Technology & AI for Business
Every owner has been told AI will change their business. Almost nobody has been told how.
This session skips the predictions and shows what small businesses are actually using AI for today, what it saves in practice, and where it produces confident, plausible, wrong output that somebody has to catch.
The useful question is not whether AI matters. It is which twenty minutes of your week it saves.
Most small business owners have tried a chatbot once, found it impressive and vague, and gone back to work. Meanwhile the businesses gaining from it are using it for specific, repetitive, low-risk tasks — and checking the output.
The risk is not that AI takes the business. It is that it produces something plausible and wrong, and nobody with the knowledge to notice is looking.
Where it works, and where it does not
32 topics across 6 areas. Six areas.
Writing and ContentThe most immediate saving for most businesses.6
- Product descriptions
- Social posts and captions
- Email replies and templates
- Quotations and proposals from a standard base
- Translating between languages
- Turning notes into a document
It writes a decent first draft and a poor final one. The editing is where your knowledge goes in.
Research and SummarisingUseful when you know enough to check it.5
- Summarising a long document
- Comparing options
- Drafting questions to ask a professional
- Understanding an unfamiliar term
- Preparing for a meeting
It will invent specifics — figures, rules, references — with complete confidence. Verify anything you would act on.
Customer SupportWhere small businesses gain fastest.5
- Answering repeated questions
- Drafting replies for a person to send
- Out-of-hours acknowledgement
- Summarising a complaint thread
- Keeping a consistent tone
Have it draft and a person send, at least until you have seen a few hundred of its answers.
Admin and OperationsQuiet, unglamorous time savings.5
- Turning a voice note into a task list
- Extracting data from documents
- Drafting SOPs from how you describe a process
- Formatting and cleaning data
- Meeting notes and follow-ups
Sales and MarketingSupport, not substitute.5
- Drafting outreach that a person edits
- Segmenting a customer list
- Ideas for campaigns
- Analysing which enquiries converted
- Writing follow-ups
Where It Costs YouThe failure modes worth knowing.6
A confident wrong answer is more dangerous than no answer, because nobody checks it.
- Invented facts, figures and rules
- Advice that does not apply in India
- Customer data pasted into a public tool
- Outputs nobody with the expertise reviews
- Dependence on a tool with no fallback
- Content that sounds like everybody else's
Where to start this week
- Pick the most repetitive writing task you have
- Draft it with AI, edit it yourself, keep the edited version
- Compare the time against doing it from scratch
- Do that for a fortnight before adding anything else
- Then decide whether it earned its place
Rules worth having
- Never paste customer or financial data into a public tool
- Verify anything you would act on or send to a customer
- Nothing legal, tax or compliance-related goes out unchecked by a professional
- A person reviews anything a customer sees
- Know what you would do if the tool disappeared tomorrow
How the session runs
A practitioner shows the tools working on real business tasks — a quotation, a customer reply, a set of product descriptions — including the moments where the output is confidently wrong. Participants try one task from their own business in the room, and leave with one repetitive job they will hand over to it for a fortnight.
What your students leave with
- A realistic view of what AI does well today
- One repetitive task from their own business handed to it
- An understanding of where it produces confident wrong answers
- Rules for what must never be pasted into a public tool
- A sense of what still needs a professional
- A fortnight's experiment rather than a subscription
Scheduled sessions
Nothing scheduled yet
Sessions are arranged with a college once a date is agreed. Ask us and we will find the right person for it.
A student rather than a college? See what is coming up, or ask your placement team to host this.
The question is not whether AI matters. It is which twenty minutes of your week it saves.
Tell us who your students are and what stage they are at. Sessions are free for participants.