8 October 2026
Where to start with AI in a small business
Most business owners know AI matters. Fewer know where to begin. The usual advice is to pick a tool and try it. A better place to start is a list of the work that eats your team's week.
Start with the work, not the tool
Ask each person on your team a simple question: what do you do every week that follows the same steps each time? You will hear about copying details from emails into a spreadsheet, chasing invoices, answering the same customer question again and again, or building the same report every Monday.
Write each one down with a rough number of hours a week.
Put a value on each task
For each task, work out what it costs you today. Take the hours a week, multiply by 52, and multiply by what an hour of that person's time really costs, including employer costs. Then ask how much of the task could realistically be taken away by automation. It is rarely all of it. Often it is somewhere between a third and two thirds.
That gives you a rough annual value for each task. It is not a promise, but it is enough to compare one task with another.
Check the data before you go further
Before automating anything, ask what data the task touches. Customer details, payment information and anything about health need more care than an internal report. Under UK GDPR you should know where that data goes and why. Some tasks are worth leaving alone until you have the right safeguards in place.
Pick one, measure it, then decide
Choose the task with the best mix of high value, low effort and low risk. Measure how long it takes today. Automate it. Measure again.
If the saving is real, you have a model for the next one. If it is not, you have learned that cheaply.
Where Forwardcycle fits
The free AI Readiness Assessment does a quick version of this for you in about ten minutes, and suggests where to start.