What is a tailored AI system for a small business?

A tailored AI system is a small piece of software built around one specific job in your company. It uses your own documents, prices and rules, and it hands back work done the way you would do it. Ready-made tools, like a general chatbot or a social media app, handle common jobs well for everyone. You need something tailored when the task depends on information only your business holds and someone currently spends hours each week copying that information between files by hand.

Below is one workflow from start to finish, then a plain way to decide which side of the line you are on.

One workflow, start to finish

Picture a three-person olive oil exporter near Lleida (an invented example, to keep things concrete). Trade enquiries arrive by email from importers in Germany, the Netherlands and Japan. Each one wants a quote: the price per pallet at their volume, delivery terms, lead time and which certificates travel with the shipment.

Today the owner handles each one by opening the price spreadsheet, checking stock, searching old emails for what this importer was quoted last time, writing a reply in English or German and attaching the right documents. Twenty minutes per enquiry. Fifteen enquiries a week is five hours, mostly on Monday mornings.

A tailored system takes over the repetitive part. When an enquiry lands, it reads it, works out who the importer is and what volume they want, looks up the price band in the spreadsheet the company already uses, checks stock and finds previous quotes to that customer. Then it drafts the reply in the importer's language with the correct documents attached.

Anything outside the usual rules gets flagged instead of answered: a volume above the normal ceiling, a country the company has never shipped to, a request for a discount. The owner reads each draft, changes what needs changing and presses send. The decision stays with a person; the searching and typing do not.

That is what we mean by tailored. It is built for one workflow, it connects to the files and inbox you already have, and it follows your rules rather than generic ones.

When a ready-made tool is enough

Many jobs look the same in every business. Summarising a long PDF, translating a menu, writing a polite reply to a review, drafting social posts. General tools do these well and cost little, so start there.

Our own Socials Agent is a ready-made tool of this kind. You describe your business once and it writes posts with captions and hashtags for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and others, from €9.99 a month. A bakery or a gym does not need a custom system to post three times a week.

A useful rule of thumb: a ready-made tool is enough when you can give it everything it needs by pasting it in, and what comes back is usable with light editing.

Signs that you have outgrown the ready-made tool

The line usually shows up as friction you have stopped noticing. Watch for these:

• You paste the same background into a chatbot every time: your price list, your house rules, your tone of voice.
• The answer depends on data that changes daily, such as stock, bookings or prices.
• You move results by hand from the chatbot into a spreadsheet, an email or an invoice.
• The task follows rules that live in one person's head, and it stalls when they are on holiday.
• A mistake is expensive, for example a wrong price in a quote or a table booked twice.

If two or more of these apply and the task takes several hours a week, a tailored system is worth pricing. If only one applies, a better prompt or a saved template inside a general tool may solve it.

What it costs and what you commit to

We price tailored systems by what they do, in three tiers. Essential, a single automated task such as a reply drafter or a weekly report, starts at €699 one-off plus a monthly plan from €75. Plus starts at €1,499 plus €150 a month. Anything larger is scoped after a call, so we do not put a fixed number on it here. The full breakdown is on the price sheet.

The monthly plan covers hosting, security, updates, monitoring, small changes and support within one working day. It starts the month after delivery and can be cancelled with 30 days notice. If you would rather own everything outright, there is a one-off handover at 1.5 times the build fee, set up on your own accounts with 30 days of fixes. Payment is 25% on order and 75% on delivery.

To judge whether it pays, put your own hourly cost against the hours the task takes each week. Only you know that number.

A system that reads customer emails also handles personal data. Ask any builder where the data is stored and which providers they use. We work under the EU GDPR and list every provider in our privacy policy; for what your own obligations are, ask your data protection adviser.

How to find out which one you need

This week, pick the one task that eats the most of your time. Write down four things: what starts it, where the information comes from, what the finished result looks like and who checks it before it goes out.

Then try the task in a general chatbot with real material, three or four times. If the results are good, stop there and save yourself the money.

If you find yourself pasting, copying and correcting every time, take your notes to scope your own system. It asks five short questions and writes a draft proposal with the starting price on the spot. It is a draft, not a quote: the exact scope and price come back in writing within two working days.