In most growing businesses the admin grew faster than the team, and too much of it still lands on the owner’s desk. These are the jobs AI can take off the pile first, without anyone needing to be technical.
Most small business owners don’t need an “AI strategy”. They need their evenings back.
According to the Office for National Statistics, around a third of UK businesses with 10 or more staff now say they use AI. For the rest, the biggest things holding them back are not having the know-how and not knowing where to start.
So let’s start. Here are seven everyday admin jobs you can hand to Claude this month, each with a prompt you can copy straight in. A quick ground rule first: keep sensitive personal data out, and always read what Claude gives you before you use it.
We use Claude in the examples below because it’s the AI assistant we use most day to day. We’ll set you up with whichever AI tool suits your business.
1. Getting through your inbox faster
Paste in that sprawling email thread and ask:
“Summarise this thread in three bullets, tell me what I’m being asked to do, and draft a short reply that says yes to X and asks for Y.”
If you connect Claude to your Outlook or Gmail, you can skip the copying and pasting and just ask it to find the thread.
2. Turning meeting notes into actual actions
Paste in your scribbled notes and ask:
“Turn these notes into a list of actions, each with an owner and a deadline, then write a short follow-up email to everyone who attended.”
3. Writing quotes and proposals
Upload an old proposal you were happy with, plus a few notes on the new job, and ask:
“Using the style and structure of the attached proposal, draft a new one for [client] based on these notes. Keep it under two pages and save it as a Word document.”
4. Keeping tabs on the competition
Checking competitors’ websites and prices is exactly the kind of repetitive job that never gets done. Once a month, ask Claude:
“Search the web for anything [competitor names] have announced or changed in the last month, summarise it, and suggest one thing we should respond to.”
5. Job adverts and first-draft policies
“Draft a job advert for a part-time bookkeeper, 20 hours a week, based in [town]. Friendly tone, clear list of duties, no jargon.”
Anything with legal weight, like contracts or disciplinary policies, still needs checking by someone qualified.
6. Getting five pieces of content out of one
“Turn this blog post into three LinkedIn posts, one customer email and a short paragraph for our newsletter.”
7. Writing down how things are done
Type or dictate rough notes on how you do a task, however messy, then ask:
“Turn this into a step-by-step procedure a new starter could follow, with a checklist at the end.”
It’s the easiest way we know to get processes out of someone’s head and onto paper.
Next step: make it a habit, not a one-off
Once a prompt works, save it. Create a Project in Claude for each regular job, put your instructions in once, and your whole team can use it the same way every time.
You can also connect Claude to your email, calendar and files, so it works with your real information instead of whatever you paste in. And on Claude’s paid plans, Claude Cowork can run regular jobs on a schedule, like a weekly summary of your inbox waiting for you on a Monday morning.
What it adds up to
Here’s a typical example. If each of these seven jobs saves you 30 minutes a week, that’s 3.5 hours a week. Over a year it’s around 160 hours, or four working weeks.
Curious how a managing director actually uses this day to day? Have a read of What I Actually Use Claude For.
Your one-week challenge
1. Pick two jobs from the list.
2. Try each prompt three times this week.
3. Jot down roughly how much time it saved.
4. Save the prompts that worked in a Claude Project for the team.
Want the whole team doing this?
Our one-day workshops take your team through exactly this, using your own real tasks. Take the 3-minute AI Readiness Check to see where you stand.
Source: Office for National Statistics, “Artificial intelligence in UK businesses: 2023 to 2026”, Business Insights and Conditions Survey, June 2026.
We’re not IT people. We’re business leaders who’ve put AI to work across sales, finance, operations and marketing. We can set this up for you, train your team and hand it over, or keep running it for you each month.
Growing pains like this are normal in a business that has grown quickly, and they’re fixable. Take the free Growing Pains Check to see where your business stands in three minutes, or book a free call about a Growing Pains Diagnostic: half a day with you and your business, then a written 90-day plan with the three changes that matter most.