You don't need to hire a consultant to start using AI in your business. For each of the five tasks below, you can try it yourself this week using Claude.ai or ChatGPT (both have free tiers) to see whether AI can actually help before you invest in anything custom.
These aren't theoretical — they're the five tasks we see owners spend the most time on, where AI delivers the most obvious and immediate value. Try each one with a real example from your business. The prompt templates below are starting points — adapt them to your specific context for best results.
Responding to routine customer inquiries
Copy a real inquiry you received this week — something routine like a pricing question, availability check, or service question. Paste it into Claude along with a brief description of your business and what you offer. Ask it to draft a response.
Most owners are surprised at how usable the first draft is. You'll typically edit it, but "edit a draft" is faster than "write from scratch." Do this for 10 inquiries and see how much time you save.
Turning meeting notes into action items
After your next meeting, spend two minutes jotting down rough notes — not polished minutes, just what happened. Then paste those notes into Claude and ask it to extract the key decisions, action items with owners, and any follow-up questions that need answers.
This one takes about five minutes total and produces something you can share with the team immediately. Most people who try this once never go back to manual meeting summaries.
Writing job postings
Writing a job posting from scratch is slow, and most of them end up sounding the same anyway. Give Claude a description of the role, the skills you're looking for, and anything specific about your company culture or work environment. It'll produce a complete, professional job posting in under a minute that you can edit from rather than write from scratch.
Drafting scope of work or proposal sections
You know what a job entails — writing it up clearly and professionally is the part that takes time. Give Claude the key details of a job or project and ask it to draft the scope of work section for a proposal. You'll still review and adjust it, but you're starting from a professional draft instead of a blank page.
Summarising long documents or email threads
Got a long contract, report, or email thread you need to understand quickly? Paste the text into Claude and ask it to summarise the key points. This works especially well for: contracts you need to review before signing, supplier or insurance documents, long email threads you're catching up on, or research you need to digest quickly.
What to do once you've tried these
If one of these experiments saves you meaningful time, that's your signal: this task is worth building a proper automation around. A custom solution — one that's integrated into your tools, pre-loaded with your business context, and usable by your whole team without needing to write prompts — will save you even more time and produce more consistent results than copy-pasting into a chatbot window.
The experiments above are a test drive. They're proof that the value is there. The custom automation is what makes it permanent and scalable.
If any of these experiments save you 30+ minutes in a week, that's worth investigating further. Book a free call and we'll look at how to turn it into a proper system.