Johannesburg
Most businesses are told they need AI. Very few are told what to actually do with it. I work on the narrow set of problems where AI genuinely helps, and skip the rest.
The useful AI applications I see repeatedly: processing unstructured data (emails, PDFs, scanned documents), routing incoming requests to the right team or workflow, answering internal questions against a company's own knowledge base, and catching errors in large datasets before they become expensive.
None of those need a massive budget or a six-month project. They need someone who can figure out whether AI is actually the right tool, connect it to the systems you already have, and make sure it doesn't go rogue.
Pulling structured data out of invoices, contracts, and forms so it doesn't need to be typed in by hand.
Reading incoming tickets, emails, or requests and sending them to the right place before a human even touches them.
Chatbots that answer questions using your company's actual docs, not a generic language model's best guess.
Checking large batches of data or output against rules that would take a person weeks to get through manually.
Tell me what you're trying to solve. I'll give you a straight answer on whether AI is right for it.