#102 How can Small Businesses scale with AI, Copilot and Lowcode

Welcome back to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. So as always, I'm here with Arno. Hello, Arno.

Hey, Sascha. Good to be here with you again. And hello to all our listeners. Great. Yeah.

And as always, we are talking about all things process and automation. And yeah, and of course everything related, all the related topics like GenAI, low-code, no-code, Copilot, all these interesting topics which came up over the last couple of weeks as well, a month. So, and yeah, a good chunk of our listeners are employees of small businesses and small to medium-sized enterprises. Yeah, and recently I had a good conversation with one of them and they have asked us to to cover how small businesses can benefit from, from, from that AI, artificial intelligence and GenAI, to grow their business. So yeah, we thought that was a great question actually, and it would be nice to cover more of that in a podcast. And that's, that's why Arno and I have decided to, to do it today. And we put together a list of 9 ways small business can use AI to grow. But before we go into the 9 points, I would like to set the scene a bit. So you all know that AI will definitely be changing the way how we do work going forward. And small businesses, yeah, so they might have that big transformation coming up for them because of AI and all the related technologies. So intelligent automation is one thing we talk about here a lot, and that that is something which now goes towards small businesses, or small businesses are using that more and more. And Arno and I, we are talking about this a lot here on the podcast. So when these technologies are used properly, they can free up teams to do more generally with the resources, whatever they do. And that applies to small businesses, of course, and to big businesses and large enterprises. Yeah, it will improve customer experience ultimately, and it helps scaling up with these technologies. And yeah, and small business owners and SME owners, they very often thought it is only a thing for the big guys. It's nothing which is available to them because it's too expensive, too complex, etc. But since that that GenAI started in 2023. Everyone is really fascinated by its ability to actually use the language to get lots of stuff done, to get automations done by just basically talking to the system. Yeah, so it's not just about enterprise using these technologies. So yeah, businesses of all sizes can use it these days. And yeah, it will definitely help small businesses and SMEs to punch above their weight and have also competitive edge out there. And yeah, as I said, Arno and I looked into this question from one of our listeners and we came up with these 9 topics. And yeah, let's dive into that. Arno, You want to take the first one?

Yes, thank you, Sacha. And that's a, a great summary or great intro. I mean, if we look at the first one, we always think about, you know, big business, big enterprise-level tech doesn't apply to small businesses because their budgets are small. But, you know, when we look at a large business, and, you know, it takes years for technologies to reach a critical mass, you know, before it sort of trickles down to, you know, businesses that's smaller in size or mid-sized businesses. You know, it tends to be people, you know, subscribing or using sort of enterprise-level software. And because they can afford it and they've got teams to maintain it, it takes a while perhaps for that to again trickle down to smaller businesses. But when we look at AI, it actually appeals to, or it's accessible to so many businesses of different sizes. So it's sort of leveling the playing field slightly. And, you know, The main reason for this is partially because AI is highly affordable and it provides very good value for money. It's easily accessible. There's a lot of AI commodity-based services out there that you can actually subscribe to. So it really liberates the way that you can access the technology. And also, you know, it's not just businesses with kind of large-scale businesses that get access to these AI services. You could, for instance, if you have a a Microsoft subscription, you can immediately have access to AI capabilities by, you know, adding that to your subscription. So, so again, it is sort of leveling that playing field. It's making it more accessible. AI itself, because it's quite topical at the minute, a lot of people are talking about it. It's something that is actually quite easy to understand because it is something that you engage, and you can ask it a question, and then it comes back with some sort of answer that you could look at and say, is this going to actually help me improve the way I work? Is it the correct answer? It might give you a new idea. So again, it's not a kind of a transactional, complicated thing where perhaps you don't understand if you look at a conventional system exactly what the outputs are. That the system generates with AI, it sort of creates it in a, in a very user-friendly, human-readable way. And, you know, and again, the topic or the application of AI is quite broad. You know, like you mentioned earlier, you could use GenAI to help you create a marketing campaign, content for marketing campaign, but you could also use GenAI to look at, for instance, a line of business system. Let's say, for instance, you've got a case management system and you can ask it questions about how many cases do you have in a system, you know, the top 10 cases that got resolved the quickest, you know, and why is that? So you can actually in a very friendly way start to question things that perhaps with traditional systems would be very hard to implement and perhaps only affordable to large enterprise organizations. So again, you know, with AI, you can automate tasks, for example, that, you know, that requires a lot of people power. Otherwise, if it's not automated, you know what I mean? So you, there is certain things where you can actually, you know, look at specific tasks and say, well, can AI actually help me to do this sort of thing, it would make sense because why, you know, why would you, why would you send a task to a person if AI can make a decision for you? You could look at that decision, perhaps, but you either context and then you make those decisions quicker. And, you know, again, with, with, with AI and affordability and accessibility, you know, the key for it and for the way it works is it uses a vast amount of data to actually create the decision trees and the sort of the networks that's needed for it. And when I say network, it's a bit like a brain, isn't it? Things are connected in a way. So if you ask it a question where there's intersections in that network, that's usually kind of where the answer comes back. So the more data you feed it, then obviously the better the results will be. And if it's contextual business data, then the AI would learn a lot more about your business, about your data, about the meetings, contents in your emails, contents in your SharePoint or in your document management system if you don't use SharePoint, for example. So again, you know, it can look into places where it's very, very hard to find data and information. And it take— it can take that and create a really, really good model for you so that if you do ask it questions, it will give you sensible answers. And, you know, again, with the task automation use case, you can actually, within site sort of boundaries, and I guess Governance, ask it to make autonomous decisions as well. You know, if the invoice is, you know, £5 and the purchase order matches, just pay it.

