Large enterprises move slowly, burdened by bureaucracy and legacy systems. SMEs, on the other hand, are agile. You can adopt new technologies, iterate quickly, and see the impact of automation almost immediately. AI is a force multiplier, and for an SME, that means you can punch well above your weight class, automating tedious work and freeing up your team to focus on growth.

Here is a catalog of high-leverage automations categorized by department, each with a mini-playbook.

Sales:

• Lead Research: Automatically enrich new leads with firmographic data, social profiles, and recent news.
• Outreach Drafting: Generate personalized first-touch emails based on a lead's industry, role, and pain points.
• CRM Hygiene: Keep your CRM clean by automatically flagging duplicate records, standardizing data entry, and archiving inactive contacts.

Marketing:

• Brief to Asset Generation: Turn a simple creative brief into a dozen ad variations, social media posts, and blog topic ideas.
• UTM QA & Report: Automatically check for broken or incorrect UTM parameters in your campaigns and generate a clean performance report.

Support:

• Intent Routing: Automatically categorize incoming support tickets and route them to the right agent or department.
• Knowledge Base Answers: Use a vector search-powered bot to provide instant answers to customer questions from your help center.
• CSAT Flags: Automatically analyze CSAT survey responses for negative sentiment and create a high-priority ticket for follow-up.

HR:

• Job Description Drafting: Generate a comprehensive job description from a simple title and list of responsibilities.
• Candidate Screening: Screen resumes for key qualifications and experience, ranking top candidates for human review.
• Interview Scheduling: Automate the back-and-forth of scheduling interviews across multiple calendars.
• Onboarding Workflows: Trigger a sequence of onboarding tasks, from sending welcome emails to provisioning accounts.

Finance:

• Invoice Capture & Approvals: Automatically extract data from invoices and route them for approval based on amount and department.
• AR Reminders: Send automated, personalized reminders for overdue invoices.
• Variance Alerts: Monitor budgets and flag significant variances for review.

Operations:

• Stock Alerts & Reordering: Automatically monitor inventory levels and trigger reorder workflows when stock runs low.
• Delivery ETA Updates: Proactively notify customers of shipping delays or delivery updates.

IT:

• Ticket Summaries: Generate concise summaries of long, complex support tickets for faster handoffs.
• Patch Scheduling: Automate the scheduling and notification process for routine software patches.
• Incident Postmortems: Draft a postmortem report by summarizing incident timelines, actions taken, and resolution.

Leadership:

• KPI Digests: Receive a daily or weekly digest of your most important KPIs from across your business systems.
• Board Packs: Automate the collection and formatting of data for monthly board presentations.
• Narrative Insights: Go beyond the numbers with AI-generated summaries that explain the ‘why’ behind the data.

We provide a tooling map to help you decide when to use a native integration versus a custom-built solution. It’s also critical to be aware of the risks, including privacy, model drift, bias, and hallucinations. Our downloadable Notion and Google Sheet templates provide a risk checklist and a starting point for implementing these use cases in your own business.