How a Small Business Can Actually Use AI to Save Time (A Real Example From My Own Week)
- 5 days ago
- 10 min read
Most “AI for small business” articles are written by people who’ve never built an automation in their lives. This one isn’t. Here’s exactly what I did this week, the tools I used, and why it matters for your business — especially if you’re working with a coach.
It’s UK Small Business Week, and the timing is good, because yesterday I did two jobs that sum up the entire promise of AI for small business owners.
I run a revenue consultancy — I’m not a tech person by trade. And yet in one afternoon I fixed something that had been niggling away at my team for months, plus built an automation to handle a job I’d honestly been avoiding for ages. No code. No agency. No big budget.
Here’s the honest version of what happened — and how you could do something similar.
The short answer: what can AI actually do for a small business?
If you take one thing from this post, take this: the best use of AI in a small business isn’t replacing people — it’s removing the boring, repetitive, easy-to-get-wrong tasks that drain your best hours. The ones you’re not naturally good at, and quietly resent.
This week, AI helped me with two:
Organising a messy digital asset folder so my PA can find images for our social posts and blogs in seconds, not minutes.
Building an automation that pulls our recorded coaching calls, writes up the session notes, extracts the action points, and files them straight into our coaching software — automatically.
Both used a tool called Claude Cowork. The second also used Make and Notion, feeding into CoachAccountable. I’ll explain each below in plain English.
Job one: getting AI to tidy up a folder no human wanted to touch
Every business has that one digital junk drawer. Mine was our image folder. Hundreds of files, all named things like IMG_4471.jpg and final_v2_USE_THIS_ONE.png — you know the sort. Total mess. So whenever my PA needed a photo for a blog or a social post, she’d be clicking through dozens of them trying to find the right one. Daft waste of her time.
So I pointed Claude Cowork at the folder and asked it to sort the chaos out.
It went through the lot, renamed every file with something a human can actually read and search, and organised everything into sensible folders — by topic, by type, by where we’d use it. A job that would’ve taken a person a tedious half-day was done in minutes.
Why this matters commercially: that’s not just my PA’s time saved. It’s faster content production, fewer “where’s that image?” interruptions, and a team that spends its hours on work that actually moves the needle. Small on its own. Multiply it across every messy system in your business and it stops being small.
Job two: turning coaching calls into action points, automatically
This is the one I’m genuinely pleased with.
As part of how we work with clients, our coaching sessions are recorded and transcribed by AI. Useful — but a recording on its own does nothing. Someone still has to listen back, write up what was discussed, pull out the agreed actions, and put those actions somewhere the client will actually see them. That’s an hour of admin per session that, frankly, I’d been doing reluctantly and inconsistently.
So I got it building me a system to handle the lot. Here’s how the bits join up, without the jargon:
Claude Cowork — the brain
Claude Cowork is an AI assistant that can actually do things on your computer and across your tools, not just chat. It’s the part that reads the call transcript, understands what was discussed, writes a clean set of session notes in our style, and identifies the actual action points — the “you agreed to do X by Friday” bits.
Make — the plumbing
Make (it used to be called Integromat) is an automation platform. Picture it as the wiring between your apps — it shifts information from one to the next so nobody’s sat there copying and pasting. In our setup, Make is the bit that spots a new call recording, grabs it, and runs it through each step in order.
Notion — the workspace
If you haven't come across Notion, think of it as a cross between a notebook, a document and a spreadsheet — a single flexible workspace where you can store information in a way that's actually nice to read. It's free to start with, and you build it to suit how you work rather than fighting someone else's rigid layout.
In our setup it does a specific, important job: it's the staging post. The session notes and action points land in Notion first, laid out clearly, before anything reaches the client. That gives me a moment to glance over what the AI produced, tidy a line if I need to, and make sure it's right. I can also add my own notes in as an extra layer. It's the human check in an otherwise automated chain — the bit that means I'm never blindly firing AI-written notes at a client without a quick look first.
CoachAccountable — the destination
CoachAccountable is our coaching software — where clients log in to see their progress, actions and accountability. This is the whole point: the action points don’t sit in a document nobody opens. They land directly in the client’s coaching app, where they’re tracked and followed up.
So the full chain is: recorded call → Make spots it → Claude Cowork writes the notes and pulls the actions → Notion structures it → CoachAccountable delivers it to the client. All without me touching it.
Where small business owners go wrong with AI
I’ve watched a lot of business owners try this and get nowhere. The mistakes are nearly always the same three:
They try to automate everything at once. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Pick the one job that annoys you most and start there. Get a win, then move on to the next. Do that once a month and in a year you won’t recognise how the business runs.
They automate a broken process. Automation makes a good process faster and a bad process fail faster. Sort out how the job should be done before you hand it to a machine. AI tidying my folder only worked because I could tell it what “sensible” looked like.
They confuse the tool with the strategy. Make, Notion and Claude Cowork are just tools. The value was in knowing which admin job was quietly costing me, and what the output needed to be. The thinking comes first. The tech serves it.
❌ Automate Everything
❌ Automate Broken Processes
❌ Confuse Tools With Strategy
↓
✅ Start Small
✅ Fix Process First
✅ Use Tech To Support Strategy
A word on cost: doing this on the cheap doesn’t work
Let’s talk money, because this is where most attempts quietly fall apart.
People try to build this kind of system using only free tiers and the cheapest possible options, then wonder why it’s clunky, breaks constantly, or simply won’t connect together. Free tiers are for testing an idea, not running a business on it.
