For the first callers only, and only for a short while: a free 15-minute assessment. We find the single highest-value hour AI can give back to your week, and show you the tool that does it. No pitch, no obligation.
Cork AI Consulting helps non-technical business owners put AI to work, without becoming developers.
We find where your week disappears into repetitive admin, then build and hand over the automations, knowledge systems and custom AI workflows that fix it. Or, if you prefer, we can support you month to month.
We started working together at Apple, on the data and automation behind global enterprise sales. Cork AI Consulting brings that approach to owner run businesses, finding where time and money are lost.
AI & Data Consultant
I’m Douglas. My obsession with AI began during my MSc in Bioinformatics at UCC. Ever since I used AI and data science to automate the discovery of data in the human genome, I was hooked.
Since then I’ve worked as an AI and Data Specialist contractor on Apple’s EMEIA Business Process Reengineering team.
At Apple, I recovered millions of euros in revenue and automated 20 hours of work weekly by building agentic AI workflows that processed customer sales data and applied complex business rules for a global, enterprise-scale sales programme.
After thousands of hours testing AI & data tools, I created a simple framework that I now use in my own work and with clients:
AOA. It stands for Audit, Optimise, Automate. The methodology is deliberately simple: find the time or money leak, fix the process before layering on AI, then automate the new optimised process.
I also write the blog on this site and keep active on LinkedIn with current AI content. And I run AI for Business, Cork Meetup, a monthly meetup for local businesses where I share practical AI and data advice.
I’m from Mallow, Cork, and outside work you’ll find me playing football, at the gym, or reading.
AI & Automation Consultant
I’m Murilo. I build the automation and data infrastructure that sales teams actually run on — dashboards, pipelines, the unglamorous stuff that has to work quietly in the background for everything else to make sense.
I studied Analysis & Development of Systems at FIAP in São Paulo and started out as a data analyst, doing the kind of work nobody notices until it breaks: wrangling scattered spreadsheets into BigQuery, automating extraction out of legacy systems everyone had learned to work around instead of fix.
I moved to Cork in 2024 and now work on Apple’s CEMEA Sales BPR & Systems team, building browser automation, Tableau dashboards, and the forecasting scripts behind sales operations across the region.
Alongside that I build for clients directly, and the pattern rarely changes: somewhere in the business, someone is doing by hand every week a job a script should do once. Removing 80% of that manual effort is a normal result for me, not an exceptional one.
I live in Cork city.
After thousands of hours testing AI & data tools at Apple and with our clients, we built a simple framework we use in our own work and with every client:
We understand the work first, improve the process second, and automate only what deserves to run.
We map your sources, workflows and bottlenecks — and hand you the blueprint.
We structure your company knowledge into one source of truth and improve the process before automating it.
We build and manage agents that answer, qualify, quote and follow up — with full context on how your company works.
Knowledge before autonomy: establish the context, improve the work, then give a bounded agent a job worth doing.
Map the work, knowledge sources, bottlenecks, and best opportunities.
Turn scattered company knowledge into one governed source of truth.
Build and manage bounded agents on top of the context they need.
Have a process that’s eating your team’s time, or a question about AI? Send a note and we’ll reply within one working day.
Curious how a project runs? See how working together works.
My obsession with AI began during my MSc in Bioinformatics at UCC, where I used AI and data science to automate the discovery of data in the human genome.
I’ve since worked as an AI and Data Specialist contractor on Apple’s EMEIA Business Sales team.
My favourite work at Apple unlocked over $3 million in revenue, automated four hours of manual work every day and reduced false negatives by 95%. I achieved this by building an AI workflow that automatically processed more than €50 million in customer sales data and applied the company’s business rules consistently.
After thousands of hours testing AI tools, I created a simple framework that I now use in my own work and with clients:
AOA. It stands for Audit, Optimise, Automate. The methodology is deliberately simple: find the time or money leak, fix the process before layering on AI, then automate the new optimised process.
I also write the blog on this site and keep active on LinkedIn with current AI content. And I run Cork AI for Business, a monthly meetup for local businesses where I share practical AI and data advice.
I live in Mallow, Cork.
Working across data engineering, analytics, and data science to turn complex EMEIA Business Sales data into automated, insight-rich solutions, building the pipelines and models behind regional dashboards, plus predictive models and advanced analyses for Account Executives and senior leadership tracking multi-billion-dollar sales programmes.
Tools: Tableau · Snowflake SQL · Python (Pandas, Selenium, Playwright) · AI agents (Claude) · Microsoft Excel
The same work, scaled down to a Cork business. Start with a conversation — no charge, no pitch.
Generic AI gives generic answers. We structure everything your company knows into one knowledge base, then build and manage AI agents on top of it that work like real employees: answering leads, sending quotes, and driving revenue with full context on how your company works.
Built and managed for you. No new software for your team to learn.
Douglas builds the agentic AI workflows. At Apple he recovered millions in revenue and automated 20 hours of work a week. Murilo builds the automation and data infrastructure that keeps those workflows running.
Together they built the workflows behind an EMEIA sales programme on Apple’s business process reengineering teams in Cork, and both build the same way for Cork businesses.
We do this work at Apple, at enterprise scale, on systems that have to hold up on a Monday morning. Owner-run businesses in Cork get the same method, at their size.
Start free, or do an AI assessment. Whether we build anything afterwards is your call.
Book a 30 minute discovery call. We’ll show you where revenue is leaking and what an agent ready knowledge base would look like.
We go deep on your business: how work flows, where knowledge lives, where revenue leaks. Then we hand you the assessment report. It’s the plan we build from, and it’s yours either way.
Learn moreWe build it: one source of truth for what your company knows, and agents on top of it that answer, qualify, quote and follow up. Fixed scope, quoted from your assessment.
Learn moreWe understand the work first, improve the process second, and automate only what deserves to run.
We map your sources, workflows and bottlenecks — and hand you the blueprint.
We structure what your company knows into one source of truth, and fix the process first.
We build and manage the agents that answer, qualify, quote and follow up.
Map the work, knowledge sources, bottlenecks, and best opportunities. You get a written report: where the time goes, what it is worth, and which fixes to do first.
One source of truth your agents run on.
Built, hosted, managed. You see the output.
Looking for a price on a rewire, three-bed in Douglas. Can someone come out this week?
An enquiry at 9 PM on a Sunday gets a real reply, not a queue position.
Built from the replies you already send, so nothing reads like a template.
Each enquiry captured, tagged and timestamped where your team already looks.
Anything it should not answer goes to a person, with the context attached.
Reads the jobs you have already quoted and prices the next one the way you would.
Turns a phone note or a few site photos into line items a customer can actually read.
Nothing reaches a customer until you have read it and pressed send.
Chases the quote on the schedule you set, then stops. No pestering.
Scored on budget, area and job type — whatever actually decides it for you.
Every enquiry read, scored and routed the same way, at three in the morning included.
Work you do not want gets a courteous reply instead of silence.
Tell it which ones you won and the scoring moves closer to your own judgement.
Sheets, docs, your own site: a price change in one place lands everywhere.
Every agent answers from the same current facts, so no two give different numbers.
Anything ambiguous comes to a person rather than being guessed at.
A weekly note of what changed, where it came from and what now answers differently.
Thanks for calling Knipe’s Luxury Garage! Who am I speaking with?
Hi, it’s Patrick.
Great to meet you, Patrick. Are you calling about your service booking?
Yeah, is tomorrow morning still good?
You’re booked in for 10 AM tomorrow. I’ll text a reminder tonight.
Understands context and tone, providing human-like voice responses instantly.
Identifies caller needs and directs them to the right team automatically.
Logs every call, sentiment, and action directly into your dashboard for review.
Handles inbound enquiries around the clock, and answers them the same way every time.
Hi 👋 I’m your AI assistant. How can I help today?
Do you have any slots free tomorrow around noon?
We do! 12 PM tomorrow is open. Can I take your address?
Sure, 22 Glenanaar, Mallow.
Perfect, you’re booked in. See you at noon tomorrow!
Responds naturally across channels while maintaining your brand’s tone.
Uses trained data to answer questions instantly and reduce support workload.
Remembers interactions to create smooth, continuous customer experiences.
Measures chat volume, response rate, and satisfaction inside one unified dashboard.
Connects CRMs, forms, and apps to automate repetitive business operations.
Executes precise actions automatically based on data changes or user activity.
