10 administrative tasks an SME can hand over to AI today
Practical, not science fiction
Generative AI will not replace your admin staff, but it can save them several hours a week. Here are ten proven uses, available with any business assistant — provided you follow the confidentiality rules.
The ten uses
- Answering recurring emails — price requests, availability, reminders: the AI drafts a reply in the right tone, you adjust it.
- Summarising a long thread — thirty emails become five lines: who is asking for what, and what remains to be done.
- Writing meeting minutes — from your rough notes (or the transcript of an online meeting).
- Preparing a sales offer — structure, wording, highlighting strengths, based on your technical details.
- Translating — a Dutch-speaking customer? A working translation FR ↔ NL ↔ EN in seconds, to be reviewed if the document is binding.
- Writing internal procedures — explain out loud how things are done, and the AI turns it into a clear, numbered procedure.
- Creating product sheets or website copy — from a supplier's technical data sheet.
- Analysing a table — "which customers haven't ordered anything for six months?", "how has monthly turnover evolved?".
- Preparing an interview or a negotiation — listing the questions to ask, the likely objections and possible answers.
- Proofreading and correcting — spelling, clarity, tone: an instant second pair of eyes before sending an important document.
How to phrase your request well
The quality of the answer depends enormously on the quality of the request (the famous "prompt"). A simple four-part method:
| Element | Example |
|---|---|
| Role | "You are the administrative assistant of a roofing company." |
| Context | "A customer asks why our quote is more expensive than a competitor's." |
| Task | "Write a courteous reply explaining our guarantees and the quality of our materials." |
| Format | "10 lines maximum, professional but warm tone." |
And don't hesitate to iterate: "shorter", "more formal", "add a sentence about our response time". It is a conversation, not a one-off order.
What not to hand over
- binding decisions (approving quotes, disciplinary action, hiring);
- financial or tax calculations without checking;
- recent factual information that has not been verified — AI can "hallucinate" figures or references with complete confidence.
Putting this in place in your team
A short practical training session, adapted to your documents and your trades, makes all the difference between "we tried it, meh" and a real time saving. It is also the first step recommended in our article AI in SMEs: where to start?