A real AI consultant,
for Glasgow businesses.

Why Glasgow work matters to me

I was born and raised in Scotland. That is not a line I put on a page to sell something, it is just where I am from, and it changes how I hear a Glasgow business owner describe their week.

Glasgow is the biggest city in Scotland and most of what makes it work is small. Independent kitchens and bars through Finnieston and the Merchant City. Trades running out of a van across the southside and Dennistoun. Shops and studios that have been on the same street for twenty years. Professional firms of four or five people in the city centre doing serious work with no marketing department behind them.

What almost none of them have is somebody whose job it is to make the business run better. The owner does that, usually at nine at night, usually badly, because they have already done a full day.

What I would actually build for a Glasgow business

It helps to be specific, because AI consultancy is a phrase that can mean almost anything and often means nothing.

A restaurant or bar. Bookings and enquiries arrive across three places, the phone, Instagram and email, and whoever is closest deals with them. Every so often one goes missing and you never find out. The fix is one inbox that catches all three, replies immediately with the things people always ask about, availability, allergens, whether the upstairs room is free on a Saturday, and passes the real ones to a person with the detail already gathered.

A trade. Somebody wants a quote. You measure up, then you write it up on a Sunday because that is the only quiet time you get, and by then two days have passed and they have gone with whoever answered first. The fix is a quoting tool that takes the job details you already collect and produces the quote in minutes, in your format, with your prices, so it goes out the same day.

A shop or studio. The same fifteen questions arrive every week, opening hours, parking, whether you post orders, whether you do gift vouchers. Answering them is not hard, it is just relentless. The fix answers them in your own words the moment they are asked, at any hour, and only interrupts you for something that genuinely needs you.

A professional firm. New enquiries need qualifying before anybody senior spends time on them. The fix asks the qualifying questions properly, writes up what it learns, and puts a short brief in front of you so the first real conversation starts from something rather than nothing.

None of that is clever. It is ordinary work done properly, and it is where the money is.

Where the money actually goes

The thing itself is usually the smaller cost. Most of what you pay for is the part before it, understanding how your business really runs, which is rarely how anybody describes it in the first conversation.

That is also why I will tell you when something is not worth building. If a job takes you an hour a month, automating it saves you twelve hours a year and costs more than it returns. I would rather say so and keep the relationship than take the fee.

The running costs are small and I will show you them before we start. Usually somewhere between ten and eighty pounds a month for the software it sits on. If anyone is vague with you about ongoing costs, that is worth paying attention to.

What I have built for other small businesses

A cake business in north east London that was losing enquiries in the gap between a message arriving and someone being free to answer it. The work was search visibility and getting the site to answer the questions people were actually typing, so the enquiries that did arrive were from people who already knew what they wanted.

An independent IT programme director who does serious enterprise recovery work and was invisible for the exact phrases her buyers search. That was a case of building the right pages and making sure Google understood which one to show, not making anything up about her.

A healer in Edinburgh whose site said what she does but not in the words anyone searches for.

Different businesses, same shape of problem. Something real was being lost between the work and the people looking for it.

When remote is the wrong answer

I work with Glasgow clients remotely and it works, but I will not pretend it is right for everything.

If the problem is on a shop floor, or in how a physical space is used, or something you would need to stand in the room to understand, being four hundred miles away is a genuine handicap and I will say so rather than take the job. Most of this work is not that. It lives in messages, quotes, bookings and enquiries, and that is all digital wherever anybody is sitting.

What matters far more than the postcode is whether the person you hire actually does the work themselves. Ask that before you ask where they are based.