Where I learned this

Over two decades of working inside corporate operations & IT teams across very different worlds — keeping the bills going out at an energy supplier (EDF Energy), delivering digital transformation to one of the largest not-for-profit financial organisations in the UK (B&CE), and working at a fruit-themed company you've heard of (Apple). Different industries, same theme: too many fiddly jobs, never enough people to do them.

Energy, financial services, consumer tech. Sectors that look nothing alike from the outside. From the inside, the same patterns kept popping up — spreadsheets stitched together with hope, inboxes that swallowed whole afternoons, three different systems that didn't talk to each other and an unlucky person whose actual job was copying things between them. After twenty years plumbing those problems inside big employers, the tools to deliver the same benefits for small ones have finally become reliable enough to be worth doing.

"Boring is good. Boring means it works every time."

— Brad, The Boring AI Guy

Why I started The Boring AI Guy

I started The Boring AI Guy because the same time-wasters show up in every Irish small business I walk into, and the technology to fix them is now cheap, reliable, and sitting on a laptop. Big consultancies won't touch jobs this size. There was a gap, and after twenty years plumbing other people's systems, I figured I'd fill it.

A pub takes thirty bookings a week by text and writes them down twice. A salon types the same reminder messages into WhatsApp every evening. A barber chases Google reviews by hand. Every one of them has a person — usually the owner — burning their evenings on repetitive admin that a small workflow could handle in seconds. That used to need a six-figure consulting engagement and a team of suits. Now it needs a few quiet weeks and one person who understands both the tools and the business. That's the gap I'm in.

Why "boring"

Because boring is what you actually want from business software. Boring runs every Tuesday at nine without you remembering. Boring doesn't need a demo. Boring quietly saves you four hours a week and never asks for a thank-you. The flashy AI stuff makes great headlines; the boring AI stuff makes the difference.

Most AI marketing is shouting. Capes, fireworks, "the future of work." The work itself is none of that. The work is a small bit of code that reads the email a customer sent and drafts a reply your team can send in two clicks. It's a workflow that takes a booking from a website form, drops it in your calendar, sends the customer a confirmation, and tells you it did. It's calm, repeatable, and almost dull to watch — which is precisely why it works.

"Boring" is also a polite way of saying I won't dress it up. If the honest answer is "this one isn't worth automating, save your money," that's the answer you'll get.

Who I work with

Owner-operators of Irish small businesses — trades, hospitality, clinics, retail, professional services, family-run shops. Anyone with too much admin and not enough patience for jargon.

You don't need to be technical, "digitally mature," or already running ChatGPT. You need one or two repetitive jobs you'd love to stop doing, and a willingness to talk about them in plain English.

Most of the work is with businesses based in Cork, Kerry, Dublin, and across the island — locally where it helps, remote where it doesn't. The fit is usually:

1–50 staff
An owner doing too many small jobs that aren't really their job
A working business already earning money — I'm not the right person to validate an idea that hasn't taken its first euro yet
Patience for plain English and an allergy to AI hype