Subscribe to our newsletter to receive business tips, learn about new funding programmes, join upcoming events, take e-learning courses, and more.
Take the first step to successfully starting and growing your business.
Join for freePosted: Fri 9th Oct 2026
Have you used ChatGPT a few times, been impressed, and then watched your business carry on exactly as it did before?
Do you suspect there are hours to be saved somewhere in your week, without knowing which jobs to start with?
In this Lunch and Learn, Ade Ajayi takes you through a simple method for putting AI to work on the jobs that repeat in a small business.
More than half of UK SMEs now use AI in some form. Around one in 10 have built it into day-to-day operations. That gap is where the time and the money sit, and closing it has very little to do with which tool you pick.
Ade covers how to choose the right job to hand over, run a two-week pilot without spending anything, and avoid the five mistakes that quietly kill this in small firms.
How to test which jobs in your week are worth handing to AI, and which to leave well alone
How to run a two-week pilot with one task, one person and one number
What goes wrong in small businesses, and the five mistakes you can skip entirely
Ade is the founder of Digital Sales Pro, a UK digital marketing agency working with growing SMEs and B2B companies on SEO, website design, paid advertising and marketing automation.
He has spent 10 years in digital marketing, has worked with more than 100 businesses since 2014, and also serves as a fractional marketing director for several companies in the UK and the United States.
His work focuses on firms with five to 50 staff, where he argues the binding constraint is rarely ambition and almost always capacity. Businesses of this size routinely need a marketing person, an analyst, or somebody to chase follow-ups, and cannot justify the hire because the role is half a job.
Watch more expert webinars
Access a growing collection of expert-led webinars covering marketing, sales, finance, growth and more – ready whenever you are.
Beth Galloway: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. Happy Friday. My name is Beth, and I'll be your host today.
For those attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses. I'm very pleased to introduce Ade Ajayi, who is an adviser. In this session, Ade takes you through a simple method for putting AI to work on the jobs that repeat in small business.
As always, if you have any questions, please post them in the chat or the Q&A, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end. The session is being recorded, so we will send the recording along with the slides in a follow-up email later today. Over to you, Ade.
Ade Ajayi: Thank you, Beth, and good afternoon, everybody. I run a small business called DSP, where we help people get found online, primarily on search engines and in LLMs such as Google Gemini and Google AI Overviews. We've discovered that leveraging AI is one of the best ways for small businesses to gain an advantage over much bigger ones.
Today, however, I'm going to focus not on how you get found but on how you use AI in your daily operations, and how it can save you a significant amount of time. The session will be in three parts. In the first 10 minutes, I'll go through my slides and show you how to set up AI, starting with four questions you need to ask. If your answer is yes to all four, AI can definitely save you a lot of time on your business processes.
In the next 10 minutes, I'll do a practical demo, building a tiny agent-style process: a scheduled task that starts helping me with something that already happens in my business every day. I'll also share a couple of ways we use AI to make a difference. The last 10 minutes will be Q&A, where you can ask about setting up AI or give me a use case or business scenario, and I'll see if we can build something quickly.
To recap, we'll cover the four-question test, which asks which jobs in your week are worth handing over to AI, and which AI can do properly. Then you'll decide on one pilot today: the one thing you want to hand over to AI. My slides say "starting on Monday", but you need to start today, so that AI begins handling the task for you on Monday. If I have time, I'll also go through five common mistakes, but if you can answer the four questions and set up a pilot, it will have been an amazing session for everyone.
Almost everyone has now used AI, and almost nobody has changed how their business is run. We dabble, use it for a few tasks, treat it as an assistant and ask it lots of questions. That's great, but we're not yet using AI as part of our workforce, and that is the shift I want everyone to make today.
You're not buying anything today, and I'm not trying to sell you an AI platform. These are the AI tools you already use. The only thing that may cost you money is moving from a free account to a paid one, whether on Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity or DeepSeek, because your data is handled differently and there is far more security around it.
On a paid account, your data is also not used to train the AI engines. You want AI platforms to cite your business information, but you don't want to feed them material for training unless it's a piece of content you've chosen to publish. In our 10-minute demo, we'll use three separate AI tools to build the skill, agent or scheduled task that helps your business.
