Where do I even start with AI in my small business?

Short answer: start with your own diary, not with a tool. The businesses that get somewhere with AI are the ones that worked out which half-hour-a-day job was costing them the most before they signed up to anything.

Why "which AI tool should I use?" is the wrong first question

It is the wrong question because the answer depends entirely on what you do all day, and nobody can answer it from the outside. A one-van heating engineer and a five-person wholesaler have almost nothing in common operationally, so a recommendation that fits one is useless to the other. Yet most AI advice is written as if every small business has the same problems.

The question that actually works is narrower: which repetitive job eats the most of my week, and is it the kind of job a machine can do? Answer that and the tool choice gets much easier, because you are shopping for one specific thing rather than browsing.

Step one: a week of rough time notes

You do not need a time-tracking app. Keep a note on your phone for five working days and jot down anything that takes more than ten minutes and that you have done before. Typing quotes. Chasing payment. Copying numbers between two systems. Answering the same customer question. Writing product descriptions. Reconciling a spreadsheet.

Do not try to be precise. Round to the nearest half hour. What you are after is a shortlist, not an audit.

Step two: put a price on an hour

Three hours a week sounds trivial until you cost it. If an hour of your time is genuinely worth £60 to the business, three hours a week across a working year is meaningful money — and it is the number that decides whether a £20-a-month subscription is a bargain or a waste. Working out that hourly figure honestly is its own job, and we have written up how to calculate what an hour of your time costs.

Step three: separate the easy from the hard

Sort your shortlist into two piles. One pile is jobs that are mostly text, mostly repetitive, and where a near-right answer you then check is useful — drafting, summarising, extracting, classifying, rewriting. The other pile is jobs that need judgement, relationships, or a guaranteed-correct number. The first pile is where to start. The second pile is where people waste six months. There is more detail in which jobs AI is genuinely good at.

Step four: do two things, not ten

Pick the two highest-value items from the easy pile and set them up properly — prompt written down, process agreed, someone responsible. Leave everything else alone for a month. Two habits that stick beat ten trials that do not, and the single most common reason small-business AI goes nowhere is attempting a transformation instead of a change.

If you would rather not do the thinking yourself

That whole sequence is what our AI Tools Report does for you. You answer about ten minutes of questions about where your hours go, what tools you already pay for and what hurts most. You get back a costed nine-slide report: an executive summary with the hours you could reclaim, an impact–effort matrix, six quick wins written as problem and fix, the recommended tools with cost and setup time, a four-day plan, the bigger projects that come after, and the monthly net return with the arithmetic printed so you can check it. It is £59.99 inc VAT and it lands in your inbox within minutes.

It will not tell you anything mystical. It will tell you, in your own numbers, which two things to do first — which is the part most owners never get round to doing for themselves.

Questions, or want a tool we don't have yet? Email hello@grafto.co.uk — a real person replies.