Replaces hours of manual tasks with intelligent end-to-end workflow logic.
Monitors automation status, success rates, and ROI metrics in one place.
These are starting points. Agents are built around your bottlenecks. The discovery call is where we find them.
Learn moreAnswer a few questions to find the best agent for you.
Book a Discovery CallThen you get every cent back. The guarantee is simple: if the assessment doesn't find you at least five hours a week of opportunity, you pay nothing. All you've risked is a 45-minute call.
No. You talk about your business the way you'd explain it to a friend. The technical part is our job. The report is written in plain language, and if you choose implementation, we set everything up and train your team.
Usually yes. A chat window is a tiny slice of what's out there. The assessment looks at your actual workflows and finds the specific tools and automations that do the repetitive work for you, which is where the real hours come back.
The assessment recommends and shows you how, with a 4-day plan you can follow yourself. If you'd rather have it done, that's implementation. Some businesses do the quick wins themselves and bring us in for the bigger builds.
Fast. The report ends with a 4-day quick start, one small action a day, so you can have something working within the first week or two. The bigger automations take longer, but the quick start is designed so the early wins carry the cost of the assessment.
A course leaves you to do the work. An agency hands you juniors. You get one senior practitioner who has shipped agentic AI in a large enterprise, applying that to your business. You work directly with the person doing the thinking.
No lock-in. The concierge is month-to-month — cancel any time. The only limit is spots: it runs on a capped roster so everyone gets senior attention, so a place isn't always open. We quote the rate on the discovery call.
You start with the AI Assessment — a fixed price, credited in full if you go on to a build. Implementation is quoted per project once the scope is clear, and the ongoing AI Concierge is month-to-month. No retainer just to get a straight answer, and no surprise invoices. What each step covers is on the services page, and we put a figure on it once we know what you need.
We're based in Cork and work with businesses across the city and county — Douglas, Ballincollig, Carrigaline, Midleton, Mallow, Cobh — and the wider Munster region. The assessment and most implementation run over a call and screen share, so we can help a business anywhere in Ireland; we just keep the in-person side close to Cork.
Your knowledge base is yours. Permissioned access, nothing shared across clients, revoke any time.
That's normal, and it's exactly what the assessment is for. We map what you have and where it lives, then turn scattered inboxes, drives, and docs into one organised source of truth. You don't clean it up first — we do.
A hire is one person learning on your payroll. We give you a structured knowledge base plus managed AI agents built on top of it — each owning a function, monitored and improved for you. And the knowledge base is yours to keep.
A focused 30-minute conversation. We map where your knowledge lives and where revenue is leaking, then show you what an agent-ready knowledge base would look like for your business. No prep required, no obligation.
Select a time below to find out what your company's knowledge is worth. Or tell us a bit about your business first and we'll let you know honestly whether it's a fit — within one working day.
The fee is credited in full if you go on to a build. If we can't find you at least five hours a week, you pay nothing.
Three engagements, one sequence. Every client starts with the assessment, because agents built without a knowledge base are just chatbots.
One step in, then build only what earns its place. See the full step-by-step →
Strategy and implementation
Find 5+ hours a week or pay nothing.
A working session for owners, operators and small teams with one job they want off their plate. We go through where the week actually goes, pick the tools that fit what you already run, and build the workflows and prompts your team keeps using after we leave.
You come away with systems that run and the notes to keep them running, not a slide deck. Builds and ongoing support get scoped on the call.
These three are not a menu you have to choose from now — they are what happens after the assessment, and it tells you which one you need. Every build is fixed scope and quoted from your assessment, with the assessment fee credited against it.
The questions your staff keep bringing to you get answered without you. Ask your own documents in plain English instead of digging through the shared drive.
Learn moreA lead lands and the reply drafts itself. We build the agent on your real work, test it on your data, then hand it to your team.
Learn moreEvery month, one more job stops being done by hand, plus upkeep on what we’ve already built. Two working calls a month, cancel any time.
Learn moreTell us what is actually broken and we will point you at the right one, or tell you honestly that none of them fit.
Book a Discovery CallNot ready to book? Come to AI for Business, Cork Meetup — free, monthly, in the city, and no pitch.
Three ways to work with us, and a free one to start with. Everyone who hires us starts with the assessment, because it is what tells you which of the other two you actually need.
Free · Start here
Twenty minutes, nothing to pay, nothing to sign.
We look at one job that keeps eating your week, and we name one tool that would take it off you. You get it in writing afterwards, whether or not you ever hire us.
It is one problem, not the whole week. The full assessment goes through everywhere the time actually goes, tests tools against what you already run, and hands you a report and a four-day plan.
We do three of these a week.
Strategy and implementation plan
We find you 5 hours a week, or it's free.
Know exactly what to implement before you build it.
We go deep on your business: how work flows, where knowledge lives, where revenue leaks. Then we map what an AI agent would actually need: the data sources to connect, whether that's email inboxes, your CRM, shared drives, spreadsheets or what your most experienced people carry in their heads.
You leave with the implementation plan: your top three to five use cases ranked by revenue impact, the schema for your knowledge base, and the order to build them in: what to connect first, and why. It's the plan we build from, and it's yours either way.
Done for you
One price, agreed before we start.
No hourly bills, no surprises. And we knock the cost of your assessment off it.
We execute the AI Assessment's implementation plan.
First the knowledge base. Everything your company knows, in one single structured place AI can use. Not a folder dump. An organized system of record.
We connect your data sources: pricing, process, customers, history, structured so AI gives real answers instead of guessing. Your own people can use it on day one, and we keep it current rather than leaving you a snapshot that rots.
Then Managed AI Agents. We build, deploy, host and manage agents that handle a specific function: answering a lead in minutes, getting a quote out, qualifying enquiries, keeping the knowledge base current etc.
Each Agent is onboarded on your company, not the internet, and we keep it working as the business changes, so nobody on your side is maintaining a bot. You just see the work get done.
Done with you, monthly
Ongoing AI support. A human AI business coach who builds with you.
Two working calls a month where we share screens and build your AI systems together, on your real work, in your real stack.
AI agents, a knowledge base, automations and skills. You own everything we build. Limited spots, month to month.
A monthly evening in Cork city for local business owners. Practical AI, no pitch, no cost.
Register for Fri 11 SepFrom your own rate and hours. An estimate, not a quote.
Take the free mini assessment. Tell us what is actually broken, and we will point you at the right one, name one tool you could use this week, or tell you honestly that none of them fit.
Book your free mini assessmentEvery stage of working together, so you know what to expect before you commit.
The fixed-price front door. Everything here is covered by the 5-hour guarantee.
You pick a slot and pay the fixed fee. That's the only commitment. If the assessment doesn't find you at least five hours a week, you get it all back, so the worst case is a free 45-minute conversation about your business.
We spend 45 minutes on where your week actually goes. We ask, you talk, and we don't pitch anything. The point is to surface the tasks that eat your time and the ones you'd happily never do again.
corkaiconsulting.ie
If AI could fix one thing in your business in the next 30 days, would you want it to make you more money, give you back hours, or make your customers happier?
What is the task you or your team repeat most often every week?
Where do things most often slow down, get stuck, or fall through the cracks?
How many hours a week does that eat, and who is doing it?
If that one thing ran itself, what would change for you?
And to put a figure on it: what is an hour of your time worth, how many hours a week are going to waste, and how many people are on the team?
We take the call away and work through it properly: every pain point pulled out, then off-the-shelf AI tools researched and matched to each one. We right-size every pick to your business, so a four-person team isn't sold enterprise software it doesn't need.
A short, plain-language plan arrives before we next speak: your main time drains, the tools that fix them, and the hours and money you get back. It ends with a 4-day quick start, one small action a day, so an overwhelmed week isn't a reason to stall.
Then we go through the report together, recommendation by recommendation. You decide what's most urgent, and whether you want to run with it yourself or have us build it. If we're done here, you still walk away with a plan worth more than you paid.
AI Assessment — cover
Financial impact — the ROI in your numbers
Executive summary
Impact vs effort matrix
Quick wins
Recommended solutions
Your 4-day quick-start plan
What comes after
Your next steps
The groundwork. Do this once and everything after it works better.
We execute the plan from the assessment, connecting your data sources into a single structured knowledge base. Not a folder dump. An organised system of record.
Done for you, quoted per project.
