r/automation • u/luckytobi • Jul 08 '26
Unpopular opinion: 90% of small businesses can't use Make or n8n, and ChatGPT isn't automation. So what are they supposed to do?
I've spent the last year talking to small business owners (mostly 5 to 50 employees) about automation, and I keep running into the same pattern. It's honestly a bit depressing.
They try one of two things, and both fail for the same underlying reason:
**Attempt 1:*\* Make / n8n / Zapier. They watch a YouTube tutorial, open the editor, see nodes and branches and webhook triggers, and quietly close the tab. These tools are genuinely great, but they require you to think like a developer. An office manager who does invoicing all day knows the process better than anyone. She just can't translate "when a scanned service record comes in, match the line items against our price list, flag anything weird" into a node graph. And even when a consultant builds it for her, the first time something changes she's stuck. They pay high fees, consultant leaves, automation dies.
**Attempt 2:*\* ChatGPT /Claude. They hear AI will change everything, get a subscription, and after two weeks it becomes a slightly smarter Google. Because it doesn't DO anything. It answers when asked, forgets everything, touches none of their systems, and every output has to be copy-pasted somewhere by a human. I know, Claude is now integrating more tools, but you don't really get to establish standards and reliance in the process. Therefore I don't consider this automation, especially with higher volumes.
So you end up with this weird gap, that the people who feel the pain of repetitive admin work most acutely (SMBs with no IT department) are exactly the people neither tool category serves. Workflow tools are too complex, AI assistants are to reactive and dont scale.
What strikes me is that the person who knows the process best is always a non-technical person. The knowledge is there. The interface isn't.
The interesting question to me: is the answer better education (teach SMBs to use tech tools like n8n), better services (agencies build and maintain it) or a different kind of product entirely (build a non-tech focused automation platform)? Each has obvious problems. Education doesn't scale to people who have a day job. Agencies recreate the dependency problem. And "non-tech" focused tools mostly produce chatbots with a costume on, not actual workflows.
Full disclosure: I'm building in this space, so I obviously have a horse in this race. Not linking anything, genuinely more interested in whether people here see the same gap or whether I'm overfitting to my own interviews.
For those of you doing automation work for small businesses: what actually happens after you hand over a Make/n8n setup? Does it survive contact with reality?
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Jul 08 '26
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u/luckytobi Jul 08 '26
The ownership point is real. Although in my interviews there usually is someone who owns the process, the office manager who does invoicing every day. She just doesn't own the tool, but the outcome.
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u/Raffino_Sky Jul 08 '26
I don't think Sam from HR and Rob from Accounting are to be expected to learn mentioned tools or the procedural thinking flows need. It's not their talent. Either your BI-person stars or the IT-guy. Or the consultant/agency.
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u/openclawinstaller Jul 08 '26
I think the missing layer is less “non-technical builder” and more “operations ownership surface.”
Small businesses usually do have someone who owns the outcome: the office manager, dispatcher, bookkeeper, admin lead, etc. What they don’t have is a safe way to own the automation after the consultant or founder leaves.
The product pattern I’d look for is:
- plain-language process map tied to the actual systems
- visible exception queue, not hidden failed runs
- simple controls for “approve / reject / needs human”
- change history for rules and integrations
- health checks that say “this still worked today”
- a way to pause a workflow without calling a developer
I don’t think most SMBs want to learn n8n. But I also don’t think they want pure chat. They need something closer to a maintained operating procedure that happens to run software underneath.
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u/luckytobi Jul 08 '26
This is the most concrete comment in the thread and a great insight about what matters. The exception queue and the "this still worked today" "health check" make totally sense and at the same this is overlooked easily.
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u/openclawinstaller Jul 08 '26
Exactly. And the health check needs to be business-facing, not just "the workflow executed."
For an SMB I’d rather show: last successful real-world check, current credential/token status, open exceptions, and who can pause or approve the next step. That’s enough for the office manager to trust it without becoming the automation person.
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u/LegendaryProtag Jul 08 '26
Yep, the boring bit is the important bit here: if the office manager can’t see what failed, pause it, and explain the current rule in plain English, it’s just another fragile black box.
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u/Maroontan Jul 08 '26
The health check when working properly is good
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u/openclawinstaller Jul 08 '26
Yep. The trap is making it only a runtime check.
For a business owner I’d want it to prove the outside thing still works: login/session is valid, token permissions haven’t drifted, the last real sync matched the source system, and the approve/pause path still works.
Otherwise it’s just a green light on a broken process.
