At a Chiang Mai massage business with five branches, the next group of customers often arrives before the previous group has finished checking out.
The founder introduced a point-of-sale system, the software that records each sale, and abandoned it. She tried again and abandoned it a second time. The system assumed time to enter information between clients, and it displayed Thai script that some of her staff could not reliably read.
She started six years ago with one branch and four employees and now employs 40 to 50 people, serving mainly Chinese and Korean tourists. Cost was not the objection and neither was resistance to change, because the system added a step to the working day where it was meant to remove one.
The same pattern in six interviews
LAN Business Consulting, a Chiang Mai consultancy, found the same pattern in its fieldwork for a guide to AI and automation for Thai small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Researcher Alia Hadiouche interviewed six owners in law, wellness, education, software, hospitality and retail, and the firm’s survey went out through the Chiang Mai Business Network.
Automation, in this context, means handing a repetitive task that follows fixed rules to software so that it runs the same way every time. In the researchers’ reading, tools failed when they arrived before the process had been written down, and the software itself was rarely the cause.
The massage business founder describes the effect on her own role: “When a business grows but its systems do not grow along with it, the owner unknowingly becomes the bottleneck.”
Lone Andersen, who founded LAN Business Consulting and has spent 30 years implementing software, much of it in banks, states the same point from experience: “In my experience, automation on its own does not fix a broken process. It accelerates the problem.”
What the evidence supports, and what it does not
The interviews are qualitative. The survey returned six responses from roughly 350 people who opened it, so the findings describe these businesses and do not describe Thai SMEs as a whole. Each of the six respondents reported losing between five and 23 hours a week to repetitive tasks, an average of about 13 hours.
A peer-reviewed study of manufacturing SMEs in Chiang Mai, published in Sustainable Futures in December 2025, points in the same direction. It asked 10 firms to rank the factors that enable AI adoption, and process ranked first among the four main categories while technology ranked last. The study covers manufacturers rather than service businesses and excludes generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, so it supports the argument without settling it for a café or a law firm.
Cost is no longer the first constraint
Access to tools is widening. The TH-AI Passport programme, covered in The 24.70 Baht Competitor, offers Thai nationals aged 15 and over free access to 30 or more AI models. The Verification Gap reports that the UOB Business Outlook Study 2026 found more than seven in 10 Thai SMEs implementing AI.
With cost and adoption both moving, the variable that separates one business from another is the process the tool is applied to.
The 30-minute exercise
The exercise needs a pen, one recurring task and 30 minutes.
- Choose a task that recurs at least weekly, such as issuing an invoice, answering a new enquiry or onboarding a client.
- Write every step in order as it happens today, including who does it, which tool they use and each point where information is copied from one place to another.
- Mark the steps where work is forgotten, delayed, entered twice or queried twice.
- Hand the list to a colleague who does not normally do the task. Each question they ask marks a step still held in one person’s head.
- Select tools only for the steps that are written down and agreed.
The result is a document that a new team member can follow, and the same document tells a software vendor or an AI assistant what needs to be configured.
Why the order favours small businesses
A small business can change a process on Monday and test the change by Wednesday, without a purchasing approval process or an older system to work around. Most current tools are sold by monthly subscription, so a tool that does not fit costs one month’s fee, and many offer free plans. In LAN’s research the larger barrier was knowing where to start, and matching a tool to a process the owner understood.
A written process is the one input that every tool requires and no vendor can supply.
