Adam Yee — AI implementation for Singapore SMEs

01

None of this looks like an AI problem.

Count the ones you recognise.

The same fact, typed into three systems.
Two systems disagree. No tie‑breaker.
A thirty-second question takes two days.
One person is the system. They took leave.
Nobody owns the first reply.
The mistake surfaces at month end.

All six are cheap to fix now.

02

The tools are easy. The order is not.

First

The facts have to be true in one place

One version of a customer, a job, a price.

Then

The work has to have a shape

A state, an owner, a definition of finished.

Only then

Intelligence, pointed at one thing

Cheap now. Worthless without the first two.

Almost everyone starts at the third one.

04

Three processes, taken apart

Archetypes, not clients. Open one.

A The invoice that arrives as a photo in WhatsApp

How it runs today: A supplier photographs an invoice and sends it to whoever they have a number for. That person forwards it to accounts. Someone reads the image and keys the vendor, date, line items and total into the accounting system. Someone else checks it against a delivery order in a different folder. If a digit was misread it surfaces weeks later during reconciliation, and by then nobody remembers the case.
What it actually costs: Not the typing. The cost is that the invoice has no status: nobody can answer "has this been paid" without asking a human, so the question gets asked constantly and each answer costs an interruption. Errors are expensive not because they happen but because they are found late.
How I would rebuild it: One intake point that accepts the photo without asking the supplier to change anything — that constraint is real and fighting it fails. Extract the fields, and where confidence is low, show a human the image and the extracted values side by side rather than guessing. Match against the delivery order automatically, and route only genuine mismatches to a person. Every invoice then has a state, so the status question answers itself.
What I would need from you: Thirty real invoices, including the ugly ones, and one person who can tell me which mismatches genuinely matter. Access is usually the slow part, not the build.
What could go wrong: Extraction accuracy on bad photographs is the honest limit. The answer is not a better model, it is designing for the failure: a human review queue that is fast to clear, and never silent auto-approval of something the system was unsure about. If your volume is under about twenty invoices a week, careful manual entry may simply be cheaper — I will tell you that rather than sell you a build.

B The rent that gets chased by hand every month

How it runs today: A spreadsheet holds who owes what. Around the same date each month somebody opens it, works out who has not paid, and writes individual messages. Some tenants pay on a reminder, some need three, a few need a phone call. The chasing is remembered rather than scheduled, so in a busy month it slips, and slipping is invisible until the cash does not arrive.
What it actually costs: The visible cost is the hours. The real cost is variance: collection depends on whether one person had time, so your cash flow inherits someone's calendar. And the person doing it is doing your least judgement-heavy work.
How I would rebuild it: The schedule becomes a system's job, not a memory's. Reminders escalate on their own — gentle, firmer, then a flag for a human call — and every message carries an approved payment link so paying is one tap rather than a bank transfer someone has to type. Payment reconciles back against the record automatically, so "who still owes" is a fact rather than an exercise.
What I would need from you: Your current sheet, the escalation wording you are comfortable sending in your own voice, and a decision on which cases must always reach a human before a firmer message goes out.
What could go wrong: Tone. An automated reminder that reads like a debt collector damages a tenant relationship worth far more than the arrears, and this is the failure I would watch hardest. It is also why I would not let the system send the final escalation itself. Note too that I would set this up to send approved payment links — I do not hold or touch your money at any point.

C The same question, answered five times a day, in three apps

How it runs today: Enquiries arrive on Instagram, WhatsApp and email. Most are the same handful of questions — are you open, how much, do you have space on Saturday, where do I park. Someone answers them between doing their actual job. Replies are slower in the evening, faster on a quiet morning, and the people who came closest to booking are the ones who waited longest.
What it actually costs: Revenue, not time. A first reply that takes four hours loses bookings to whoever answered in four minutes, and you never see the ones you lost, so this cost is invisible in a way the others are not.
How I would rebuild it: Answer the repeated questions instantly on every channel from one source of truth, so opening hours live in exactly one place and are never wrong on Instagram. Hand a real booking straight into the calendar. Route anything unusual to a person with the conversation attached, so they are not asking the customer to repeat themselves. The bot's job is to be boring and correct, not to sound human.
What I would need from you: Two weeks of real enquiries so the questions come from your customers instead of my assumptions, plus your genuine rules about availability and pricing — including the ones you have never written down.
What could go wrong: Confidently answering a question it should have escalated. A system that invents an answer about your pricing is worse than a slow human, so I build these to say "let me get someone" rather than guess, and I would rather it hand off too often at first than once too rarely.

