Three starting points that fit a small team
- Drafting. Replies to the same ten customer questions, job descriptions, handover notes. A person still sends them.
- Documents. Invoices, delivery notes, application forms — extract the fields, type less.
- Your own knowledge. A search box over policies and past jobs, grounded with RAG, so staff stop asking the same person.
These are the same patterns as in AI for business, sized for a team that cannot spare a project manager for six months.
Two things to leave alone for now
Autonomous agents that can pay suppliers or write to customers without approval. And “train our own model”. You do not have the data, and you do not need it. Use a hosted model, ground it, measure it.
If the work is a fixed sequence with clean inputs, you may want automation and no model at all. See AI versus automation.