Every AI pitch you have heard came with a platform, a transformation, or somebody losing their job.
The useful version is much smaller. Usually something like this.
- Invoices arriving as PDFs, retyped into a sheet
- The weekly report, rebuilt by hand out of four tools
- Enquiries read, sorted and routed one at a time
- The same reply, written for the fortieth time
- Data moved between two systems that refuse to talk
Yours may not be here. Something like it is, as long as somebody spends real hours on it every week.
Most of what runs your business already works. It paid the bills long before anyone mentioned AI. The job is to find the few places where a machine genuinely helps, support what is already there, and leave the rest alone.
One workflow. Ten working days. Four thousand dollars.
I build this for a living. I am a co-founder at Sircl, where we make AI that runs in production for enterprise clients. I take these smaller builds because I want to understand how this works in other kinds of business. A distributor, a clinic, a school. The pattern is never quite what I expect, which is the point. You get the build. I get the range.
Day one we write down what the job costs now. Day ten you measure it again. The difference is the number. Hardly anyone writes down the before, which is why so few of these can say whether they worked.
Not all of it should be automated. Anything somebody has to answer for stays with a person. The machine does the reading and the sorting, then hands over the decision. When it is not sure, it asks.
The build is a one-off. Running it is not. Most of these cost a few dollars to a few hundred a month depending on volume. You get that number before you commit.
- Runs in your account, not mine
- The logic written down in plain English
- An hour with whoever will use it
- Nothing licensed, nothing locked
Half after the first conversation, half on handover.
If it does not do what we agreed, you do not owe the second half.
If that first conversation shows nothing here is worth automating, I say so and we stop. No invoice.
Tell me which job it is.