How artificial intelligence (AI) can cut admin for small businesses

Artificial intelligence has become a buzzword, and it is easy to feel it is either magic or hype. For a small business, the useful question is much simpler: which boring, repetitive jobs could it take off your hands?

What AI is good at

Today’s AI tools are good at reading, writing and spotting patterns. That makes them useful for admin, which is mostly reading information in one form and writing it out in another. Some everyday examples:

• Reading receipts and invoices. Take a photo of a receipt and AI can pull out the supplier, date and total, ready for you to check.
• Turning notes into proper records. Quick notes, voice notes or photos from a job can become a tidy job sheet or report.
• Drafting documents. First drafts of quotes, invoices, emails and social media posts, written in your business’s style.
• Spotting gaps. Flagging a missing timesheet, an unsigned job or an overdue check before it causes a problem.
• Summarising. Turning a long email chain or meeting notes into a short summary and a list of next steps.
• Answering questions about your own information. Asking, in plain English, which jobs are waiting to be invoiced, rather than building a report.

Where to start

Pick one task that is repetitive, takes up real time and follows a clear pattern. Receipts and expenses are a common first choice, because the task is the same every time and the result is easy to check. Job sheets and timesheets are other good candidates.

Before you change anything, write down how the task is done today and roughly how long it takes. That makes it much easier to judge whether the new way is actually better.

Keep a person in charge

AI is not perfect. It can misread a blurry photo, misunderstand an unusual note, or write something that sounds confident but is wrong. The safest approach is to treat AI as a fast assistant, not a decision-maker:

• A person checks anything that goes to a customer, affects money or is used for safety records.
• Anything the AI is unsure about is flagged, not guessed.
• You can always see and change what it produced.

Set up this way, AI saves the typing while you keep the final say.

Look after your data

AI tools often send information to an outside provider to be processed. Before you use one for business information, check where the data goes, whether it is used to train the provider’s systems, and how long it is kept. If you handle personal information about customers or staff, make sure the tool fits your data protection obligations, and update your privacy information if needed.

Standalone tools or built into your systems?

There are lots of standalone AI tools, and many business software products now include some AI features. They can be a good way to experiment. The biggest savings, though, tend to come when AI is built into the way work already flows, so information captured once on site becomes the job sheet, the report and the invoice without anyone copying it across.

That is the approach we take at Appright: we build AI into bespoke apps around how each business works, with a person always checking the results. If you would like to talk through where AI could help in your business, email us for a no-obligation chat, or read about the signs your business has outgrown spreadsheets.

More guides

• Signs your business has outgrown spreadsheets
• Bespoke app or off-the-shelf software: which is right for you?