The work nobody should be doing
Most offices run on a handful of jobs that involve reading something in one system and typing it into another. They are slow, they are error-prone, and they are the cheapest thing in the business to automate.
Process automation is the least glamorous AI work and usually the first thing worth doing. It rarely needs a clever model. It needs somebody to sit with the person who does the job, write down what actually happens including the exceptions, and then build the boring version that runs every morning without being asked.
Also sold as business process automation, BPA, workflow automation, robotic process automation and RPA.
The work it takes
off your desk
Move data between systems that will not talk
The order in the inbox, the record in the CRM, the invoice in the accounts package. Somebody is currently the integration, and it is costing you their afternoon.
Chase the things that stall
Approvals, timesheets, signed documents, missing information. A reminder that goes out on its own is worth more than a person remembering to send it.
Produce the recurring paperwork
The weekly report, the monthly statement pack, the certificate that goes out with every job. Same shape every time, assembled from data you already hold.
Catch the exceptions early
A price that does not match the order, a booking with no deposit, a form with a missing field. Rules that a person applies inconsistently at four in the afternoon.
No surprises,
in writing.
Scope and price agreed before anything is built. If we think you do not need this, we will tell you that instead.
Get a quote ↗- A written map of the process as it really runs, exceptions included
- The automation, running against your live systems
- Defined handling for every exception we found, including "stop and tell a human"
- Monitoring, so a silent failure is not discovered a month later
- Documentation written for your team, not for a developer
Where this
goes wrong
Every supplier will tell you what their service does. These are the ways it fails, and what we do about each one. If a supplier cannot tell you this, they have not built enough of them.
Automating a broken process
If the process is wrong, automation makes it wrong faster and at scale. Half of this work is redesigning the steps before anything is built, and occasionally the honest answer is that you need fewer steps, not software.
Ignoring the exceptions
Every process has a "well, except when" case, and it is never in the written procedure. Miss them and the automation works for three weeks, then quietly produces nonsense.
Nobody owning it
An automation with no named owner is an outage waiting to happen. Someone in your business needs to know what it does, how to pause it, and who to call.
Silent failure
The worst outcome is not a crash, it is an automation that keeps running while doing the wrong thing. Anything we build tells you when it stops being confident.
What everyone
asks us
Often just automation, and we will tell you when that is the case. AI earns its place when a step needs judgement, like reading an unstructured email. Rules are cheaper, faster and easier to audit for everything else.
Pick the job that takes the most hours and involves reading something in one place and typing it somewhere else. The saving is easy to measure and a mistake is easy to spot.
In the work we do it removes tasks, not roles, and the tasks it removes are the ones nobody wanted. If a supplier is selling you headcount reduction, ask them who checks the output when it is wrong.
Common, and usually workable. Old systems often have more predictable behaviour than modern ones. Where there is genuinely no way in, we will say so rather than build something fragile.
Other AI services
Start with
one job.
Tell us the task that eats the most time. We will tell you honestly whether AI is the right answer for it, and what it would cost to find out.
Get a quotation