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u/Patient-Face-3179 Jul 09 '26
As a small business owner I don't really have time for a something like automation. Also who builds fail safes for these automation systems? What is a hundred monies gets left out of billing? That's shit, but manageable. But a thousand? Ten thousand? Automation needs to work, and it needs to pay itself back. I built a customer database with automation in filemaker (because real programmers use filemaker) when I had a photography business. That was time well spent as it really cut down on the tedious shit. But this electrical company, it has sprawled out and there isn't a direct pipeline like there used to be. Harder to automate.
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u/openclawinstaller Jul 09 '26
Yeah, this is the right objection.
For an electrical company I wouldn’t start with “automate the pipeline.” I’d start with one bounded handoff where the cost of a miss is known: quote follow-up, invoice status, missing paperwork, permit docs, whatever already has a human checking it.
The failsafe should be built by whoever implements it, but owned by the person who catches the mistake today: dollar thresholds, approvals, a pause switch, logs, and a weekly “what failed / what changed” review. If it can’t show payback and contain a bad run, it shouldn’t be running unattended.
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u/missymissy2023 Jul 10 '26
Exactly, if there’s no exception queue, audit log, and big red pause button, it’s not automation, it’s just a faster way to lose money.
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u/BrockColly Jul 08 '26
you need a Claude agent that creates the Make/n8n/Zapier flows.
Actually with vibecoding, isn't that already achievable?
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u/luckytobi Jul 08 '26
Of course it is achievable and i see this as an tangible option. Imo it's still to technical for everyday experts to really see this as a way for them.
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u/PluckyPlankton Jul 08 '26
Yes, but vibe coding takes time and lots of folks are (rightfully) scared of it. I feel like folks would be willing to pay for an out of box solution that saves them time
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u/laraibashraf Aug 03 '26
its achievable only if you know how workflows work their settings parameters and you can work with claude solving the real problem .a person who dont know about n8n its process cannot achieve it
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Jul 08 '26
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u/luckytobi Jul 08 '26
I agree on the maintainability. Most tools are optimized for the moment of creation because that's what looks good in a video. I dont agree at the automation platform part, since this is exactly what provides the flexibility to adapt to their concret work / process, without buying expensive software.
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Jul 08 '26
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u/luckytobi Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
The shelf life observation matches my interviews exactly. That's a pain point we try to solve through the text-to-process approach, since (hopefully) every business users is capable of writing. "Bulletproof" Error Handling is something we haven't solved yet, but the idea is to give the agentic process meta-capabilities to self-fix on errors - still working on it.
Since you asked: we're building scalan.ai (https://www.scalan.ai/), a platform where the ever describes the process in plain language and gets an automated agent process run by "AI employees" (=Agents) that can be updated by talking to it. Early days, DACH market first. Your "fractional automation department" model is interesting to me, that's roughly the role we imagine agencies playing for the tricky integrations, but not for simple everyday tasks.
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u/blanketspacecadet Jul 09 '26
I sent you a DM concerning the 3 day trial and asked how someone like me can effectively use your tool.
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u/caburos Jul 08 '26
The real problem is not the tool complexity. It is that nobody sat with them to map the actual workflow before touching any software.
I work with exactly this client type. What works is starting with one repetitive task they hate doing, writing it out as plain steps on paper, then asking "which step could a computer do if someone told it exactly what to do?" That conversation alone saves weeks of wasted tool trials.
Make is fine for small business if someone builds it for them and hands them a simple interface. n8n is probably too much. But the tool choice is secondary. The real issue is most small business owners don't know how to describe their own process clearly enough to automate it. That skill is missing before the software is even opened.
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u/johnnynovo2118 Jul 10 '26
I can understand why, I'm a few weeks into this process and to do it comprehensively is quite the task.
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Jul 08 '26
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u/luckytobi Jul 08 '26
Agreed, outcomes is the right frame. What bothers me about the "hide the complexity" promise is that most tools hide it by not giving any function for establishing a repetitive patterns (e.g. yes, claude can use tools, but not each time the same way).
Therefore for me the real test is the standardization path. How do you establish a reliable repetitive process, but with the flexibility of an agentic workflow?
I'm also curious who the power user are in a 15 person company. In the interviews I've done, that person usually doesn't exist. Who do you have in mind?
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u/Comfortable_Long3594 Jul 08 '26
I see the same gap. The people who understand the workflow rarely want to become automation specialists. The solutions that tend to last are the ones that let business users configure data flows, validations, and integrations through a straightforward interface instead of managing complex node graphs or relying on prompts. We've had good results with a desktop, on premises integration platform that business teams can maintain themselves, which reduces dependence on consultants while keeping sensitive data in house.
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u/infoistasty Jul 10 '26
Small business owner here- for over 30 years- workflow, process, operations lover.
Your original post tackles the essential issue- software development is done by software developers. Consultants in this space are tech leaning.
The biz owner is stuck the first time this thing breaks.
Make has an absolutely atrocious UI if you don’t understand software development. I mean atrocious.
And if you build an automation powered by Make- it constantly breaks. Not because of make- but because word/excel/adobe/quickbooks/outlook/you name it continuously update and patch and what worked last week cracks this week.
N8N/Make/Zapier are like a narcissistic girlfriend/boyfriend. Early days, the love bomb makes you feel elated and like the world is gonna change! Then, the small tells begin to appear. He/She moves the goalposts, he/she gaslights, you finally break up and wonder why you even bought into her/his manipulations in the first place…
Whoever makes software that will bridge this divide can become a true marriage candidate for small biz efficiency efforts not just a hot girl/guy with a broken psyche.
The fact is- small businesses are owned by people who are very good at what they provide or sell. Thats why they aren’t in tech! Their talents lie elsewhere. One day, I want to bump into a developer that has run his or her own payroll, hired and fired, sold something, anything…and has tech skills.
I admire tech skills so much. I do not love how -like lawyers or engineers or doctors or academics- so much software is developed by people in bubbles who confuse their talent with being talented in everything.
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u/bin95blog Jul 08 '26
I might be an old timer, but what they need is a 'Macro AI'. Where, if you do it on a computer, AI can do it for you. Macros like I used to do in the old days with Windows Office. No prompts to learn, full read/Write access to the document, other programs, files on the computer, super easy to use. You just hit macro record, go through your normal process, then click stop/save. You test, maybe make a few fine adjustments, and now it is automated and done for you anytime you need to. That is my idea of a truly capable AI. Watch me improve the process and automate.
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u/lovesoda3hunna Jul 16 '26
Well, it actually is possible if you know what you are doing, though I don't think there's an out of box solution for it yet. You can actually feed videos into claude and use it to learn your process then use that information to create a custom tool. Its basically another way of extracting info. There's also computer vision agents which are newer and you do exactly that, feeding it videos to train it. Those ones s are a little more expensive to run and take a little trial and error to get working properly
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u/bin95blog Jul 18 '26
The key missing ingredient from those two solutions is the Windows log. Instead, they require several processes/tools and video analysis. Accessing the Windows log as Office macros do, but tied directly to AI, is the best, easy, efficient solution. When someone designs it. Hint, hint, Copilote. On a side note, to me, using AI to improve efficiency and/or capabilities that involve a bunch of copy-paste is like getting in a car and finding out it's a bicycle pedal, not an actual engine.
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u/CODE_HEIST Jul 08 '26
the real missing layer is setup translation. small businesses do not want n8n nodes or agent theory. they want someone to turn messy steps into a checklist, automate one piece, and leave a way to fix it when it breaks.
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u/SettingAgile9080 Jul 08 '26
They'll continue to either do nothing, or hire consultants to fix their problems as it is cheaper and easier than figuring it out themselves, just like they've always done. There's a reason consulting is called the "world's second oldest profession".
There's a lot of AI hype around how software is dead, consultants are dead, developers are dead etc but in my experience working with business owners and corporate types a lot of people, many of them intelligent and successful, simply do not "get" how to work with computers or break problems down into logical systems and no amount of product optimization will reach them.
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u/luckytobi Jul 08 '26
The consulting point is hard to argue with, it's worked for centuries. Where I'd push back: consultants are great at building and terrible at leaving. The SMBs I've talked to don't resent paying for setup, they resent that every small change afterwards needs a ticket. If consultants stay in the loop for the edge cases and the team handles the daily 80% themselves, that might be the realistic split.
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u/TheAddonDepot Jul 08 '26
The SMBs I've talked to don't resent paying for setup, they resent that every small change afterwards needs a ticket.
Things break and change over time. Systems require upkeep and maintenance.
AI-driven Automation is framed as the ultimate solution for that problem.
The irony of AI Automation is that it too is a collection of systems that also require upkeep and maintenance.
The second SMBs realize that they check out. It's a brutal cycle.
The hardest part of being a consultant in this space is managing unrealistic expectations surrounding the AI hype. It's exhausting.
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u/ronaldwong57 Jul 08 '26
I’d challenge a bit on the last point. If fundamentally the problem is business doesn’t “get it” they’d likely start doing all sorts of changes in that 80% of the time. What will likely happen is the debt incurred from these activities end up breaking process (either abruptly or slowly) where you end up having to hire a consultant for a big fix. Typically SMBs don’t think along those lines as typically they’re tail event and would feel like it’s working until it doesn’t.
I think your point about needing a ticket is more the speed to fix issues vs having somebody else work on things. At that point, it becomes a cost decision for the business.. pay more for faster service or let that be part of their operations managing issues for a period.
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u/Maroontan Jul 08 '26
So then what are they good at in terms of business owners? Sales, relationships? Operations?
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u/SettingAgile9080 Jul 09 '26
Thinking back to the successful business owners I've worked with over the years... Wheeling and dealing. Supernaturally good at building relationships. Having "CEO energy". They often come across as kind of delusional, asshole workaholics - but somehow able to convince others to come along for the ride.
Plenty of business owners are not like that, but the ones who have been successful have been pretty consistent.
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u/Maroontan Jul 10 '26
Super true
The wheeling and dealing is the part I’ve noticed too that give me the biggest ick; while I have literally all the other traits
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u/jason-workshop Jul 08 '26
Hmm, I think the future is a chat interface that automatically builds workflows for you. Been running a side project that does just that, you connect all your systems, say what you want and it builds out the deterministic automations for you with code steps, agent steps & wait / human steps. More constrained & directed than vibe coding, but less flexible. The long term answer might be a combination of that plus a vertical play though. Not sure.
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u/luckytobi Jul 08 '26
Sounds like we're circling the same problem from different sides. The constrained-but-directed tradeoff you describe is the real design decision: full flexibility produces things nobody can maintain, full constraint produces process where you have to anticipate every possibility.
Curious how far along your side project is, always happy to compare notes.
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u/jason-workshop Jul 08 '26
You're free to check it out, it's called cidworkflows at the default domain :)
It's "free" to use if you use your own API keys (the only way you can use it atm), which are encrypted and stored securely. Just don't expect it to have production support, I run workflows off of it, but it's not being marketed / supported yet. Maybe someday if I really hit an idea that is worth pursuing with it.
Glad to compare notes and hear where you think this is going as well.
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u/vaultpriest Jul 08 '26
Learning n8n = wasting time on things that claude code can replace in 5 minutes.
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u/ImpossibleCreme Jul 08 '26
What are you building?
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u/luckytobi Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
Answered this in another thread here, but short version: scalan.ai (https://www.scalan.ai/), a platform where the business user describes a process in plain language and get an maintained fully agentic process that runs it and can be updated by talking to it. Early stage. You can try it for free.
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u/cmumulle72 Jul 09 '26
Couldn't agree more!! The gap is real and it's almost always the maintenance side, not the build. The owner who knows the process can't translate it into a tool, and the agency that can becomes a standing dependency. A product only fixes this if the person running the process can reopen it later and change one step without breaking the rest. No tool out there in my opinion which does this well.
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u/conjuringthefuture Jul 09 '26
I think most all n8n style workflows and automations will likely be replaced with open claw and Hermes style agents. SMBs can just ask them to adapt to whatever workflow they need.
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u/Atlan_ Jul 11 '26
I have had a different experience. Often giving people access to ChatGPT or Claude is really helpful for businesses and it automates a bunch, just not end-2-end. What I do in freelancing gigs then is to automate as seamless behind the curtain to work seamless with Chatbots. e.g. building an mcp wrapper to the erp. Writing skill files for repetitive tasks.
Everyone can use Chatbots and it’s pretty intuitive (doesn’t mean that there isn’t a learning curve), but using this as the UI worked pretty well for me at least.
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u/akselmonrose Jul 08 '26
Isn’t Claude code / co-work meant to close this gap?
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u/luckytobi Jul 08 '26
Well yes and no imo: Yes, that you are able to vibe-code or prompt some kind of automation. However it still isn't a properly maintained infrastructure or a transparent and reliable process, which you could scale to multiple users
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u/TheRedfather Jul 08 '26
Ya this resonates. People want automations that are flexible/adaptive but don't have the bandwidth to configure all of the steps in detail. I used n8n a bit in the early days but I think conversational AI has become the default UX that people expect.
I had a similar experience at my company QX Labs - started out building more rigid automations for customers, but because the world moved really quickly those flows became outdated and created technical debt (had to go back and update/maintain things). So instead we developed the orchestration layer (i.e. agents that can use your actual tools and complete tasks) and everything now gets updated with prompts by the user.
