AI Stack Audit – 90-min review of your current tooling

Most AU small businesses are sitting on AI tools they paid for but barely use. The stack audit is the cheapest way to find out what you’re leaving on the table.

What the audit actually looks at

The audit is a structured 90-minute walk through everything you currently pay for and everything you do by hand that a 2026 AI tool could now do for you. We share screens. You log in to the tools live, we look at the real account, not a tidy version you prepared. That is deliberate: the value is in the gap between what a tool can do and what you have actually switched on.

Across a typical SME we look at four layers:

• Your assistants. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot. Which plan you are on, who has access, and whether anyone has built reusable prompts, Projects or Custom GPTs, or whether the whole team is re-typing the same instructions into a blank box every morning. This is the single most common source of waste we find: a paid Claude or ChatGPT seat used like a slightly smarter Google.
• Your automation plumbing. Zapier, Make and n8n. Where data moves between your tools by itself, and where a human is still copying a lead from a form into a spreadsheet into a CRM into an email. In 2026 most of that hand-copying is a 20-minute automation, and you are often paying for the Zapier seat already.
• Your CRM and data. Whether your CRM (HubSpot, Pipedrive, GoHighLevel) is structured, attributed and reported on, or whether it is a contact graveyard nobody trusts. Bad CRM data quietly poisons every automation downstream, so we check it early.
• Your documents and knowledge. SOPs, product docs, pricing, FAQs. What is written down and reusable, and what lives only in the founder’s head. This determines whether a Custom GPT or Claude Project is even buildable yet, or whether you need to document first.

What 2026 AI can genuinely do for an SME (and what we flag)

We keep the recommendations grounded in what current tools can actually do today, not what a vendor demo promises. As of 2026 that includes:

• Drafting at near-human quality for support replies, proposals, follow-up emails, listing copy and SOPs, with a human reviewing and approving. The model writes the first 80%; your person makes it true and on-brand.
• Reading and structuring messy input. Pulling line items out of a supplier PDF, summarising a 40-minute call transcript into actions, classifying inbound enquiries by intent. This is where the time savings are largest and least visible.
• Connecting your tools without code. Make and n8n now ship native AI steps, so an automation can read an email, decide what it is, draft a reply and file it, end to end, with a human approving the send.
• Answering from your own knowledge via a Custom GPT or Claude Project loaded with your SOPs, so your VA stops asking the founder the same five questions a week.

We are just as clear about where it breaks. AI still hallucinates confidently on facts that are not in front of it, so anything customer-facing or money-related needs a human in the loop. It cannot reliably act on live customer data without a proper API integration (that is real build work, not a prompt). And it should never give regulated advice (legal, medical, financial) on your behalf. A good audit tells you which of your ideas are a Tuesday-afternoon switch-on and which are a real project with real risk.

A worked example of the report

Say you are a 6-person AU services business paying for ChatGPT Plus on two seats, a HubSpot Starter plan, and a Zapier account that runs three old zaps. A typical report might surface: a $9,000-a-year saving by consolidating three overlapping note-taking and transcription subscriptions; a half-day-a-week win by building one Custom GPT that drafts your standard client onboarding emails; and a fix for the HubSpot setup so lead-source reporting finally works, which changes where you spend your ad budget. Those are the kinds of items that add up past the $5,000 guarantee. Every item is scored by effort and by annual value, so you can do the easy wins yourself that afternoon.

How the engagement runs

It is deliberately small and fixed. You give us read access (or a screen-share login) to the tools on the list above, and a sentence on your single biggest current pain. We run the 90-minute call live, recorded if you want it. Within five business days you get a written report, typically 8 to 12 pages: a 30-day quick-wins list you can ship without us, a 90-day roadmap for the bigger rocks, a 12-month outlook on what to revisit, and a tool-by-tool assessment with cost and value trade-offs. The whole thing is $497 fixed, money-back if we don’t find at least $5,000 of annual opportunity.

It is genuinely fine to take that report and execute it yourself, or hand it to another vendor. If we spot high-value implementation work we quote it separately inside the report, with no pressure to use us for it.

A few honest questions people ask

Is this just a sales pitch for your other services? No. The deliverable is the report, and roughly a third of the value we find is “cancel this, you are paying for it twice” rather than “buy something new”. If the report does not stand on its own, the guarantee refunds you.

What if I have barely started with AI? Then the audit is premature. Start with our AI prompt library, use the tools for 90 days, and book the audit once there is real usage to review. We will tell you this rather than take the $497.

Who runs it? Jenn runs roughly the first 30% of audits; senior implementation leads run the rest. Either way the report passes through Jenn’s editorial review before it reaches you.

How is this different from a free vendor demo? A vendor demo shows you what one tool can do and is paid to sell it. The audit is platform-agnostic and paid by you, so the recommendation can just as easily be “cancel this” or “you do not need a new tool, you need to switch on the one you have”. The most valuable line in many reports is not a new purchase at all.

Who gets the most from it

The audit pays back hardest for a specific kind of business: one that is already spending $200 or more a month on AI and automation tools without a clear strategy, or one that suspects it is under-using a Claude, ChatGPT or CRM stack it already pays for. It is also the right move before a bigger investment: if you are about to spend $10k or more on AI implementation, a $497 second opinion that tells you which parts are real and which are vendor optimism is cheap insurance.

It is the wrong move for two groups. If you are not yet using AI at all, there is nothing to review, so start with hands-on usage first. And if you are an enterprise with established AI governance, the audit is built for SME-scale and will not match how you operate. We will say so rather than take the brief.

What “done” looks like

Every DotVA AI services engagement is fixed-scope, fixed-price, and fixed-timeline. No retainers without a defined deliverable. No “discovery phases” that turn into 6-month projects. The scoping call is free; the written quote that follows is what you sign off on.

Why we say no

We turn down roughly 30% of applications. Usually because the team isn’t ready, the goal isn’t clear, or there’s a simpler path that doesn’t need us. We’d rather tell you that on the discovery call than take a brief that won’t deliver. The shortest path to outcome isn’t always us.

Apply below

Two minutes. We read every application within 1 business day. If we’re a good fit, we book the scoping call. If we’re not, we say so – and usually suggest who is.