Automation and AI for your business
If you have heard a lot about AI and still could not say what it would do in your business, this page is for you. No jargon, and nothing you have to already know.
Based in Adelaide, South Australia. I work remotely with businesses of any size across Australia.
Here is the whole idea in one sentence: it is good at the jobs a person does the same way over and over, and bad at the ones that need judgement. Everything below follows from that.
Request a free chatHow to tell if one of your jobs is worth it
Three questions. If the answer to all three is yes, it is probably worth half an hour of conversation.
- Does somebody do it the same way every time?
Same steps, same order, same kind of information going in. If every instance is different, there is nothing to hand over.
- Does it happen often enough to add up?
Twenty minutes a day is about eighty hours a year. Once a quarter is usually not worth building anything for.
- Would it be obvious if it went wrong?
The safest jobs to automate are the ones where a mistake is visible straight away, not the ones that quietly rot for six months.
You can put your own numbers through the rough cost calculator to see what one of these jobs is costing you a year, before you speak to anyone.
Open the cost calculatorWhat it does well, in five groups
Almost every system I have built is one or two of these. If you recognise something your team does, that is the thing to bring to a first chat.
Paperwork
3 jobs
- Reading a document and pulling the numbers out
Invoices, delivery dockets, timesheets, application forms, PDFs from suppliers. It reads them and fills in the fields, and puts anything it is unsure about in front of a person.
- Turning a scribble or a voice note into a proper record
What somebody typed on their phone in a ute becomes a tidy job record with the right fields filled in.
- Tidying messy information
Addresses typed six different ways, product names that never match, the same customer entered twice. It gets them into one shape so everything else works.
Moving information around
3 jobs
- Moving information between two programs that do not talk Most common
The classic one. Something is entered in one place and has to appear in another, so somebody types it twice. This is the most common job worth automating.
See it as a real problem: The same thing, typed twice - Sorting things as they arrive
Filing emails, attachments, photos and forms into the right place, with the right name, against the right customer or job.
- Checking one list against another
What was ordered against what arrived, what was quoted against what was invoiced, the roster against who actually worked. It shows you only the differences.
Writing and answering
4 jobs
- Answering the same question people keep asking
Where is my order, what are your hours, how do I do this. It answers from your own information, and hands over to a person when it does not know.
See it as a real problem: Answering the same email again - Writing the first draft of something
A reply, a quote covering letter, a report summary, a job ad. A person still reads it and sends it. It removes the blank page, not the judgement.
- Summarising something long
A week of emails on one job, a recorded meeting, forty pages of notes. It gives you the short version and points at where each part came from.
- Answering a plain question out of your own records
"How much did we do with them last year?" typed as a question, answered from your own numbers, without anyone writing a report first.
Keeping watch
2 jobs
- Watching for something and telling you
A payment that has not come in, a certificate about to expire, a job sitting untouched for a fortnight, a subscription about to renew.
- Finding the odd one out
The invoice that does not look like the others, the order ten times the usual size, the week a number moved and nobody noticed.
Repeat jobs and reports
2 jobs
- Running the same steps in the same order, every time
Setting up a new starter, closing off a finished job, month end. It does each step, checks it worked, and shows you anything that did not.
See it as a real problem: Setting up a new starter - Putting a report together from several places
Instead of somebody exporting three spreadsheets and pasting them into a fourth, the report builds itself and says how old the numbers are.
What it is not good for
This half matters as much as the first. Knowing where the line sits is most of what stops an expensive mistake, and if your problem is on this list I will tell you rather than build something anyway.
The short version: a person should decide anything that depends on knowing people, anything costly to get wrong, and anything you would have to explain afterwards.
- Judgement that depends on knowing people
Whether to give this customer more time, whether this person is ready for more responsibility, whether to take this job on. It does not know them. You do.
- Anything expensive to get wrong with nobody checking
Paying money out, changing a price, sending something to a customer. These can be automated right up to the point of the decision, and then a person presses the button. That is how I build them.
- Work that is different every time
If there is no pattern, there is nothing to teach it. One-off jobs stay human jobs, and that is fine.
- Being the only copy of something that matters
It should always be working on top of a system that holds the real records, not be the place the records live.
- Legal, financial or medical decisions on its own
It can prepare, summarise and draft. A qualified person still decides.
- Anything where you must be able to explain the reasoning afterwards
If you would have to justify the decision to a regulator, an auditor or a court, build it so a person makes the call and the system shows the working.
- Replacing somebody wholesale
A job is dozens of small tasks, and only some of them repeat. In practice it takes the repetitive ones off a person, which is a different thing and a much better one.
Words you will hear, in plain English
- AI
- Software that can handle language and messy information rather than needing everything in exactly the right box. That is the whole difference from ordinary software.
- Automation
- A job that used to need a person now happens on its own. Most of what I build is this, with a bit of AI in the middle where the information is messy.
- Integration
- Getting two programs to talk to each other, so something entered in one turns up in the other.
- Agent
- A piece of software given a job and allowed to take several steps on its own to finish it, rather than doing one thing when you press a button.
- Model
- The engine underneath, made by a company like Anthropic, Google or OpenAI. They get better and cheaper every few months, which is why this is worth doing now and was not five years ago.
- Your data being used for training
- Whether what you put in is kept and used to improve the provider's own product. The default on anything I build is that it is not, and it is written into the agreement rather than promised on a call. The full answer on data is on the questions page.
- On your own infrastructure
- "Infrastructure" just means the computers and accounts something runs on. Running on yours, rather than mine or anybody else's.
- Handover
- The end of a build, where the code, the accounts and the written instructions all go into your name and you could carry on without me. Who owns it at the end?
Still not sure
if yours fits?
That is the normal place to start, and it is exactly what the free half hour is for. Bring one job that annoys you. You will get a straight answer, including if the answer is that it is not worth building.
Request a free chat