AI for small companies

Yes, it's useful, and a small company often gets value out of it sooner than a big one, because it has fewer processes to change and decides faster. It's mostly used for repetitive tasks: writing emails and quotes, summarising documents, organising customer information or answering frequently asked questions. You don't need a technical department or a big project to start: a chat assistant and one specific task that's eating your time today is enough.

What confuses people most is thinking that "bringing in AI" means buying expensive software or hiring a consultancy. In practice, it almost always starts with someone on the team using a chat (ChatGPT, Claude or similar) for one task and checking whether it really saves time. The other typical mistake is expecting it to do everything on its own: AI gets things wrong, sometimes very confidently, and someone has to check what comes out, especially if it's going to a customer or to the tax office. And watch out with data: before pasting in customer information, check what the tool does with it.

I apply AI in my own systems and in clients', and there are no blog articles with this tag yet. Until they arrive, my practical recommendation: pick a single task that repeats every week, try it for a month with a chat assistant and write down how much time it saves you, or whether it saves you nothing. If the number comes out in your favour, move on to the next one. Starting small is the cheapest way to get it wrong, and getting it wrong is going to be part of the journey, I can promise you that.