Straight answers about AI for your business

What actually works today

A few things sold under the banner of "AI automation" are genuinely useful right now, and none of them need a project or a consultant:

• First drafts. Letters, job adverts, website copy, replies to awkward emails. Someone still has to check it, but the blank page problem is gone.
• Meeting notes. Recording a call and getting a decent written summary out is cheap and works.
• Finding things in documents. "What does our contract say about late delivery?" against a folder of PDFs is a real time-saver.
• Reading paperwork in. Pulling the lines off supplier invoices or delivery notes into a system, with a person checking the result.

Most of this costs a modest monthly subscription per person. If someone quotes you five figures to "implement" it, that's your answer about them.

What's premature

• Letting it run anything unsupervised. Quoting, ordering, pricing, replying to customers on its own: not yet, not for a firm your size.
• AI agents that promise to run your admin end to end. The demos are impressive; the Tuesday-afternoon reality isn't there yet. We've written the longer answer on agents.
• Replacing a person. The tools make good people faster; they don't yet replace the person who knows why customer X always wants Thursday delivery.

What to ignore

If your existing software vendor has added "AI" to the product name and a chunk to the invoice, ask them exactly what it does. The honest answer is often a feature you already had, renamed. And any pitch that starts with the technology rather than your problem can be binned unread; good fixes start with the problem.

Does your business need AI?

Probably not this quarter, and certainly not before the basics. If your orders are re-typed between systems and your margins live in a spreadsheet nobody trusts, fixing that is worth more than any of the above, and it's not AI work. It's plumbing. When the basics are sound, the useful bits of AI will still be here, cheaper and better than they are today.

A second opinion

If someone's quoted you for it and you want a straight read, ring us. We don't sell it, so we don't mind which way the answer goes.