Many tasks in our businesses need someone with a specific skill set, but not all of the time: five hours a week, say, or three. You can't hire half a person, and as a small business, every pound counts. If a person isn't useful enough to justify the cost, there's no point in hiring, and AI fills that gap.
You can use AI in your back office for things like quotes, invoice queries, meeting notes and job sheets. You can use it in your front office, for how a client enquiry is processed, how quickly it's answered and how it's summarised. You can also use it for parts of your marketing and sales.
One thing I must say is that AI does not replace critical thinking or decision-making; it only enhances it. I know we've all heard that, but it's important to repeat. Now let's look at a scenario: saving five hours a week per person in your business.
If you break down the cost of getting someone to do a task for five hours weekly, or of hiring someone for four to six hours a week, just one agent, one scheduled task or one skill can save your business £11,500 per person per year. You can do a lot more with fewer people, and your team doesn't get overwhelmed or burn out.
So what are the four questions? Think of any task you run as a business owner, such as invoicing, creating proposals, parts of lead generation or your weekly accounting review. That review might cover income, outflows, cash flow and where money is coming from and going to, along with a system to track and follow up on invoices.
Chasing invoices is one of the hardest parts of running a business. It takes a lot of time, diplomacy and consistent nudging, and it's one of the things I've now handed over to AI. It has gone better, and I've got more invoices paid, faster.
Whatever the task is, you need to answer these four questions. First, does it happen at least weekly? It should be something you do every week, on a frequent cycle. Second, does it run on words or data rather than judgement? Drafting, summarising and sorting all qualify, as does creating content that doesn't need your personal judgement.
Third, could a capable new starter do it from written instructions? That doesn't mean an entry-level person; it means any new starter in your business could handle it if they had the instructions. It's something that can be done without intellectual property or nuance that only comes from you, or where your process has been documented well enough to hand over.
Fourth, can you check the output in less time than the job itself takes? If the answer is yes to all four questions, you have something AI can handle for you. If it's no to any of them, I wouldn't give it to AI, not yet.
You'll get the video and the slides, so you don't need to take notes, although you can take screenshots if you like. All four have to be yes, because three out of four is how a business ends up with an expensive mess. The exception is if you're very technical, very good at AI and know how to write code and build interfaces.
So how do you set this up? You write the process for the task, not the prompt, just the process. Then apply what I call the holiday test: what happens to this process if whoever handles it, you or someone on your team, is away? If it stops, and the four answers are yes, it should be handed over.
There are three things that cost you money in this process. The first is buying more tools. Most of us in small businesses like to buy tools because we think they solve the problem, but you may have found, as I have, that this only gives a reprieve for a few days, weeks or even months, because it's usually a process problem, not a tool problem.
The second is when nobody owns a task. Here, we're giving ownership to an AI agent or scheduled task, but someone still has to check it, particularly at the beginning. The third is client data, which you must be careful with. Don't put client data into free AI accounts; it's dangerous, risky and unethical, so please don't do it.
If you've answered yes to all of these questions, we move to the second phase, which is building something. Let me switch to sharing my screen. If you have any questions, just raise your hand and I'll get to them.
A lot of people think you need to be on Claude's paid account. That's true, though you don't need the Max plan; the Pro plan is enough. But if you have a Google account and use Gemini, especially if you pay for it through a Google domain name, you can do this already.
Claude is what I'm using here, and I use it in many ways. As of this morning, Claude has merged Claude Chat and Claude Cowork into one version, whether you're on the web or in the app. That's great because you no longer have to switch between them, and it's fully integrated as of this morning.
I'm not talking about building complex AI agents. I've built a lot of agents and a lot of scheduled tasks, and I find they work in much the same way below the surface. A scheduled task does everything an agent will do if you give it the right instructions, and it's really simple to build.
I've removed all my existing scheduled tasks to keep this neat. In Claude, I go to Scheduled and create a new task, either manually or with Claude. If I create it with Claude, all I have to do is tell Claude what I want, and it starts asking me questions straight away.
It offers options, such as a morning brief. Every morning, Claude goes through my calendar, emails and Google Chats with my team and clients, then gives me a list of everything I'm supposed to do that day. That means I don't have to wake up to 100 emails, because everything important is sent to me in the morning so I can plan my day.
