AI in admin work: 6 questions to ask before you adopt anything
AI can take a lot of routine work off your plate – if you ask the vendor the right questions. A short checklist.
Countless “AI solutions” have appeared on the SME market in recent years. Some genuinely save hours; some just add a new source of errors. The difference rarely comes down to the model – far more to how it fits into the workflow. Six questions worth asking.
1. Does it write to my system without me knowing?
This matters most. A language model can be wrong very convincingly. If a tool posts to your accounting software, ERP or CRM without approval, errors pile up quietly. Ask for a setup where a person decides before every write – at least for the first months.
2. Can I see why it suggested what it did?
“92% accuracy” for the whole email doesn’t tell you which value to check. You need per-value signals and reasons: “I assigned it to this client because the sender’s domain matches.”
3. Can it invent an identifier?
A good solution never makes up a client code or item number; it picks from candidates that exist in your master data. If nothing fits, it says so – it doesn’t guess.
4. Where does the data go?
Ask which provider receives the email content, where it is stored, and whether an on-premises model is an option. Ask too whether your company’s data is isolated from other customers’.
5. Can it be measured on my own data?
A demo on the vendor’s samples always looks good. Ask for a measurement on your own anonymised emails: how many values it got right, how many cases needed only a glance.
6. What do I keep if I leave?
The log, your rules and the processed data are yours. Ask up front in what form you get them back.
If you get straight answers to these, you are likely adopting a tool your colleagues will actually want to use – because it helps, and nobody has to clean up after it.