05

The questions people actually ask

Data, lock-in, what happens if you leave, and the rest

Where does our data go?: Wherever you decide, and I will put it in writing before anything is built. Plenty of these systems run entirely inside infrastructure you already own and pay for. Where something does leave — a document-reading service, for instance — I will name exactly which service, exactly what is sent, and what it retains, before you agree to it. If a class of document cannot leave your building, that is a design constraint, not a blocker.
Our staff will think this is about replacing them.: Sometimes they are right to be suspicious, so it is worth being straight about it. What I build removes copying, chasing and status-checking — the parts of the job nobody defends. If your actual plan is a headcount cut, tell me, because it changes the design and I would rather know than find out. In my experience the fastest way to sink one of these projects is to surprise the people who do the work.
We tried automating this and it did not stick. Why is this different?: Usually it did not stick for one of three reasons: it could not handle exceptions so people quietly went back to the old way; it needed the input to change and the input did not change; or one person understood it and they left. I would want to hear which of those it was before proposing anything — the previous attempt is the most useful information you have, and I would not treat it as a blank slate.
Do we get locked in?: You own the code and the documentation, it runs on your accounts, and another developer can pick it up. Any third-party service in the design is named up front with what replacing it would cost. If I disappeared, the thing keeps running.
What if it breaks at 2am?: Anything I build fails visibly rather than silently — the point being that a broken automation nobody notices is far worse than one that stops and says so. Every process keeps a manual path, so a failure slows you down instead of stopping you. Support after handover is a separate conversation and a separate price, and it is optional.
Do you actually build it, or subcontract?: I build it. You are dealing with the person doing the work, which is the main practical difference between me and an agency, in both directions — there is no team to absorb it if I am busy.
Can you work with our existing systems?: Usually. If it has an API, yes. If it does not, there are still options and they are uglier, so I will tell you honestly whether working around it is worth it or whether the real answer is to leave that system alone and build beside it.
How long does one process take?: I will not give you a number before understanding the process, because one invented on a first call is a number I would then be managing rather than the work. You get a written timeline with the fixed quote, before anything starts.

06

Bring me one stubborn process

Describe it in your own words, however messy. I will tell you what I would build first, what I would leave alone, and whether it is worth building at all.

adam@adamyee.dev

A reply in writing, with an actual opinion. Not a calendar link.

I will say no if

It runs a few times a week. Under about twenty cases, a careful person is cheaper.
Nobody can describe how it works today. Then the first job is mapping, and mapping cannot be skipped.
You want AI because the board asked. I have nothing that survives that brief.

I would rather lose the enquiry than the first month.

The tools arrived.
The systems didn't.

None of this looks like an AI problem.

The tools are easy. The order is not.

The facts have to be true in one place

The work has to have a shape

Intelligence, pointed at one thing

Same material. Same volume.

Three processes, taken apart

A The invoice that arrives as a photo in WhatsApp

B The rent that gets chased by hand every month

C The same question, answered five times a day, in three apps

The questions people actually ask

Bring me one stubborn process

The tools arrived.The systems didn't.

None of this looks like an AI problem.

The tools are easy. The order is not.

The facts have to be true in one place

The work has to have a shape

Intelligence, pointed at one thing

Same material. Same volume.

Three processes, taken apart

A The invoice that arrives as a photo in WhatsApp

B The rent that gets chased by hand every month

C The same question, answered five times a day, in three apps

The questions people actually ask

Bring me one stubborn process

The tools arrived.
The systems didn't.