Where to start with AI in a small business

• It repeats. Daily or weekly, so the time saved adds up and the pilot produces evidence quickly
• It is text-heavy or messy. Reading documents, sorting email, drafting the same kinds of replies. If it is purely rules, plain automation is cheaper and more reliable than AI
• A mistake is catchable. A person reviews the output before it reaches a customer, a payment or a record

Time the task as it is done now. The recurring work calculator turns minutes a week into hours and dollars a year.

• Reading incoming documents and pulling out the details to file or enter
• Sorting a shared inbox and drafting replies to routine questions for approval
• Summarising calls, meetings or long email threads
• An internal assistant that answers from your own procedures and price lists

• A customer-facing chatbot that answers on its own, in your name
• Anything that decides money, eligibility or a diagnosis without a person checking
• A company-wide “AI strategy” before a single task has been tried
• A task that happens a few times a year

Three things take days, not months, and make everything after them safe: put staff on business AI accounts the company controls, write a one-page AI use policy, and check who can see what in your files before connecting any assistant to them (the Copilot checklist covers how).

1. Write down how long the task takes now, and how often it goes wrong
2. Build the smallest version that does the task with a person approving
3. Run it on real work for a few weeks
4. Measure the same things again
5. Decide on the numbers: expand it, change it, or stop

The AI readiness check takes two minutes and tells you which groundwork is still missing.