Australia

AI for small and medium businesses

Anum gives an Australian small or medium business the AI function it can't afford to hire: finding where AI is worth using, writing the policy, building it into the workflow, training the staff, and measuring whether it landed. Then a fractional AI lead for as long as it is useful.

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Who this is for

Australian businesses that have decided AI matters and have nobody whose job it is to deal with it.

That is the whole qualification. We do not sort businesses by headcount, because the number of people on your payroll is not what decides whether this work pays. What decides it is whether the same job happens every week and a person is doing it by hand.

The sectors we see it in most often are professional services, wholesale and distribution, trades and field services, health practices, hospitality groups and property. A small business and a medium-sized business usually arrive with the same story: the tools are bought, nobody owns them, and the work still takes as long as it took last year.

There is no minimum. A small business gets the same eight steps a larger one gets, on a smaller scope, because the method does not change with the size of the room. Anum is a Melbourne firm and works across Australia.

You do not need a data team and you do not need to know what you want built. If you can tell us where your week goes, that is enough to start.

Where it lands

The jobs an SME asks us about first.

None of these is exotic. They are the recurring, high volume, low judgement parts of a week, which is exactly the shape of work that repays workflow automation and exactly the shape a small business stops noticing because it has always been done this way.

Quoting

The quote that goes out on Thursday

Because the last similar one had to be found first, and the person who wrote it is on site. Quoting is the most common first use case we see in trades, field services and wholesale, and it is usually the one with the clearest payback, because a slow quote is a lost job.

Reporting

The report that is assembled by hand every month

Numbers pulled out of one system, pasted into a spreadsheet, written up as commentary that says roughly what it said last month. The assembly is automation work. The commentary is where a person is genuinely needed, and that is the split we look for.

Onboarding

New starters asking the same twelve questions

The answers already exist, in a policy, a procedure or somebody's old email. Made searchable and answerable with the source attached, a new starter reaches competence in weeks instead of months, and a senior person stops being the help desk.

Admin

Reading a document to get three fields out of it

Receipts, invoices, delivery dockets, forms. The AI reads it, pulls out the date and the amount, codes it, drafts the entry and files it. A person checks and approves. Twenty minutes at a keyboard becomes one review click.

Month end

The week that disappears every month

Chasing, reconciling, and asking six people for the same thing. Some of this is automation. Some of it is a broken process that automation would only make worse and faster, and we will say which is which before anything gets built.

Your own prior work

Answering "have we dealt with this before"

Across years of files, prior advice and old jobs. This is the one owners underrate and it is often the largest number in the business case, because the alternative is a senior person spending forty minutes remembering.

The starting point

Most of what you need is already on the market, and some of it is already on your invoice.

Microsoft 365 Copilot came with the licence bundle. Someone expensed a ChatGPT subscription. A few people use it for the odd email. There is no policy, no training, and no number anyone could point to.

That is not a technology problem. It is the absence of anyone whose job it is. A large organisation hires an AI enablement lead to do it. At the size most Australian businesses run at, that role is hard to justify as a full time salary, so it goes undone.

So the work usually starts with configuring what you already pay for and fixing the workflow around it: a prompt library for the jobs your team repeats every week, your own documents made searchable, automation between the systems you already have, a written rule about what can go near client information, and training at people's own desks. Sometimes it is a custom build. Sometimes it is that AI is the wrong tool for that problem, and we will tell you so.

What AI enablement costs sets out what those licences run to per seat, where those figures come from, and how our own fee is agreed.

How it runs

Discovery first, and the honest answer if there isn't one worth doing.

Discovery is the paid entry point and it is a fixed piece of work with a start and an end. We sit with your people while they do their actual work, every team and not only the ones who volunteered, map the workflows, and rank them by what they are worth and how hard they are. Then we measure what the chosen ones cost you today, because without that number there is no honest way to say later whether it worked.

You come out of Discovery with:

  • A written opportunity map, every workflow watched beside the people doing it, then ranked by value and effort.
  • A recommendation on what to do first.
  • The baseline: the two or three numbers a rollout would have to move, measured before anything changes.
  • A do not automate list, and why each item is on it.
  • What an AI use and data handling policy for your business has to cover.
  • A training session with your team, built from what we found, which happens whether or not you go on to the Rollout.
  • A Rollout proposal, scoped and priced, in writing.

If we don't identify at least one AI use case with a clear payback inside six months, we'll tell you the Rollout isn't worth it yet, and refund the Discovery fee.

The full eight step method is written out on our AI consulting page, and the five kinds of AI a business actually uses are on the patterns page. Both are published before you speak to anyone.

The first step is a free 30 minute call. Nothing is paid before it and there is nothing to prepare for it. Written for your sector: professional services and trades and wholesale.

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