👋 I write practical tips for SMEs on implementing AI into their workflows. If you want to stay in the know, consider subscribing to this newsletter (you get my AI hackathon playbook exclusive to this newsletter, for free):
Small businesses embracing AI tools are seeing productivity gains between 27% and 133%, with 91% of those using generative AI reporting significant improvements.
This Week's SME Reality Check
The AI Tool That Worked
A small video production shop in the UK, Lambda Films, used to lose a lot of business to competitors because they weren’t able to visualize their ideas in initial stages to potential clients to reel them in (pun intended). With a small team, they just couldn’t compete with other companies that had whole divisions to support the sales process. That all changed when they started using Midjourney, an AI platform that enables users to turn textual prompts into visual assets. After implementing Midjourney into their workflow, they can translate ideas to pictures much more easily and at scale they need.
Midjourney and other tools such as Adobe Firefly, Canva AI, Microsoft Designer, Google’s VEO, and many more are a way for small and medium businesses to compete with larger companies they haven’t been able to do before. What matters now are ideas and execution, and much less headcount.
Midjourney. As you can see, users are…creative.
The AI Tool That Failed
@Replit You can read the thread here, and all the convos with @Replit. It went rogue again during a code freeze -- and deleted our >production< database.
Rule #00001 my CTO taught me: never, ever, never, ever touch the production database.
Even in 2005, when we launched the first
— #Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin (#@jasonlk)
4:04 PM • Jul 18, 2025
Not everyone’s summer was quiet. saastr.ai founder Jason Lemkin used Replit, the most established online coding platform, to work on new features for his product. The tool ended up completely erasing his production database, after it agreed not to. You can see the full conversation here, but the only lesson to take away is: by all means learn and produce with AI, but reconsider when and where. Some things are still better left to the humans in the room.
As these AI-enabled platforms become more powerful and popular, you will also see a lot of consultants pop up that will offer to develop stuff for you through them. Watch out for their experience, as they (and you in turn) might get burnt in similar ways.
Key takeaway: Always maintain separate development and production environments when testing AI coding tools. It might prevent a costly mistake.
Tool Test Results
Tool: Google Workspace with Gemini (e.g., Gmail, Docs, Sheets).
Cost: 14$ (~12€)/user/month for Standard plan which includes Gemini in all these app. You can go cheaper at 7$/user/month with Gemini only in Gmail, depending what you need.
Email Summarization (Gmail): Caught up on email chains in minutes, helping to quickly grasp context and respond effectively. But the real time saver is drafting replied. More on that below.
Content Generation (Docs): Drafted first versions of various marketing materials (social media posts, product descriptions) much faster, significantly reducing time spent on initial content creation.
Data Organization (Sheets): Much easier to pull down analyses, using natural language prompts. Especially when I need to use new formulas, charts and stuff I’m not familiar with.
Search: along with drafting replies, this is probably the other biggest time saver for me. Unfortunately, just as I have finally mastered the dark art of email-searching, now you can easily type “get that receipt from the webshop i dont know the name of a couple of months ago” and you’ll probably get what you were looking for in the results.
SME Verdict: Highly recommended. Tools like Google Workspace with Gemini act as a "superpowered writing assistant" that can dramatically reduce time on administrative and creative tasks, freeing up effort for core business activities. At €12/user/month, you probably break even if each employee saves just 2 hours monthly on admin tasks.
Quick Win of the Week
Practical tips on workflows you can implement in short time.
This week, I’m shouting out AI use in email clients; specifically Google Workspace and Outlook (Copilot). I personally use Superhuman, but the features are very similar in all cases. Two features that I use extensively are:
Email thread summarization
Draft a reply
Specifically, I don’t know how I used to live without drafted AI replies before. It’s a life saver to be able to jot down ideas of the things I want to say and not worry about grammar, typos or anything else apart from driving the core message. Just click done and boom—you have a reply ready to be sent! Instead of picking my brain for half an hour if something I’ve said should sound differently, I can now just focus on the ideas and not worry about the rest.
Superhuman research has found teams who use AI in the email workflow respond to messages 12h faster.
How to use email AI summary and drafts
Ensure your Google Workspace account has Gemini access enabled. Check your organizational settings or directly within Gmail. Same goes for Outlook—you need to have Copilot available as part of your subscription as well as enabled for use in your organization. They are both available as part of a subscription in both services which will set you back by 22-30€/user/month, depending which subscription you get.
AI Email Summary
Open any lengthy email thread or conversation in the email client (ideally web interface as these get the latest features the fastest).
Look for the "Summarize" option (a button at the top of the email thread, next to the title or subject) and click it.
Instantly receive a concise summary of key points from the conversation. Use this to quickly understand the gist.
Outlook Summary Interface
Gmail Summary Interface
Draft a reply with AI
Look for the “Help me write” icon in Gmail to write a prompt that will help you write out the email based on your ideas. In Outlook, start Copilot by clicking the button (usually in the upper right corner in your ribbon). Both will open a panel where you can chat about the email in.
Enter your ideas or just say “Draft a response to this email”. It will quickly create a response which you can then adjust on your own or just iterate with the AI telling it what you want to change. You can even reference documents you want to use to draft the responses or include in the response.
Once you’re happy, just tell it to save the draft and then you send it off, or even more easier, just tell it to send the email for you (now or later).
Email Draft Interface in Gmail
That’s it—as easy as 1,2,3. Something that can help you save hours just this week alone.
You can dive deeper here for Outlook and here for Gmail.
AI Field Notes
Short stories of real life encounters with AI at the office.
Win: I was giving access to a tool the other day to a colleague (as one does 50% of their time at work). It wasn’t working and they asked for help. I asked Perplexity (i.e. Claude) to help; we tried the first thing on this list (re-check your email) and it worked!
Fail: The same colleague was having trouble with exporting a video in CapCut. My inclination again, of course, was to ask ChatGPT. It did not help and ended up battling it out with CapCut for hours before finally making it work (nobody know how but hey, that’s technology for ya)
Due to the nature of this newsletter, I’m always on the lookout for new tools and use cases to automate with AI. That’s where “There’s probably already an AI for that” comes in. It’s a great way to stay on top of things and look for your next tool of choice:
