What could AI actually do in your job?
What AI could do in running the business
Six kinds of thing, in order. The first three you can start this week with the tool you already pay for. The next two need building. The last you should buy.
Basic promptsprompt owner
Ask the chat tool you already have in plain words and check what comes back. No set-up. It works today.
What it takes. A subscription, ten minutes of practice and your own judgement on every answer.
- A monthly update to the team or the board drafted from your own numbers
- Homework on a prospect, a partner or a hire before the meeting
- A first draft of any policy, job description or process doc from a few bullet points
- And hundreds more. Anything you'd ask a bright new starter to take a first pass at.
Advanced promptscontext owner
Give it what it needs before you ask: the brief, the examples, the rules, the data. This is context engineering, and the quality comes from what you feed it rather than how you word it.
What it takes. The right material gathered in one place and a clear idea of what good looks like.
- A proposal checked against your last three that won and your own pricing rules
- Customer call transcripts turned into the three things customers keep saying, set against what you already know
- A competitor's website and pricing read against yours with the gaps named
- And hundreds more. Anything where you already hold the material and the judgement.
Skillsskill owner
A job written down once so anyone on the team gets the same result every time: the steps, the rules, the examples, saved and shared.
What it takes. Someone to write it and own it, and training so the whole team uses it rather than the keen few.
- Your voice and positioning written down once so everything the team sends sounds like you
- A proposal skill with the structure, the proof points and the pricing rules built in, usable by anyone
- A weekly numbers skill: paste the figures and get the same three-paragraph summary every week
- And plenty more. We run over 180 of our own.
Automationsauto owner
The same job running on a trigger with nobody typing a prompt: when a call ends, when a lead lands, every Monday at eight. Connected to the tools you already run.
What it takes. The process written down step by step, test cases, data you're allowed to connect to, and a build.
- Every new enquiry enriched and qualified before anyone reads it
- The weekly numbers pulled from your systems and summarised without anyone pasting
- Renewal dates and quiet accounts flagged a month before they cost you
- And more. We've built over 50 of them.
Agentsagent owner
Software that makes a bounded decision inside a workflow that already runs, with a written job, tests and a person at the gate. The last thing you add rather than the first.
What it takes. The automations underneath it already running, a fence round what it may never do, and someone watching it.
- Enquiries routed to the right person with the obvious no's declined politely and the rest flagged
- Churn risk judged across the client base with a person deciding what to do about each one
- Supplier and contract renewals reviewed and recommended for you to sign off
- And a few more. We've built them and every one is custom to the business. Because an agent is left to run on its own, there are fewer good use cases than you'd think. For now.
Tech built for the jobbuy owner
Some jobs already have a product that does them well. Buy it, plug it in, and keep the build budget for the things nobody sells.
What it takes. A subscription and an hour to set it up. Check what it does with your data first.
- A call recorder that writes the notes and the actions
- A bookkeeping tool that reads receipts and chases invoices
- A scheduling tool that books meetings without the back and forth
- And more every month. If a product already does the job well, this is the list it belongs on.
If the ones you want sit below the line, that's a build, and it's the conversation we're set up for. If they sit above it, start this week and come back when the list gets longer.