An AI mistake just reached a customer. What you do in the first hour
An automated quote goes out at 10:40 on a Tuesday. The price is wrong by a factor of ten. A customer has already opened it.
FIT Automate — Practical Automation for Small Business¶
Where your company's knowledge actually lives
Your operations manager resigns on a Friday. On Monday you find out the approval rules for your three largest accounts lived in her head and in one chat thread nobody else was in.
Someone on your team wants to use an AI tool. How do you decide?
Your operations lead sends a message on Friday afternoon. She wants to use a new AI tool to summarise client calls. It costs $30 a month. She needs an answer.
Why your AI answers one question well and fumbles the next
A 30-person insurance brokerage asks their assistant what the renewal window is for commercial auto. Four seconds later they have the right answer and the right clause. Ten minutes after that, someone asks which clients have renewals falling inside a rate change. The same assistant returns something vague and slightly wrong.
What not to automate, and how to tell a real boundary from an excuse
A 40-person logistics firm wanted to automate its customer complaint responses. The volume was there. Around 30 a month, all arriving by email, all needing a reply inside a day. On paper it was a clean candidate.
The knowledge base that maintains itself
Someone changes a process in March. The page describing that process still says what it said in January. Nobody decided to let it drift. It drifted because updating the page was a separate job, and separate jobs get dropped.
Your knowledge base is your governance layer
Someone asks what discount a reseller qualifies for. Three people answer. All three sound certain, two are wrong, and nobody can point to where the rule actually lives.
Start with documents, not AI
You decide this is the quarter you finally build a knowledge base. So you open pricing pages. You book two demos. You start a trial.
AI is an operations tool before it is a developer tool
AI sounds like a developer tool. Read the coverage and you would think the whole point of it is shipping code faster.
A clean exit: what happens to your data when you leave
Anyone can make it easy to sign up. The real test of a partner is what happens when you leave. That is the moment you find out whether they respected your business the whole time.