It also looks at what I had to do yesterday, what I finished and what was left undone, and adds that to my current list. That gives me a clean priority list every morning, which I can edit however I like. Other options include an inbox triage with drafted replies, a weekly client digest and meeting follow-ups.
Instead, I'll ask for a weekly review of all invoices and any pending payments. It asks how often I want it to run: weekdays, daily (which includes weekends), or weekly on a chosen day. I choose weekly, Fridays at 5pm.
It then asks where my invoice and payment records live. Mine are in Gmail, but we also use FreeAgent, and I'm sure a few of you do too. It asks for access, which is something you should check carefully, and then asks which invoices to cover: what clients owe DSP, what DSP owes suppliers, or both. I said both, and it thinks through the process and creates the task.
While that runs, let me show you my daily brief, which Claude gives me every morning. I use a RAG (red, amber, green) system for the things I need to do. Today's list has a red item, which is sending access to one of our partners for a client's work, and another to join this Lunch and Learn on Zoom at 11:30.
Other items include a client's weekly podcast update call being cancelled because the client has travelled, and Enterprise Nation items being confirmed. My team also sent a podcast follow-up to a client. Claude tells me my Google Chats weren't reviewed because I wasn't signed in at 8am when the task ran.
If I go back to my scheduled tasks, you can see it's a simple command. Check my Google Calendar and summarise all my meetings for today. Go through my Gmail, find any requests or tasks assigned to me, and give me a clear list and action plan in plain English, nothing too crazy.
I also ask it to use the RAG system to flag and highlight tasks, and to check my Google Chats in my browser, because I use multiple browsers. I've given it all the links to go through every single day, so there are no excuses and no issues. It reviews whether I have any pending requests from team members, and it always shares summaries as a RAG-rated checklist.
Because this task is relatively easy, I've asked it to use Sonnet 4.6, so I'm not using my Opus credits. It runs every weekday at 8:30am and is fully automatic. I've set it to work on this computer, but I can change that, and I save it and it arrives every morning.
This is another one for the company: our weekly SEO post ideas. I built it in minutes. Claude gives me options, I choose content ideas, and it asks which industry I want to scan for weekly news.
I'm showing you this on one account, but I have lots of tasks running across content, marketing, sales, operations and invoicing. They run steadily in the background, and I just go in at different times in the week to check what's been done and make sure everything is fine.
The good thing is that I'm doing this on Claude, but I can also do it on Gemini. Remember I said not to put company information into a personal account, so I'll use a personal Google account just to show that it's possible, on either a paid or a free account. In Gemini, I go to Scheduled actions and create a new one, such as a news digest or a topic exploration.
I give it a name, for example "Review all podcast schedules and plans", and add the instructions: where the podcast is, how it happens, how often I want it (daily, weekly or monthly) and what time of day. It then sends the result to my inbox at that time, and I don't have to do anything. You can do the same with ChatGPT or any other tool.
Another way I've used AI successfully is with ChatGPT, where we have a team account and do a lot of work in projects. We manage a podcast for a client, which involves a lot of confidential material, so I'll try not to show too much. Before each episode, we need to research the guest, and I've fed multiple sets of research data into the project instructions.
Now, when the client has a guest, I just put in the person's name. Could somebody give me a name in the chat? Emma Grid, thank you. I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
From just the name, it does very deep research, finding everything about the person online. It then produces everything we need to run the podcast, including a guest overview, a flow of questions and a version for the client. This takes 10 to 15 minutes, and because I've built it as a tool for my team, all they need to do is put in the name.
That project knows exactly what to do, with no questions asked and nothing else needing to be said. The outputs are finalised, although I still have to look at them. This has saved us approximately 40 hours of work per client, because it used to be a deep dive involving a lot of research and a lot of questions. We built it up over months, feeding the data into this ChatGPT project.
To answer the question of whether you can do the same in ChatGPT: yes, you can schedule tasks there, even on the web rather than the desktop app. I create a new scheduled task, add files or context, and it prompts me back and forth with questions based on my history, which is mostly about AI, SEO and generative engine optimisation. I'm trying hard to fit all of this into 30 minutes, and we'll hopefully have many more sessions.
There is a lot you can hand over to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or DeepSeek. I've used many of these tools to test this, and it works. The last thing I'll share is skills, which you've heard about a thousand times.
