By Julie Robinson
The homework from our AI advisor was simple: Figure out what are your top 3 business problems?
I sat with that question longer than I expected. Not because I didn’t have answers, but I needed to really identify which problems would have a direct impact on my business and those that I could do with some help on.
The light bulbs are on.
The items that I came up aren’t earth shattering, there was no atom splitting going on, but these areas of my business that bog me down. My mindset shifted from what are my top 3 business problems to what are the top things that I could really use some help with, a different emphasis.
- The spreadsheet moment.
I needed a better way to manage business cash forecasting. I am not an accountant, I am not a pivot table queen and this is not my natural territory.
I turned to Claude. In under ten minutes, REVELATION!
That was the moment I felt it. Not read about it, not heard someone talk about it on a podcast — felt it. The tool I have built by having a 2 minute conversation with Claude can do things that would have taken me hours, or cost me money to outsource, or simply wouldn’t have happened at all. And for that particular project it’s just the start. I can see how some functions in Accountancy & Finance can easily be wiped out by an AI assistant. Data driven, instruction led, no ambiguity, perfect for Claude to execute on.
- Commission Scheme Comparison Calculator
Some plans are very simple and some are very complicated, to the point where people in the business working with them can’t actually figure out what they are going to earn. Try to compare them? Well…. you could be there a while trying to figure out which might be to your benefit.
Another project for Claude. Factual. Arithmetic. Structured.
The results? Simple, clear, easy to use. LOVING IT.
My instinct so far has been to lean on Claude for mathematical and data-heavy problems. Maybe that’s because it’s where I feel least competent, so the impact is most obvious. But that also means I’ve barely scratched the surface. The next frontier for me is bringing it or another tool into problems that are less factual, more nuanced.
Here’s what nobody told me, and what I think a lot of people miss: you don’t need to learn a special language. No technical expertise required to have one of these tools help you .
Just instruct the tool that you are working with like a human. It’s not scary, and it’s not difficult, just talk. Think of it like having an executive assistant who already understands your business, knows what you’re trying to achieve, and gets things done without needing everything spelled out.
- The CRM revelation.
This one genuinely blew my mind.
We’re in the process of switching CRMs, and the AI assistant built into the new platform is something else entirely. It reads my meetings, it reads my emails, and it gives me follow-up tasks based on the conversations I’ve had, automatically. Without me having to think about it at all!
Follow-through is everything in our business. The number of times a great conversation has fallen through the cracks because other priorities got in the way – here’s a remarkable fix.
That is not a small thing.
GPT v Claude v Gemini v ??
Claude for the thinking work, we’re looking at Notion for the organisational work and Perplexity for research. We couldn’t try them all.
Summary.
Wrote this one with help. The irony is not lost on me.
