AI that works inside the business you already run.

I’ve built software for small businesses since 1999: CRMs, phone systems, online stores, and the reports behind them. Now I wire AI into those same systems, so it drafts the email, finds the customer who’s gone quiet, or tells you what changed overnight, instead of being one more tab nobody opens.

Tell me about your business See what I’ve built

What I can do for you

Wire AI into the systems you already have.

An assistant that can see your CRM, your inbox, your inventory and your orders is worth ten that can only chat. I connect AI to the data your business already keeps, through tools that let it look things up and take the actions you allow, and nothing else.

Take the repetitive work off your team.

Drafting replies, summarising long threads, sorting what comes in, a morning rundown of what changed overnight. The work that eats an hour a day is often the easiest to hand to AI, as long as it’s built to fit how your office really works.

Work out what’s worth doing before you spend.

Not everything needs AI, and some of what’s being sold won’t pay for itself. I’ll look at how your business runs and tell you plainly what’s worth doing, what isn’t, and roughly what it would cost. If the honest answer is “nothing yet”, you’ll hear that too.

Keep it private, on your own hardware.

The models can run on a computer in your office instead of someone else’s cloud, so customer records and email never leave the building. I run my own assistant this way (Rook, below) and can set the same up for you.

Work I can show you

Rook, a self-hosted assistant

The assistant I built for myself and use every day. It runs on open models on my own machine, reads my Slack, keeps my tasks and notes, looks things up on the web, and sends me a briefing of what needs attention, with a push to my phone. Nothing it knows leaves the box.

Read the case study

AI for a sales team

A client’s inventory system now has AI built into it. It helps their sales team draft customer emails and work out who to call, and when. It’s part of the software they already use rather than a separate tool to remember.

More about this project

How working with me goes

A conversation

You tell me how the business runs and where the time goes. I ask a lot of questions. No charge, no slide deck.
A small first project

Something fixed in scope that proves the idea on your real data. You see it working before you commit to more.
Grow what works

If the first piece earns its keep, we add the next one. If it doesn’t, you’ve spent little and learned a lot.

Estimates are honest guesses, and I say so up front. My Ethics Policy is on this site for a reason.

Twenty-five years inside small-business systems

AI is only useful once it can reach your data. These are the kinds of systems I’ve built and connected, so I know where that data lives and how to get at it safely.

Replaced a $40,000 Cisco phone system with free, open-source software, with no service contract.
Moved a business from a custom CRM to Salesforce, converting and importing all their data.
Streamed live data into Microsoft Power BI from the database a client already had.
Built three custom CRMs tied into accounting, shipping partners, card payments and online orders.
Architected e-commerce sites from the ground up, with custom checkout and payment processing.
Wrote two open-source database tools, Thinker for RethinkDB and Arangler for ArangoDB.
Built a task runner for scheduled and on-demand jobs, with live stats and a log of every run.
Made two Shopify apps: Copycat, for extra content fields, and Search Reactor, a better store search.
Captured call records and recordings from a Freeswitch VoIP system, so a sales team could see every past call.
Built video storage and streaming so clients could host their own video.
Built a system for sharing your location with trusted family and friends.
Developed custom content management for editing content across many websites at once.
Embedded Braintree card payments inside Salesforce, so the sales team never leaves their CRM.
Captured every email to or from a customer into a searchable history on their record.

A little about me

I grew up in the country and still prefer wide-open spaces with fast Internet. Off the clock I modify kids’ ride-on toys, build electric vehicles, and do woodworking.

The developer motto I’m known for: “We don’t ship crap.”

“The contract we have with the computer is that if we give it a program that is not absolutely perfect, then the computer has license to do the worst possible thing at the worst possible time.”

- Douglas Crockford

It’s a favorite because it reminds me what cutting corners really costs.

Tell me what eats your team’s time.

A short email is enough. I’ll reply with whether I think AI can help, and what a first step would look like.

Get in touch