We build, deploy, host and manage agents that handle specific functions, with full context on how you work. You just see the work get done.
Or keep going with us. Two working calls a month, on a capped roster.
The first win is rarely the last. Something always slips back: the quote that goes out three days late, the enquiry nobody rang back, the marketing you keep meaning to post. The concierge is the standing arrangement for that. Two 45-minute working calls a month, month to month, on a roster we cap at eight.
Every call ends with something running in your business instead of a document about it. Quote follow-up that sends itself, review requests that go out after every job, a month of posts drafted from one hour of you talking, the weekly numbers written up while you sleep. You pick what we start with. We share screens and build it while we direct: what to open, what to click, what to type. You drive, so by the time the call ends you understand what you have and can run it without us.
One short intake form before the first call is all the paperwork there is. It tells us where your week goes, so we start building in session one instead of spending it finding out, and after that we just keep building. The recording, the transcript and the action items land in your Notion hub the same day, which means the business keeps what we built and not just whoever sat in on the call. Between calls a voice note on Voxer comes back inside 12 business hours, so the small thing that would have stalled you for a fortnight gets sorted that afternoon.
Then it stacks. Next session we fix whatever did not stick, then put the next piece on top. Twenty-four sessions a year, everything we set up is yours and stays yours if you stop, and you can stop any month you like.
Working sessions where we build automated workflows, live.
Twenty minutes on your business, then you decide.
Book a Discovery CallEach framework is a building block of your AI infrastructure, designed to automate, connect, and scale your operations with precision.
Thanks for calling Knipe’s Luxury Garage! Who am I speaking with?
Hi, it’s Patrick.
Great to meet you, Patrick. Are you calling about your service booking?
Yeah, is tomorrow morning still good?
You’re booked in for 10 AM tomorrow. I’ll text a reminder tonight.
Understands context and tone, providing human-like voice responses instantly.
Identifies caller needs and directs them to the right team automatically.
Logs every call, sentiment, and action directly into your dashboard for review.
Handles inbound enquiries around the clock, and answers them the same way every time.
Hi 👋 I’m your AI assistant. How can I help today?
Do you have any slots free tomorrow around noon?
We do! 12 PM tomorrow is open. Can I take your address?
Sure, 22 Glenanaar, Mallow.
Perfect, you’re booked in. See you at noon tomorrow!
Responds naturally across channels while maintaining your brand’s tone.
Uses trained data to answer questions instantly and reduce support workload.
Remembers interactions to create smooth, continuous customer experiences.
Measures chat volume, response rate, and satisfaction inside one unified dashboard.
Connects CRMs, forms, and apps to automate repetitive business operations.
Executes precise actions automatically based on data changes or user activity.
Replaces hours of manual tasks with intelligent end-to-end workflow logic.
Monitors automation status, success rates, and ROI metrics in one place.
Looking for a price on a rewire, three-bed in Douglas. Can someone come out this week?
An enquiry at 9 PM on a Sunday gets a real reply, not a queue position.
Built from the replies you already send, so nothing reads like a template.
Each enquiry captured, tagged and timestamped where your team already looks.
Anything it should not answer goes to a person, with the context attached.
Reads the jobs you have already quoted and prices the next one the way you would.
Turns a phone note or a few site photos into line items a customer can actually read.
Nothing reaches a customer until you have read it and pressed send.
Chases the quote on the schedule you set, then stops. No pestering.
Scored on budget, area and job type — whatever actually decides it for you.
Every enquiry read, scored and routed the same way, at three in the morning included.
Work you do not want gets a courteous reply instead of silence.
Tell it which ones you won and the scoring moves closer to your own judgement.
Sheets, docs, your own site: a price change in one place lands everywhere.
Every agent answers from the same current facts, so no two give different numbers.
Anything ambiguous comes to a person rather than being guessed at.
A weekly note of what changed, where it came from and what now answers differently.
Answer six questions and pick a time. Then we spend the call on your business, not on catching up.
Tell us about your business.
It takes about a minute. Your answers go straight onto the booking, so we arrive knowing where the time is going.
Find where AI can save your business 5+ hours every week, guaranteed.
How much is your time worth?
We find the hours.
The AI Assessment names the recurring work AI can take off your week, costed, in plain English. You get the plan to put it in place.
Book a Discovery CallA fixed-price look at where your week actually goes, then a plain-English plan for getting the time back. If it doesn’t find you five hours a week, you get the fee back — so the worst case is a free conversation about your business.
If you still touch the quotes, the invoices and the follow-up yourself, the constraint on the business is your week. The assessment starts there: not with what AI can do in general, but with where your hours actually go.
Anywhere from just you up to about twenty staff, where the owner is still the one chasing the paperwork at nine in the evening. That is the week we go looking through.
Electrical, plumbing, roofing, groundworks, landscaping, cleaning. Quotes going out late and missed calls cost real jobs, and both are fixable without changing how you work on site.
Accountants, bookkeepers, clinics, property services. Repetitive document work and client back-and-forth eat the chargeable hours, and that is exactly the kind of work AI is good at.
Two people use ChatGPT, nobody agrees on how, and none of it is written down. The assessment turns scattered use into a short list of tools worth standardising on.
€500once, all in
A 45-minute look at where your week goes, then the research done properly: every time drain matched to an off-the-shelf tool, right-sized for a business your size, priced out in hours and euro.
If the assessment does not find you at least five hours a week, you pay nothing. Separately: if you go on to have us build something, the €500 comes off the price in full.
Want the numbers on your own figures first? The services page has the ROI calculator and what a build costs after this.
The fixed-price front door. Everything here is covered by the 5-hour guarantee.
You pick a slot and pay the fixed fee. That's the only commitment. If the assessment doesn't find you at least five hours a week, you get it all back, so the worst case is a free 45-minute conversation about your business.
We spend 45 minutes on where your week actually goes. We ask, you talk, and we don't pitch anything. The point is to surface the tasks that eat your time and the ones you'd happily never do again.
corkaiconsulting.ie
If AI could fix one thing in your business in the next 30 days, would you want it to make you more money, give you back hours, or make your customers happier?
What is the task you or your team repeat most often every week?
Where do things most often slow down, get stuck, or fall through the cracks?
How many hours a week does that eat, and who is doing it?
If that one thing ran itself, what would change for you?
And to put a figure on it: what is an hour of your time worth, how many hours a week are going to waste, and how many people are on the team?
We take the call away and work through it properly: every pain point pulled out, then off-the-shelf AI tools researched and matched to each one. We right-size every pick to your business, so a four-person team isn't sold enterprise software it doesn't need.
A short, plain-language plan arrives before we next speak: your main time drains, the tools that fix them, and the hours and money you get back. It ends with a 4-day quick start, one small action a day, so an overwhelmed week isn't a reason to stall.
Then we go through the report together, recommendation by recommendation. You decide what's most urgent, and whether you want to run with it yourself or have us build it. If we're done here, you still walk away with a plan worth more than you paid.
AI Assessment — cover
Financial impact — the ROI in your numbers
Executive summary
Impact vs effort matrix
Quick wins
Recommended solutions
Your 4-day quick-start plan
What comes after
Your next steps
Twenty minutes on your business, then you decide. Book a Discovery Call
Douglas and Murilo run this between them. The person on your discovery call is the person writing your report, and there is nobody in the middle turning what you said into a brief.
Most of what an Irish small business needs already exists for the price of a phone bill. We reach for that first, and we only propose building something when the sums say a tool will not do.
A four-person team should not be sold enterprise software. Every recommendation is scaled to your headcount, your budget and how much appetite you actually have for change.
We are in Cork, we run a free monthly AI meetup here, and you can come and size us up in a room before you spend anything. Details on the meetup page.
A fixed-price review of how your week runs, for €500. It is a 45-minute discovery call, then the research done away from you, then a short plain-English report and a review call to walk through it. You finish with a named tool for each of your main time drains, what each costs, and a four-day plan to start.
Then you get every cent back. That is the whole guarantee, and it is why the worst case here is a free 45-minute conversation about your business. Separately from the guarantee: if you go on to have us build something, the €500 comes off that price in full.
Your side of it is about two hours: 45 minutes on the discovery call, the report to read, and the review call. The research in between is ours to do. The report reaches you before the second call so you are never being read at down a screen share.
No. You talk about your business the way you would explain it to a friend. The technical part is our job, the report is written in plain language, and nothing in it assumes you have an IT person.
