Where Should Irish SMEs Start with AI? Start with the Pain.
If I had a euro for every time a client asked me "where do I even start with AI?" — I'd have retired by now.
It's the most common question I hear. And honestly, I'm not surprised. The noise around AI is deafening. Everyone is promising you the world — automated marketing, AI-generated sales strategies, chatbots that replace your entire customer service team. It sounds brilliant. It also sounds overwhelming.
After two years working directly with Irish businesses to implement AI in practical, working ways, here's my straightforward answer.
Forget the glamour. Start with the grind.
AI is genuinely powerful — but not in the way it's usually sold. It's not a silver bullet. It won't transform your sales while you sit back. What it does exceptionally well is handle the repetitive, time-consuming, error-prone work that quietly drains your business every single day.
The data entry. The manual reporting. The spreadsheet trawling. The copy-paste jobs that take your best people hours every week and produce nothing creative, nothing strategic, and nothing they actually enjoy doing.
That's where you start. You identify the most painful, repetitive process in your business, and you get AI to remove it.
A Real Example
One of my clients had a staff member spending significant time each week doing the following: manually going through a customer database, checking when each customer's product service was last completed, calculating whether a service was due within the next 30 days, highlighting those records, and then drafting and sending reminder emails individually.
Tedious. Error-prone. And not a great use of anyone's time.
The solution was a small automated system built around their existing data. Every day, the system checks the database automatically. It identifies every customer falling within the 30-day service window. It uses AI to generate a personalised reminder email for each one, based on a template approved by the business. It sends them — without manual intervention.
The outcome? No customer gets missed. The process that previously took hours now takes one button click. The staff member involved was genuinely relieved to have it off their plate.
That's the real value of AI for your business.
Not the headline version. The working version. AI placed inside a real business process, alongside your team, removing the work that shouldn't require human attention in the first place.
Once you've got that running, you look at your next most painful process and ask the same question: can AI remove this pain? You build it piece by piece. Process by process. That's how digital transformation actually happens in a real SME — not in one dramatic leap, but in a series of practical wins that add up.
Where to Start
If you're an Irish SME owner trying to figure out where AI fits in your business, the exercise is simple. Sit down with your team and ask: what's the job everyone dreads? What takes the most time for the least return? What gets done inconsistently because it's so tedious?
That's your starting point. That's where AI will give you the fastest, most tangible return.
If you'd like to talk through what that might look like for your business, [get in touch or book a call via the link below], or leave a comment, would love to discuss.
Declan Lenahan is the founder of DL Consultancy, working with Irish SMEs on digital transformation and business process improvement. From Chaos to Control.