Your SME doesn’t need a chatbot. It needs the work after the chat done

Small businesses in Southeast Asia already rely heavily on WhatsApp for various operations. Instead of focusing on AI chatbots to speed up customer interactions, a more practical approach is to identify one recurring manual task that consumes significant time and effort. For instance, order administration on Rosalie Cheese, a food business, was consuming more than four hours daily.

By automating this process using AI, the task took only 20 minutes. The bottleneck, however, lies in the handoffs between systems, rather than the initial response. In a professional services firm, reconciliation took over 20 hours weekly, mostly spent transferring data from one system to another. By streamlining this handoff, the same work only took under 30 minutes a week.

It is crucial to build AI systems that generate accurate results based on predefined rules and logic, rather than relying solely on AI models to make critical decisions. Money-related or customer-facing tasks should still be handled by humans to maintain trust and prevent errors. Implementing a new AI system should be a quick process, fitting within a week and utilizing existing tools like WhatsApp, spreadsheets, and accounting software.

Before investing in AI, SME owners should ask themselves a few key questions: which specific task will the AI improve, how much time is currently spent on it, what happens when the AI is unsure or makes a mistake, and whether the system integrates with the tools already in use. The ultimate aim is to free up the team's time, not to simply have an AI system.