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By Kehinde Aderemi
Pelumi Ololade is the Founder of Pop A.I Automations. He is an AI Automation specialist using N8N to build chatbots, onboarding workflows, inventory systems, feedback/ review agents, lead generation systems, and content automation.
He also designs and develops modern, responsive websites that are built to convert and can be fully integrated with automation systems and payment solutions.
The young IT guru also helps businesses save time, reduce costs, and improve processes through seamless automation and smart website solutions.
In this interview, Ololade speaks on the challenges and prospects facing Artificial Intelligence and how businesses can use it to their advantages.
What informed your decision to set up the Pop A.I Automations?
Honestly, it started with my love for working with data. Between my academic background and the experience I picked up across economics, banking, data analytics, and customer service, I kept seeing the same pattern, that good decisions come from good information, and most small business owners simply don’t have the time or tools to turn their own data into something useful. I realised that same thinking, using data properly to optimise and streamline how things run, wasn’t just for big corporations with whole analytics teams. It could just as easily help a local business owner running things on their own.
That’s really the foundation Pop A.I Automations was built on, taking the kind of processes and systems you’d normally only see in larger, more technical companies and making them accessible and affordable for everyday SME owners who aren’t technical themselves. I wanted to bring that industry standard level of efficiency down to the local level, so a grocery store or a barbershop could benefit from the same kind of smart, data informed systems as a much bigger business, without needing a tech background or a huge budget to get there.
What business problems were you seeing repeatedly that convinced you automation was becoming essential for SMEs?
My first case study and client came from direct observation. I regularly shopped at local ethnic grocery stores and patronise other SMEs like hair salons in the UK and noticed how tedious their common operations were. Things like monitoring their stock and placing orders for them on time, replying customers’ FAQs, tracking orders, onboarding new customers or even booking and logging their appointments were all slow and manually operated, resulting in gaps in service, delivery, missed leads, duplicate or clashing appointments and many other issues. It became clear that founding Pop A.I Automations would serve these people well in terms of helping them streamline their processes through affordable automations.
How is AI changing the way small and medium-sized businesses operate today?
The pace of change right now is honestly hard to keep up with. There’s some kind of meaningful update almost every week. For SMEs specifically, the biggest shift I’m seeing is around all the repetitive stuff that used to eat up a business owner’s day, answering the same FAQs over and over while they’re also trying to run a restaurant, a barbershop, a grocery store, whatever it is. With the right automation, a small business owner can effectively have a small team of AI agents working for them for a fraction of what hiring would cost, something like a receptionist, a sales agent and an inventory agent all running in the background. The chatbot gets trained on their actual FAQs so it answers correctly, takes bookings straight into their calendar, updates their CRM, handles orders and confirmations, and can hand off to a real human the moment certain trigger words come up. It also routes the conversation to whichever agent is relevant, depending on what’s being asked, all within seconds, so you’re not losing leads just because nobody replied fast enough.
Inventory is another area where this is making a real difference. The automation can cross check stock levels against a set threshold and automatically reorder from the right supplier before anything actually runs out, so the business owner isn’t finding out they’re out of stock from a frustrated customer. Honestly I think we’re still early on this. AI can be applied across so many parts of an SME’s operations, and it’s only going to keep making things easier from here. It’s not a trend that’s going away.
What are the biggest operational inefficiencies you encounter when working with businesses?
The same handful of problems shows up again and again, no matter what kind of business I’m working with. Manual order handling is probably the biggest one, someone typing out responses to customers one by one, checking stock by hand, then logging it all somewhere separately afterwards. Onboarding is another big one, new customers or clients getting a slow, inconsistent welcome because there’s no system behind it, just whoever’s free that day sending a message whenever they remember. And then there’s the classic disconnected CRM, where customer information lives in three or four different places that never actually talk to each other.
What ties all of this together is that none of it is really a people problem; it’s a systems problem. The staff aren’t doing anything wrong, they just don’t have infrastructure behind them, so they end up carrying all of that manual weight themselves. That’s usually the first thing I look for when I start working with a business, not what they’re doing badly, but what they’re doing manually that really should just be running in the background on its own.
Why do many businesses struggle to adopt automation successfully?
People like what they’re used to. Asking them to change their processes for even a tested and tried method sometimes seems very stressful and risky for them without properly considering the benefits in terms of time and cost saved. Secondly and most usually, it’s the setup cost, not even the maintenance cost. A SME usually fails to see the value of automation until he sees his competition succeeding with it.
The other big reason is that people often build automation in pieces instead of as a system. They’ll automate one part of the customer journey but leave the rest manual, so you end up with this patchwork where nothing really connects and the business still has to do a lot of manual stitching behind the scenes. I always try to build things so they’re reusable and connected from the start, because that’s usually the difference between automation that actually sticks and automation that quietly gets abandoned a few months later.
Can you share an example of a project where automation significantly improved a business process?
I did multiple automations for a client with a grocery store here in the UK called Wura Foods. Basically I went to the client offering an ecommerce website so they can scale-up and start taking orders, but the client already had an app he built himself with all their products. But the problem? The app couldn’t onboard customers yet, so it was just there for months. Luckily I’m an A.I specialist and I informed him I could automate his onboarding. Now actions like registering on the app, making orders, or even marketing communications are all automated. You get an automated confirmation on email and WhatsApp in seconds. We also made an automated WhatsApp ecommerce system for them that works as a 24/7 shop and customer service agent.
