The vital connection helping small businesses to get more from AI

AI adoption is steadily growing in Australia. According to the National AI Centre opens in a new tab, 38% of small to medium enterprises are already adopting it for business processes, and are using it for everything from sales forecasting to fraud detection. 

Yet many early adopters are finding that they soon hit a wall. Yes, the LLMs are great at drafting emails or brainstorming ideas for a new marketing campaign, but unless they are connected to wider business processes, their impact is limited. To get more value from LLMs and AI agents, you need to connect them to the workflows and agreements that run your business. Only then can you truly automate and take the burden of onerous admin off your team’s plate.

Think of an LLM as a new hire. It needs training.

To understand why this “connectivity” is so important, you might want to think of an LLM as a new employee. You hired them based on their exceptional credentials: highly capable, smart and articulate. Problem is, they don’t know your business history. They don’t have access to your customer records, your current contracts, or your internal tools.

Without this access, each time you ask the LLM to do something, you either need to add in the required context or manually connect the model to your other systems. These manual steps become a bottleneck, seriously compromising the LLM’s ability to live up to its potential. 

What if you could connect this “new hire” to the business processes, systems, and data it needs? Doing so would help you move faster through these three stages of AI maturity and value creation:

• Basic: AI supports standalone tasks, such as drafting emails or brainstorming ideas.

• Connected: AI is linked to the workflows and agreements that run the business, such as preparing and sending an agreement or updating a deal stage.

• Advanced: AI can support more complete, cross-system processes, such as triggering approvals, monitoring agreement status and surfacing key obligations.

As the stages above show, the value of AI grows when it moves from isolated tasks to connected business workflows. And it means that all the things you hired AI to do are now made possible. 

A connected LLM is a capable LLM

When your LLMs connect to your wider business within one seamless ecosystem, you reduce manual work, improve productivity and create the capacity for growth. Here are three operational areas ripe for transformation in SMBs:

1. Sales: Instead of sales reps manually transferring quote details from a CRM into an agreement template, AI can review the deal terms, populate the contract, and initiate the signature process through Docusign. Once signed, the system automatically updates customer deal stages and triggers onboarding workflows.

2. HR: When hiring new staff, an AI-enabled system can help draft customised offer letters based on standard templates and candidate details. It can then dispatch the employment agreement via a platform like Docusign and automatically track completion. Once the offer is accepted, it can alert your payroll system.

3. Procurement: Manually managing vendor contracts and supplier agreements can lead to missed renewal dates or delayed orders. AI can analyse incoming vendor contracts, summarise key clauses and notify you about important obligations.

Beyond these operational improvements, AI can also help enhance the customer and employee experience. Things move faster for customers; while your employees can focus their energy on high-value, rewarding tasks instead of tedious admin. 

Start with one simple, high-value workflow

Knowing where to start with AI-powered transformation can feel overwhelming. LLMs can feel vast; your tech stack can feel complex. The good news? You don’t need an army of developers or software engineers to get started. Most modern cloud apps and AI tools offer user-friendly, pre-built integrations designed so SMB owners and managers can easily put the tech to the test. 

A great place to start is with a common agreement workflow. Something repetitive, like customer proposals or subcontractor agreements. 

If you already use Docusign, then our MCP Connectors can be switched on to form a trusted, secure “bridge” between an LLM like Claude and your agreement platform. Once connected, a whole new world of time-saving efficiency opens up. You could ask your AI assistant to generate, send or update these agreements without leaving your conversation. Or, you could ask the AI to search them for any potentially risky obligations. 

Essentially, MCP Connectors give your LLMs the context they need – so they can do the best job for your business. 

Want to know more about the opportunities MCP Connectors could open up for your SMB? Please get in touch. Or, for a more technical deep-dive on how to connect your LLMs to Docusign agreement intelligence with MCP, read this article next.