Exactly. Yeah.

It's £15 or $15 for somebody to actually pay or to process the invoice.

Exactly.

Have that, that you would say, you know, where, where do you like, that sort of thing. And just practical things to get started with AI, things like, you know, keeping track of, for instance, meeting notes in a video call. You know, AI can actually transcribe that to you, but not just word for word transcribe. It actually can generate you a summary of it and also action points that is assigned to the different people. Now, usually how that works, you have to write notes down in the meeting. Perhaps you record the meeting, you listen back, you understand, you know, who needs to have specific action points. AI just produces that for you in a summary. You could look at that and be like, okay, I want to add something else to this. It just speeds up the way you work. And all of this, this is not crazy tech that only large organizations have access to.

No, it's there, isn't it? Yeah. So it is incredible because we all know that, doesn't it? Just mentioned that was the video meetings. So when you take notes while you're on the call, then obviously you might— you're not concentrating too much on your own, on the other person, isn't it? And that sometimes doesn't come across very well. Or you just record it, but then you have to go through the whole meeting otherwise manually again to capture all these points. And with AI listening in, basically into the meeting, can even do recommendations on the fly. Have you asked, have you asked maybe this interested person how much is the value of the property, or do you like this and this accessory on top of it? So you can actually steer the conversation as well with the help of AI. So yeah, this is really what the Copilot term, isn't it, nearly embodies. It's there for you like a wingman, isn't it? So it's always there for whatever you do to do things slightly better or easier. And you mentioned that asking the system these days, I remember that Iron Man Jarvis AI, isn't it? So Iron Man is always talking to his computer, oh, can you tell me about this and that? And where's the situation, was this specific parameter? And then looking at the data and you can drill deeper and deeper into the data without actually generating report yourself and then look at it. And yeah, so this is all usually very manual and time-consuming work. Now you can talk to your systems in a new way which was never there before. Yeah, very fascinating.

Yeah. Do you want to tackle the next point then?

Yeah. So of course with all that what we were mentioning, it definitely AI definitely is there to free up time for all the teams, for small teams and big teams, because it can help to automate all these routine tasks we do every day in the company. So, and therefore streamlines whatever we do, for example, customer service inquiries. So instead of asking, no, answering all these questions, the same questions again and again and again. We can now, and we see that more and more, but not every business is actually using it. We could have a chatbot connected to our customer service either via the WhatsApp channels or email channels or on the websites or whatever channel is nearly like the preferred way for customers who can then answer all these questions. And it doesn't really matter if it's by a human. So usually customers want certain things clarified and a chatbot nowadays can really understand what was the question. It's not like a very dumb thing and then, oh, I didn't understand your question, I didn't understand your question. Nowadays you have like a really, really good conversation and these chatbots, they are working with your knowledge. I think that's the key thing which we didn't have before, sort of, GenAI too much. So I think that got really, really good over the last couple of months. So yeah, with that, yeah, it can save a lot of time and customers are more happy. And that's the key thing, isn't it? We want these touchpoints with our customers, internal, external customers, we want them to be remarkable, outstanding, and AI can contribute to that a lot. So So whatever is repetitive and time-consuming— data entry, scheduling, email trawling, analyzing, social media posting, sorting, all that stuff— all that stuff manually done leads to errors. And using AI, of course, we know, with a good copilot, with the right instructions, can help us to be more productive.

