What does an AI company actually do for a small business?

An AI company like ours takes a job your business does by hand, every day or every week, and builds the thing that does it for you. That might be a tool your team runs, a routine that passes information between the apps you already pay for, or a private assistant that answers questions from your own files.

The AI is usually the smallest part. Most of the work is understanding how your business already runs, then building something that fits it rather than asking you to bend to fit a package.

We’re Duet, a small studio based in Bath, working with businesses in Bath, Bristol and anywhere in the UK. The work we’re asked for falls into five kinds:

• Tools made to measure. A job that runs on rules someone keeps in their head, or in a spreadsheet only one person understands: rotas, rounds, quotes, stock, bookings. We build those rules into a tool anyone on the team can run.
• Routines between your apps. Email, calendars, shared drives, accounts packages and messages, joined up so the copying and chasing happen by themselves. Anything a routine isn’t sure of comes back to you as a question.
• Paperwork read into your books. Receipts, invoices, delivery notes and voice notes from the van, filed into the books you already keep. Where a figure is unclear, it asks rather than guessing.
• Answers from your own documents. Ask a question and get an answer in a sentence or two, with the page it came from, so you can check it.
• A prototype week. An idea on Monday, a working first version in real people’s hands on Friday.

One store of a large supermarket chain built its home-delivery rota by hand: 294 shifts a week. Checked rule by rule, the hand-built rota broke 73 of the drivers’ rules. The tool we built for it took about four hours of working with AI. It writes a rota that keeps every rule, and it saves the store about £3,000 a month by covering the week with two part-time roles instead of a bigger hiring drive. The full story is in the delivery rota case.

It isn’t a chatbot bolted onto your website, and it isn’t a subscription to software you then have to learn. It also isn’t always the answer. If a spreadsheet fix, a setting in a tool you already pay for or one phone call would solve the problem, we’ll say so.

Most jobs start with a conversation: what the job is, how it’s done now, and what “finished” means. Then you get one fixed price in writing, before we build anything. If you’re in Bath or Bristol we’ll come to you. Everything we build is on AI for business.