--- title: "AI Opportunity Assessment for Small Businesses | Matthew Oldach" url: "https://matthewoldach.com/services/ai-opportunity-assessment/" description: "Find the repetitive work worth improving, check whether AI is the right tool for it, and leave with a short brief for the first fix." --- 1. [Start](https://matthewoldach.com/) 2. [Services](https://matthewoldach.com/services/) 3. Find the opportunity ![Services chapter pop-up book](https://matthewoldach.com/models/services/theatre-v1/poster.webp) [Start](https://matthewoldach.com/)[Services](https://matthewoldach.com/services/)[Projects](https://matthewoldach.com/work/)[Field Notes](https://matthewoldach.com/writing/)[About](https://matthewoldach.com/about/)[Contact](https://matthewoldach.com/contact/) [PuttPulse](https://matthewoldach.com/work/#puttpulse)[Shiny-filteRs](https://matthewoldach.com/work/#shiny-filters)[Hinuhinu](https://matthewoldach.com/work/#hinuhinu)Map layers: Moisture · Solar · Ocean depth [Supervised UMAP](https://matthewoldach.com/writing/supervised-umap/)[The Gamification of Fitbit](https://matthewoldach.com/writing/fitbit-gamification/)[Highlighting 3D Brain Regions](https://matthewoldach.com/writing/highlighting-3d-brain-regions/) [Work with me](https://matthewoldach.com/services/)[Experience / CV](https://matthewoldach.com/experience/) [Find the opportunity](https://matthewoldach.com/services/ai-opportunity-assessment/)[Build a focused solution](https://matthewoldach.com/services/ai-workflow-automation/)[Help the team adopt it](https://matthewoldach.com/services/ai-training-adoption/)**Good ideas deserve a way across.** Bring the ambition. Shape the plan. Build it together. Make it yours. [Write me a note](https://matthewoldach.com/contact/#enquiry)Every good collaboration starts with a note. Services chapter preview. [Open Services chapter page ↗](https://matthewoldach.com/services/)[Open Services page ↗](https://matthewoldach.com/services/) Choose a chapter to turn through the book in order. Viewing **Services**. Keyboard and reduced-motion navigation switch directly. Use the chapter links to open the regular pages. The animated prototype needs JavaScript. Remote AI consulting # Find the AI opportunity worth pursuing. Find the repetitive work worth improving, check whether AI is the right tool for it, and leave with a short brief for the first fix. [Start a conversation ↗](https://matthewoldach.com/contact/?service=ai-opportunity-assessment) Start with the work, and pick the tool later. Look for the job that takes too long, keeps producing small errors, or only works because someone remembers the next step. I’ll help you look at that workflow closely and decide what would actually help. Sometimes that’s AI. Often it’s plain automation or a tidier process. ## Who this is for An owner or a small team with a problem that keeps coming back, and access to the people who do the work. Maybe you rebuild the same report every week, hunt for information across a pile of documents, or copy details between tools that don’t talk to each other. Those are the kinds of jobs worth a look. ## What you leave with * A map of how the work happens today: what comes in, who decides what, where it gets handed off and where it breaks. * A short, ranked list of opportunities, with my reasoning for each one. * A check on what a fix would need: the data, the tools it would connect to, privacy limits and where a person should review. * A brief for the first improvement, including what success looks like and how we’d measure it. Sometimes the best recommendation is to simplify the process before buying or building anything. The assessment stands on its own, and you’re free to stop there. ## How we work remotely We start with a conversation and a walkthrough of one real task. You show me what arrives, what happens next and where it gets stuck. We share screens and agreed examples, then go through the findings together. Anything sensitive stays out of public case studies and is handled the way we agree up front. The assessment is yours to keep. Use it to plan internal work, commission a build, or decide a workflow is fine as it is. ## Where this comes from At work I measure before I build. When I made a natural-language assistant for a genomics database, the target was a lookup that took bench scientists about 15 minutes. Afterwards it took about 15 seconds. I bring the same habit to small teams: understand the job first, then agree on how we’ll know it got better. Some of my older public work, like [a Fitbit API analysis](https://matthewoldach.com/writing/fitbit-gamification/), shows the same interest in turning messy data into something useful. ## Scope and pricing factors Scope depends on how many workflows we look at, how many people are involved, which systems we need to inspect and whether real examples already exist. After a first conversation I write up the deliverables and a scope before any paid work starts. I don’t publish a fixed price, and I won’t promise a return on investment. ## Questions before starting ### Do we need clean data first? Not necessarily. Part of the assessment is finding out whether data quality is what’s holding you back, and what would need to change before a fix can be reliable. ### Will you recommend AI for everything? No. A simple rule, an integration or a smaller process change is often easier to run and easier to check. The recommendation explains why. ## Choose the next step If you already know the opportunity, look at [a focused build](https://matthewoldach.com/services/ai-workflow-automation/). If you have a tool but the team isn’t using it consistently, look at [training and adoption](https://matthewoldach.com/services/ai-training-adoption/). [Tell me about the workflow →](https://matthewoldach.com/contact/?service=ai-opportunity-assessment)