, checking and corrections take six minutes altogether, the saving is two minutes. These figures illustrate the calculation; they do not predict your result.

Measure omissions and ease of use too. If the team spends its time finding the original message or repairing summaries, the outcome may be less appealing than the initial demo.

Set a review date and put someone in charge of the trial. Depending on the results, you can expand the scope, adjust the task or stop.

A useful first automation teaches you what you can confidently delegate. That gives you a concrete foundation for the next step.

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Have a repetitive task in mind? We can help you work out whether a simple rule, AI or a better business tool could help. Let's talk.