How to find your first AI task in your own business

00:00

Most owners come to AI from the wrong end. They hear about a tool, sign up, poke at it for a fortnight and then decide AI isn't for their business. The tool was never the problem — the task was never chosen properly.

00:55

So we start with a time audit, and it takes about twenty minutes. Open a blank page and write down every job that happened in your business last week that involved typing, reading or explaining something. Quotes, invoices, supplier emails, rosters, reports, follow-ups, the same phone answers you give ten times a week.

01:40

Don't filter yet. The jobs owners dismiss as too small are usually the ones that repeat forty times a month, and repetition is exactly what AI is good at.

02:30

Now score each line three ways. How often does it happen — daily, weekly, monthly? How repeatable is it — does it follow the same shape every time, or does every instance need judgement? And who does it — you, an admin person, or a technical staff member on a high hourly rate?

03:20

Anything that is frequent, repeatable and currently done by an expensive person is your shortlist. Anything that is rare, judgement-heavy or legally sensitive stays on the human list for now, and that's a perfectly good answer.

04:05

Next, the number. Take the top three tasks and estimate the minutes each one takes, times the number of times it happens per month. If quoting takes ninety minutes and you do twelve quotes a month, that's eighteen hours. If AI plus your review gets it to thirty minutes, you've returned twelve hours a month.

04:50

Put your own hourly value against those hours. Twelve hours at eighty dollars is roughly nine hundred and sixty dollars of capacity a month. That's the figure that tells you whether a forty dollar subscription is worth it, and it's the figure we put in every audit report.

05:20

Then pick one. Not five. One task, set up properly, running for two weeks, with you checking the output each time. If the quality holds and the hours show up, you add the next task. If it doesn't, you've lost a fortnight rather than a year and a staff rollout.

06:00

That's the whole method. Write down where the week goes, score it, price the hours, prove one task. If you'd rather do that with someone who has done it a few hundred times, that's exactly what the forty-five minute audit is.