Yeah, and you talk about Copilot, and that actually brings me to the next point, which is providing data analysis and deep insights into your data. So pointing AI to your business as a whole. So this includes business systems, documents, conversations over Teams, email. Looking at people's calendars. AI can actually provide very powerful data analytics that, that provides you with actionable insights. And this is not just for management, this is also for users of AI. You know, we can look at predictive analytics, for example, for sales forecasting. It could potentially look at your, your previous sales figures, it could look at your existing opportunities, it could look at perhaps, you know, opportunities where there's a better chance for conversion. You can bring in customer behavioral analysis as well to see, you know, where you could upsell and cross-sell. So there's so much potential. And, you know, if you look at something like Microsoft Copilot, for example, that actually looks at your Microsoft estate in terms of documents, data, you know, across the board. And it actually provides you great context for doing these, these, or extracting these insights, you know, from, from your business and asking questions and asking, you know, summaries and, you know, for information that would be really, really hard, if not impossible, to obtain. And again, you know, if you look at, and again, I'm gonna look at sales because that's a very, very easy use case to understand. You know, AI can identify opportunities for you that, you know, allow you to speak to a customer or prospect in a specific way, you know, based on sort of previous conversations with a similar prospect in the same industry. It could create sort of, let's say, a cold calling script for you that is based on the, you know, your conversion, your positive conversion or successful conversion of previous prospects for that particular industry, for example, or that vertical for that particular product you're trying to sell or that specific service. You know, if you look at things like sentiment analysis as well, you know, this will actually sort of extract if somebody is angry, if somebody is happy, if somebody is satisfied, and, you know, make suggestions on, you know, what potentially next steps could be to rectify a problem, where to route a very, very angry customer to which case sort of inbox or a case queue that should be routed to. So again, you know, from a sort of a data analysis and insight perspective, it is very, very good at understanding your landscape, your data landscape, um, in, with inside your business, uh, the way you work, um, you know, your information. And again, you know, having that as a sort of instant available sort of lake of knowledge to tap into and ask questions is tremendously powerful. And, you know, and again, we, we, we, you know, if we had this conversation 5 years ago and you talked about these things, you say, well, that's only big, you know, Fortune 100 or Fortune 500 companies that do stuff like that. But the reality is that any, any size business that subscribe to AI services, and again, I'm gonna use the Microsoft example because it's an easy one to understand. But you've got Microsoft subscription, you've got your Microsoft Office data in one place, you can use Copilot. It knows what information and where. If there's a specific insight that you want to extract or a specific question perhaps that you want to get answered, AI will actually assist you to get that information or get that answer or guide you to allow you to understand where to go do further investigation or further analysis. So it's this sort of ultimate way to query your information pool without actually having to have technical skills. And again, it's akin to sort of having this office expert that you can ask any question about anything inside your business and write your answer. Now, you might look at that and say, well, I don't really like this answer, but at least it gives you a point of view. Do that. 24/7, if that makes sense.

It's brilliant. It's really amazing. And the thing is, we do also so many different things during the day, especially in the small business. Very often it's like lots of people wear different hats and it's just natural that you can't know and remember everything. So you hear something like you mentioned that sentiment analysis before. Sometimes there's emails coming in, you're not reading it at the right time. and then it was like a really concerned customer. Because you're in a smaller business, you might miss that. But with AI scanning it, escalating it automatically, those kind of things are hugely helpful. And I think even if that AI is not— lots of, lots of times we say, oh yeah, it's not good enough, the, the quality is not good enough. Yeah, but if it's already 80% there or 60% there, additionally as a tool bar as your copilot in the company, 100%, it must be more useful than not having it.

Exactly, exactly.

And for such a low cost, and in comparison to like your assistant which is always around you reminding you of things, yeah, it's very huge change. Yeah, in the same way, it's is market— is when it comes to marketing and sales and lead generation, I think AI can be so helpful. So imagine, for example, that you, you have an online meeting with one of your customers and they mention about a specific aspect. We talked about this earlier, recording it, transcribing it, summarizing it, recommending actions, etc. But that, that is exactly that. So you might not remember just a a tiny bit, say it on this little comment here and there, but AI will just take it as it is and will then maybe recommend different things. So to follow up proactively on a specific topic, and it can prepare even those kind of follow-ups and you can review it. So we don't want necessarily AI go full on automating the customer interactions yet, But definitely if you can draft things and suggest things and prepare things, that's already a huge, huge help. And, and especially when we are a business which wants to scale, all those little helpers and activities AI can contribute is huge. And it could find as well things in your CRM system. It can find the right opportunities based on as well based on data. It can go out and find more information about a specific prospect. If you say this is your target account, you want to get into like a really, really big company. AI can continuously find information, the latest accounts, the, not accounts, what is it, the management reports and all that stuff, gets little nuggets out of that which might be helpful for the next outreach. So yeah, without AI, You as a human, you have your limits. And yeah, exactly.