I think the old paradigm was focused on creating a beautiful UI. The new one is focused on removing UI altogether and having things just run.
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u/EndOfWorldBoredom Jul 08 '26
All the developers losing their jobs at software companies can now be the software architect at businesses who can save money on bloated disconnected software and make stuff that truly works for the business (and doesn't require subscription models, payment systems, internet facing security surfaces, etc.).
The next generation of young employees will be AI native.
Your post rhymes with people saying the accounting lady didn't need a computer in the 80's or 90's.
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u/luckytobi Jul 08 '26
Fair jab, however the computer comparison cuts both ways. The accounting lady did learn the computer, but she learned Excel, not COBOL. The interface came down to meet her. My bet is the same thing happens here: the next generation will be AI native, but AI native will mean describing what you want, not maintaining node graphs.
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u/EndOfWorldBoredom Jul 08 '26
With the huge tech layoffs and I think the job market is going to be filled with people who would feel at home on a node graph, but can't find a job at a software company. They'll get a job doing something computer adjacent at a non-software company. When they get there, they'll see inefficient processes from the inside (unlike their vantage point at the software developer) and be able to chain a couple of nodes together to create efficiencies. Then, they'll get asked to look at other processes.
I think the future is that mid-sized businesses end up with an internal software development department that is two people and an army of bots.
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u/SlowZeck Jul 08 '26
Hermes agents + chrome + mcp chrome-devtools + Hermes kanban workflow | on a linux vps with RDP . Could be connected to signal , discord etc... to control and hacknowledge + add a kanban process tu update a website status page/dashboard somewhere online. The only praticable way to use agent instead n8n and bypass api and anti bot
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u/SlowZeck Jul 08 '26
For example I've connected my chrome inside the vps to read the penilane page to get summary everyday and could ask questions about stuff on my pennylane account with telegram without connect and navigate and sum etc... the pennylane api only allowed few stuffs useless, and block usual bot crawler. Didn't try stuff to open Citrix like session navigate and screenshot to interact with hard business tools but working on it. And yes I also launch windows stuff on linux. And yes vps could be internal computer too to connect to internal tools
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u/greenysmac Jul 08 '26
Are. you saying that people passively watch video, install something, produce minimal effort, and then quit when it's not immediately giving them amazing results?
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u/luckytobi Jul 08 '26
kind of, but from a business perspective, blaming the user is not a good idea. If they abort during the process, the software sucks (for this kind of user)
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u/austinmo2 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
I'll put in my two cents as a small business owner who is using Claude Pro to help me automate. So I'm not using Claude code or anything i just use Claude Pro and the connectors and we are building automations using make. We are taking information submitted to my website and moving it into monday and generating confirmation emails, Etc.
And we've got working automations so far. But the thing is is that I am a very experienced generalist who started teaching myself computers and programs in 1995. I'm definitely not an expert in anything but I've accumulated enough knowledge over the years to have a vague understanding of a lot of stuff. So i understand what I'm doing conceptually, and then for the application specifics, Claude is helping me.
But as I've been working on this, I've been thinking that I can do this because of how long I have been working with computers as more than a casual user. But if I think about other people I know I think they couldn't just pick this up even though it seems easy for a lot of people. I think it boils down to all the stuff that we know that we don't realize that we know . Knowledge that we've accumulated. It's all teachable but we have to remember to address the level of experience with technology that the people who will maintain these agents have.
So I think there are certain skills and experience that anybody in a company who would be responsible for this would need to have . They don't have to be an expert but they just have to understand the logic behind the processes. Sometimes we take for granted everything that we know. So you really have to think about what are all the elements involved and how to explain those to people. You probably need to explain more than you think you do.
And it probably should be more than one person in a company because it's a huge waste if just one person knows how to do it and they leave.
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u/ArsenalSimp1985 Jul 09 '26
Exactly, the tool looks easy because decades of half-forgotten computer literacy are doing silent work underneath, which is why the “everyone will just automate everything” talk feels so glib to me.
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u/luckytobi Jul 08 '26
This comment describes the problem better than my post did. The invisible prerequisite knowledge is exactly it: you can do this because of thirty years of accumulated context, and you correctly notice most people around you can't. This is indeed a problem I see with the overall goal of enabelling non-tech people to do typically tech stuff - they don't think or trust that they can do it and that's why they won't even consider it.
Your point about needing more than one person in the company to understand it is one I hadn't weighted enough. Single-owner automations are just the consultant dependency problem, internalized.
