Identifying an Opportunity
AI Adoption Checklist for SMEs: Is AI Right for Your Business?
Artificial Intelligence offers businesses powerful tools to enhance products and services, but not every AI implementation delivers real value. For SMEs, the key is to determine whether AI genuinely improves outcomes, rather than adopting it for the sake of innovation. Below is a practical checklist to help you assess whether AI is the right fit for your business.
Understanding AI’s Role
AI creates unique solutions by learning from examples and applying predefined rules. However, its effectiveness depends on whether it truly enhances your service or product.
Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Do you have an application or service that would be significantly improved by AI?
Existing solutions based on historical expertise are valuable, first identify how AI adds value for the client, then determine if that can be accomplished using AI.
Does the expected improvement justify the investment?
Many AI solutions are only marginally more efficient than established methods.
Data Requirements
Do you have access to a dataset that can form the foundation of an AI solution?
The set of examples must be the intellectual property of the service provider, have a degree of exclusivity and be easily transposed into an electronic format.
Open source alternatives may be available, but they might not add significant value to your service or product as they are available to your competitors.
The use of corporate AI services as a framework for a product will restrict sales margins but reduce development costs.
Hybrid Solutions
Which part of your process would benefit most from AI?
Analytical solutions to problems provide more efficient solutions than data driven AI methods.
Only use AI where existing analytic solutions are inadequate. A hybrid approach utilising analytic and machine learning techniques will substantially reduce the processing effort and energy usage when compared with an AI only solution.
Timeliness and Quality Considerations
Are you providing instantaneous responses, or can processing occur over time?
The amount of processing that you will require to provide a service will depend upon your business model. ‘Instant’ answers will require substantially more GPU hardware than overnight services.
Workflows directed by the client are likely to require a more robust user interface, representing a significant startup cost.
If you are offering a B2B service, then it is very likely that the client will want some form of certificate of conformance highlighting the information generated by your product or service.
Current AI solutions seldom generate such information, so it may be necessary to add some degree of manual inspection of the results generated by an AI process.
Final Thoughts
AI can be a game-changer for SMEs, but only when applied strategically. Rather than adopting AI for the sake of innovation, businesses should focus on measurable improvements, cost justification, and hybrid solutions that balance AI with proven analytical methods. By carefully considering these factors, SMEs can harness AI in a way that delivers real competitive advantages while managing costs and risks effectively.
