AI Automation for Small Business
The repetitive work in your business — intake, quoting, scheduling, follow-up, data entry, reporting — handled by AI with a person checking the edge cases, built in weeks and measured against a test set you agree first.
Overview
The best automation candidates are boring. That is what makes them safe.
Every small business has a few hours a day of work that nobody wants and nobody needs a human for: re-keying an enquiry from the website into the CRM, pulling the figures from a supplier's PDF into the accounting system, drafting the same five follow-up emails, assembling the Monday report from four spreadsheets, answering the same twelve questions on the phone. The work is repetitive, it follows rules most of the time, and the person doing it would rather be doing almost anything else.
That is where AI automation pays for itself, and it is where we start. A one-week discovery maps the candidates and ranks them by hours saved against risk if the automation gets it wrong. Then a pilot: the automation built against real examples from your business, measured against a test set we agree before writing anything — this many invoices, this many enquiries, and here is what a correct result looks like. Only if the pilot clears the bar you set do we build it into production, with a person checking the cases the system is not sure about and a log of everything it did.
We use the models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google through their business APIs, grounded in your own documents so the answers come from your material rather than the internet, and your data is contractually excluded from training. What we will not do is automate a judgement call that should stay with a person, or install a chatbot nobody asked for.
Capabilities
What's included
- Discovery and automation mapEvery repetitive task in the business ranked by hours saved against risk — the plan you keep whether or not you build.
- Intake and lead handlingWebsite, email and phone enquiries read, qualified, entered into your CRM and acknowledged, with a person notified when it matters.
- Documents and data entryInvoices, orders, forms and PDFs turned into structured records in the systems you already use.
- Quoting and scheduling assistantsFirst-draft quotes from your price book and booking that respects your rules, checked before they go out.
- Reporting and summariesThe weekly numbers, the meeting notes and the status update assembled for you, from your own data.
- Marketing automationFollow-up sequences, content drafts and review responses prepared for approval — never published unreviewed.
How We Work
Our approach
- 01
Discovery
One week: the task list, the data behind it, the risk of each, and the test set that will decide whether it worked.
- 02
Pilot
The highest-value automation built against real examples and measured against the agreed set. Fixed price, clear bar.
- 03
Production
Integration with your systems, permissions, logging, and the human checkpoint for uncertain cases.
- 04
Monitor
Accuracy tracked over time and re-tested when a model version changes, with a monthly summary.
What You Get
Commitments
Contractually excluded, on every engagement.
Known-good answers, run before launch and after every change.
A person checks the cases the system is not sure about.
To Get Started
What we need from you
- An hour with the person who does the repetitive work today, and another with the owner.
- Thirty or so real examples of the task — enquiries, invoices, reports — to build the test set from.
- Access to the systems the automation reads from and writes to, granted at the minimum level.
- A decision on who approves outputs and who gets the exceptions.
Common Questions
Questions we get asked
What can realistically be automated in a small business?
Work that is repetitive, follows rules most of the time, and has a clear right answer: reading enquiries into a CRM, extracting data from documents, drafting routine emails and quotes, assembling reports, answering common questions from your own material. Work that needs judgement, empathy or accountability — a difficult customer, a pricing exception, a hiring decision — stays with people, and we will say so in discovery.
Is this just a chatbot?
Usually not. A chatbot is one possible front end, and most small businesses do not need one. The automations that save the most time run in the background — reading, extracting, drafting, filing, summarising — and surface to a person only when something needs a decision. Where a conversational interface genuinely helps, for example answering customers' routine questions from your own documents, we build it with citations and a hand-off to a human.
What does AI automation cost?
Discovery is a fixed-price week. The pilot is quoted from the discovery with a fixed price and a defined success bar, and production is quoted only if the pilot clears it, so you are never committing to the whole program up front. Running costs are the model usage and any integration platform, which are small and itemised. We do not publish figures because the right first automation differs between a law office and a machine shop.
What happens to our data?
It stays yours. We use the business APIs from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google under terms that exclude your data from model training, store retrieval indexes in accounts you control, and scope every integration to the minimum access the task needs. Data residency, retention and who can see what are written into the design before anything is built.
What if the automation makes a mistake?
It will, sometimes, which is why every automation is measured against a test set before launch, logs what it did, and routes anything it is not confident about to a person. We agree with you in discovery which mistakes are tolerable — a misfiled document is recoverable — and which are not, and the human checkpoint sits exactly where the cost of an error is high.
Do we need our own developers or IT department?
No. Most clients have neither. We build and run the automation, document it, and hand your team the controls they need — approving a draft, correcting a record, switching a flow off. If you do have an IT person or a developer, they are welcome in the project, and if we already manage your IT the integration work is simpler still.
Find the first
hour to give back.
Tell us about the task that eats the most time in your business. We respond within one business day with whether it is a good candidate and what the discovery week would cost.