Skip to content
SmallShopAustralian Made Software
← All insights
If everyone's telling you to use AI and nobody's telling you where to start

Where should a small business actually start with AI?

Everyone's telling you to "use AI" and nobody's telling you where to start. The starting point is usually a task, not a technology.

6 min read
Decide

"Where should we use AI?" is the wrong first question, because it starts from the technology and works backwards to a use for it. The useful version of the question starts from the task: what's slow, repetitive, or backed up right now, regardless of what fixes it.

Where the obvious starting points usually sit

  • Answering the same customer questions over and over, by email or phone, that a written answer would cover just as well.
  • Quoting or pricing work that follows a pattern, but still gets typed out by hand each time.
  • Getting information out of documents — invoices, forms, applications — and into a spreadsheet or system, by reading and retyping it.
  • Following up on things that fall through the cracks because nobody has time to chase them: unpaid invoices, unanswered quotes, leads gone quiet.

A three-step way to find your actual starting point

  1. 1Ask whoever does the most repetitive part of the job what they'd remove first, if they could remove one thing. They already know. Nobody's asked.
  2. 2Count it — roughly how many hours a week, on the clock, by the person who actually does it. A task costing six hours a week is worth solving properly. One costing forty minutes a month probably isn't, yet.
  3. 3Check what you already pay for. Most CRMs, accounting packages and office suites shipped AI features in the last two years. Sometimes the fix is a settings toggle, not a project.

This is deliberately the same test we'd apply to someone else's $45,000 quote before recommending you sign it. It doesn't get skipped just because we're the ones doing the recommending.

What doesn't need to be the starting point

A custom-trained model, an "AI strategy document," or a chatbot on your homepage are rarely where the actual time is going. They're the visible, easy-to-pitch version of "using AI," which is exactly why they get proposed first — and exactly why they're worth being skeptical of as a first move.

The businesses that get real hours back tend to start narrow: one task, counted honestly, fixed properly, with a person still checking anything that matters. Wider comes after, once the first one's working.

Read next

All insights