Plenty has been written about the big implementation that disappoints. The system goes in, the project is signed off, and the operation takes a year to catch up with it. That is a real problem and it deserves the attention.
It is also not the problem most transport offices have.
Most AI does not arrive as a project. It arrives on somebody’s card for £30 a month. There is no supplier, no go-live date, no training day, no integration to test and nobody to ring when it goes quiet. It is bought by one person on a Tuesday because it looked like it would help, and whether it survives is decided entirely by what happens in the following fortnight.
So here is a more useful question than any about implementation. Of everything your office pays for monthly, which did somebody actually open last week?
HoursBack runs AI workflow assessments for UK small businesses and I map where the working week actually goes in businesses across a lot of different industries. What that vantage point shows you is which problems belong to a sector and which do not. This one does not. Here is what kills those small purchases, and none of it is the software.
It asked for a permission nobody could approve. An owner tried to connect two systems she already paid for. The setup screen asked for access to her files, including the right to delete them. Nobody in the business could tell her whether that was safe, so she closed the tab. Months later it was still closed and the subscription was still being paid.
This is the one I would not have predicted and it is now the one I see most. So: who in your office says ‘yes’ when a piece of software wants access to your driver records or tacho data? Not who owns the process. Who is allowed to click the button? If the honest answer is ‘nobody’, then every tool you buy has a hard stop built into its first week, and it will hit that stop silently. There is no failed project to review. There is a tab somebody closed.
It was never actually the company’s tool. In one business, staff were running AI on their own personal accounts because nobody had bought a company subscription. Whatever they worked out stayed in an account the business did not control, and when they moved off the task it went with them.
That is worth checking in a transport office, because it is invisible on any system audit. The planner who has quietly got good at using AI to help draft customer updates is probably doing it on a login you have never seen and cannot recover.
The person who would use it would not pay to learn it. An owner told me he was using an AI tool he disliked because it happened to be free, and was not buying the one he actually wanted. Not for the money. Because he would be paying for something he was, in his own words, ‘thrashing around and being bad at’.
The government’s AI adoption research names skills among the most commonly cited barriers for UK businesses. That is what it sounds like from the inside. Not somebody who cannot learn it. Somebody who will not spend money to be visibly bad at something for a month.
It failed once. Someone tried to connect two systems, it did not work on the first attempt, and nobody went back. I have that written down more than once in nearly the same words. Tried it, did not work, moved on. The job it was meant to take over is still being done by hand every week.
The money is not really the subscription, though that keeps going out. When businesses count properly afterwards, the gap between the hours a review identifies and the hours they actually recover is wide. One owner has nine hours a week of the 23 that were there to find.
Transport starts further back than most sectors. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s AI adoption research found 90% of transport and storage businesses neither use AI nor have plans to, against 80% of businesses generally, the widest gap of any sector it measured.
Here is the difference that matters between a big system going in badly and a small one quietly dying. When a major implementation underperforms, everybody knows. There is a budget attached, a supplier to call and somebody whose job it is to fix it. When a £30 tool stops being opened, nobody knows at all. No meeting is held. No decision is recorded. It does not appear on any report, because there was never a project for it to appear on.
That is why the small purchases need less process than the big ones, not more. One person, a card, and standing permission to approve the access a tool asks for without escalating it. Everything else is optional.
David Bevan, founder, HoursBack
