Only one in eight Canadian businesses has actually put AI to work. Ottawa wants that at six in ten by 2034, and there's a national strategy now, with a free government tool on the way to help small businesses figure out whether they're AI ready.
I do that assessment for a living. So let me save you the wait.
Here's the part almost nobody says out loud. You don't have an AI problem. You have an AI question, and it's a small one. Where in your week does the same information get typed twice?
That's the whole starting line. Not a chatbot. Not a model. Not a subscription to something with "AI" in the name. Just the spot where a person is doing a robot's job.
I was in a shop a while back. About a dozen people, doing fine. Their office manager had a routine for every new job. She'd take the details off the booking, type them into the scheduling software, then type the same name, address and notes into the accounting system, then once more into a spreadsheet somebody built years ago to track what was still outstanding. The same information, three times, every job, all day.
She was good at it. That was the problem. Because she was good at it, nobody had ever counted what it cost. When we did, it was close to an hour a day. Five hours a week. A full working day every two weeks, spent moving words from one screen to another.
None of that needed a model or a chatbot. It needed two systems that already held the same customer to talk to each other one time, so the details typed in the first place showed up everywhere else on their own. That's what "AI ready" actually looks like at the start. It isn't buying intelligence. It's deleting the dumbest, most repeated task in the building first, so that when you do add something smarter, it's sitting on top of clean work instead of a mess.
The owners who get the most out of AI aren't the ones who bought the most of it. They're the ones who found their one typed-twice task, killed it, and then went looking for the next one.
And if you're in BC, here's the part most owners miss: the training to get your team actually using these found their one typed-twice task, killed it, and then went looking for the next one.
And if you're in BC, here's the part most owners miss: the training to get your team actually using these tools can be up to 80% covered by a provincial grant. The readiness tool Ottawa is building is real, and it's coming. But none of it moves until someone inside the business points at one task and says this should run itself.
Here's the one to run this week.
Take one job, or one order, or one new customer, whatever a single unit of work is in your business. Follow it from the moment it comes in to the moment it gets paid, and write down every screen someone types it into. If the same name, address or detail gets entered more than once, you just found where to start. That's your first automation, and it's almost always cheaper and faster to fix than people expect.
You don't need to be ready for all of AI. You need to be ready for one task. That's the entire job of an AI Assessment, run across the whole business instead of one desk: https://www.chanautomation.com/ai-assessment
Reply and tell me the one place in your week something gets typed twice, and what software you're on. I'll tell you whether it's worth automating.
Kevin Chan
The Ops Shortcut by ChanAutomation
https://www.chanautomation.com/ai-assessment