The AI tools UK small businesses are actually using right now

Short answer: if you run a cafe, a plumbing business, or a salon, there's already a specific AI tool built for exactly your situation. Husayn Kassai, founder of ollo (and previously Onfido, sold for $650 million), names three: jely.chat for trade and home services, heyjessie.co.uk for hospitality and food orders, and Cyberstaff for appointment-led services. Not general AI advice: actual products, actual industries, actual use.

Why "just use AI" isn't useful advice

Most AI advice for small businesses is generic: try ChatGPT, automate your admin, see what sticks. Husayn Kassai's answer, when asked what small businesses are actually doing with AI, was different. He didn't describe a category. He named companies.

"Small businesses using AI, there's a lot of activity around hospitality and food services for placing orders, essentially automating those phone calls," he says. "It's not dissimilar for appointment-led services: booking, scheduling. You have trade and home services: plumbing, electricians, cleaning. There's compliance involved."

Each of those isn't a hypothetical. Each has a real tool already serving it.

Trade and home services: jely.chat

If you're a plumber, electrician, or cleaner, the problem Kassai describes is specific: "tools like jely.chat can help small businesses arrange for a plumber to go to someone's home, and if that plumber is discussing with the household what work needs to happen, and all that's captured via WhatsApp agents, that is then logged both for compliance reasons, also for billing, for invoices to go out."

That's not "AI helps trades businesses." That's: a WhatsApp-based agent captures the conversation about what work is needed, and turns it directly into the compliance record and the invoice, without anyone manually writing either one up afterwards.

Hospitality and food: heyjessie.co.uk

For cafes, restaurants, and fast food shops, the recurring problem is the phone. "In food, there's orders and menus and calls, fast food shops, cafes. heyjessie.co.uk is becoming very popular there," Kassai says.

The specific job it does: answer the phone, take the order, get it to the kitchen. It's the exact scenario Kassai opens with elsewhere in the same conversation: "I'm busy in my cafe, and when I get a call, it's hard to answer or it's hard to follow up."

Appointment-led services: Cyberstaff

Salons, beauticians, and similar appointment-based businesses get a different tool: "For appointment-led services, beauticians, salons, and a whole range of other areas, there's Cyberstaff, they do a very, very good job there."

The shape of the problem here isn't the phone call itself, it's the booking, rescheduling, and no-show cycle that eats time in any appointment-based business.

Why this matters more than another generic list

Kassai's own framing, live on the call, was direct: "This is actually giving concrete names and concrete use cases, concrete examples." He's right that this is rarer than it should be. Most AI-for-small-business content stays at the level of "AI can help with customer service". True, but not actionable. Knowing that jely.chat exists for exactly your trade, or heyjessie.co.uk exists for exactly your food business, is the difference between "AI could help" and "here's what to actually go look at this week."

What this means for you

Before you build anything, check what already exists. Kassai's view, stated elsewhere in the same conversation, is that for the most common SME problems a custom agent is often "a bit of an overkill", because a tool built for exactly that job may already be out there. That doesn't mean never build: if your process is unusual, or nothing on the market fits, building your own can be the right call. But it should be a decision you make after looking, not the default. The first job is finding out whether someone has already solved your problem.

What to try this month

Identify which category you're actually in (phone-heavy hospitality, appointment-based, or trade and compliance-driven) and look at the specific tool named for it above. You're not choosing between "AI or not." You're choosing whether to look at a tool built for exactly your situation.

Want to go further? Try our AI tools to work out where AI fits in your business, or come to one of our free events to see tools like these in action.