Made for Swiss self-employed & SMEs
Most Swiss SMEs don’t have an AI problem — they have a subscription problem. The marketing suggests a growing stack of specialised apps: one for writing, one for meetings, one for invoices, one for social posts. In practice, three well-chosen tools cover the large majority of what a small business actually does with AI in 2026. Everything else is optional until proven otherwise.
The core three
Watch what gets opened during a normal working week and the same three categories keep appearing:
- One strong general assistant. ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini — one paid seat for each person who writes regularly. Drafting letters and offers, summarising documents, translating between German, French and English, making sense of a spreadsheet, preparing a meeting. This one seat delivers most of the measurable value, because it is the tool people actually use every day.
- The AI already inside your office suite. If the company pays for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, Copilot or Gemini is either included or one add-on away. It drafts emails, recaps meetings and searches documents where those files already live. Test what your existing licence includes before buying anything new — many SMEs pay twice for the same capability.
- A private option for sensitive data. A local model on the office laptop, or a cloud tool in a zero-retention configuration, for contracts, salary data and client files you would not paste into a random web form. This is the tool that keeps the other two out of trouble.
What you don’t need (yet)
Just as important is what to skip. You almost certainly don’t need a separate AI app for every task — the general assistant covers writing, summarising and translating. You don’t need an autonomous agent without one clearly defined weekly job. And you don’t need the “AI-powered” upgrade of software you barely used before it grew a chatbot. If a tool cannot name the recurring task it takes over, it is a gadget, not infrastructure.
Two rules before you subscribe
- The weekly-task test. A tool must take over a task you genuinely do every week — not a hypothetical one — and save more time than it costs. Price your own hour honestly: a CHF 30 subscription is cheap twice over if it removes two hours of admin, and expensive at zero if nobody opens it.
- The exit test. You must be able to export your data — prompts, documents, contact histories — in a format you can read without the vendor. Tools that hold your work hostage get more expensive every year, not less.
Then count the total. CHF 20 here, CHF 35 there, CHF 15 for something you forgot about: small subscriptions quietly become a four-figure annual budget. A stack is a cost centre until every line proves otherwise.
The Swiss specifics that matter
- Data protection. Under the revised Swiss Data Protection Act, client data stays your responsibility no matter which tool processed it. Keep sensitive files with local or zero-retention options, and keep client names out of free web tools with unclear retention terms.
- Language quality. Whatever you buy must write proper German and French, not just English. Test each tool with a real letter from your own archive before committing to an annual plan.
- Data location. Many Swiss SMEs prefer hosting in Switzerland or the EU. It is not mandatory in every case, but it noticeably shortens client conversations.
An inventory, not a stack
Keep one page: every AI tool, its monthly cost, its renewal date, the recurring task it performs, and a rough estimate of hours saved. Review the page quarterly and cancel anything nobody has opened in three months. Three tools that are actually used beat fifteen that looked impressive in a demo — and a stack that is easy to explain is also the one that is easy to change when something better arrives in 2027.
