janyl

A line drawing of a single entrepreneur standing at the center of many tasks happening at once, each one reaching her from a different direction: a phone ringing, an invoice, a delivery, a customer waiting, a screen of figures, a calendar. Drawn in a uniform stroke with no fill and no shading.

SME superpowers

In most great literature about heroes, the thing that makes them great is also their biggest risk. Achilles is unmatched at Troy because nothing can make him back down, and it is that same refusal that keeps him in his tent while his friends are killed. Icarus can fly at all because he is not afraid of height. Oedipus is the only man in Thebes who can solve a riddle, and he does not stop solving them when he should. SMEs are no different. Their size and niche give them the agility, domain expertise and a sense of employee ownership that large companies cannot replicate. But these advantages are only advantages if they are at the heart of an SME’s business decisions.

A janyl agent puts these superpowers front and center in the conception of day-to-day work. It is biased towards action, assuming that information it presents will be actionable and suggesting courses of action directly to correct decision makers within a company. As an example, an agent that notices a supplier has quietly raised its unit price does not file that in a weekly report. It tells the person who signs the purchase orders, that morning, with the old price beside the new one and a draft of the email asking why. Agents are also instructed early to accrue a sense of domain expertise, not just in the data it has access to, but also the business approaches that are unlocked by that data and the biases that come along with that orientation. For example, in one of our cases, it learned a dental clinic focused specifically on patients who are frightened of dentists, leveraging this to help it rewrite its appointment reminders so that they described what happens in the chair rather than only the time, and also to work out where it stood with respect to the competition, once it noticed that the two practices nearest it had both stopped offering sedation and it was the only one in its district still taking those referrals.

Most importantly, SMEs have teams that are more invested than the average team. This is often because the employees are friends with the founders, have more responsibility than they would otherwise enjoy in a larger organization, and have shares in the company. A janyl agent learns to never treat any employee as an interchangeable cog, and takes rulings by employees on everything from aesthetics to regulations seriously. It defaults to a flat hierarchy, assuming that if someone makes a call that is important to them, it should be checked with that person regardless of their role. As an example, an agent drafting a customer mailing checked the wording with the person who answers the phones, because she is the one who hears what customers call things. She changed two words, the agent kept them, and nobody senior was asked whether she was right.

The SME market is the largest market in Europe, representing 51% of the economy. We make no secret at janyl that we are serving this market because we believe that it is the best one to grow in. While many of our competitors are chasing seven-figure deals with Europe’s largest firms, we believe that if we nail the day-to-day problems facing SMEs, we’ll make the greatest impact.

We love hearing from SMEs, so drop us a line letting us know what you do. We can’t wait to hear from you.

  • Eurostat, sbs_sc_ovw, enterprise statistics by size class and NACE Rev. 2 activity, EU27, 2023, read 3 September 2026. Enterprises employing fewer than 250 people account for EUR 5 329 351 million of EUR 10 462 378 million in value added across the business economy, 50.9%.