I consult on AI for Australian businesses. In practice that means most of my job is telling people not to buy something.
There is a lot being sold to small businesses right now on the strength of the word “AI” alone. Some of it is genuinely useful. Most of it is a chatbot that annoys your customers and a monthly invoice. Here’s how I’d sort it if you run a small business around Sunbury.
Where it genuinely helps
Sorting your enquiries before you see them. If you get twenty enquiries a week and twelve are spam, four are tyre-kickers and four are real jobs, having something read each one and mark it accordingly saves you real time and stops you missing the good ones on a busy day. This is boring and it works.
Answering out of hours. Someone finds you at nine at night, sends a message, and gets a useful reply in under a minute instead of waiting until Tuesday. The critical detail: it must answer from your information — your prices, your service area, your actual availability — and it must know when to say “Stuart will call you in the morning” rather than guess. A system that invents an answer about your pricing has cost you more than it saved.
Turning one piece of writing into five. You write up a job you’re proud of. That becomes a news post, a Facebook post, an Instagram caption and a paragraph in next month’s email. That’s not clever, but it’s the difference between posting regularly and never posting at all.
Drafting the reply you don’t want to write. Quote follow-ups, a response to a difficult review, the same explanation you’ve typed two hundred times. Drafting, though — you still read it before it goes.
Where it doesn’t
A chatbot bolted to your home page. For a business with five services and a phone number, a chat widget adds a step between the customer and your number. Your customers want to ring you. Let them.
Writing your website copy. You can tell. Everyone can tell. The reason someone picks you over the other sparky is that you sound like a person who has been doing this for twenty years, and the fastest way to lose that is to have a machine smooth it into the same three paragraphs every other tradie’s site has.
“AI SEO” packages. Mass-produced pages targeting every suburb in Melbourne. Google has been demoting this for years, and when it catches up with you, it takes your legitimate rankings with it.
Anything that emails your customers without you seeing it first. One hallucinated price is worse than a hundred slow replies.
The test I’d apply
Before you pay for any of it, ask two questions:
- What specific thing that I do every week does this stop me doing? If it can’t be named in one sentence, it’s a solution looking for a problem.
- What’s the worst thing it can do unsupervised? If the answer involves a customer receiving something wrong in your name, it needs a human in the middle — and if a human is in the middle anyway, work out whether it’s still saving you anything.
Most small businesses need one of these, not five. If you want a straight answer about which — including “none of them, spend the money on a decent photographer” — ask me. I don’t charge for that conversation.