Design thinking · AI use cases · High Street businesses

AI, sized for the shop you actually run — not a boardroom.

SeaGlass works with small and medium businesses — cafés, independent shops, consultancies, trades — to find the one or two places AI can genuinely help. No jargon, no six-figure contracts, no software that sits there unused.

Book a coffee See how it works
Fixed fee, agreed upfront You own everything we build No annual lock-in
Where local businesses get stuck

Off-the-shelf rarely fits the way you actually work.

Cafés & restaurants

A booking bot that doesn't understand walk-ins, or a review tool nobody has time to check.

Independent shops

Three subscriptions bought at once, one of them actually used, all of them still billing monthly.

Consultancies

Sold the tool before anyone asked what the actual bottleneck was in client delivery.

Trades & services

Quoting and scheduling still done by hand at 9pm, while the AI subscription sits untouched.

How we work

Design thinking, applied to finding the right use case — not the flashiest one.

  • 01

    Listen

    A half-day on-site, no forms, no slide decks — just a conversation about where time actually gets lost in the day.

  • 02

    Map

    We lay out the real workflow together and find the one or two points where AI could genuinely help — and just as importantly, where it can't.

  • 03

    Pilot

    A small, cheap, reversible test with your team, on your real work — not a demo, not a slide deck.

  • 04

    Embed

    We train the team, write it down simply, and make sure it keeps working once we're not in the room.

  • 05

    Review

    We sit down again after 90 days and are honest about what's working, what isn't, and what happens next.

Built on community, not contracts

You shouldn't need an IT department to feel safe doing this.

  • Fixed-fee work, agreed before we start — no surprise invoices.
  • Everything we build is yours to keep, edit, or walk away with.
  • Small peer cohorts of local business owners, so you're not doing this alone.
  • Monthly coffee mornings and short talks — free to attend, no pitch.
  • We'll tell you plainly if AI isn't the right answer for something.
"Most of what's sold to small businesses as AI is a generic tool wearing a new logo. Our job is to find the one thing worth doing, and make sure your team can actually run it without us." Richard Morland — Founder, SeaGlass
A recent project
Retail · Use case discovery

Finding the right entry point, not the obvious one

A local retail business came to us assuming they needed a customer-facing chatbot. Two days of mapping their actual workflow showed the real time-sink was stock reordering and supplier email chasing — not customer chat at all. We piloted a small AI-assisted reordering process instead.

3use cases mapped
1piloted first
90dto first review
Note to Richard — I couldn't fully make out the client/site name in your last message. Send over the real project name and a line or two from the portfolio deck and I'll drop the specifics straight in here.
Get involved

Three easy, low-pressure ways in.

Book a coffee

A free, 30-minute, no-slides conversation about where AI might — or might not — help your business.

Get in touch

Come to a talk

Short, plain-English monthly sessions for local business owners — what AI is actually good for, and what to ignore.

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Just ask a question

Not ready for a chat? Send a question and we'll answer it honestly, even if the answer is "you don't need this."

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