AI automations for small and medium businesses: where to start
Customer replies, product pages, emails, reports and documents: the repetitive tasks AI can already take off your plate, and how to start small.
In small and medium businesses a big part of the day goes into repetitive tasks: answering the same questions over and over, copying data from one document to another, writing descriptions, preparing reports. This work is necessary, but it does not grow the business. Today artificial intelligence can automate much of it at a modest cost, without turning the way you work upside down.
What AI can already do for a business
There is no need to start with complex projects. These are the automations I see working best, with measurable results within a few weeks:
- ▸Customer replies: an assistant that answers frequent questions about orders, shipping and products, and hands over to a person when needed
- ▸Product pages: titles, descriptions and translations written from technical data, then reviewed by someone who knows the product
- ▸Incoming email: automatic sorting by topic and urgency, with a draft reply already prepared
- ▸Documents: data extracted from invoices, orders and delivery notes and loaded into your ERP without retyping
- ▸Reports: weekly summaries of sales, campaigns and customer service, written in plain language
- ▸Content: drafts of articles, posts and newsletters to polish, not to publish as they are
Where to start: small and measurable
The best way to start is to pick a single process, frequent and tedious, where a mistake costs little. You measure how long it takes today, build the automation, test it for a few weeks with a person checking the results, and only then decide whether to extend it. A typical case is customer service for an e-commerce store: the same ten questions often cover more than half of all messages.
How a virtual assistant works for an online store
Read the chatbot guide →What it really costs
AI costs come in two kinds. There are subscriptions to ready-made tools, handy for getting started, and there are pay-as-you-go costs for models used through APIs, charged by the amount of text processed, the so-called tokens. For many business automations we are talking about a few euros, or a few tens of euros, a month: the real cost is the time to set them up properly and to check them at the beginning.
Estimate what your automation would cost
Calculate token costs →What not to hand over to AI
- ▸Decisions with legal, tax or medical consequences, without a professional checking them
- ▸Customers' personal data sent to external services without checking privacy terms and contracts
- ▸Texts published without proofreading: AI can be wrong with great confidence
- ▸Processes nobody in the company really knows: first clarify the process, then automate it
How I set up an automation
I start with an analysis of how you work today: where time is lost, what data is already available, which tools you use. Together we pick one or two processes to start from, I build the automation with the most suitable tool, ready-made or custom, and I measure the time saved. Only when it works do we move on to the next process.
Which repetitive tasks would you like to take off your day?
Contact me →