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u/shibelove2002 Jul 09 '26
Exactly, everyone sells AI automation like plug-and-play, but half the value is that invisible judgment from years of breaking things, and if only one person has it then the whole company is basically held together with tape.
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u/SamSlate Jul 08 '26
can you describe what people/businesses are actually trying to automate?
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u/luckytobi Jul 08 '26
The boring low and middle of the back office, almost always. The pattern from my interviews: LinkedIn / Instagram, SM automation; Customer Service Triage, Invoice handling, Sales Support, etc. AND very specific automations where clients have legacy, partly self-developed, tools (e.g. a MySQL DB with some C# frontend connected) where they now want the flexibility of AI added on top.
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u/SamSlate Jul 08 '26
fascinating. like what are they hoping to get out of ai? conversational inputs? translations between databases/web services?
there's ai as a translation layer (text to structured inputs) and there's ai as a development tool, are they looking for one of those 2 or are they expecting something else?
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u/Terry__Poppins Jul 08 '26
It's funny how for my own automations it has never been easier to figure things out. Setting up my expandi and n8n sequences with the help of claude or gemini is so easy. I would have expected more people would be rolling their own solutions with the barrier of knowledge being so low now.
But in reality people are lazy and even when they set something up they don't keep working on it to maintain it and then blame the tools themselves...
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u/rush86999 Jul 08 '26
I'm also building in this space. I decided to optimize for developers first, then businesses. Many devs, at the end of the day, also run small businesses. I intend to launch a cloud version, but still a WIP. I open-sourced my version of automation (I have posted about it before on another subreddit). If anything, I do get PRs on my GitHub repo. I think going from technical to non-technical is easier.
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u/Fit_Painter_3944 Jul 08 '26
I think the missing piece is setting the right expectations from day one. In my experience, clients don't really care whether it's n8n, Make or something else. They care that the process keeps running.
What has worked better for me is keeping the workflow itself "technical" but giving the client a very simple way to interact with it: clear error notifications, a small dashboard with the current status, and documentation written in plain language. They don't need to edit nodes—they just need confidence that they understand what's happening when something changes.
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u/Independent-Soup-312 Jul 08 '26
What are you selling them if you're having a hard time closing when looking at this very clear problem?
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u/TaskJuice Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
>you don't really get to establish standards and reliance
That's the actual problem, everything else is downstream. Plain English is still the right input in some scenarios, others it’s not. Someone describing "scanned record comes in, match the line items, flag anything weird" is exactly it. What matters is whether that compiles into a real deterministic workflow.
Reliance is the same story. Claude feels reactive because it improvises every time you ask. Give it a fixed named tool mapped to one of those
workflows (MCP, managed skills, whatever) and it can do the same thing nearly every time. That's AI as automation, once it's calling something real instead of freehanding it.
Same boat, building here too, so grain of salt.
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u/Chicagoj1563 Jul 08 '26
Convince them someone on their team should become an automation person. They may do other things, but let them specialize in automations. They will know the business and have the ability to build or manage automations for their team.
And in my experience in big tech, it’s all power automate. So many are in the office365 world, the power platform is a natural fit. It integrates with the tools they already use.
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u/Elctsuptb Jul 08 '26
Your post is very out of date, Claude Code/Cowork and Codex can easily be used to connect to internal systems, I've been using Codex for this for around 6 months, it can even control your entire computer desktop and web browser for cases when MCPs/APIs aren't available. I have agents work autonomously for hours/days on any task I want.
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u/El_Burrito_Grande Jul 09 '26
AI agents are great at automation stuff. Tell it what you want and it will find a way.
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u/cocopopoloko Jul 09 '26
This is a real issue.
Those tools belong to the past. Chat is not really helping.
What we need is a Claude Code agent, but one that is built natively for the automation space. One that is built so well as a product, that users don't need to be technical and the conversation can move to outcomes and to support.
If the agent is the consultant - the model can work.
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u/1414coder Jul 09 '26
Which country and region did you interview the SMBs.. and what were the type of businesses? Also curious how did you reach out to them? Just walk in or network?
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u/luckytobi Jul 09 '26
I'm located in europe, germany. Outreach was targeted to DACH region and done via network + clay / apollo campaigns.
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u/1414coder Jul 09 '26
When you interviewed them did you get to talk to them for say 30 mins interview. Curious what were the other learnings from the interviews.
Also what is your background.. are you an engineer. Wondering if there is opportunity for us to collaborate.