And I think that you're not going to remember everything all the time, and especially things that changes constantly and also new things, right? So the next one I want to touch on is employee productivity and collaboration. So you talked about meeting summaries. And again, just to reemphasize, this is something that is out there and it's available today. Where you can have things like, you know, AI-driven sort of summarization of conversations. You could identify the action items like I mentioned earlier. You know, it can even trigger and start workflows based on specific points, you know, with, with inside, you know, sort of a, summation that it's made suggests that this process perhaps needs to be started in terms of the workflow. You know, I look at things like AI-driven virtual assistants and, you know, they can help things like scheduling reminders. Yeah, you know, anything kind of the workflow optimization. So in terms of employee productivity, again, that's within Sitebridge for any size business that starts using AI technologies.

Yeah, and sometimes it's when we talk about generally automation and business processes for small business, I'm surprised a lot when I speak to some small business owners, they are not even using these little things like this scheduling and reminding. And you think, come on, this is just a tiny, tiny bit. It doesn't— and that was available already a few years back. Now obviously it gets even better with with more complex scheduling, with different parties and all that stuff, and maybe even calling, right? But lots of things which are not going well when it comes to scaling at small businesses are not necessarily— or the AI is not, oh, the thing which was missing. No, there are lots of other reasons, and sometimes it is really this 1% here, 1% there, which makes these big changes. And Scheduling, that was one thing I recently had. So I know still so many small businesses, they're going back and forth on an email. Oh, when is the best time for you to do that? When is the best time? Okay, sometimes you maybe want to be polite or so, I don't know, but it is time-consuming and very often it's just time-wasting as well a lot. And I noticed recently there is one startup I have to post that here in the show notes. But they do a full conversation of Tesla salesperson. An AI is actually calling you, say, hey, you have been on our website inquiring some information. And the AI is doing the whole conversation similar like we have heard maybe 4 or 5 years ago, this Google Assistant making a call and doing a reservation at the Chinese restaurant. Is also like, yeah, it's super fast nowadays. It can really detect pauses and it really behaves very human-like. It's not like the call center voices you have. The automated call center telephone system is really, really powerful. So yeah, next point, we have cybersecurity and data protection as one thing small business can use these days as well with AI because Looking at data with AI is nowadays so much easier for small business to use. We can then now use AI to monitor different things in your business. We can find patterns where unusual patterns of activities, security breaches, yeah, everything which looks a bit like a threat, we could use that. Something what you know from other bigger companies is like, hey, someone logged in with this IP from Turkey, that doesn't look right. So obviously you can do those kind of things across your organization as well by looking at the data. You can just uncover these unusual patterns and then react to it more proactively instead of, yeah, you find out in the news that your platform has had a breach or had some issue with data. So especially when you're in a small business where there's regulation, a lot of regulation in your sector, maybe you're finance-related small business, then yeah, it is a very tough one if you missed some cyber attacks or some data protection issues. Yeah, uh, shall I take the next one or do you want the next one?

