A 90-day AI plan for an SMB: what to actually do from September to December

September is when companies decide what they will actually do before the year ends

If AI has been on your list since January and nothing has happened, the problem is almost never the technology: it is that the project was never cut down to something small enough to start. This is the plan I use with SMBs that want to reach Christmas with one automated process that works, not with a slide deck.

Month one: pick one process and measure it. In the first four weeks you write no code. You pick a repetitive, measurable, high-volume process — quote requests, customer replies, order entry, payment reminders — and you measure it as it is today: how often it happens per month, how many minutes it costs each time, who does it, where it stalls. Without that baseline you will never be able to say whether the project worked, and by December the discussion becomes an opinion. In parallel you check data access: where the data lives, who can read it, whether there is an API or only an export.

Month two: a pilot in production, not a demo. Between week five and week eight you build the first version and put it in front of real people, on limited volume. The difference between a pilot and a demo is that a pilot works on real cases and fails in public — which is exactly what you need. In this phase you keep a human in the loop: the automation prepares, a person approves, and every error becomes a rule that was missing.

Month three: take your hands off the wheel and widen. From week nine you reduce manual checks on the cases that have proven reliable, keep human approval only where risk is high (pricing, sensitive communications, personal data), and extend the flow to one adjacent process. By late December the goal is one stable process in production and the second already started.

What it costs, transparently

A single well-built automation starts at 1,200 €. A vertical AI agent connected to business systems typically lands between 2,500 and 8,000 €, with integration accounting for 40-60% of the work. Recurring costs in an SMB — model, hosting, maintenance — usually sit between 50 and 250 € per month. A broader multi-process programme runs 30,000-50,000 €, which is not the right starting point for a company that has never shipped anything.

The four mistakes that kill these projects before Christmas.

• Starting several processes at once: none reaches production.
• Not measuring the baseline: in December you cannot prove anything.
• Assigning the project to someone with no time: without an internal owner with two hours a week, it stalls.
• Waiting for perfect data: data gets cleaned while the pilot runs, not before.

What you can do this week

Write down the three processes that wasted the most time in July. For each one, note how often it happens per month and how many minutes it costs. The one with the highest product of those two numbers is your first project — usually the one nobody wanted to look at.

If you want, we can make that choice together in a free 15-minute call: you leave with a straight answer on what to automate first, what it costs and how many weeks it takes, even if you then build it in-house.