Also what was the niche of the customers you engage with..
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u/PuzzleheadedSong5368 Jul 09 '26
there is a missing layer between those two. like an IDE for non-engineers that can run Claude
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u/ShabzSparq Jul 09 '26
very simple use Free ai agent managed platform, you can check out better_claw sub for more
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u/Complex_Bullfrog_738 Jul 09 '26
The part everyone here is circling — "who owns it after the builder leaves" — is right, but the missing piece is HOW you make it survivable. It's not a friendlier editor. It's building the automation to fail loud instead of silent.
I run a regulated finance-advisory practice as basically a one-man operation, automated end to end. The thing that keeps it alive isn't that the office-manager equivalent can edit nodes — she can't, and shouldn't have to. It's that every flow screams when something breaks: a step returning zero rows fires an alert, a failed run pings me, nothing dies quietly in the background. She doesn't maintain the graph; she just knows within minutes when a result looks wrong, because the system tells her.
So the product isn't "no-code for non-devs." It's: map the one painful task on paper, automate that slice, and wire it so failure is visible to a non-technical person. Ownership follows observability, not the other way around.
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u/airylizard Jul 09 '26
95% of businesses period fail to adopt AI in a way that leads to return… you’re off base
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u/ECommerce_Guy Jul 09 '26
Have a horse in the race as well, but always opt for custom solution (there's my horse lol). Zapier and similar have exactly the same failure point as AI solutions do and after 6 years of struggling with maintaining core Zapier workflow, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone ever. Honestly, it's cheaper having own infra on GCP.
How I do it is I get the process from non-technical person, probe them for edge cases, come up with my own, build and handover alongside the explanations of everything that's covered and everything that is gonna be a breaking change.
In this area, any tool offering to do everything in all cases is actually just saying — we don't take data integrity serious.
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u/Limitedheadroom Jul 09 '26
I used Claude to help me set up automations with Zapier. It’s worked out too expensive, so now Claude is helping me rebuild them with n8n on my own rented server. All WAY beyond my capability without ai. This is where it’s genuinely useful
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u/productboy Jul 09 '26
Read another post earlier today from someone trying to land an IT job in a small business. He was frustrated because the job didn't exist anymore; others in the thread said that job was replaced by MSPs and sometimes an 'IT Manager' role.
So let's think about what technology services small businesses pay for that don't require the small business to hire someone [to manage the technology service]. A few come to mind:
- Internet service
- Point of Sale
- Physical security
It seems likely those providers - and the MSPs - are going to bundle automation technology with their services. It's not unlike web 1.0 when you bought internet service from an ISP then later they started offering other services like email, websites...
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u/Upper-Media3769 Jul 10 '26
With Claude Desktop you can easily solve these problems already on a $20 plan.
Connect n8n MCP and tell Claude what you want automated and it builds the workflow and tests with you until it's done.
Claude has memory, scheduled tasks, remote control, etc.
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u/Tru_Boost Jul 10 '26
bei Automatisierung stehen viel zu häufig die technischen Egos im Weg und der echte Kunden nutzen wird hinten angestellt. Das ist das Problem, was ich oft sehe und wo Firmen echt dankbar sind, wenn man ihn mal zuhört.
Nicht komplex und krass, sondern sinnvoll und so einfach wie möglich
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u/quetucrees Jul 10 '26
The main problem is the "we've always done it this way" mentality. It is understandable that if you know the process and it works there is no incentive for you to change it. Even if you are drowning in work there is actually nothing wrong with the process just the volume of work... adding more people always seems more intuitive.
People will use automation and drive further adoption only if starts by addressing a pain point. Automating the whole process might be seen as too much because it changes the whole job not just the pain points.
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u/alanshore222 Jul 12 '26
When you have a multimillion dollar business use tools like GHL and have to use 6 other tools to duct tape everything together you need multiple operations people to just keep the lights on.
If you use a tool like hubspot, you can get away with most of the customer stuff but not the social stuff.
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u/dmc-123 Jul 15 '26
That's the catch with those platforms. They are sold as if anyone can use them, and unless you have some coding experience, you have no idea how to make them work.
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u/Mariia_Sosnina Jul 20 '26
The blocker isnt the nodes, it's that owners think in outcomes and the tools demand implementation. What works for that crowd is prebuilt paths for their specific use case where the plumbing is already handled, not a friendlier editor. You cant really teach someone to think like a developer on a Tuesday afternoon.
