Small-business AI is a workflow cleanup problem

I think small-business AI is less about getting an "AI employee" and more about cleaning up one workflow at a time. AI vendors are starting to package assistants around the tools small businesses already use: accounting, payments, CRM, docs, email, design, reporting. That direction makes sense. But connecting AI to business software does not automatically make the workflow reliable. Before delegating a recurring task, I would define five things: * source of truth * owner * exception path * review point * done state If those are unclear, AI mostly accelerates ambiguity. The best first workflows are boring: * draft invoice follow-ups * classify support requests * summarize weekly numbers * extract document data * clean up call notes * prepare lead summaries Repeated input. Low-risk output. Human review. Obvious exceptions. That is a much better starting point than "let AI run the business." What small-business AI workflows have actually lasted for you?