AI Audit for Small Business: What You Should Walk Away With
Thinking about an AI audit for your small business? What a good one should hand you, what it costs, and the red flags that mean grab your coat and walk out.
An AI audit for a small business is one of those things that sounds boring and is actually where most of the money gets made or wasted. Because the audit decides what you build. And if you build the wrong thing you can light a lot of cash on fire before anybody notices.
I sell these. So yeah, grain of salt. But this post isn’t about mine. It’s about what any good AI audit should hand you, and how to tell when you’re getting sold instead of helped.
Why bother with an audit at all
Because most AI projects don’t pay off. That’s not me being dramatic. MIT’s research found about 95% of generative AI pilots showed no measurable profit impact.
95%.
And it’s not because the AI doesn’t work. It’s because people picked the wrong jobs, or nobody owned it, or nobody checked the work. I wrote a whole post on why AI projects fail with my own screwups in it.
The audit is supposed to stop that before it starts.
What a good AI audit for a small business should hand you
When it’s done you should be holding something. A real document you could hand to your team. If you walk away with “great conversation, let’s set up a follow up,” you didn’t get an audit, you got a sales call.
Here’s what should be in it.
A list of jobs for AI, ranked. Not “use AI for marketing.” Specific jobs in your business, ranked by how much time or money they’d give back. And it should be about your business. If it reads like it could’ve been written for any company, it was.
Real numbers. Hours a week back, roughly what that’s worth, and what it costs to run. Ballpark is fine. No numbers at all is a problem.
What NOT to do. This is the one people skip and it might be the most valuable part. A good audit should tell you some stuff to leave alone, because AI is bad at it, or the risk isn’t worth it, or it’d annoy your customers. If the audit says AI should do everything, it’s a sales brochure.
Which AI fits which job. Different models are good at different things (I get into that in ChatGPT vs Claude vs Grok for business). An audit that only ever recommends one product is usually somebody’s reseller deal.
Risks for your business specifically. Customer data, what’s ok to put where, what could embarrass you.
And who owns it. A name on your team. If the plan doesn’t say who’s going to run this stuff, it’s going to sit in a folder.
Red flags. Walk away if you see these.
They push the biggest package first. A good audit is the small step that tells you whether to take a big step. If the audit is just a door into a $50K project no matter what, run.
They’re selling one tool. If every answer ends with the same software, and it happens to be the one they resell, that’s not an audit.
No numbers. Just vibes and buzzwords. “Transformational.” “AI-first.” Ok cool, how many hours?
It’s free. I know, I know. But free audits are almost always a pitch. You get what you paid for and then a sales sequence.
They’ve never run AI in their own business. Ask them. “What AI do you have running in your own company right now?” If the answer is ChatGPT for emails, they’re reading the same articles you are.
They bill hourly for it. Then the audit gets longer and the plan gets fuzzier. Funny how that works. (I rant about hourly billing more in what AI consultants actually cost.)
Buy it from someone who’s done it
MIT found something else interesting in that same research. Buying from specialized vendors worked about 67% of the time, and internal builds worked about a third as often. Translation, people who’ve done it before do it better. Shocker.
That doesn’t mean you need a giant firm. It means you need somebody who’s actually built and run this stuff and been burned by it.
How mine works (short version)
Mine is $1,500 flat. You give me about an hour on a video call and a 30 minute review at the end. You get the written plan in about a week. If it doesn’t find at least five hours a week your team gets back, you don’t pay. And if you hire me after, the $1,500 comes off. Full details are on the audit page.
But again. Whoever you go with, hold them to everything above.
Frequently asked questions
What is an AI audit for a small business?
It’s a look at how your team actually spends its time and a plan for which jobs AI should take, what that saves you, what it’ll cost to run, and what to leave alone. It should be built on your business, not a template.
How much does an AI audit cost?
Prices are all over the place. Mine is $1,500 flat. Be careful with free ones, they’re usually a sales pitch for whatever the person resells.
How long does an AI audit take?
A good one takes a couple weeks start to finish, but only a couple hours of your time. If it eats weeks of your team’s time, that’s a consulting project, not an audit.
Want one built on your business? Book an AI Staff Audit.
Want this working on your team, not just in a blog post?
The AI Staff Audit maps the jobs your team should hand to AI, what it saves you, and what to leave alone. If it doesn't find at least five hours a week, you don't pay.
Book an AI Staff Audit, $1,500