This article is part of a series exploring how AI can be used to scale and democratise expertise, helping small businesses protect themselves from scams.

My interest in this topic comes from several directions. During the fintech stage of my career, I founded DragonBill, a platform designed to help small businesses improve cash flow and reduce late payments. My wife is a self-employed designer and is actively involved in this project as our small business subject matter expert. Combined with my work in cyber security, governance and resilience, this has given me an appreciation for both the opportunities and challenges faced by small business owners.

Rather than focusing solely on technology, this series examines scams through a socio-technical lens: the interaction between human and technological elements. This distinction is important because optimising one part of a socio-technical system can sometimes reduce the effectiveness of the system as a whole. Modern scams rarely succeed because of a single technical failure. Instead, they exploit a combination of technology, business processes, behaviour, context, trust and decision-making.

Throughout this series, I’ll share lessons learned while researching scams, identifying common risk moments, understanding how they’re exploited, and exploring ways to make protective knowledge more accessible to small businesses.

The thinking behind this work draws on several disciplines, including systems thinking, socio-technical systems, human-centred design, cyber security, and decision-making under uncertainty. While these fields are often discussed separately, scams sit at their intersection. This creates an interesting challenge. How do you scale specialised expertise without losing the human judgement, context and empathy that make it valuable?

This will also be a personal learning journey. Much of the discussion around systems thinking, socio-technical systems, human-centred design and AI happens at a conceptual level. This project is an opportunity to explore how those ideas can be translated into something practical, low friction and valuable for small businesses. As part of this project, I’ll be getting my hands dirty again, deepening my understanding of how AI can be used to achieve this.

Success won’t be measured by the sophistication of the technology, but by whether it helps people make better decisions, protect their businesses, and spend more time focusing on what they do best.