The assessment recommends and shows you how, with a four-day plan you can follow yourself. If you would rather have it done, that is a build, and the assessment fee comes off it. Plenty of businesses do the quick wins themselves and bring us back for the bigger pieces.
Usually yes. A chat window is a small slice of what is out there, and one person using it well is not the same as the business using it. The assessment looks at your actual workflows and finds the tools and automations that do the repetitive work for you, which is where the hours come back.
It stays between us and it is not used to train anything. We only need enough to understand how the week runs, so there is rarely any reason for us to see customer data at all. If a recommendation would involve personal data, the report says so and says what that means under GDPR.
That is a fine outcome and it happens. There is no retainer to sign and nothing renews. The tools go in your name, the plan is yours, and if you never speak to us again you are still ahead of where you started.
Pick a slot for the discovery call. That is the only commitment, and the guarantee covers the rest. If it turns out we are not the right fit for what you need, we will say so on the call rather than take the fee.
Book the call, talk us through a normal week, and you will have a plan with real numbers on it. If we cannot find you five hours, you pay nothing, so the worst outcome is 45 minutes spent thinking clearly about your own business.
One source of truth for what your company knows, structured so AI gives real answers instead of guessing.
Learn moreAgents that answer, qualify, quote and follow up — built on your work, hosted and managed for you.
Learn moreTwo working calls a month, always-on access between them, and one more job off your hands each month.
Learn moreAll four steps in order, with what each one costs to start: the services page.
Find where AI can save your business 5+ hours every week, guaranteed.
How much is your time worth?
We find the hours.
The AI Assessment names the recurring work AI can take off your week, costed, in plain English. You get the plan to put it in place.
Book a Discovery CallEverything your business knows — pricing, process, customers, history — pulled out of inboxes and shared drives into one structured source of truth. Not a folder dump.
The groundwork. Do this once and everything after it works better.
We execute the plan from the assessment, connecting your data sources into a single structured knowledge base. Not a folder dump. An organised system of record.
Twenty minutes on your business, then you decide. Book a Discovery Call
A fixed-price review of where your week goes, then a plain-English plan: the time drains, the tools that fix them, the hours back.
Learn moreAgents that answer, qualify, quote and follow up — built on your work, hosted and managed for you.
Learn moreTwo working calls a month, always-on access between them, and one more job off your hands each month.
Learn moreAll four steps in order, with what each one costs to start: the services page.
Find where AI can save your business 5+ hours every week, guaranteed.
How much is your time worth?
We find the hours.
The AI Assessment names the recurring work AI can take off your week, costed, in plain English. You get the plan to put it in place.
Book a Discovery CallA lead lands and the reply drafts itself. We build each agent on your real work, test it on your data, then run it for you. Fixed scope, quoted from your assessment.
Done for you, quoted per project.
We build, deploy, host and manage agents that handle specific functions, with full context on how you work. You just see the work get done.
The building blocks we assemble these from — AI receptionist, chat assistant, workflow automations — are shown in full on the services page.
Twenty minutes on your business, then you decide. Book a Discovery Call
The ones we build most often, shown doing the work. Each one is built on your process, tested on your data, then run and monitored by us.
Looking for a price on a rewire, three-bed in Douglas. Can someone come out this week?
An enquiry at 9 PM on a Sunday gets a real reply, not a queue position.
Built from the replies you already send, so nothing reads like a template.
Each enquiry captured, tagged and timestamped where your team already looks.
Anything it should not answer goes to a person, with the context attached.
Reads the jobs you have already quoted and prices the next one the way you would.
Turns a phone note or a few site photos into line items a customer can actually read.
Nothing reaches a customer until you have read it and pressed send.
Chases the quote on the schedule you set, then stops. No pestering.
Scored on budget, area and job type — whatever actually decides it for you.
Every enquiry read, scored and routed the same way, at three in the morning included.
Work you do not want gets a courteous reply instead of silence.
Tell it which ones you won and the scoring moves closer to your own judgement.
Sheets, docs, your own site: a price change in one place lands everywhere.
Every agent answers from the same current facts, so no two give different numbers.
Anything ambiguous comes to a person rather than being guessed at.
A weekly note of what changed, where it came from and what now answers differently.
Thanks for calling Knipe’s Luxury Garage! Who am I speaking with?
Hi, it’s Patrick.
Great to meet you, Patrick. Are you calling about your service booking?
Yeah, is tomorrow morning still good?
You’re booked in for 10 AM tomorrow. I’ll text a reminder tonight.
Understands context and tone, providing human-like voice responses instantly.
Identifies caller needs and directs them to the right team automatically.
Logs every call, sentiment, and action directly into your dashboard for review.
Handles inbound enquiries around the clock, and answers them the same way every time.
Hi 👋 I’m your AI assistant. How can I help today?
Do you have any slots free tomorrow around noon?
We do! 12 PM tomorrow is open. Can I take your address?
Sure, 22 Glenanaar, Mallow.
Perfect, you’re booked in. See you at noon tomorrow!
Responds naturally across channels while maintaining your brand’s tone.
Uses trained data to answer questions instantly and reduce support workload.
Remembers interactions to create smooth, continuous customer experiences.
Measures chat volume, response rate, and satisfaction inside one unified dashboard.
Connects CRMs, forms, and apps to automate repetitive business operations.
Executes precise actions automatically based on data changes or user activity.
Replaces hours of manual tasks with intelligent end-to-end workflow logic.
Monitors automation status, success rates, and ROI metrics in one place.
These are starting points. Agents get built around your bottlenecks — the discovery call is where we find them.
Book a Discovery CallA fixed-price review of where your week goes, then a plain-English plan: the time drains, the tools that fix them, the hours back.
Learn moreOne source of truth for what your company knows, structured so AI gives real answers instead of guessing.
Learn moreTwo working calls a month, always-on access between them, and one more job off your hands each month.
Learn moreAll four steps in order, with what each one costs to start: the services page.
Find where AI can save your business 5+ hours every week, guaranteed.
How much is your time worth?
We find the hours.
The AI Assessment names the recurring work AI can take off your week, costed, in plain English. You get the plan to put it in place.
Book a Discovery CallYou keep hearing AI could save your team hours. Working out where to start is the hard part, and you do not have spare evenings to figure it out alone. That is the job we do. Twice a month we get on a call and build one real improvement in your business with you, and you can message us in between. No jargon, no homework you cannot follow.
Search for AI help and you get two poor options: apps that cheer you on, and agencies that do the work somewhere far away and email you a report. Most owners we meet in Cork tell the same story. They know AI matters, they tried ChatGPT once or twice, and it went nowhere useful because nobody showed them what to do with it in their own business. What is missing is not another tool. It is someone in the work with you.
You are good at the work and buried in everything around it. We take the quoting, follow-up and paperwork that eat your week and hand pieces of them to AI, one call at a time, until the week runs lighter.
Trades, clinics, home services, shops. Customers now ask ChatGPT and Google who to hire before they ring anyone. We work on getting your business into those answers, and on the follow-up that turns an enquiry into a booked job.
You run everything yourself and the week only holds so many hours. We set up the research, writing and admin routines that let one person work like a small team, and we show you exactly how each one works.
You do not need to be technical and you never have to pretend to be. We explain things in plain English, show you what to click, and go at your pace. Most owners we work with started exactly where you are.
€1,100a month
You bring whatever is slow, broken or not getting done. We show you how to fix it with AI and we build it together on a screen share. You own everything we set up, and it compounds: each month builds on the last.
Month to month. Cancel any time and keep everything.
Need one problem solved in a single session instead? That is what the AI Assessment is for. The Concierge is for owners who want things running month after month, not just a plan.
An hour of what you know becomes weeks of posts, emails and pages that sound like you. No more knowing you should be posting and never getting to it.
More people ask ChatGPT and Google AI for a recommendation before they buy. We set your site up so those tools can read it and have a reason to name your business.
Follow-up emails, review requests, reports, copying details between systems. We connect AI to the software you already pay for, then write it down so the business keeps it.
Before we speed anything up, we make sure your marketing says the right thing. AI multiplies a clear message and exposes a fuzzy one, so the words come first.
The Concierge is not an agency where you hand over a wishlist and wait. We bring the direction, show you the path, and stay in the work with you while we build. What you get with it is the part nobody sells: a look at how we use AI every day to run our own business, adapted to yours. It is built for owners who want to cut through the hype and get real hours and real customers out of AI.