You can go to GitHub and download skills, but the way to really train an AI to work as you do is to record yourself. Use a Zoom or Google Meet recording, or any screen-recording app, while you perform a task that only you normally do. You don't need to say anything or explain it.
When you're done, feed the video into Claude and ask it to turn it into, first, a skill and, second, a scheduled task. Then repeat the exact same process, usually 10 to 15 times. For those first 10 to 15 times, don't ask Claude to do it for you; do it yourself and feed the videos in as training.
After 15 times, you probably won't have to do that task again, because Claude will have figured out the nuances and the gaps, built a proper process and be able to run it for you. That works for almost anything you have to do. Our time is far spent, so I'll stop there and ask you for your questions.
Beth: Thanks, Ade, that was great. I had no idea you could put in a recording of yourself doing a task. That's amazing.
We have a use case from Alicia, who says one of the most time-consuming things for her is manually recording social media content performance metrics. Do you know a way to automate this with AI? She has found that social platforms block automated access, so she has struggled to identify a solution.
Ade: That's a really great question, Alicia, and the answer is yes. For the podcast we run for clients, we manage posting and reporting across platforms, and AI does all our reporting, analytics and drafting. I sent a report last week and AI did everything.
The secret is this. The platforms do block AI, but they can't block your screen. With Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT, you give it access to your Chrome, then open Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads or Google Ads on your screen and give the AI access to read your screen and use your cursor.
It then does the work as if it were you. You don't have to integrate it, because platforms keep blocking integrations, but you can find workarounds by granting access, and I do that all the time. I no longer create reports about anything for anyone.
Beth: To clarify, Alicia asks whether you're saying to use the Claude Chrome extension as a workaround.
Ade: That's what I'm saying. It might take a bit of practice to learn what to use and what not to use, but it works amazingly well.
For Alicia or anybody else, I'm happy to help you set this up. I'll do a free 45-minute session, with no charge, where we go through your AI tool and you set it up on your end while I consult. I know time is far spent, so let me share the slides again.
Beth: That sounds great, Ade. I've shared your Enterprise Nation profile in the chat, so please do reach out. Fran says she'd love a follow-up session, so maybe we'll have to bring you back.
Ade: I will, and there are a lot of follow-up sessions to this. Please reach out to me on Enterprise Nation. I also have a free audit tool that will help you find what you need to do for your business to be discovered by AI, which is a massive opportunity that a lot of people aren't leveraging.
Beth: Thank you. Can I keep you for one more question? We had one in the chat from when you were showing how Claude automates your tasks. They'd like to know whether it only spots things in your emails, or whether you can point it towards a proper task list that you already keep, such as Outlook tasks or Microsoft To Do.
Ade: Absolutely, you can point it at almost anything. Claude and ChatGPT both connect with Microsoft and Google, and Gemini integrates natively with Google Slides and Google Sheets. You can also integrate with Microsoft Outlook and the entire Microsoft suite.
If you're not comfortable with that, all you need to do is be logged in on your screen and give Claude access to your Chrome. In the next session I do, I'll do that live. When I started, I would ask Claude to do the work and then sit for hours watching it, because I like to see it work.
That let me identify the gaps, see where the errors were and what it wasn't doing right, and then frame up the process and give it better instructions. Once that was properly done, I could integrate directly. Now Claude does a lot of my work whether I'm online or not, whether my laptop is on or not and whether I'm travelling.
I just come in and review it. The one thing I haven't done yet, because I have trust issues, is let Claude send emails on my behalf. It drafts them but never sends them; I look at each one, tweak it, make it sound more like me and then send it. Every email is usually drafted by Claude now, based on the history and context, and the draft is about 70% there.
Beth: It's nice to have that human judgement element at the end, isn't it?
Ade: Absolutely.
Beth: That's brilliant, thank you so much. Fran says there were so many useful nuggets of information in this 30-minute session, which I absolutely agree with. There's so much more to explore, so we'll see you soon, Ade, we hope. Thank you to everyone, and enjoy the rest of your Fridays.
Ade: Thank you very much. Bye.
Unlock more on-demand sessions designed to help you sharpen your skills, grow your business and stay one step ahead. Find more Lunch and Learn webinars
