How can the regular everyday business get instant value from AI?

It seems like every week there are massive new announcements in the AI world ranging from new chat models, to better coding tools, to even more realistic video generation. These things are great, but for most “regular” businesses like landscapers or manufacturers or autobody shops, it’s very unclear how any of these flashy new models are going to benefit their business.

The truth is that these shiny new tools won’t benefit the everyday business in any meaningful way.

But that doesn’t mean that traditional businesses can ignore AI. Savvy business owners, regardless of industry, are using AI to dramatically improve the efficiency of their operations by automate various parts of their business, which frees up employee time while also delivering more consistent outputs.

Here is how any business, regardless of industry, can get immediate value from AI:

Step 1: Audit your business processes

Go through each of your business processes and write out the steps required to achieve a desired outcome.

For example lets say you run a pressure washing business. You might start by auditing your quoting process.

Maybe it looks something like this: customer requests a quote via your website, an employee then looks up the property on google maps and estimates the square footage to be cleaned, then they do a calculation to arrive at the price, and then they send an email to the customer with the quote.

Do this for all of the key processes of your business.

Step 2: Identify processes that could be automated

What makes a process a good candidate to automate? Generally speaking you’re looking for processes with these three things:

The processes happens frequently

The process has a clear starting point and end result

The steps necessary to go from the starting point to the end result are roughly the same each time

If a process has these three things it is very likely to be a candidate for automation.

Step 3: Automate it

This is the fun part.

At Koka Labs we typically build automations using n8n. For those unfamiliar, n8n is a tool that lets you string together a series of “nodes” that can do all sorts of stuff. The cool part is that you can include AI nodes that use LLM models from companies like OpenAI or Anthropic. These AI nodes grant significant flexibility and an ability to successfully complete tasks that wouldn’t be possible with traditional automations.

This three step system is how we identify opportunities and develop automations for our clients at Koka Labs. If you’d like help putting AI to work in your business, feel free to reach out. Our mission is to enable real world businesses to enjoy the benefits of AI quickly and affordably.