Before each call you tell us what is slow or broken: quotes going out late, leads nobody follows up on, the hours lost to admin. We pick the thing that moves the business most, not the shiniest tool.
We share screens and set the real thing up in your business while we direct: what to open, what to click, what to type. You drive, so you understand what you have and can run it without us. We show it working in our own business first, then we do it in yours.
Next call you tell us what worked and what stuck, we fix the friction, and we add the next piece on top. Six months in you are not holding a strategy document. The marketing goes out, the follow-up happens, and the busywork handles itself.
Or keep going with us. Two working calls a month, on a capped roster.
The first win is rarely the last. Something always slips back: the quote that goes out three days late, the enquiry nobody rang back, the marketing you keep meaning to post. The concierge is the standing arrangement for that. Two 45-minute working calls a month, month to month, on a roster we cap at eight.
Every call ends with something running in your business instead of a document about it. Quote follow-up that sends itself, review requests that go out after every job, a month of posts drafted from one hour of you talking, the weekly numbers written up while you sleep. You pick what we start with. We share screens and build it while we direct: what to open, what to click, what to type. You drive, so by the time the call ends you understand what you have and can run it without us.
One short intake form before the first call is all the paperwork there is. It tells us where your week goes, so we start building in session one instead of spending it finding out, and after that we just keep building. The recording, the transcript and the action items land in your Notion hub the same day, which means the business keeps what we built and not just whoever sat in on the call. Between calls a voice note on Voxer comes back inside 12 business hours, so the small thing that would have stalled you for a fortnight gets sorted that afternoon.
Then it stacks. Next session we fix whatever did not stick, then put the next piece on top. Twenty-four sessions a year, everything we set up is yours and stays yours if you stop, and you can stop any month you like.
Working sessions where we build automated workflows, live.
Twenty minutes on your business, then you decide. Book a Discovery Call
The Discovery Call exists so we can tell you honestly whether this is the right fit. Here is who should not book one.
If a €29-a-month AI coaching app fits where you are, use one. The Concierge is for owners who have tried ChatGPT on their own, got nowhere useful, and want real people in the work with them until things run.
AI does not run your marketing by itself and we will not pretend it does. What works is clear direction, the right order of operations, and improvements built deliberately on your real work.
This is not hand it off and wait. We bring the direction and we build with you, so your business owns the result. If you want an agency to run your marketing while you watch from a distance, we are the wrong hire and we will say so.
These places are for owners who have decided to get help and want it done right. If you are still weighing it up, come to the free Cork meetup first. The Concierge will be here when you are ready.
This only works if we meet and you use what we build between calls. If the diary cannot hold two working hours a month plus a little time in between, a one-off assessment is the better buy.
We can show you what we run in our own business, and we will measure what we build for you honestly. Nobody can promise your revenue number, and you should not trust anyone who does.
A monthly service where we help you put AI to work in your business: €1,100 a month, on a capped roster. You get two 45-minute calls a month where we build real improvements together on a screen share, unlimited Voxer access in between, and a Notion hub holding every recording and action item. You are hands-on with us guiding, so when a call ends you understand what you have and can run it without us.
It depends which kind you mean. Most things sold as an AI business coach are apps: a chatbot that asks you goal-setting questions and encourages you. A human one works differently. We get on a screen share twice a month and walk you through building the improvements your business needs, whether that is marketing that goes out consistently, a website AI tools will recommend, or busywork that runs itself. We direct and demonstrate, you drive.
An app gives you answers and encouragement, and AI models are famously agreeable: they tend to validate whatever you bring them. The Concierge gives you people who push back, pick the problem that actually matters, and guide you while you build the fix in your own accounts. When the call ends you have a working improvement, not a chat transcript.
For brainstorming and first drafts, honestly, yes, and we will show you how to get more out of it. The limits show up fast though. It agrees with you too easily, it does not know your business unless you teach it, and it cannot set up and connect your tools for you. The Concierge uses those same AI tools, with people who know what to build, in what order, and how to make it stick.
We meet on a screen share and build the actual improvement live, with us directing: what to open, what to click, what to type. You do it in your own accounts, you use it between calls, and next month we build on top of it. Between calls you can send a voice note or a message on Voxer and get an answer within 12 business hours. Done for you leaves you dependent on the vendor. Done with you leaves you with the working setup and the skill.
AI coaching apps run to tens of euro a month. A human consultant on retainer usually runs from a thousand to several thousand. The AI Concierge is €1,100 a month, month to month. It is not a magic button and not a hand-it-off service: we bring the direction, we build with you on two working calls a month, and everything we set up is yours.
No, by design. We do not take your marketing away and run it for you. We provide the direction and the path, and we walk it with you on screen shares, so your business owns what gets built and the skill to run it. If you do want something built and handed over, that is Managed AI Agents, which is a different service.
Whatever is costing you the most time or business right now. Common projects: turning an hour of what you know into weeks of publishing, follow-up that goes out on its own, your website showing up when customers ask ChatGPT or Google AI for a recommendation, and internal shortcuts that give you hours back. You bring the problem, we build the thing that removes it.
Any business where the owner is stretched thin. We work with local and service businesses across Cork and Munster, trades and clinics, consultants, and small online businesses. If your customers search for businesses like yours, or you spend hours a week on repetitive work, there is something here worth building.
Both, on purpose. A coach keeps you accountable and leaves the doing to you. A consultant hands you a plan and leaves the running to you. The Concierge sits in the middle: real improvements to your real business, with our direction and the training baked in, so things keep working after the engagement ends.
A one-off is the right buy when you have one problem and need a plan for it. That is the AI Assessment. The Concierge is a different product: we do not start from zero each call. We hold the context on your business between sessions, each one builds on the last, and the improvements compound instead of restarting. An assessment ends with a plan. A Concierge month ends with something running.
Because it is us on the calls, building with you, not a team running a template. We cap the number of Concierge clients so every engagement gets real attention. When the roster is full, new enquiries go on a waiting list and we tell you honestly how long the wait looks.
No, and you never have to pretend to be. Most of what we build runs in tools you already use, plus AI tools we walk you through in plain English, click by click. Where something genuinely needs a developer, we say so and scope it clearly rather than pretending it is simple.
Yes, it is month to month. No annual contract and no lock-in. Everything we build together lives in your own accounts and stays yours after you leave, which is the point.
Book a Discovery Call, tell us what is actually broken, and we will give you a straight answer on fit. If the Concierge is not right for you, we will point you at what is. Want to get a head start? Fill in the intake questionnaire first and we will come to the call already knowing where your week goes.
A fixed-price review of where your week goes, then a plain-English plan: the time drains, the tools that fix them, the hours back.
Learn moreOne source of truth for what your company knows, structured so AI gives real answers instead of guessing.
Learn moreAgents that answer, qualify, quote and follow up — built on your work, hosted and managed for you.
Learn moreAll four steps in order, with what each one costs to start: the services page.
Four steps, in the order they happen: the assessment that finds the hours, the knowledge base underneath, the agents that do the work, and the monthly help if you want it. Read it before you book anything.
The fixed-price front door. Everything here is covered by the 5-hour guarantee.
You pick a slot and pay the fixed fee. That's the only commitment. If the assessment doesn't find you at least five hours a week, you get it all back, so the worst case is a free 45-minute conversation about your business.
We spend 45 minutes on where your week actually goes. We ask, you talk, and we don't pitch anything. The point is to surface the tasks that eat your time and the ones you'd happily never do again.
corkaiconsulting.ie
If AI could fix one thing in your business in the next 30 days, would you want it to make you more money, give you back hours, or make your customers happier?
What is the task you or your team repeat most often every week?
Where do things most often slow down, get stuck, or fall through the cracks?
How many hours a week does that eat, and who is doing it?
If that one thing ran itself, what would change for you?
And to put a figure on it: what is an hour of your time worth, how many hours a week are going to waste, and how many people are on the team?
We take the call away and work through it properly: every pain point pulled out, then off-the-shelf AI tools researched and matched to each one. We right-size every pick to your business, so a four-person team isn't sold enterprise software it doesn't need.
A short, plain-language plan arrives before we next speak: your main time drains, the tools that fix them, and the hours and money you get back. It ends with a 4-day quick start, one small action a day, so an overwhelmed week isn't a reason to stall.
