AI & Automation

Everyone says I should be using AI. I'm mostly just drowning in repetitive jobs and I don't know where to begin.

Let's get one thing out of the way: AI is a genuinely good and incredibly powerful tool, but it isn't a single thing you can "do". We use AI tools every day. Crucially, it genuinely isn't the right tool for everything, and anyone who tells you it is has something to sell you.

So the question here isn't "how do we use AI?" It's "what is the thing you do in your business that is core to its operation? and "which of your jobs are boring, repetitive and rule-based enough that a machine should be doing them?" Sometimes the answer is AI. Sometimes it's a straightforward automation with no AI in sight. Sometimes it's a better spreadsheet. And sometimes it's a human's big squishy brain, because the job needs someone to care. We start from the job and work out the tool — never the other way round.

Sound familiar?

• You retype the same information from one system into another — orders into a spreadsheet, a spreadsheet into an invoice.
• Crucial parts of your daily workflow live in someone's head and rely on that person copy-pasting/filtering/emailing/messaging just the right way because everything seemingly needs to be in a different format or the whole thing falls apart. Oh and none of this is documented.
• You answer the same customer questions fifty times a month.
• Writing product descriptions or social posts swallows a day you haven't got.
• Everyone tells you to "use AI", and you've no idea where to start without it going strange on you.
• You tried an AI tool once, got something odd or confusing, and quietly gave up.
• You feel nothing but overwhelm when you look at the thousands of seemingly similar AI-based tools out there that promise to revolutionise your day.

What's usually going on

• Tools that don't talk to each other. Your shop, your email, your accounts, your spreadsheet. Each fine on its own, each needing you to carry things between them. And one wrong copy-paste breaks the whole chain.
• The wrong jobs are on your plate. Work that's repetitive and rule-based (a machine can do it), work that needs language and a bit of judgement (AI can help, with you checking), and work that needs a person — all piled together on your desk.
• Nervousness about privacy, and fair enough. Customer details are personal data. Where it goes matters, and we won't put it anywhere we couldn't explain to you.

How we'd tackle it

1. List the jobs that eat your week. An hour with us, a pen (remember those?), and an honest look at what you actually do.
2. Sort them. Automate it, get AI to help with it, or leave it alone entirely. Plenty will end up in that last pile and we'll say so. We don't have a billion-dollar stake in OpenAI (alas), so we will only ever implement things that will genuinely help you.
3. Build the first one small. Check it works, check it saves what we thought it would, then do the next. If you'd like us on hand after that, a monthly day of our time keeps it all ticking over. And we're always at the other end of an email

Where we'd start

Three ways in, depending on how you like to work: a single workflow built for that one profoundly irritating job that makes you bang your head against the wall; we help getting an AI assistant or rules-based automation system properly set up around the way you actually work (we're patient with people who aren't developers); or — if you'd like a steady drip rather than a project — a regular day each month of us working through your list.

The honest bit

We'll tell you when the answer is "don't automate that" — either because it's cheaper to do by hand, or because the job is where your personality lives. We use the right tool for the job; sometimes that's AI, and sometimes it's absolutely your good old fashioned noggin.

Tell us the one job you'd happily never do again. Get in touch

Related challenges: Modernisation · Inventory & Logistics