The near-miss that stays with me involved an invoicing agent, a twenty-two-person wholesale business, and a customer email list. The agent’s job was reasonable: chase overdue invoices, escalate after fourteen days, summarize collections every Friday. What nobody scoped was what happened when the invoice module misread a merged spreadsheet. The escalation step, built in a
If you run a small team and you have been weighing whether to automate customer support with AI, this story is for you. At 11:40 on a Tuesday night, Priya’s phone buzzed for the ninth time since dinner. She runs a twelve-person D2C brand in Pune that sells hand-stitched leather bags. All of a sudden,
The subscription audit at a fifteen-person accounting firm last month found all three assistants on the company card, which is the ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini for business question in its most expensive form. ChatGPT for the junior staff, Claude for the two partners who write reports, Gemini because it came bundled and nobody had
Two quotes landed in the same week from two founders asking me the same build vs buy AI agents question. The first, a logistics founder in Mumbai, had just survived a platform renewal. The bill: $18,000 a month for an agent suite that half his team ignored. His note read like a man pricing saws.
The AI implementation cost for small business arrived in Indore as three quotes in one April week. First, a freelance consultant offered an assessment for forty thousand rupees. Then a city agency proposed a fourteen-lakh automation program covering sales, support, and reporting. The SaaS salesperson, meanwhile, was cheerful that the whole problem would cost “about
A founder I work with in Jaipur has a folder with nineteen logo files in it. Nineteen AI platforms he has demoed since January, each one pitched by its salesperson as “basically hiring a digital employee.” He has signed up for none of them. The demos were all impressive in the same way: a chat
Also, two Mondays ago, a friend who runs a nine-person marketing agency in Manchester showed me her screen. Two browser windows, two AI products. In reality, in the first one, an AI assistant had drafted a tidy client recap. That used to cost her an hour every week. Nice work. In the second window, an