Articles

Practical notes on automating small business work

Written for the person who does everything themselves. No jargon, no products being sold in disguise — the answer first, and the reasoning behind it.

15 September 2026 AI cannot fix a process you have never written down Why most small business AI projects stall in week two, and the unglamorous thirty minutes of work that has to happen first.
15 September 2026 Marketing with AI when there is no marketing team How to get a month of marketing out of one afternoon, and why posting more is almost never the thing that was missing.
15 September 2026 How to check AI output when you are not the expert The whole point is that it knows things you do not. Here is how to sanity-check work you are not qualified to mark, without becoming an expert first.
15 September 2026 From one-off AI wins to something you can rely on Why impressive results keep failing to add up, and how to turn scattered experiments into a system that works when you are not in the room.
15 September 2026 How to get your business recommended by AI assistants People now ask ChatGPT for suppliers instead of searching. What decides whether your business is the one it names, and what has no effect at all.
15 September 2026 Should you tell customers you use AI? When disclosure is required, when it helps, and the one situation where staying quiet will genuinely cost you a customer.
15 September 2026 What to use AI for in a small business — and what not to A practical sorting rule for deciding which jobs to hand to AI, which to keep, and which will quietly cost you a customer.
15 September 2026 When AI gets it wrong in front of a customer Whether you have to honour a price your system quoted by mistake, what to say, and the change that stops it happening twice.
8 September 2026 You clicked a phishing link. Here is the first hour. What to do in the first hour after someone clicks a phishing link, in order, including the two steps most people get backwards.
8 September 2026 Do you have to report a data breach? How to work out whether an incident is legally reportable, who you tell, and why the 72-hour clock starts earlier than most people assume.
8 September 2026 Does a small business actually need a firewall? The honest answer for a business with no server room: you already have one, the expensive one probably will not help, and here is what to buy instead.
8 September 2026 How to use AI without sounding like AI The tells are structural, not vocabulary — and asking it to sound more human does nothing. Here are the seven giveaways, and the three edits that remove all of them.
8 September 2026 Is it safe to put customer data into an AI tool? It depends on which account it is going into, and the answer is already written down in the plan you are on. Here are the three things to check, and the one-page rule to hand your staff.
8 September 2026 How to roll out MFA without locking everyone out A practical order of operations for turning on multi-factor authentication across a small team, including the break-glass account most guides forget to mention.
8 September 2026 Why the same prompt gives you a different answer every time It is not broken and you did nothing wrong — variation is designed in. Here is which kind of variation is harmless, which kind is a real fault, and the four changes that make output repeatable.
8 September 2026 What to revoke when someone leaves A practical offboarding security checklist for small businesses, covering the accounts that are always missed and the order that stops a leaver keeping access.
8 September 2026 What AI actually costs a small business The subscription is the smallest number on the bill. Here is the full cost model, the four charges nobody budgets for, and how to work out whether a tool is earning its keep.
8 September 2026 What should a small business automate first? Not the job that annoys you most. The one you do most often, that has the same shape every time, and where a mistake is cheap to catch. Here is how to score your own list.
8 September 2026 Your backup is not a backup until you have restored from it Why most small business backups fail at the moment they are needed, what ransomware does to cloud sync, and the twenty-minute test that tells you the truth.
5 September 2026 How to stop AI inventing answers to your customers AI will confidently tell your customer a refund policy you never wrote. Here is the technique that stops it — grounding — and the one test that proves it is working.
2 September 2026 Make vs Zapier vs n8n: which is cheapest for a small business? An honest comparison of the three automation platforms small businesses actually use — how each one charges, why that matters more than features, and how to choose without regretting it.