AI integration
Everyone's telling you to use AI. Almost nobody's telling you where.
Most of what gets sold as business AI is a chatbot that gets switched off within a month. The useful version is quieter, more boring, and considerably more valuable.
How we go about it
We start with your actual process — the quotes, the orders, the invoices, the enquiries — and not with a demo of something we’d like to sell you. Then we work out which parts of it AI genuinely handles well, which parts just need two systems joined up, and which parts shouldn’t be automated at all.
That last category is real and it’s usually the largest. A great deal of what people want to point AI at is better solved by connecting two things that already exist — cheaper to build, more reliable, and it doesn’t need checking.
You get all of that in writing as part of the audit, with one of three verdicts against every place your business is leaking: AI handles this well, this just needs plumbing, or don’t automate this. You keep the document whether or not you build anything with us.
Where it genuinely earns its keep
Four jobs. Notice that none of them are a chatbot.
Reading documents nobody should be typing
Supplier invoices, emailed purchase orders, delivery dockets, timesheets, receipts. Every supplier formats theirs differently, half of them send scans, and one still faxes. This is the strongest case there is: high volume, checkable, and the saving is obvious in the first week.
Sorting and routing what comes in
Reading an enquiry, working out what it's actually about, sending it to the right person, and drafting a first reply for them to check. Most enquiries don't die from neglect — they die in the wrong inbox.
Drafting inside a job you already do
The cover note on a quote, the follow-up on a quiet one, the summary of a site visit. Written for a person to glance at and send, never sent on its own.
Answering from your own records
“What did we quote them last time?” “What's our process for this?” Answered from your own files and history rather than from a general-purpose model that has never seen your business.
Where we’d tell you not to use it
We’re aware this is an odd thing for a supplier to publish. It’s also the most useful thing on the page, and if you ask three other firms the same question you’ll see why.
- Anything where a wrong answer reaches your customer, or a regulator, without a person seeing it first
- Decisions about people — hiring, performance, who works which shift
- Work that has to be right every single time rather than almost always, unless a human checks each one
- Anything two systems talking to each other would fix more cheaply and more reliably
- Writing your marketing. That's the crowded end, you can do it yourself for nothing, and it isn't what we're for
- Training a custom model. Nothing at your size needs one, and saying yes would cost you a quarter
The rule that makes it safe
Nothing an automation writes reaches your customer until one of your people has seen it.
These systems are occasionally, confidently wrong. Not often — but often enough that something will eventually go out with your name on it that shouldn’t have. The check takes seconds and it’s the difference between a tool you can leave running and one you’ll switch off after the first bad week.
If someone asks us to remove that step because it’s slower, that’s the one thing we’ll decline outright.
It goes inside what you already run
This isn’t another login for your team. The invoice gets read and lands in Xero. The order lands in Cin7 or Unleashed as a draft for someone to approve. The job detail lands in Fergus or Tradify. The booking detail comes out of Rezdy.
Your people carry on using the systems they already know. The difference is that the typing stops.
We also won’t bore you with which model or platform does the reading. That’s our plumbing, it changes as better options appear, and it isn’t what you’re buying.
What it costs, and how honest the numbers are
Fixed price, agreed before anything starts. We don’t publish bands, because the same task takes a different amount of work depending on how messy the documents are — and with this kind of work, most of the effort is in the testing rather than the building.
We’ll tell you the accuracy you should expect, in writing, before you commit. Something that reads most of your invoices correctly and flags the rest for a human is a genuinely good result and it will save you real money. Anyone promising you perfection is either misunderstanding it or hoping you won’t check.
We also won’t sell you AI as a way to reduce headcount. It removes the retyping so the person doing it can do work that needs judgement. If cutting staff is the goal, we’re the wrong supplier.
Where to start
Start with a conversation
No charge and no pitch. If we’re not the right people for the problem, we’ll tell you and point you somewhere better.
Free · no pitch
You tell us what’s slow or manual. We ask the questions we’d ask any new client. By the end you’ll know whether we can help, roughly what it would involve, and what it would cost.
We work evenings and weekends, so there are a limited number of slots each week. Trades tend to ring rather than book — info@nullnil.net works just as well.