Then we go through the report together, recommendation by recommendation. You decide what's most urgent, and whether you want to run with it yourself or have us build it. If we're done here, you still walk away with a plan worth more than you paid.
AI Assessment — cover
Financial impact — the ROI in your numbers
Executive summary
Impact vs effort matrix
Quick wins
Recommended solutions
Your 4-day quick-start plan
What comes after
Your next steps
The groundwork. Do this once and everything after it works better.
We execute the plan from the assessment, connecting your data sources into a single structured knowledge base. Not a folder dump. An organised system of record.
Done for you, quoted per project.
We build, deploy, host and manage agents that handle specific functions, with full context on how you work. You just see the work get done.
Or keep going with us. Two working calls a month, on a capped roster.
The first win is rarely the last. Something always slips back: the quote that goes out three days late, the enquiry nobody rang back, the marketing you keep meaning to post. The concierge is the standing arrangement for that. Two 45-minute working calls a month, month to month, on a roster we cap at eight.
Every call ends with something running in your business instead of a document about it. Quote follow-up that sends itself, review requests that go out after every job, a month of posts drafted from one hour of you talking, the weekly numbers written up while you sleep. You pick what we start with. We share screens and build it while we direct: what to open, what to click, what to type. You drive, so by the time the call ends you understand what you have and can run it without us.
One short intake form before the first call is all the paperwork there is. It tells us where your week goes, so we start building in session one instead of spending it finding out, and after that we just keep building. The recording, the transcript and the action items land in your Notion hub the same day, which means the business keeps what we built and not just whoever sat in on the call. Between calls a voice note on Voxer comes back inside 12 business hours, so the small thing that would have stalled you for a fortnight gets sorted that afternoon.
Then it stacks. Next session we fix whatever did not stick, then put the next piece on top. Twenty-four sessions a year, everything we set up is yours and stays yours if you stop, and you can stop any month you like.
Working sessions where we build automated workflows, live.
Twenty minutes on your business, then you decide. Book a Discovery Call
A fixed-price review of where your week goes, then a plain-English plan: the time drains, the tools that fix them, the hours back.
Learn moreOne source of truth for what your company knows, structured so AI gives real answers instead of guessing.
Learn moreAgents that answer, qualify, quote and follow up — built on your work, hosted and managed for you.
Learn moreTwo working calls a month, always-on access between them, and one more job off your hands each month.
Learn moreWhat each step costs to start is on the services page.
Welcome! To join the free event, please register below.
Register free on EventbriteMost AI events are built for developers. This one is built for you: the Cork business owner who knows AI matters but does not have time.
Join the AI for Business, Cork Meetup!
AI for Business is a free monthly meetup at Maldron Hotel, South Mall, where non-technical business owners meet to discuss and learn about AI.
Every month you will learn specific tactics that non-technical business owners can use to implement AI in their business to save time, make more money, or increase the quality of their product or service.
This month: learn how to use Claude inside your small business.
Douglas Woollam & Murilo Reis both worked as Data & AI automation specialists at Apple. They will demo Claude Cowork in action and show exactly how the average small business owner can use it inside their business.
Who this is for: anyone interested in implementing AI into their small business to save time, make money, or increase the quality of their product or service. Zero technical background needed.
Free to attend. Space is limited, so be sure to register in advance.
Doors and networking
Presentation and Q&A: Claude Cowork for small business
Structured networking: trade your #1 AI problem
Finished
Maldron Hotel South Mall Cork City
93 South Mall, Cork, T12 EE72, Ireland · paid parking at the venue
Yes, it costs nothing to attend. We run it to meet local owners and to show what these tools can actually do. If you later want a one-to-one look at your own business, that is our paid work and it is completely optional.
Once a month on a Friday, 6:30pm to 8:00pm, at the Maldron Hotel South Mall — 93 South Mall, Cork, T12 EE72, with paid parking at the venue. It is normally the first Friday, moved when that falls on a holiday. The next one is Friday 11 September 2026, and tapping that date at the top of this page opens the whole run.
Not at all. If you can use email, you are fine. We keep everything in plain language and show things working rather than talking theory. Zero technical background needed.
No pitch from the stage. We show useful tools and answer your questions. If you want to take it further afterwards you are welcome to ask us, but nobody is getting sold to.
Just yourself and one task that eats your week. Bring a laptop if you would like hands-on help setting something up for your own business during the networking half hour.
Hold the BlarneyKey for the gift of the gab. On device voice-to-text that gives your AI real context. Local, private, free.
Free Apple Silicon Mac · macOS 15+The products are what we make for ourselves. The paid work is the same thing, aimed at the job that eats your week.
Named after the stone up the road, which is said to grant the gift of the gab to anyone who kisses it. Same idea, less bending over.
Key 110 or Right ⌥ is your Blarney key. Hold it, talk, and the words land wherever your cursor is.
Key 110 or Right ⌥ your Blarney key · hold to talk · double-tap to lock onagainst typing at 60 wpm
1.8× faster than typing at 60 wpm
across 75 sessions
of speaking per go
best ever: 2 days
sessions so far
“Add a rate limit to the contact form so the same email can’t submit more than three times an hour, and log the ones it blocks so I can check none of them were real people.”
“Can we push the Kelleher walkthrough to Thursday afternoon? Something came up on their assessment and I’d rather give it the time than rush the call.”
“Note for the write-up: their biggest time sink is re-keying delivery dockets into the accounts package by hand, easily two hours a day across the office.”
“Reply to the Cork Chamber thread: yes to the 12th, I’ll bring a short demo and keep it to twenty minutes.”
“On my way, ten minutes out. Order me a flat white if you’re up at the counter.”
Say the name of a saved prompt and BlarneyKey pastes the whole thing instead of the words you said. Say “Get Things Done” and the full template lands.
Prompts (1)
How matching works
The whole utterance has to be the trigger phrase. Matching ignores case and punctuation, and extra spaces are ignored.
Keys
Hold any of them to talk, or double-tap to lock dictation on. Tap again, press Escape, or click stop on the pill.
The keypress also reaches the focused app.
More than one is useful when your keyboards differ: a spare key on an external board, and something like Right ⌥ on the built-in one. Sixteen presets to pick from, or record a spare key of your own.
Test microphone
Trims steady background hum before it reaches the model.
Live transcription
Dictation
Keeps recording after you let go, for longer dictation.
A small indicator with the live level and a stop button.
A soft cue when dictation begins and ends.
Insertion
Paste is instant. Type it out, character by character, for apps that reject a synthetic paste.
Formatting
Tidies punctuation and stray filler on device. Set it per app under Apps below.
Apps
Where dictation is allowed to paste. Turn Format on for an app and its dictation gets the cleanup pass.
Sensible on your own machine. An allowlist is for when you want the discipline.
Allowed (8)
com.apple.Notescom.apple.mailcom.apple.MobileSMScom.apple.Safaricom.google.Chromecom.apple.Terminalcom.tinyspeck.slackmacgapnotion.idAdd by bundle ID
For anything that is not a normal app in /Applications.
Time saved
The baseline the dashboard measures time saved against. Most people type around 40–60.
General
Launch BlarneyKey quietly to the menu bar when your Mac boots.
Everything stays on your Mac. No account, no network calls, nothing to sign into.
Matching ignores case and punctuation.
It started as a way to stop typing long instructions to AI tools, and turned into the thing we use everywhere text goes.
Hold a key and speak, or double-tap to lock it on for a longer stretch. Sixteen keys to choose from, or record a spare one of your own. Keys you need for typing are refused outright.
Say “weekly business review” and the whole template pastes out. Matching ignores case, punctuation and messy spacing, because speech adds all three.
Words, sessions, speaking speed, day streak, and the time saved against a typing speed you set yourself. Filterable by app, with a copy button on every line of history.
Paste this into Terminal. It checks your Mac, installs the speech engine, downloads the model, builds the app and opens it.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AirDoogle/blarneykey/main/install.sh | bash
Five to ten minutes, and most of that is the 1.4 GB speech model downloading. Nothing to click through while it goes.
System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility. That is what lets the app put text into other apps. It shows a banner with a button until you do.
That is the default key. Change it to whatever suits in the menu-bar menu, and reset it from there if you ever bind something awkward.
xcode-select --install)
About 1.5 GB of disk for the speech model
Something not behaving? The troubleshooting notes on GitHub walk through checking the speech engine on its own.
