Do you need an AI consultant, or can you do it yourself?

We offer AI consulting, so you might expect us to say you need one. Often you don't. It depends on the job. Some you can do with a subscription and an afternoon. Others go wrong without someone who has done them before.

What you can do yourself

A subscription to ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot or Claude does a lot of useful work. Without any help, you can:

• Draft and tidy writing: emails, job ads, quotes in your own words, social posts, tender responses. Give it your rough notes and ask for a clean version.
• Summarise long documents such as contracts, supplier terms, council notices and meeting notes.
• Work through a spreadsheet. Ask it to explain a formula, build one, or spot patterns in a table you paste in, with the privacy cautions below in mind.
• Plan things: menus, rosters, checklists, marketing plans, first drafts of procedures.
• Learn something fast, like a new regulation, an unfamiliar piece of kit, or how a particular Xero report works.

If you haven't tried these, start there. You'll find out what the tools are good and bad at, and that's worth knowing whether or not you ever hire anyone. Treat every answer as a draft. These tools can be confidently wrong, so read what they give you before you rely on it.

Getting started by yourself

1. Pick one tool. If you use it for work, take a paid plan for the better models. Business and personal plans can treat what you type differently, so read the data settings first.
2. Use it on real work for a few weeks. Keep a note of what saved time and what didn't.
3. Before you paste anything about customers or staff, check what the provider does with it.
4. Show what works to the person on your team who's keenest.

Where DIY runs out

When it has to run without you

A chat window needs you in it. If you want quotes to appear when an email arrives, or enquiries answered at 9pm, something has to run in the background and tell you when it breaks. That is software, and someone has to build it, host it and look after it.

When it has to connect to your other software

Reading from Xero, writing to a job management tool, pulling from a booking calendar: all doable, and all places where home-built attempts stall. We do this work under systems integration.

When mistakes are expensive

A wrong paragraph in a draft email costs you a rewrite. A wrong number on an invoice or in a machine program costs real money. Where you need checks, testing and a fallback, experience saves you learning the hard way.

A wrong paragraph in a draft email costs you a rewrite. A wrong number on an invoice or in a machine program costs real money.

When customer data is involved

Pasting a customer list into a public chatbot is the kind of shortcut that causes trouble. I go through the basics in using AI safely with customer data in New Zealand.

When you don't know what to build

Often the useful part is an experienced outsider looking at how your week runs and saying which job is worth fixing. That has little to do with the technology.

AI consultant or DIY at a glance

What to expect from an AI consultant

If you do bring someone in, whether it's us or anyone else, hold them to this:

• They start with your business, not with a tool they want to sell.
• They tell you when AI is the wrong answer, including when a simpler option does the job.
• They say what's included before work starts.
• They keep a person in charge and explain how the output gets checked.
• They're clear about what happens after launch: hosting, support and who owns what.
• They don't promise specific results.

For help deciding where AI fits in your business, see AI consulting. If a job should run by itself, see AI automation or chatbots and assistants. We're three people in Nelson: Michael talks to you and leads the job, and two senior AI developers build it with him.

Splitting the work

Many owners end up in the middle. They use a subscription themselves for everyday writing and thinking, and bring us in for the one or two jobs that have to run on their own and connect to other software.

If the answer is "you can do this yourself, here's how", I'll say so. To see how the sums work, read how to work out the return on AI.

Next step: see what a job that runs on its own looks like in the booking-to-paid walkthrough.