We put AI at the centre of how we work in June. Here is what it changed for our clients, what it never will, and the three rules we would start with if it were your business.
The way to use AI in a small business is to let it do the graft and keep a person in charge of everything that matters. Write your rules down, make it learn from every mistake, and check what it hands you before anyone else sees it. That is the short version. Here is the long one, from four months of running our whole studio on it.
AI-Accelerated, not an AI agency
In June we went all in. Claude Code, an AI tool you talk to in plain English that builds what you describe, now sits at the centre of how we work. But we did not turn into an AI agency. We are AI-Accelerated. The AI makes us fast. Ten years of doing this is what makes the work right.
That sounds like wording. It is not. It decides who is in charge.
Start with your own business
The first thing we pointed it at was us. We were paying for four different tools that did not talk to each other: bookings, projects, contracts and forms. They are now one system, built around the way we actually work, and that alone saves us around £1,000 a month.
We also built a staff portal so nobody has to chase who is on what, our own SEO software that shows a business where it stands on Google and whether AI assistants recommend it, and what we call our brain: over a thousand notes on how we work. Every client, every rule, every lesson. The AI reads it before it touches a job.
What it changed for our clients
Speed comes first. A business owner rang one evening at 7pm about his systems. The next day he had a working demo of the new one. A damp proofing firm in Sheffield said yes to a new website, and ten days later it was live. Fifteen pages, all the content written.
Then there is what is now possible. A personal trainer has his own booking software instead of renting it, sitting next to the coaching app he already uses. A family courier firm swapped an old database for one system that prices the job, tracks the vans, tracks the jobs and does the invoices. A business that size could never have had that built before, not at a price that made sense.
That is the real shift. Work that used to be for big companies with big budgets, done properly for the businesses we actually work with.
What it should never do on its own
This is the part that matters most, because it is where AI goes wrong for most people.
- It does not sit on the call with your customer. It does not know your business, and it does not decide what good looks like.
- It still gets things wrong. Of course it does. Nothing goes to a client until it has been checked the way a customer would see it: loaded on a phone, clicked through, looked at by a person.
- It does not answer your customers. When a client messages us, they still get a person, not a bot.
- It does not do the craft that needs a human eye. Our logos are still designed by hand, never AI. And if a client wants their website built fully by hand, start to finish, that is still there. Same standard either way.
Every job still has a person in charge of it, from start to finish.
Three rules to start with
If you are thinking about doing the same in your business, these are the three things we would sort first.
1. Write your rules down
How you work, how you talk to customers, what you never do. AI follows what you have written, not what is in your head. If it is not written down, it is a guess.
2. Make it remember every mistake
Every time it gets something wrong, write a note so it does not happen twice. Ours has over a thousand. That is how every new job starts where the last one finished, rather than from scratch.
3. Check the output, not the promise
AI will always tell you it is done. That does not mean it works. Load it, click it, use it the way your customer would, and only then believe it.
Questions people ask
Do I need to be technical to use AI in my business?
No. The useful part is knowing your business well enough to write down how it should run. The technical side is where someone like us comes in.
Will AI replace my staff?
That is not how we use it. It takes the repetitive graft off people: the typing up, the copying between systems, the chasing. The judgement, the customer relationship and the final check stay with a person.
Is AI-built work lower quality?
It can be, when nobody checks it. We hold the same standard whether a job is AI-Accelerated or built fully by hand, and nothing goes out until a person has used it like a customer would.
