Service
Workflow Automation
The retyping, the copying between systems, the report somebody rebuilds every Monday. Built, tested, and handed over with the keys.
Most of what gets sold as AI in a small business is not a model at all. It is two systems that were never introduced to each other, and a person in the middle acting as the integration. That person is the most expensive component in the process and the only one that gets tired.
A build here runs $2,500 to $12,000. Canadian agencies publishing numbers quote $2,000 to $8,000 for a single workflow and $2,500 to $25,000 for a multi-workflow project, so this is the same market, quoted before you have paid anything.
What drives the number
| Driver | Cheap end | Expensive end |
|---|---|---|
| Systems involved | Two, both with a modern API | Four or more, one of them a desktop application with no API |
| Decision logic | Straight through, one path | Branching by customer type, value, region or approval level |
| Error handling | Retry and email somebody | Reconciliation, audit trail, and a rollback path |
| Personal information | None, or internal only | Client health, financial or identity data, which restricts the tooling |
| Volume | Tens of runs a day | Thousands, where per-run costs start to matter |
| Who runs it after | You, on your own account | Me, with a monitored monthly service |
The single biggest jump on that table is the fourth row. A process that touches somebody else's personal information cannot use whatever is cheapest, and the reasons are set out in the note on PIPEDA and AI tools.
The jobs that come up most
- Order or job entry that currently happens twice, once in the system that took it and once in the system that fulfils it.
- Quoting, where one person writes every quote from a price list and a memory of what was done last time.
- The Monday report that somebody rebuilds by hand from three exports.
- Intake, where a form, an email and a phone call all arrive in different places and somebody merges them.
- Invoicing and reconciliation, where the delay is not the work but waiting for the person who does it.
- Document generation. Contracts, work orders and certificates assembled from fields that already exist somewhere.
Which of those to do first is not obvious from inside the business, which is what the $999 assessment is for. If you already know, skip it and ask for a quote.
What you get at handover
- The automation running on accounts you own, in your name, paid on your card. Not on mine.
- A written runbook naming every credential, every trigger and every failure mode, so a different supplier can take it over.
- A test the automation runs against itself, and an alert when it fails, because a silent automation is worse than no automation.
- Thirty days of fixes at no charge, then either you run it or I do.
Ongoing operation is optional and runs $150 to $400 a month depending on volume and how badly it hurts when it stops. Plenty of clients take the runbook and never call again, which is the intended outcome.
What I will not build
Anything that puts a model between a customer and a number that has to be right. A model that composes an invoice total is a model that will eventually compose the wrong one. Automation moves data and applies rules; where judgement is needed, it drafts and a person approves. That line is not a philosophy, it is the difference between a system you can leave alone and one you have to check.
Before you spend anything
Tell me how many people work there, what the busiest hour of the week looks like, and which task everybody complains about. That is usually enough to say on a first call whether an assessment is worth your $999 or whether you have one obvious problem that needs one obvious fix.
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