Well, I just want to quickly brief about, um, talent management and HR. Spoke about employee productivity earlier, and I think this is one to bring in as well, where AI can actually assist us with the, the whole recruitment process and employee onboarding, perhaps identify potential job candidates and also automating the applicant screening, or perhaps make recommendations on people that's already within your business. Now I know that touches on larger businesses, but you know, there might be a specific skill set that you're after, a specific role. And if you can plug AI into your HR data, then you could ask it questions and narrow down exactly you know, exactly the sort of candidate that you, that you need, the type of skills, location. And again, AI would, would, would help you kind of narrow things down and make recommendations. Now you don't have to use that outcome, but again, it might just steer in the direction of a potential employee that's already inside the business that is looking for a role, for example. If I look at onboarding, you know, we talk a lot about onboarding in the show. And, you know, I think AI will help us transform employee onboarding, not just automate it, you know, and it can be anything from sort of, you know, understanding the person's location, understanding a bit of background on the candidate. You know, it can be anything that you feel would make the onboarding process not just quicker, but also more personalized. And I think that, you know, that would bring new hires up to speed quickly with inside the organization. You know, if the right sort of messaging goes out, the right sort of procedures, the right tone of voice. So all of these things are quite hard to craft by hand, whereas if you have AI, you can do it in a very consistent way. Could be contextual as well. So it's not going to be the same across the board. And then also the maintenance of this across the business can be made easier using AI. And again, you know, that yields a really good feel-good factor for new employees. It will lead to better productivity for employees as well because they feel welcome, they feel known. Feel part of the team. And, you know, we always say know your customer, but I think there's probably a know your employee sort of argument as well, where, you know, they are a very valuable asset inside your business. And, you know, so is your customers. And I think the same amount of effort and the same amount of sort of attention should be paid to sort of employee onboarding as well, not, you know, not just reserve that for customer onboarding. And a happier workforce will obviously ensure that your business is more stable and your business grows quicker because people will be more engaging, people will come up with more ideas, and people will use AI to actually assist them to come up with great ideas. So it is a sort of a positive circle when you look at the kind of the whole talent management piece as well. And, you know, we talk a lot about soft skills and, you know, how do we speak to customers? How do we speak to one another in meetings? And I think AI can actually perhaps look at soft skill development and, you know, the way people perhaps communicate to customers. And, you know, you could use AI to make suggestions and use AI to standardize the way kind of people correspond so that again, it feels good to the customer, it feels consistent, it feels, you know, that today I'm speaking to Joe, tomorrow I'm speaking to Mike, and they've just got different, totally different styles. Whereas I think, you know, with these skills development, I can perhaps make some recommendations on you know, the way perhaps we talk to a customer that could be quite a difficult customer to deal with, or need to speak to a customer where there could be, you know, could be a problematic account. So again, you know, a lot of these use cases exist, you know, with inside sort of the HR space. And I would say that, you know, this would actually foster a very positive culture within the workplace and ultimately lead to a higher retention of employees as well.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that would be lovely. Yeah, because the trend is different still, isn't it? So because not all the businesses are using all these new technologies to the fullest. Everyone knows about them. There is a big hype, but I think the problem is AI in HR and talent management is not everywhere yet. So now we are not more on this, on this side where I think the retention is actually at the lowest level ever with the younger generation, of course, because we seem to not get the workplace structured in a way they maybe like to work in these days. So maybe AI in HR and talent management will change that to keep them longer there, longer than 6 months or so. That would be nice. Yeah, small businesses also can hugely benefit from that. All these platforms are now available in the cloud. So most services are available by a SaaS model or cloud platform model. And that allows small businesses to start small and use all these benefits of AI and you pay as you grow. That's pretty much what it is. And you can very easily, very often, let's think about the Microsoft Cloud Platform. So you can add these things over time when your business is growing and your team is growing and your requirements are growing, you can add more, more capabilities onto it or you use it more. So it's really like pay per use, pay per growth, nearly. And that makes it very easy for small business to actually tap into all that cool technology, into the latest of AI. It is not just for the big ones. You can start small and then grow. And yeah, that helps you to scale your small business, 20 employees, 100 employees. And yeah, and you will, yeah, you don't have to buy like a huge mainframe data center stuff, and then you have crazy costs. Now, the costs obviously in line with what you're using the systems for and the technology for. So yeah, definitely on track to be a sort of a secret weapon of small businesses. AI, I mean. So that's really very powerful. So the businesses who are using it, they will have that competitive edge. Everyone else who is not using it will struggle going forward. It doesn't mean they all will be gone, but definitely the business who are using AI and making that really, really powerful within their company, they will have far more benefits and they find the best talent, they find the talent at the right time and everyone else has to do it all manually. Oh, it takes so long. Surprise, use AI and you can, yeah, grow the business, you identify new revenue opportunities, you get rid of all the tedious tasks, you can concentrate on high-value activities, you can concentrate on that innovation work, thought-leading kind of activity, which, which really sets you apart as a small business, right? So, so if you, if you always have to do all that manual stuff, you will never have time and enough money available to actually put the required 5, 10, 15% of your, of your capacity into, into new innovative things which will help you to grow your business. So, so yeah, AI, absolutely a secret weapon for small businesses. Not a secret weapon, I guess, for, for small business for, for long. The more businesses are using it. Yeah, we will be preaching AI automation, low-code, no-code, Copilot, absolutely more going forward, like we always do. Here on the podcast, we will also talk about how small businesses can use it, SMEs can use it, enterprises can use it. And hopefully that's interesting. If you have any thoughts on what we include here on the podcast, let us know. Yeah, so we will be back as always very, very soon again with another episode. And until then, let's Automated.