Consider a baker who pauses between batches to answer questions about custom orders and pickup times. Each reply takes attention away from the work at the counter. A tool that prepares an accurate reply for approval might be worth trying.
That is a useful place to look for artificial intelligence, or AI: a recurring piece of work where you can recognize a good result. Choose a task you understand well enough to check.
Give the first draft a clear job
AI writing tools can prepare text from instructions and information you supply. The U.S. Small Business Administration identifies drafting business content and summarizing meetings among the uses owners can explore, while recommending a small start and human review.
For the baker in our example, that could mean using the bakery's ordering policy to draft a reply about placing a cake order. Give the tool the information it needs and tell it which questions to leave for a person. Someone at the bakery checks the reply before sending it, particularly anything that commits to a price or pickup time.
The same approach can help with a service description for a website. Supply the services you actually offer, the area you cover and the details customers need before contacting you. Ask for a draft using those facts. Read it as carefully as you would text written by someone unfamiliar with your business.
If the draft needs extensive rewriting every time, keep track of that effort. A quick first answer is only part of the job.
Turn notes into follow-up work
After a busy day, the information you need may be scattered across notes and messages. A summarizing tool can help put it into a form you can review.
For a construction business, a trial might use invented site-visit notes to produce a list of follow-up questions. Ask the tool to separate agreed actions from suggestions and flag missing details. A note saying that someone needs to order materials should stay unassigned if the notes do not name a person responsible.
Compare the result with the original notes. Did it leave out a task? Did a possible date become a firm deadline? Those details determine whether the summary is useful.
Once the summary has been checked, a connection to your project system could put approved tasks where your team already works. That connection is a separate piece of setup; generating a list does not, by itself, update a project.
Make existing answers easier to find
An assistant on your website could help people find information in an approved set of business documents. Its usefulness depends on those documents being current and on how it handles questions they cannot answer.
Start with the questions customers already ask. If most people want your opening hours, putting those hours in a visible place may solve the problem. An assistant may be useful when questions vary and the answer sits across several service pages. Questions about availability or an individual order need access to the relevant system before an answer can be trusted.
Decide what happens when information is missing. A clear route to a person is preferable to an invented answer.
Test the task, including the checking
Choose a few representative examples and complete them using your current process. Then try the proposed tool on equivalent examples. Record the time spent preparing the input, reviewing the result and correcting mistakes. Include any extra steps needed to move the result into the software you use.
Researchers writing for Brookings explain how the customization required to put AI into use can change its economics. For your own trial, write down the subscription cost and the work needed to keep information current. Compare the complete process with what you do today.
Use public information or fabricated examples while testing. Before supplying customer records or private business documents, check the service's terms for storage, access and use of your information. NIST's generative AI risk guidance identifies both confidently incorrect answers and data privacy as risks to manage.
Pick one task you would like to spend less time on this week. Bring an example of the input and the result you need to a consultation with MCBMichigan. That gives us something concrete to discuss and a way to judge whether a proposed tool would help.
