The micro-loss that blurs everything
Ask an SMB owner where AI could help, and the answer is usually the big topics: automate invoicing, run predictive marketing, rethink customer support. Those are important. They’re not the right starting point.
The right starting point is what no one talks about in meetings: the twenty minutes per person per day spent looking for where a document is, what address a quote was sent to, what exactly the customer’s email said last week.
What you lose in micro-searches never shows up on the P&L. But multiplied by thirty people over twelve months, that’s two FTEs.
The test no one runs
An experiment to run this week, with no AI, no software, no budget. For three days:
- Ask five people to note every time they look for information in internal documentation.
- Note the duration of each search: 2 min, 5 min, 12 min, “I gave up”.
- Note whether they eventually found it, or ended up asking a colleague.
The average result on the SMBs we’ve measured: 40 to 90 minutes per person per day, depending on documentation maturity. That’s massive.
Three sources that always weigh
Across AI assistant deployments in SMBs, three sources systematically come out as the most useful to index first:
- The shared NAS / Drive: the messy memory. It’s heavy, it’s old, but that’s where the history lives.
- Meeting recaps: the living memory. No one rereads them. Everyone wonders what was decided.
- Recurring customer emails: the sales memory. Replies on pricing questions, terms, exceptions.
These three sources usually cover 70% of daily searches. See also Five concrete ways AI transforms an SMB.
What an assistant brings back, concretely
Asked of a properly fed assistant, the question “who handled the Petit account in 2023, and what discount did we give them” gets an answer in four seconds, with the original quote cited and Marie’s email approving it.
The same question in the current system: SOS Slack to the whole team → 8 minutes of discussion → someone digs up an email → we hope it’s the right one. Multiply by everything your team looks up in a day.
ROI measured in hours, not euros
From the numbers we measure six months into deployment:
Real ROI is measured in hours, not euros — because the gain isn’t a payroll saving, it’s a redirect of attention toward the topics that deserve it. See the simulator on the pricing page to estimate your case.
If you don’t know where to start, start with the hour lost per day. It’s smaller than the big programs, less glamorous, more profitable.
Twenty minutes on one of your real documents. We look together at how much time the team loses, and where the assistant gets it back first.
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