Overview
AI without boiling the ocean
Structured adoption paths for AI in small business, with forty high-leverage skills you can roll out without overhauling everything at once.
Inside the module
- Level 0–4 maturity ladder for automation
- Where LLMs help vs where deterministic automation wins
- Governance: approvals, logging, and human-in-the-loop
- Starter stack patterns that fit SMB reality
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What's inside
A level 0-4 maturity ladder so you know exactly where you are today and what to automate next.
How it works
Implementation guide
Step 1
Document + observe workflows
Step 2
Pilot with narrow scope
Step 3
Measure time saved + errors
Step 4
Scale what survives contact with reality
40 SMB skills
A practical checklist you can adopt in order. Swap labels to match your industry; keep the spine.
- 01Executive dashboard definition
- 02Weekly operating review cadence
- 03Customer intake automation
- 04Invoice and AR aging visibility
- 05Cash runway forecasting
- 06Lead source attribution
- 07CRM hygiene rules
- 08Pipeline stage definitions
- 09SOP authoring with owners
- 10Ticket routing and SLAs
- 11Email triage templates
- 12Meeting memo automation
- 13Calendar blocking for deep work
- 14Hiring scorecard templates
- 15Onboarding checklist automation
- 16Vendor renewal tracking
- 17Contract key date alerts
- 18Inventory reorder signals
- 19Quality control sampling
- 20Customer health scoring
- 21Churn reason taxonomy
- 22NPS / CSAT capture loop
- 23Product usage telemetry basics
- 24Incident postmortem template
- 25Security baseline checklist
- 26Access review cadence
- 27Backup and restore drill
- 28Data classification (PII vs public)
- 29Prompt library for repeated tasks
- 30Document RAG over policies
- 31Internal chatbot over SOPs
- 32Code or script review checklist
- 33CI smoke tests for critical paths
- 34Zapier / iPaaS guardrails
- 35Webhook signature verification
- 36Secrets management hygiene
- 37Cost monitoring for AI usage
- 38Model output logging
- 39Human approval for sensitive actions
- 40Quarterly automation portfolio review
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Get started with AI Automations
Implementation
How to roll this out successfully
Even a sharp blueprint stalls without the right rollout. A few patterns we've seen consistently separate the teams that ship from the ones that don't:
- Start with one painful workflow, not a full reorg.
- Assign one accountable owner per process — not a committee.
- Capture baseline metrics before you change anything.
- Ship in two-week increments and review every Friday.
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