The Disciplines Plate I AI Adoption & Implementation
AI Adoption &
Implementation.
AI that actually does a good job for your business.
Mostly document search, customer support and first drafts, for small businesses across Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. I choose the model by testing several against the real task.
Return to the workshopAI can save a small business hours a week, and do a few things that were not possible at all a couple of years ago. Most of the skill is in choosing which problems to point it at, and spotting the ones that are better solved the old-fashioned way.
So I look before I build anything: which jobs are repetitive enough, and tolerant enough of the occasional wrong answer, to be worth handing over. Sometimes none of them are, and I'll tell you so. I won't put an "AI-powered" sticker on a tool that worked perfectly well without one.
§ The work
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I.
Intelligent document search
Ask a question in plain English and get back the passage that answers it, from across your emails, PDFs and shared drives, including the documents nobody remembers writing. The technique is retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG.
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II.
AI customer support
A chat or email assistant that answers from your own material. It takes the common questions at any hour, sorts what comes in, and passes anything that needs a judgement call to a person. The point is fewer tickets without bad answers going out under your name.
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III.
Data analysis & insights
Get something useful out of the spreadsheets nobody opens, such as which customers are buying less or what changed last quarter, without hiring a data-science team or paying for a six-figure BI platform.
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IV.
Content generation & summarisation
First drafts of the repetitive writing - product descriptions, meeting notes, research digests - and a one-page summary of the 40-page report nobody was going to read. A person still decides what goes out.
§ The process
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Step 1
Discovery
I start with where your time goes. Which jobs get done by hand every week, and what information is hard to find when you need it?
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Step 2
Opportunity analysis
I pick out the few uses of AI that make sense for your business and budget. Some need building; others are an off-the-shelf tool set up well, and I'll tell you which is which.
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Step 3
Proof of concept
Before building anything big, I make a working prototype. You try it on your own work and decide whether to go further before you have spent much.
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Step 4
Implementation
I build the full version and connect it to the systems you already use, then show your team how it works.
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Step 5
Refinement
I keep an eye on how it performs and adjust it as your team finds the rough edges. Ongoing support is included in the price.
Questions, answered
How do I know whether AI is worth it for my business?
Usually by looking at where the same question gets answered fifteen times a week, or where somebody reads a document to find one number. Those are the jobs AI is good at. If I look and the answer is that AI won't help, I'll say so.
Will my data be used to train a model?
No. Where a hosted model is used, it is one whose terms exclude training on customer data, and that is in writing. Where that is not acceptable, the work runs on a model hosted on infrastructure you control.
What will it cost?
The prices on this page are starting points, so you can tell in a minute whether you are in the right range. Each job is then quoted after a conversation, because the price depends on the shape of the job and nobody knows that yet. The first half hour is free, and it usually settles whether this is a small piece of work or a large one before any money is discussed.
Who owns the code when it is finished?
You do, outright, including the source. It is handed over with the runbooks needed to keep it running, and there is no licence to renew and no seat to pay for. Commissions, not subscriptions, is meant literally.
What happens if you are unavailable?
Everything is built so somebody else could pick it up: common technologies, readable code, written runbooks and nothing proprietary. It is a fair question to ask of a one-person business, and the answer is in how the work is built.
Do you work outside Suffolk and Cambridgeshire?
Yes. Local work gets the option of somebody in the room, which is worth more than it sounds for the first conversation and the handover. Everything after that is done remotely for most clients anyway.