Apple charges $99 a year for the certificate that lets a Mac app be signed and notarised. Without one, any ready-made app you download is quarantined by Gatekeeper and refuses to open until you go digging through System Settings. The workaround going round the internet is a command that strips that protection off, and that is not something anyone should paste on a stranger’s say-so.
Building it on your own machine sidesteps the whole thing. No untrusted binary arrives, so there is nothing to override and no security check to turn off. The cost is the command line tools and a few minutes of compiling.
Transcription runs on your Mac, on the Neural Engine. There is no account, no server and no network call — the app works with the wifi off. The code is MIT licensed and public, so you don’t have to take our word for any of that.
Leave your email and we’ll let you know when a version works on Windows or an older Mac — and when we put out anything else worth your time. Nothing else, and one click to stop.
BlarneyKey came out of one annoying job we did too many times. Most businesses have three or four of those. Finding them is what the assessment does.
Find 5+ hours a week or you pay nothing
Practical, no-hype notes on AI and automation for Cork and Munster businesses: what it actually costs, which jobs to hand over first, and how to use these tools without getting burned. Plain English, written for busy owners.
AI pays for itself fastest in a recruitment agency on the writing and the follow-up, not on deciding who gets shortlisted. Job specs, candidate summaries, interview notes and the chase that keeps a placement alive are all repetitive, high-volume, and safe to hand over. Screening decisions are not.
AI earns its place in an Irish pharmacy on the counter admin and the phone, not anywhere near clinical judgement or the dispensing process. The wins are the repeat-prescription chase, the same twenty questions asked every day, and the paperwork that piles up behind the dispensary.
Most useful AI automation for a small business is working within days, not months. A drafting habit takes an afternoon, a single automation that runs by itself usually takes one to three weeks, and anything quoted in quarters is either much bigger than you need or badly scoped.
AI for a gym or fitness studio is most useful on the admin around the training, not the coaching: bookings, no-shows, lapsed members and the weekly content.
No business is too small for AI, but plenty are too small for the version of it being sold to them. If you are one person with a phone and a spreadsheet, the useful question is not whether to adopt AI, it is which single job in your week you would hand over first.
An AI course teaches you to use the tools; an AI consultant works out which jobs in your business are worth handing to them. Most owners need the second thing first, then the first thing to stick.
Real AI automation examples for a small business are duller and more specific than the hype suggests: a quote drafted from site notes, an inbox sorted before you open it, an invoice chased on day seven, a Monday report that writes itself.
AI for a construction small business earns its keep on the paperwork, not the building: drafting quotes, writing up site records, and chasing the documents and payments that quietly stall a job.
AI for estate agents in Ireland earns its place on the admin that eats a viewing day: drafting listing copy, chasing enquiries before they go cold, and turning scribbled viewing notes into follow-ups you would otherwise write from memory.
Writing AI prompts that actually work means giving the tool three things every time: the real context, the exact output you want, and an example of good, so it stops guessing at what "good" means.
AI vs hiring in a small business comes down to one test: automate the work that repeats to a pattern, and hire when the job needs judgement or presence.
AI email management works best for a small business when it sorts and drafts while you decide what actually gets sent, which keeps replies personal.
AI helps a Cork clinic write appointment reminders, draft patient information sheets and answer common questions faster, but anything touching patient records needs a properly configured, GDPR-compliant tool, not a free consumer chatbot.
AI helps a Cork shop write product descriptions, answer supplier and customer emails faster, and turn reviews and stock updates into social posts, without needing any technical setup.
AI is useful in a small Irish law firm for drafting, summarising and admin, as long as a solicitor checks every output and client confidentiality is settled first.
The EU AI Act applies lightly to most Irish small businesses: if you use ordinary AI tools, your duties are transparency and staff training, not paperwork.
An AI receptionist for a small business is software that answers calls, texts, or web chats when nobody is free to pick up, and either resolves the enquiry or books a slot straight into your calendar.
The best AI tools for small businesses in 2026 aren’t one big platform, but a short list matched to the job: a chatbot for drafting, a notetaker for meetings, and one scheduling tool that actually talks to your calendar.
To choose an AI consultant in Ireland, look for fixed pricing, a guarantee tied to a real outcome, and someone who names the tools before you pay anything, not after. Beyond that, most of the job is spotting who is selling hype and who is going to sit with your actual week.
Is AI actually worth it for a small business? Usually yes, but only for the dull, repeatable parts of the week, not as a blanket upgrade to everything you do.
How much does AI automation cost for a small business in Ireland? Honestly, less than most owners fear, once you split it into three plain tiers. The trouble is that the true answer starts with “it depends”, and nobody enjoys hearing that. So I’ll break the range down properly, with real figures where they exist and clear bands where they don’t.
The AI Assessment is a fixed-price look at how your week actually runs, ending with a plain plan and a four-day quick-start you can follow.
Is it safe to put client data into AI tools? Usually yes, if you pick the right tier and follow a few plain house rules that keep GDPR onside. The honest answer, for most businesses I meet around Cork, is that the tool itself is rarely the problem. The habits around it are. A lot of the worry I hear from owners is vague. “I don’t want to get in bother, so we just told the team not to touch it.” That is understandable. It usually means the team is using AI anyway, quietly, on their own phones, with no rules at all. Which is the worst of both worlds.
Seven low-risk tasks a small business can automate this month, each quick to set up and chosen to give a Cork owner back real time each week. None of them need a big project, a new platform, or a member of staff who understands code. Most are jobs you already do by hand every week: the small repetitive stuff that takes an hour here and forty minutes there until half your Friday is gone. So here are seven, with a plain reason each one is worth doing.
AI for hospitality doesn’t have to mean losing the personal touch. Here’s how Cork cafés, restaurants and hotels can use it to cut admin. Picture a Saturday in a busy spot off Oliver Plunkett Street. The floor is full, the kitchen is flat out, and somewhere between the lunch rush and the evening covers a pile of small jobs is stacking up. Three reviews to reply to. A supplier waiting on an order confirmation. Two enquiries in the inbox asking the same thing about the set menu. None of it is hard. All of it eats the hour you should be spending on the floor, or at home.
AI for accountants and bookkeepers in Ireland saves real time on drafting, summarising and chasing, but the figures still need a human eye. If you run a small practice in Cork or anywhere across Munster, you know the shape of the week already. Client work in the day, then the admin tail after: the email you owe three people, the meeting notes you meant to write up, the reminder about a VAT deadline you keep forgetting to send. That tail is where AI earns its keep. Not on the numbers themselves. On everything wrapped around them.
AI for tradespeople in Cork can take quotes, invoice chasing and job notes off your evenings, so the paperwork stops eating your nights. Picture the usual. It’s half nine at night. The van’s back, the kids are down, and you’re at the kitchen table with a cold cup of tea, working out a quote you should have sent on Tuesday. You’re grand on the tools. Nobody ever told you the job came with two hours of admin a night.
Do you need an AI consultant, or can you sort it yourself? Here’s an honest guide for Cork and Munster owners on when DIY works and when help pays. A lot of the time you can do it yourself, and I’ll tell you when. I’d rather you spend nothing and get a small win than hand me money for something you could have set up over a wet Sunday afternoon.
To know if your business is actually making money, you need one view that refreshes itself and gives a straight answer on a Monday. A lot of the owners I talk to here in Cork are flat out. The vans are moving, the diary is full, the team is stretched. Then I ask one simple question, how much did you actually make last month, and the honest answer is a shrug. That shrug is not a sign anyone is doing a bad job. It is a sign the numbers live in too many places to see at once.
ChatGPT vs Claude for business? For most Irish SMEs both are excellent, so the real win is picking the one your team will actually use. I get asked this a lot by owners around Cork, usually after someone in the family or the office swears blind by one of them. It’s a fair question. Here’s how I’d think about it, without the hype.
One team I worked with started every week the same way. Someone exported four files, cleaned them by hand, pasted them into a template, and sent it round by ten. Two hours gone before the real work even started.
There is a lot of noise about AI taking jobs. On the ground, in ordinary businesses, that is not what I see happening.
Last updated 26 August 2026
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Made for Apple in my role as a Data Analyst. Created with artificial data.
Awarded to <0.01% of published vizzes by Tableau's editorial team.
Hover, filter and switch tabs.
Featured by Tableau's official account on LinkedIn.