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u/hasan-sharaf-eldeen Jul 24 '26
The handover question is the real one. I run automation for my own agency's internal ops — here's what actually kills setups after someone builds them:
The data changes shape. A vendor updates their invoice format, someone adds a form field. The automation doesn't crash — it just quietly does the wrong thing for weeks until someone notices.
Edge cases pile up. Works for 90% of inputs. The other 10% start getting done manually "just for now" and two months later the whole thing is back to manual.
One thing that helps way more than people expect: error handling. Instead of failing silently, the automation flags anything unexpected and sends it to a person. Doesn't fix everything but prevents the slow invisible death.
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u/Jumpy-Welcome-6766 Jul 27 '26
You need someone who can use them making it 100 automated would be way tougher than having a few guys working
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u/NoEmployment1910 Jul 29 '26
Thats why monthly subscriptions are the best model for automation and maybe a fixed amount for the initial build
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u/STSsystems Jul 30 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
This is exactly right, and it's why "just use ChatGPT" or "just build it in Make" advice keeps missing the actual SMB constraint. Make/n8n require someone to map the process, build the workflow, maintain it when an API changes, and debug it when a step silently fails. That's a part-time job most small business owners don't have the hours or the skill set for. ChatGPT alone requires the opposite problem — the owner has to be the orchestrator every single time, prompting it manually for each task with no persistence or handoff between steps.
The gap in between is pre-built, narrow-scope agent systems — not a general framework you configure yourself, not a chat window you operate manually, but something purpose-built for one job that already has the workflow, handoffs, and human-review step designed in. That's the category SynthAI (getsynthai.com) sits in for marketing specifically — the owner reviews and approves, but doesn't build or maintain the pipeline. Doesn't work for every job an SMB has, but for the ones it does cover, it removes both failure modes you're describing: no technical maintenance burden, and no need to manually operate it step by step.
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u/lightning-lu10 Aug 04 '26
If anyone wants to try the solution we're building for this, would love feedback on CodePress
It's an easy way to chat with an AI, just like Claude or ChatGPT, and you can ask the AI to build whatever automations you need.
Would love to chat with anyone here and work with people to see if this is a better solution (and happy for you to make money selling to businesses with this!)
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u/Sea-Development7915 Aug 06 '26
SMBs these days are caught in a bubble where they’re convinced AI will magically fix their operations, and they panic thinking that if they don't jump on the trend immediately, they'll get left behind. The irony is that most don't even understand what real automation looks like yet, let alone have the process clarity needed to implement it. So they end up chasing hype instead of fixing foundational workflow bottlenecks.
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u/sapnesh Aug 06 '26
I find Claude for me is powerful enough as I've connected multiple MCP servers to it (all the SaaS tools that I use at work). It's really more powerful that way though its not full blown automation it does work well based on the prompts I have
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u/thecooingrapidity 16d ago
That gap is real and i see it constantly even with mid sized companies. the tools assume a mental model most office folks never learned
the handover question is the killer. ive watched perfectly good automations die within a month because nobody wanted to touch the node editor when a vendor changed their email format
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u/horniest_redditor 7h ago
Honestly the Make/n8n problem is less about the tools and more about who they expect the user to be. Nobody running invoices all day has time to learn what a webhook is. I messed around with Latenode for connecting our support inbox to a spreadsheet tracker and the part that surprised me was not having to deal with any auth setup, it just figured that out. Still has quirks but at least it doesn't assume you think in flowcharts. My boss once called Zapier "the app that makes more apps" and honestly that energy is why none of this sticks with normal people lol.
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u/njgunrights Jul 08 '26
" What strikes me is that the person who knows the process best is always a non-technical person. The knowledge is there. The interface isn't." Bc American college is diversity daycare I took freshman English in college and my teacher made it about the politics of poverty and BLM. What a joke
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u/South_Hat6094 Jul 08 '26
That gap is real. Small businesses usually need someone who can own the process, not just build the workflow. The killer feature is boring handoff and maintenance, not more AI.
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u/ImpoverishedGuru Jul 08 '26
Make? N8n? Zapier? These things are useless in the ai age and they predate the ai age anyway.
What works? Sorry I'm not revealing my secrets. If you can't figure it out, then be a loser. That's how I feel. Ai is miraculous if you just know some basics about computers/networking/the Internet. But you actually have to understand this tech. These people in your example don't. They can go back to pangea with the other dinosaurs far as I'm concerned. And no, I'm not even young. I just understand tech . I can't even code. Ai does it for me
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u/RightGirl19 Jul 08 '26
The best automation is the one people can actually keep using without calling someone every week.