The short answer is no, almost never
To automate the repetitive work of an office, artificial intelligence is almost always unnecessary, because most of that work is made of rules somebody in the company can already explain out loud, and a rule you can say out loud can be written down
Take the supplier who sends the invoice every month on the same layout, the number is always in the same place, so is the taxable amount, so is the total, and the person who posts it isn't interpreting anything, they're repeating steps they learned years ago and by now do without thinking
When the steps are these, the work isn't asking anybody to guess, it's asking to be written down once and then run always the same way, and a program has been doing that for thirty years with no need for any new word
Where artificial intelligence really is needed
Artificial intelligence is needed where the data arrives dirty and has to be interpreted, meaning where there is no hard rule that covers the cases, and this happens more often than it looks
One example is the skewed scan of a handwritten document, with a stamp over the numbers, where looking in the right place isn't enough because there is no right place, or the email dashed off by a customer who orders the goods in words, with no codes, no table, and a different turn of phrase every time
In situations like that the part that interprets makes sense, and Muffin Suite uses it when the case calls for it, but keeps it under control, meaning what it comes up with goes through the checks like any other data, the totals have to add up, the VAT number has to exist, the dates have to make sense, and if something doesn't add up the system stops instead of writing something at random into your business software
Why they offer it to you anyway, and how you decide
If somebody is putting artificial intelligence into a job that consists of copying three fields from a tidy file into a screen, that isn't a technical choice, it's the word of the moment that sells today, and you're paying for it twice, once in the monthly fee and once in unpredictability
The way to notice is simple, ask what happens when the document arrives different from usual, if the answer is that the system works it out on its own, push, because the good answer is that the system stops and tells you, and on this you can also read the guide on the checks and stops in an automation
The right question isn't whether to use artificial intelligence, it's whether the data coming in is tidy or not, if it's tidy you write the rule and sleep soundly, if it's dirty you interpret it and put more checks around it
Almost every process in a small office sits in the first group, and to tell which group yours is in you only have to look at where the documents come from, and how much they resemble each other, on the underlying distinction there is more in the guide on automation and artificial intelligence
