ServiceAutomate

When the honest answer is "you don't need an LLM."

A pilot that replaces repetitive operational work using workflow automation (n8n, Zapier, RPA, scripted pipelines), with AI pulled in only where it materially beats the automation option on cost or capability.

Bring a workload Read: off-the-shelf vs bespoke

Duration

2–6 weeks

Price

From £4,800 ex VAT

Terms Scoped per engagement from £4,800. Tighter scope, shorter delivery, lower price. Complex integrations push the upper end.

01 · Fit

Who it's for. Who it isn't.

Don't book this if

01 You're committed to a pure-AI deployment for brand or strategic reasons: that's fine, do Rapid Secure AI POC.
02 Your workflow is novel or unstructured: LLMs are the right tool, do the POC instead.
03 You want a free consultation disguised as "assessing whether automation fits"; this engagement is for teams ready to ship.

Book this when

01 Your "AI problem" is actually a workflow problem with a human in the middle.
02 Back-office operations with high repetition, moderate complexity, and strict audit needs.
03 Your Discovery or Cost Model output said "this doesn't need AI, or doesn't need it yet."

02 · Deliverable

What lands on your desk.

01

A working automation pilot inside one operational area.
02

Cost-benchmark against the AI alternative across tokens, compute, and cloud cost, so the chosen path is defensible.
03

Audit trail at the workflow level. Who triggered it, what it did, where it went.
04

Handover plan for the team that owns the workflow afterwards.

03 · Phases

How it runs.

Phase 01

Scope the workflow

Map the current process. Identify the handoffs and the costly steps.

Phase 02

Pick the platform

n8n, Zapier, Make, scripted pipeline, or RPA. Decision driven by audit needs, volume, and existing stack.

Phase 03

Build and integrate

Stand up the automation, connect source systems, add audit logging from day one.

Phase 04

Measure against baseline

Time saved, error rate, cost per run. Side-by-side with the AI alternative.

Phase 05

Readout and handover

Joint session with the team that will run it. Runbooks, credentials, monitoring pointers.

04 · Sample

What the output looks like.

Anonymised preview of an Automation-First Pilot readout. The honest "you don't need an LLM" deliverable, cost-benchmarked.

Automation vs AI · benchmark readout

Client · [Anonymised]

Workflow · Invoice intake + GL coding

Pilot · 4 weeks · Week 17, 2026

Author · Matt Shore

★ Recommended · automation

Rules-based intake + OCR

n8n workflow + Tesseract + 240 GL coding rules. Deterministic. Audit trail per invoice. Falls through 4.1% of cases to a human (down from 100%).

£0.018 per invoice processed
98.4% straight-through rate
Setup · 3 weeks · £14k one-off

Alternative · AI

Cloud LLM · invoice extraction

Frontier vision model with custom prompt + GL coding via second pass. Handles edge cases better but introduces token cost, latency, and a non-deterministic audit story.