Here’s what we actually chose, and why:
CoachAccountable — because it has a proper API. An API is what lets other software talk to it automatically. Plenty of cheaper coaching tools don’t offer one, which means nothing can flow into them without a human copying and pasting. No API, no automation. That decision alone ruled out half the market.
Notion — because it’s flexible. You set it up around how you actually work, instead of twisting your process to fit some rigid bit of software. That’s exactly why it works so well as the middle layer — it bends to you.
Extra Make credits. The free plan runs out fast once an automation is doing real work. We pay for more so it doesn’t stop mid-job.
API tokens topped up on both Claude and ChatGPT. Every time the AI reads a transcript or writes notes, it costs a small amount in “tokens.” Run it properly and you need credit in the tank.
Claude Max. The paid tier that makes Claude Cowork genuinely useful rather than a limited demo.
All in, this is costing us £100+ per month.
And here’s the part that matters: it is worth every single penny. When a system saves you one to two hours a day, the maths isn’t close. Put any reasonable value on an hour of your time and £100 a month is a rounding error against what you get back. We’re saving the equivalent of most of a working day every week — and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what these tools can do.
That’s the mindset shift. Stop asking “what’s the cheapest way to do this?” and start asking “what’s this worth if it works?” Cheap systems fail and cost you nothing but disappointment. Properly resourced systems compound.
The bit most people miss: your coach should be helping with this!
Here’s something I feel strongly about, and it ties directly to UK Small Business Week’s theme of helping businesses grow.
If you’re paying for a business coach in 2026, and they can only talk to you about strategy, mindset and goal-setting — they’re giving you half a service.
The biggest lever available to a small business right now is the ability to free up time and capacity through AI and automation. A coach who can help you think about your business but can’t help you implement the systems and show you how small businesses use AI to save time is doing the opposite, costing you money and wasting your most valuable resource — your time!
Strategy without implementation support is just a nice conversation. The coaches worth paying for in 2026 are the ones who’ll sit with you, look at where your time actually goes, and help you build the systems that fix it. Not just tell you to “leverage AI” and leave you to work out how.
That’s the standard to hold your coach to. And if they can’t meet it, you’ve outgrown them.
The takeaway - how small businesses use AI to save time!
AI for small business isn’t about robots taking over. It’s far more useful and far less dramatic than that: it’s about getting the boring, draining, repetitive work off your plate so you and your team can do the work only humans can do.
This week it gave me a tidy asset library and an automated coaching workflow. Next week it’ll be something else. That’s the compounding effect — and it’s available to any small business owner willing to start with one task.
Why not watch this video overview to recap
Frequently Asked Questions
How did you get started?
Honestly? I didn’t follow a course or a grand plan. I just started asking Claude how-to questions — “how would I do this?”, “is this even possible?” — threw my actual business problems at it, and let it guide me through. I'd advise anyone just getting started to, pick the one task you most wish would disappear, ask Claude the daft questions, and build from there.
Don't try and fix everything at once. Get one thing working, feel the difference, then move to the next.
How much does it cost to set up AI automation — and what do agencies charge?
Ours costs a bit over £100 a month in tools and credits. The setup itself? I did it across a day and a morning — however most of it ran in the background while I got on with my normal admin.
It was like having an employee in the corner of the office quietly building the thing, popping over now and then to ask my opinion. I barely lost any working time.
If you were to higher a UK agency to come in and do it for you, you should expect to see an invoice roughly in the region of £3,000–£5,000 to automate just a few processes, and i've also seen some fees range from £15,000–£25,000 for a full build, plus £500=£1000+ a month to keep it running. Which just is not affordable for most small businesses.
That’s exactly why we do it differently. We help you build it and learn it at the same time, alongside the coaching — so you’re not handing over thousands and staying dependent on an agency forever. And our own CRM bundles a lot of this automation in for £149 a month, which covers most of what a smaller business needs out of the box.
What tools do I need to automate tasks like call notes and admin?
Ours uses Claude Cowork to read and write, Make to connect the apps up, Notion to hold it all, and CoachAccountable as the final stop. But don’t get hung up on the exact tools. You want something smart enough to do the actual thinking, something to shift the data between your apps, and somewhere sensible for it to land. That’s it.
Can AI replace my employees?
Wrong question, really. The point isn’t cutting people — it’s taking the dull, repetitive jobs off their plate so they’re free for the work that actually pays. The hours AI and Automation gives back are hours your team can spend on billable work or chasing new business, instead of admin nobody enjoys.
Do I need to be technical to set this up?
Not really, no. I’ve got a bit of interest and aptitude for it, but I’m no developer — I built ours without writing a line of code. What got me here was asking a lot of questions, doing a fair bit of research, and learning by doing. (My partner Sally will tell you my real qualification is hundreds of hours of YouTube of an evening, which is honestly where half my ideas come from.) That said, it’s far quicker with someone in your corner who’s already made the mistakes — which is exactly what good coaching gives you.
Should my business coach help me with AI and automation?
In 2026, yes. The biggest lever you’ve got right now is freeing up your own time, and AI is how you do it. A coach who’ll talk strategy all day but can’t help you actually build the thing is giving you half a service. Hold them to the higher standard.
Want help working out where AI could give you your time back?
I help UK service businesses find the bottlenecks quietly costing them time and money — and build the systems to fix them, including practical AI and automation that actually gets implemented, not just talked about.
Book a free discovery call and let’s find the first task worth automating in your business.
Written during UK Small Business Week 2026.