Christmas is a major time for sales around the world, and making the most of the holiday rush can be a bit challenging. In this task, I helped Apple analyse Christmas data to uncover insights into customer behaviors during the festive season. The dataset provided includes anonymized Christmas sales data across various product categories, customer demographics, and marketing campaigns.
Here are my key takeaways
Children (ages 1–11) contributed nearly 40% of total Christmas sales, with Smartphones and in-store shopping being their top preferences.
The top 5 best-selling products, all for children, declined by up to 15% over four years — highlighting changing consumer trends.
United States led with €6.2M in sales and US Apple Stores leading with €2.5M in sales, while Netherlands grew 14%, and Canada declined by 12% since 2018/2019. Irish Store Select (Compu B) increased sales by 19.3%, which could be targeted for future sales leads.
Covid caused a -3.2% dip in 2020, followed by a +1.9% recovery in 2021, though sales hadn't fully rebounded.
Customers tend to buy 1–5 products per transaction, but when making bulk purchases, they preferred 5, 10, 15, or even 30 items. This suggests an opportunity for special pricing on bulk purchases to encourage upselling.
December accounted for 77% of in-store sales, showing a strong opportunity for seasonal promotions. Shopping timing varied — females preferred Sundays and Mondays, while males leaned towards Thursdays for gift buying.
Two tabs answer the six questions. Slide between them — or tap either dashboard to zoom in.
This tab helped answer the questions on Customer Segments, Best Performing Products, Geography, and Covid. It revealed that Children (ages 1–11) contributed nearly 40% of sales, highlighted the decline of top-performing products, mapped regional performance, and showed how sales dipped during the pandemic.
This tab helped answer the questions on Pricing and Shopping Timing. It analyzed how price variation affected sales, identified bulk promotion opportunities, and pinpointed December's 77% in-store sales share as the key window for promotions.
Instead of looking at the data by calendar year, data was grouped into Christmas Seasons to get a better understanding. For example, November 2018, December 2018, and January 2019 are combined into Xmas 2018/2019, considering these three months as one season for retailers and shoppers alike.
The Children segment (ages 1-11) stood out, contributing nearly 40% of total Christmas sales over the years. Interestingly, there was no significant difference between male and female customers across different age groups.
In-store shopping, particularly for the Children segment (74% in stores), was a prevalent choice. This is understandable as kids often prefer the hands-on experience of selecting gifts. Cash was the preferred payment method for Kid purchases, while Teens (ages 12–17) and Adults (ages 18 and over) leaned towards credit card, and cash was their least preferred payment method.
Overall, iPhone and Apple TV took the lead as the top-selling product categories, contributing a significant 27% to total sales among the 11 categories. While iPhone stole the spotlight as the most beloved and profitable category with a staggering 77.03%, it's important to note that its sales had seen a notable decline in the past couple of years.
Breaking it down to the product level, Iphone 13 and Iphone SE were the best sellers, each making up 7.9% to the overall sales. Interestingly, the top 5 performers were all targeted at the Children segment. However, despite their initial popularity, all of these products saw a decline in sales, ranging from -2% to -15% over the past four seasons. Zooming in on the Teenager segment, HomePod Mini emerged as the most cherished Christmas gifts. Meanwhile, in the world of Adults, the Apple Watch Series 5 stole the show, contributing the most to sales and enjoying a substantial sales growth of nearly 50% since the Christmas season of 2018/2019.
United States took the crown for the most Christmas sales over the four seasons, reaching €6.2 million. Canada, once the best in Xmas 2018/2019, faced a decline of -12% over the four seasons. The Netherlands showcased the most significant growth of 14%, climbing from the 7th to the 5th spot.
Drilling down to the Sales Leads, the three Stores in United States (Apple Stores, Best Buy USA & MacConnection) emerged as the top-selling Stores, each generating over €1.8 million in sales. In Ireland, Apple Store Ireland & Select (Compu B) emerged as the top-selling Stores, each generating over €0.9 million in sales.
The Christmas gift market felt the impact of Covid in 2020, experiencing a -3.2% sales decrease. A recovery followed in 2021/2022 with a +1.9% increase, but the sales had not yet reached pre-Covid levels.
Despite higher prices, children's products lead in sales quantity, with over 12 thousand units sold for each product over the past four Christmas seasons. Among products for adults, unit price variation did not significantly affect the quantity sold (around 6–7 thousand units per product).
Customers tend to buy 1–5 products per transaction, but when making bulk purchases, they preferred 5, 10, 15, or even 30 items. This suggests an opportunity for special pricing on bulk purchases to encourage upselling.
December was the busiest month for Christmas gift shopping, with sales doubling compared to November and January. In-store shopping dominated December, accounting for 77% of sales, making it an excellent time for in-store promotions.
Shopping times varied across different channels. In-store shopping peaked on Monday, followed by Sunday. Sundays at 3 pm became the busiest time for Christmas markets. Online shopping provided flexibility, with peak times at Monday 8 am, Wednesday 11 pm, and Saturday 7 am. Weekday afternoons at 4 pm witnessed the highest online sales. While females preferred Sunday and Monday for Christmas shopping, males leaned towards Thursdays for their festive gift-buying spree.
Made for Mallow – Liscarroll Landscaping in my role as a Data Analyst. Recreated with artificial data.
I built the BI stack for a landscaping business I co-founded — an SQL script and Power BI report that replaced manual processes. It increased profit by 20%, identified high-value towns to focus marketing and service checkups on, and saved 1.5 hours of reporting time every week.
Enhanced decision-making with DAX measures that blend distance, fuel price, rental gear and crew size into margin KPIs; visuals let the business slice profit by customer, townland, week or service at will.
Increased gross profit by 20% by developing DAX-based metrics for cost and profitability in a Power BI dashboard, identifying underpriced jobs, and presenting data-backed pricing recommendations to the business owner that included overlooked costs like fuel, distance and differing equipment.
Achieved an 85% repeat booking rate by tracking job frequency in Excel, automating maintenance reminders in Python, and optimising schedules to group nearby clients in Power BI, boosting recurring revenue, client satisfaction, and operational efficiency.
Enabled prioritisation of high-margin, efficiently scheduled jobs and reduced prep time by developing DAX-based KPIs in Power BI that provided cost breakdowns per job by time, location, proximity, and resource costs, improving decision-making and auto-generating daily equipment lists.
Cut weekly reporting time by 75% from 2 hours to 30 minutes by creating a user-friendly Excel workbook, automating the pipeline to the Power BI dashboard and ensuring smooth adoption with a comprehensive user guide and video walkthrough.
A single pipeline moves the data from a spreadsheet all the way through to an interactive report.
My Python code converted individual Excel pages into individual CSV files, ready to import into the Postgres SQL server.
# execute py file in jupyter_venv
from pathlib import Path
import pandas as pd
# path to the workbook
wb = Path('Mallow - Liscarroll Landscaping/landscaping_schema.xlsx')
# check the file exists before proceeding
if not wb.exists():
raise FileNotFoundError(wb)
# iterate through every sheet
for sheet in pd.ExcelFile(wb).sheet_names:
df = pd.read_excel(wb, sheet_name=sheet, engine="openpyxl")
csv_path = wb.parent / f"{sheet.lower()}.csv"
df.to_csv(csv_path, index=False)
print("Exported", csv_path)170-line SQL script used to build tables from the CSV files. Defines keys and data types, NULL / empty value handling. CTE for dashboard metrics.
Below is the base CTE on fact_work_order, normalises service_charge nulls to 0, rounds to two decimals, and outputs dashboard metrics: operating_cost, total_profit, profit_per_person, total_time, and profit_per_hour
Two tabs make up the report. Slide between them — or tap either dashboard to zoom in.
Includes slicers for below / on-target jobs, year and job type. The map and revenue-by-town bar chart use a field parameter to toggle between revenue, profit or profit/hr for flagging high-value towns. The column and line charts can be drilled up or down for time-series analysis.
Presents a job-level table with key metrics: work date, customer, duration, distance, crew size, revenue, profit, profit per hour, operating costs, target revenue, earnings potential and price status. All slicers are synced with the summary page.
18 DAX measures were created across both tabs of the dashboard. Here are three of the core ones.
Overall, this project demonstrates how a data pipeline built with Microsoft Excel → Python → SQL → Power BI can transform raw operational data into actionable insights that increase profit, identify high-value clients, and support smarter business decisions.