Our fee is proportional to the time & money saved by streamlining a repeating task. This ties the outcomes to the investment, which means we only succeed if you do.

In the Explore & Map phase, we analyze the time/money you’re spending on a task over the course of a year, and how much of that time/money we can give you back by automating or streamlining it. Our fee is proportional to the savings, guaranteeing ROI. We will show you all of these numbers before you approve a project, so it’s clear what your investment is vs. what your savings will be. This process also makes it obvious when it’s not worth having us automating something, and we’ll be the first to tell you if it isn’t.

Let’s pretend that you have a successful brick & mortar retail business and have decided to add eCommerce to your operations. You currently have an inventory of approximately 1,000 products which need to be moved into your new eCommerce system. You have the basic details about these products listed in your current POS system (namely, SKU, title and price), but the new eCommerce system requires more information (description, photos, weight, color, etc.) Your manufacturers are not able to provide the data you need for you, so your current plan is to visit the manufacturer’s website(s) to obtain information and photos, and then manually copy all of the information into the new eCommerce system.

Assuming it takes you 15 minutes per product to grab the information from these websites, format it, crop photos, and upload everything to your eCommerce system, you’re looking at 15,000 minutes, or 250 hours of solid work to complete this task. You decide to assign one of your sales associates to assist with this, who you are currently paying $18.50 per hour (for the purpose of this example, we’ll assume your employer costs like EI are included in this rate.) At 250 hours, this task is going to cost you $4,625 in wages to complete. 

But don’t forget, you’re not only paying for the wages to do this work, but losing that associate off your floor, which hurts your ability to make new sales (this is what we refer to as an opportunity cost – the cost of losing existing sales opportunities to a lower-value task.) Further, if you decide to bring in another associate to cover them, you are now doubling the cost to $9,250 to cover the extra wages. 

Let’s also look at calendar / project time. Assuming your sales associate works 37.5 hours per week, and can dedicate all of their time to this task without interruptions, it will take them approximately 6.6 weeks to populate the catalog. However, if they are not able to dedicate their time solely to this task (you need them on the floor helping customers as well), it would take much longer. Let’s say they can dedicate 2 hours of the day, their morning before lunch, to complete the work. At that rate, it would take 25 weeks, or approximately 6 months, to populate the catalog. In either case, your eCommerce project will be stalled with your agency until the catalog is populated, delaying your project (and your path to eCommerce revenues – another opportunity cost) and potentially creating other costs as well, like extra agency fees to extend the project with them and so on.

So as it stands, you’re facing a minimum cost of $4,625 (which is likely going to be closer to the tune of $10-20K with the opportunity costs factored in), and a project delay of anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months to complete your new eCommerce website.

Enter Automate & Conquer:

1. We investigate your POS system and discover a way to export some of the inventory data. We are able to extract the SKU, title, and price of each item.
2. Next, we setup a scraper to visit your manufacturer websites and grab the product information. Surgically using AI to process the content, we enrich each product listing with photos, descriptions, features, categories, sizes, weights, and more. Our system also automatically crops and processes the photos.
3. We deliver a ready-to-import spreadsheet and files to your web agency. We work with them to ensure the data can import correctly and fix any small issues or errors in the formatting, and they move on with importing the catalog and finishing your website in record time.

Boom. You have the data ready to go in 1-2 weeks and for significantly less than what it would cost for you to do manually. Your associates can continue helping customers the entire time, keeping your sales numbers up, and you free up your own time to prepare additional content for your new website, like your privacy & returns policy. You’re months ahead of where you were going to be and a heck of a lot happier knowing you avoided all that mind-numbing data entry.

Our philosophy is to use the simplest tool possible to do the job. Before we even explore adding AI to the mix, we first look at more traditional software and processes to solve the problem. With sufficient programming and business knowledge, a person can automate a lot about a business reliably without the use of AI. We only add AI if there is a specific, well-defined and narrow use case for it, such as writing human-like responses, providing summaries of content or data, or to drive a key decision point with narrow and clear guardrails. By surgically adding AI to traditional automation methods, we keep the cost down and greatly improve repeatability/reliability of the solution.