AI for regional small business: let the humans be the humans

I keep noticing the same thing at small business events around regional New South Wales.

Someone gets up in front of a room full of local business owners to talk about AI, and they teach the shiny, techy, golden things. How to make an AI twin of yourself. How to code a virtual agent that does EVERYTHING for you.

And I'm sitting there thinking: we're in regional New South Wales. We're running businesses where we're serving our neighbours. Our customers buy from us, the humans.

So this is my take on AI for regional small business, one that fits how our businesses work out here in the country.

In a regional business, your reputation IS the business

For most regional small businesses, the owner is the brand. Our personal connections, who we are, our place in the community: our reputations are our business.

That changes what good AI use looks like. If we use AI to make fake videos of ourselves, or to stand in for us as the face of the business, that's just not the way forward, in my humble opinion.

Put AI in the back office, not at the front counter

The best first move for most regional businesses is AI that frees up time for customer facing work. Either bringing in new customers, or serving your current customers.

I recently heard about a council in Sydney using customer service voice agents. People talk to the bot first, and only get passed to a person when the bot can't help. So, fewer enquiries land with human staff.

I think that's great in some ways. But I don't see it as the first or best way to bring AI into a regional area, where plenty of people aren't digitally literate, the community is diverse and multicultural, and people just want to be helped. By people.

So my approach would be the other way round. What can we hand to AI behind the scenes, so there's more time and more people available to actually talk to customers?

Back office jobs AI is good at:

Every one of those gives time back to the person who answers the phone.

AI for regional small business starts with what you already do well

Small businesses, and especially regional businesses, don't need to chase shiny things. The biggest and best investment you can make is looking at what you already do digitally. What's repeatable, what you already know how to do, and do well.

Then train your AI to do that for you.

The order matters. When AI is doing a job you know inside out, you can check its work, and you'll spot when it makes a mistake or doesn't do things quite right. When AI is doing something new to you, it can get it wrong, send it out into the world, and you won't even know.

A simple way to pick your first job:

1. Write down the computer based tasks you repeat every week.
2. Circle the ones you could do in your sleep.
3. Pick the one that eats the most time.
4. Show your AI how you do it, with a few past examples of it done well and why the job matters.
5. Check everything it produces until you trust it.

Use the time you get back for human work

Once the repetitive jobs are more automated and running smoothly, you get hours back.

That's when you sit around the table with your team and use your human intelligence and collaborative problem solving. Right, now we've got this extra capacity. What other problems could we solve? How could we do things differently?

The other way round, where we keep adding fun new AI things while still doing all the repetitive work by hand, never gets you there. You never build the better way of doing things, or the point of difference that sets you apart in your market.

Use AI for what it's good at, and create more time and space for human intelligence, human connection, human community and human collaboration.

If the answers feel right, go for it. If they don't, it's the wrong tool for your business, however good the demo looked.