Just wrapped up a small FAQ bot for a support team. Took about 60 hours total from discovery to deployment. The client had 4 support reps spending 3 hours daily answering the same basic questions. Now the bot handles ~40% of those inquiries, saving roughly 3 hours per day across the team. Not revolutionary, but it's a tangible improvement that didn't require a six-month project or a dozen consultants.
What's the smallest useful AI deployment you've shipped? I'm looking for concrete examples that took under 100 hours to build and delivered real value.
We're seeing a few patterns emerge from these quick wins:
FAQ auto-reply: The one we just finished. Most companies have a set of questions that make up 60-70% of their support volume. A simple bot that can answer these with company-specific knowledge (not generic internet responses) frees up humans for more complex issues.
Contract summarization: Legal teams drowning in NDAs and vendor agreements. A tool that can extract key terms, obligations, and dates from contracts saves hours of manual review. One client built this in ~45 hours and cut their contract review time by about 50%.
SOP chatbot: Operations teams with documented processes that nobody reads. A chatbot that can answer "how do I..." questions using existing SOP documents. One implementation took ~70 hours and reduced the time to find procedures by ~75%.
Which of these have you tried? What other small-scale deployments have worked for you?
The key with these small projects is focusing on a single, well-defined problem where you can clearly measure the before and after. No need to boil the ocean—just solve one specific pain point that your team is facing today.
What's your smallest-but-most-useful AI deployment? Let's swap notes.
This piece is from our notes on helping SMBs (10-100 people) build their first in-house AI teams. If your team is exploring this — quick feedback and questions welcome in the comments.
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