It was a Sunday morning. I was in my pyjamas, cup of tea in hand, and I had a very familiar task lined up.
One of our clients has an inbox that receives order confirmation emails from a vendor. Every week, someone on their team has to open each email, check the details, extract the relevant information and update the billing system manually.
It’s not glamorous work. It’s not difficult work. But it takes time — somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes every week, depending on how many orders have come in. And as the business grows, that number will only go one way.
The problem with manual processing
Repetitive, manual data tasks have a few things in common:
- They take longer than they should
- They’re prone to human error, especially when someone’s tired or distracted
- They don’t scale — what takes 30 minutes with 20 orders takes 90 minutes with 60
- They eat into time that could be spent on something that actually moves the business forward
This particular task was also happening on top of everything else the team needed to do. It was nobody’s favourite job, and it was always the first thing to slip when the week got busy.
What we did instead
Instead of doing it manually, I asked Microsoft Copilot to:
- Go through the mailbox
- Read the order confirmation emails
- Extract the relevant data from each one
- Compile it neatly into a spreadsheet, ready for the billing system
Time taken: about three minutes.
The result was accurate data, no missed emails, and a clearly structured spreadsheet that could be imported directly. The saved time went back to the team — in this case, quite literally to me on a Sunday morning, sitting on the sofa instead of staring at a screen.
This is what practical AI actually looks like
There’s a lot of noise around AI at the moment. Most of it focuses on dramatic transformation, replacing entire roles, or tools that promise to change everything overnight.
The reality for most small businesses is much more straightforward — and much more useful.
Practical AI looks like this: identifying one repetitive task that takes up time your team would rather spend elsewhere, and removing it. Not replacing people. Not over-engineering. Just quietly eliminating admin so your team can focus on things that actually matter.
Microsoft Copilot is included in certain Microsoft 365 licences, and it’s capable of exactly this kind of task — reading emails, summarising documents, drafting communications, processing data. The challenge isn’t the technology. It’s knowing where to apply it and how to set it up properly.
Where to start
If you’re not sure whether AI and automation could help your business, start by asking one question: what does my team do every week that they’d rather not?
Chances are, at least one of those things is a candidate for automation. It might be processing emails, compiling reports, chasing approvals, generating documents or updating spreadsheets. Each of those is achievable with the right tools and a bit of sensible configuration.
We run an Automation and AI service specifically for businesses like yours — identifying the right opportunities, implementing them properly, and making sure your team actually uses what we put in place. If you’d like to understand what might be possible for your business, book a free call and we’ll talk it through.
No hype. Just an honest look at where your time is going and what we could do about it.