How Small Businesses Can Leverage an AI Consultant

AI is already inside a lot of businesses.

One employee uses ChatGPT to write emails. Someone else uses it for research. Another person has figured out how to build a decent proposal with it. Somebody else refuses to touch it.

That’s pretty normal.

The problem is that all of this often happens with no real plan. Nobody owns it. Nobody is asking how the tools should work together, what the team should and shouldn’t do with them, or where AI could actually make the business better.

That’s where an AI consultant can become useful.

Start With the Work People Don’t Need to Be Doing

I think one of the biggest opportunities with AI is to look around the organization and ask a simple question:

What are our people spending time on that doesn’t really require their expertise?

Maybe they’re writing routine follow-up emails. Maybe they’re moving information from one place to another. Maybe they’re doing research, summarizing meetings, updating spreadsheets, preparing reports, or building first drafts of proposals.

None of those things are necessarily unimportant. They just may not be the best use of that employee’s time.

Let’s say six people in a company each save two hours a week because they’ve learned how to use AI well.

That’s about 50 hours a month.

If you value that time at $75 an hour, that’s roughly $3,700 worth of capacity every month.

And the bigger question is what those people do with the time they get back.

Maybe they spend it with customers. Maybe they make more sales calls. Maybe they manage people better. Maybe they solve harder problems. Maybe they finally get to spend more time doing the work they were actually hired to do.

That’s where AI gets interesting.

AI Gets More Useful as You Learn How to Use It

Most of us start with something simple.

“Write this email for me.”

That’s fine. It saves a few minutes.

Then you start to realize AI can do more than respond to a prompt.

Maybe you have ten people you need to follow up with after an event. AI can work with your spreadsheet, use information you already have about those people, prepare the follow-ups, update the spreadsheet, and put ten emails into your drafts folder for you to review.

You still make the decisions. You still know the people. You still hit send.

You just didn’t spend your morning doing the busy work.

As people get better at using AI, opportunities like that start showing up all over the business.

Somebody Needs to Own This

This is where I think a lot of organizations are going to struggle.

Their employees will experiment with it. A few people will get pretty good at it. But quite often they’re all using their own personal accounts.

Ideally, you want to create a company account, with guardrails and policies and tools.

And then what?

Someone still needs to help the organization decide how AI should be used and keep that system healthy over time.

That might include:

• maintaining the company’s AI tools, projects, Skills, plugins, and workflows
• helping employees figure out better ways to use AI in their actual jobs
• creating clear policies around privacy, appropriate use, and problems
• training the team as the technology changes
• providing support when someone gets stuck
• looking for new places where AI can create useful capacity

For a large company, that might eventually become a full-time job.

For a small business or nonprofit, it probably doesn’t need to be.

Don’t Delegate Your Soul

There’s another side to this that matters just as much.

If we hand too much of our thinking over to AI, we can get lazy.

People stop questioning the output. They stop exercising some of the skills they used to use every day. The organization’s writing starts to sound generic. Decisions begin to drift away from the people, values, experience, and judgment that made the organization good in the first place.

I call that soul drift.

The goal is to delegate the busy work while keeping people deeply involved in the parts that need their expertise, judgment, passion, relationships, and creativity.

Six months into a good AI strategy, I’d want employees to feel better about AI than they did when they started. They should have less repetitive work, more confidence, and more time to do the parts of their jobs that matter.

A Good Place to Start

If AI is already showing up inside your business, you probably don’t need another random subscription.

You need a plan for how you’re going to use it.

An AI consultant for small business can help you find the right opportunities, train your people, build useful systems, and keep everything moving as the technology changes.

That’s the work I do at Cingularis. AI Solutions with Soul.

If you’d like to talk about what AI could look like inside your organization, let’s get on a short Google Meet. No obligation. No sales pitch. We’ll talk about what you’re doing now, where AI might actually help, and whether there’s anything useful I can do to help you move it forward.

Cingularis: Helping organizations who do good, do even good-er!