Before comparing tools
Describe the workflow in one sentence
Start with a practical sentence: “Turn a standard job note into a customer-ready summary for a manager to review” or “Classify incoming enquiries and place them in the right queue.” If the sentence is vague, the product comparison will be vague too. Do not buy a general AI subscription hoping the best use case will reveal itself later.
Note the trigger, the input, the expected output, the exception cases, and the person who stays accountable. That is enough to identify whether you need a drafting assistant, an automation layer, a knowledge base, or simply a better internal process.
Stop sign: If nobody can explain how the output will be checked before it is sent, published or acted on, the workflow is not ready for a tool trial.
The selection checklist
Score the work, then the risk, then the product
1. Value. Does it remove a real repeat task, shorten a response time, improve consistency, or make a decision easier? Set a simple baseline in minutes, errors or missed follow-ups.
2. Input sensitivity. What information will people paste, upload or connect? Separate public material, internal business material, personal information and sensitive information. The last two need a much higher bar.
3. Data handling. Read the product's current plan, privacy terms, admin controls, retention options, data location and training settings. Do not assume a free account and a business plan behave the same way.
4. Access. Who can invite users, connect a mailbox or drive, export data, change billing, or see conversation history? Use named accounts and remove access when staff leave.
5. Accuracy and review. Test real but sanitised examples, including awkward cases. Decide what must be checked, by whom, and what the fallback is when the output is wrong.
6. Integration. Confirm it works with the systems your team actually uses. A polished demo that creates another copy-and-paste step may not save time.
7. Cost and exit. Price the whole workflow: licences, implementation, training, monitoring and migration. Know how to export your work or turn the tool off without losing a business process.
Run a contained trial
Use a short, reversible pilot
Choose one team, one workflow, one owner and a 30-day review date. Give people a one-page rule: approved use, prohibited inputs, required review, where to report a bad output, and who can approve a new connection or upgrade. Measure the agreed baseline rather than asking only whether the tool felt impressive.
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner recommends due diligence before selecting commercial AI products, including whether the product suits its intended use, how human oversight will work, and who can access information put into or generated by the system. That is a useful minimum for any Australian small business, even where a use case feels low risk.
Default rule for public tools: Do not enter personal information, sensitive information, customer records or confidential commercial details unless the business has assessed that exact product, plan and use case and approved it in writing.
The decision
Adopt, adjust, or walk away
At the end of the trial, keep only the tools that produced a measurable improvement with controls the team will actually follow. If the value is real but the risk is too high, change the input, restrict the workflow, use an enterprise plan, or keep the step human. A “not yet” decision is often the most mature one.
Further reading: OAIC guidance on commercially available AI products and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.