AI::where_the_gains_are
What can AI do for your business?
No demonstration and no promises. Answer four questions about your work and you will see which measures deliver the most in your situation — with an estimate of savings, costs and feasibility.
In SMEs, AI is rarely a system that takes over the work. It is a component in your existing process that performs one well-defined step that is now done by hand: reading a purchase invoice, sorting the mail, finding an agreement in your own documents. That sounds more modest than the picture you are presented with elsewhere, and it is. But it is the part that works.
Work that can be taken over well
Three characteristics keep recurring: the input is fixed, the result can be checked, and a mistake stands out immediately.
- Reading documents: invoices, receipts, packing slips. A document goes in, a set of fields comes out.
- Sorting and distributing: classifying incoming mail and passing it to the right person.
- Finding things: asking a question in plain language and getting an answer from your own documents, with source references.
- Gathering: pulling figures together from the source for a report. You draw the conclusions yourself.
Work that cannot
Here AI is not cheaper than a person, just harder to correct. That says nothing about the technology and everything about your administration.
- Decisions that rely on agreements that are not recorded anywhere.
- Planning rules that live in the head of one experienced colleague.
- Work where a mistake only becomes visible weeks later.
- Processes where nobody quite remembers why they are done this way.
And sometimes AI is not the answer. If your time mainly goes into retyping data between two systems, a regular integration is cheaper, faster and more reliable. We simply say so below as well. Incidentally, the outcome does not come from a language model but from a fixed set of rules: the same answers always give the same outcome, and no figure is made up.