The AI Audit

Most small businesses buy the tool first and go looking for a use. This book runs it the other way round.

You have been told that artificial intelligence will save your business money. Nobody has shown you the arithmetic on your numbers - and the arithmetic you have seen elsewhere leaves something out.

It leaves out the checking. When a person writes a client email you do not read it first. When a machine writes one, you do. That time is real, it recurs on every single instance, and it is the difference between a decision that was correct and one that was flattered.

A fourteen-step audit you work with a pencil, on your own figures, over about five weeks and six hours of actual effort. It starts with a fortnight's log of where your hours really go, prices those hours at what they truly cost you, and ends with a ranked list of tasks, each with a budget attached.

By the time you go looking at tools, you already know exactly how much you are allowed to spend. Almost nobody has that number.

• The loaded-hourly-cost calculation most owners get wrong by nearly half - in the direction that makes them do less than they should
• The four buckets every task falls into, and why applying the wrong kind of tool to the wrong kind of task explains most disappointment
• Five questions a task must pass, one of which can disqualify it on its own
• The three times rule: why a surplus has to be large before you proceed, and what to do when you narrowly miss it
• How to design a pilot that can actually fail, and a kill condition somebody signs before the money is spent
• Six patterns that account for nearly every failed automation - recognise one and save yourself a pilot
• Forty common tasks pre-sorted, with the checking cost that usually decides each one
• Fifteen worksheets, reproduced blank at the back, one to a page

Not one tool, platform or vendor is named. Any list printed today is wrong by the time the book ships, and a method that depends on a named product dies with it. This audit tells you what to buy the way a survey tells you where the foundations can go: precisely, without naming a builder.

Written for owners and managers of businesses under twenty people. No technical knowledge assumed. If you can use a calculator you have everything the method requires.