Like many independent garage owners, I’ve always had to wear a dozen hats — technician, service advisor, bookkeeper, and tea maker. And like most of you, I’ve often felt like there just aren’t enough hours in the day.
That’s why I’ve started using AI tools — not in some futuristic way, but in small, practical ways that are already saving me time and helping me grow the business.
I’ve been using AI for a few years. Initially, it was a bit rubbish, really, but it has consistently improved and is still evolving, becoming ever faster. I still double-check and adjust everything, but it has significantly sped up many operations.
The back office functions are where I found the first useful application of AI, generating the sort of documents that I hate writing but are essential for modern business like generating risk assessments, policy documents, creating forms etc.
Because it uses info from thousands of similar examples on the web the risk assessments can turn out to be really useful, highlighting risks and mitigations I hadn’t considered, leading to “.. oh yeah, that’s a really good idea, I’ll do that.” moments.
It’s also good at using it’s awareness of all the information on the internet to analyse my business plan to find opportunities and weaknesses as well as market research, coming up with potential plans for how we can develop and ideas that I hadn’t thought of.
On the technical front, it can summarise a vast amount of information, turning complicated instructions into step-by-step guides and analysing reports from around the world on how they solved tricky problems. That’s the sort of thing where I’d have to spend hours trawling the web to find answers, filter the rubbish from reality to find a way to fix a problem; now AI does it in seconds.
But it’s in marketing that AI is really impressing me. Whilst you could get AI to write blog posts I personally don’t like it, but you can use AI to do research and give you the info needed for a post. I know some people are getting it to write regular blog posts and engaging images for their website, and just tweaking it, this helps the site stay fresh and helps get web traffic.
But where it is really useful is in answering basic customer questions on social media platforms and on your website, about half the questions we get are basically the same, things like where are we, what are the costs, what do we offer etc. and although the answers are clearly on the website, sometimes people just want a dialogue to answer their questions. AI can do that, and the systems out now are actually quite good. That means we deal with the more relevant questions, freeing up time, and AI turns casual enquiries into real leads for us.
If you use a paid AI service, it will gradually learn about your business and the way you work, becoming more useful and relevant to your specific business over time.
AI is turning into another member of staff, one that has immense potential but currently needs supervision and probably shouldn’t be left working alone. A bit like employing a graduate…
Ralph Hosier – C.Eng, B.Eng, MIET, MIMI, MGoMW
