· Dark Oak · 5 min read
If you run an Irish small or medium business, the second half of 2023 will have brought you about a hundred suggestions for what to do with software in 2024. Some of them were about AI. Some were about migrating off Excel. A surprising number were about “your digital transformation journey.” Most of them assumed you have a CTO. Most of you don’t.
This is a short, opinionated list of five places where we’d actually spend the budget if we ran a 10–150 person business in Ireland next year. None of them require buying a “platform.” Most of them can be costed at a fixed price and finished inside the calendar year. All of them are things we’d quote on at Dark Oak — and we’d tell you up front if any of them aren’t worth the spend in your case.
1. Pick one workflow to automate end to end — not “an AI strategy”
The strongest move we keep seeing in late 2023 is the smallest one. A business identifies a single repetitive workflow — inbound RFQ (request for quote) intake, supplier invoice processing, returns triage, weekly stock reconciliation — and replaces 70% of the manual effort with a focused piece of software. They don’t try to “transform the business.” They take one Friday afternoon back.
A few signs that a workflow is a good candidate:
- It happens at least once a week.
- It eats more than half a day of someone’s time when it does.
- The decision-making logic could be written down by the person doing it.
- The data lives in two or three places that already talk to the outside world.
If you can name a workflow that fits all four, that’s where we’d start. Budget anywhere from €4k to €15k for a fixed-price build of one of these, plus a small monthly Care plan to keep it running. The thing to avoid is the “AI strategy” engagement — a six-figure scoping exercise that produces a PowerPoint instead of a piece of software.
2. Stop trying to escape your SaaS — budget for the glue
There is a particular trap a lot of growing Irish SMEs walk into around the 50-person mark. The team has outgrown the off-the-shelf SaaS (Xero, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Shopify, the usual suspects). The instinct is to look at “replacing” it with custom software. That instinct is usually wrong.
In nine cases out of ten, what you actually need is an integration layer — a small piece of custom code that talks to your existing SaaS tools and fills the specific gap that’s slowing you down. A real example we saw this year: a wholesaler was paying for three SaaS products that didn’t talk to each other, and the operations manager was spending six hours a week re-keying data between them. A €6k integration build solved the problem permanently. Replacing the SaaS would have cost €50k and taken eight months.
In 2024, if your software pain comes from systems not talking to each other, plan for integration. Custom builds only make sense when the underlying workflow is genuinely distinctive and stable for the next 3–5 years.
3. Start a small document or intake agent
This is the one piece of AI work we genuinely think every SME with paperwork should look at in 2024. The technology that landed in 2023 — function calling, structured outputs from the LLM (Large Language Model), retrieval-augmented generation over your own files — has moved document-handling from “interesting demo” to “shippable product.”
A typical first build:
- Incoming invoices arrive in a shared mailbox or folder.
- An agent reads each PDF, extracts the header and line items, validates against the matching purchase order.
- Clean invoices get posted to your accounting system; anomalies go into a review queue for a human.
- You measure the error rate over the first hundred documents in production and tune from there.
We’ve seen this kind of build save 25–40 hours a month for a finance team of two. The build itself usually runs €6k–€12k fixed-price, with a Care plan to maintain accuracy as the document formats drift. If you only do one piece of AI work in 2024, do this one. It’s boring, well-understood, and pays for itself.
4. Take EU data residency seriously now
The EU AI Act was politically agreed in December 2023 and will start coming into force in stages over the next few years. The detail is still settling, but the direction of travel is clear: your AI vendor’s data-handling practices will matter, and not just for high-risk systems.
Combine that with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) commitments you already have to your customers, and the practical advice for 2024 is simple. When you choose a vendor — for AI, for SaaS, for hosting — ask three questions:
- Where is the data physically stored?
- Is there a Data Processing Agreement (DPA) in place by default?
- If a sub-processor is outside the EU, what’s the legal basis?
Anyone who can’t answer those three from memory is not a vendor you want a five-year contract with. Vendors who can — and increasingly that includes the bigger frontier AI providers — are worth a small premium. If you’re going to commission new software in 2024, ask the same questions of the people building it.
5. Set a flat-fee maintenance budget you don’t break
The most expensive software is the software no-one is maintaining. Sites that haven’t been patched in two years, internal tools that quietly stopped working last spring, AI agents producing slowly-degrading outputs because nobody set up an evaluation harness. These are not failures of the original build — they are failures of the maintenance budget.
For 2024, decide what you can afford to spend monthly on keeping each piece of software healthy, and stick to it. As a rough guide:
- A business website on a modern stack: €100–€300/mo for hosting, patching, monitoring, and a monthly report.
- A small custom application: €300–€800/mo for the same, plus a few hours of development time for small enhancements.
- A production AI agent: €400–€1,500/mo, including monitoring for drift and quarterly re-evaluation.
If your existing vendor can’t quote you a flat fee for this, that’s a sign. If a new vendor won’t put the maintenance figure on the same proposal as the build, that’s a bigger sign. The build is the cheap part; the next five years are what costs you.
What we’d take into 2024
If you read this list and find yourself nodding along to three of the five, that’s roughly the conversation we expect to have with most SMEs we meet next year. Pick one workflow, glue the SaaS instead of replacing it, ship one document agent, get serious about where your data lives, and pay someone properly to keep it all working.
If you want to talk any of this through, book a free discovery call. Thirty minutes with an experienced engineer, no hard sell, and an honest view on which of the five is worth doing for you.