Porch Labs

AI in a small business

What AI is good for in a business your size, and where we’d keep it out

You’ve probably heard that AI will change everything, and you may have tried a chatbot that confidently got something wrong. Both impressions are fair. Here’s what we’ve seen it actually do well, and how we decide whether to use it.

Painting: two letter trays on a desk, one an untidy pile of papers, the other the same papers sorted into neat stacks.Painting: two letter trays on a desk, one an untidy pile of papers, the other the same papers sorted into neat stacks.

What changed

For most of the last twenty years, a computer could only handle information that arrived in a neat, expected shape. An order form, yes. An email from a customer who mentions the date in the third paragraph and the headcount in a P.S., no. That’s why so much small-business work is still a person reading one thing and typing it into another.

Language models, the technology behind tools like Claude and ChatGPT, read that kind of messy writing well. They can pull the date and the headcount out of the email, summarize a long thread, or turn a photo of an invoice into rows in a spreadsheet. They’re not always right, which matters, and we’ll get to it. But they’re right often enough that a person checking the work is much faster than a person doing all of it.

The second change is less visible. The same tools help programmers like us write, test and fix software faster. A small, focused tool for one business used to take long enough that only larger companies could justify it. Much of that time has shrunk. That’s why we think custom work is now worth considering for businesses that never would have before.

What it does well

  • Reading and sorting. Pulling the useful parts out of emails, forms, PDFs and invoices, and putting them where they belong.
  • Drafting. First drafts of replies, quotes, review responses, job posts and descriptions, written from your own information.
  • Answering from your own material. Finding the answer in your policies, menus or house guide, and saying where it found it.
  • Changing formats. Turning a vendor’s price sheet into something you can compare, or a schedule into a printable card.
  • Helping us build. Faster development means lower cost for the custom pieces you actually need.

Where it falls short

It can be wrong in a confident voice. It doesn’t know your regulars, your town or what you promised someone on the phone last week. It has no judgment about when to bend a rule for a good customer. And it shouldn’t be the reason a long-time customer stops hearing from a real person.

So we use it where a mistake is easy to catch and cheap to fix, and we design the work so a person sees it before it matters. Where a wrong answer would cost you a customer or money, it drafts and you decide.

Prepare, then decide

The simplest rule we use: the tool prepares, and a person decides. Preparing means reading, sorting, checking and drafting. Deciding means sending, booking, charging, promising and anything else that speaks for your business.

A vendor invoice, start to finishAn illustrative example of the line between preparing and deciding.

The tool prepares

  1. Reads the invoice PDF when it arrives by email.
  2. Lists each item, quantity and price in your sheet.
  3. Compares prices with last month’s invoice.
  4. Flags anything that went up more than you’d expect.

You decide

  1. Look over the flagged lines.
  2. Call the vendor, switch, or let it go.
  3. Approve the invoice for payment as you do now.

It never pays, orders or emails a vendor on its own.

When customers ask an AI where to go

More people now ask ChatGPT, Google or their phone’s assistant where to eat, what show to see or who can fix the porch, and those assistants answer from what they can read online. If your hours, menu or booking link are wrong or missing in the places they read, they’ll repeat the mistake.

What assistants read, what you can control, and what nobody can promise

What it costs to run

AI services charge by how much you use them. For the kind of work above, at a small business’s volume, that usage is usually a small line item compared with the people-time it saves, but it isn’t zero and it isn’t fixed. Before we set anything up, we’ll tell you which service it uses, roughly what we expect it to cost each month, and whose account it bills to.

Questions owners ask

Do I need AI?

Maybe not. Plenty of the problems we see are fixed by a correct Google listing, a better website, or one fewer subscription. We’ll only suggest AI where it saves real time or money.

Will this replace my staff?

That isn’t what we build for. The goal is to take the copying and sorting off the plate of the people you already have, so they spend more time on customers and the work only they can do.

What happens to my business’s information?

It depends on the service and the plan, and they differ. We’ll tell you which services we’d use, what their terms say about storing and training on your data, and keep sensitive information out of tools that don’t need it.

What if it gets something wrong?

It will, sometimes. That’s why we set things up so a person reviews anything that goes to a customer or moves money, and why we start with jobs where a mistake is easy to spot.

Can you just set up ChatGPT for us?

Yes. Sometimes the most useful thing is an hour showing you and your staff how to use a general assistant well for your own work, with no custom software at all.

More to read

Curious whether any of this fits your business?

Tell us about the part of your week that feels most like copying and pasting. We’ll tell you plainly whether AI would help, or whether something simpler would.

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