If you run a business in the Klamath Basin, you have been told by now that you need AI. What nobody tells you is where to start. There is a new word every month — generative, agentic, models, agents, tokens — and a new product behind each one. Is the AI you already pay for working for you, or against you? Which model should you use, and when? What is a CRM, and why does everyone say you need one? Who has time to keep up with any of it while running a business?
Meanwhile the real costs sit right where they always have. Add up what a small business spends, in money and in the owner's evenings, on marketing, on social media content, on bookkeeping, on building and keeping up the website, on IT. A receptionist to manage the office and the calendar runs $35,000 to $45,000 a year fully loaded. A marketing manager costs more, and a marketing department far more — and it is hard to say whether the result was worth it. None of that is the business. The business is the thing you are actually good at, and it is probably not bookkeeping, marketing, IT or software.
And there is the other side of the ledger, which nobody puts on a spreadsheet. What is the price of marketing against the cost of not marketing — the customers who never heard of you? What is the price of building AI into your business against the cost of letting every competitor get there first? AI is not going to take your job. Someone using AI might.
The short answers
Generative AI writes or draws something when you ask it to. Agentic AI does the work inside your own systems — files the note on the right customer, sends the reminder, notices the invoice that never went out, drafts the reply — within limits you set, and stops for you on anything that matters. Which model, and when is not your problem; it is the job of whoever runs the system for you, the way you do not choose which switch your phone call goes through. A CRM is simply the one place where everything about a customer lives — every call, quote, invoice, email and note — instead of in five apps and a notebook. Most small businesses do not have one, which is why the same customer gets asked the same question three times.
So what if one system did all of it?
What if the customer records, the scheduling, the quotes and invoices, the email, the website and its forms, the documents, the projects and the reporting all lived in one place — in your building, on a small server about the size of a hardback book — and an AI assistant with its own account worked across all of it for the owner, the managers and the staff, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year? Set up by someone local, trained to how your business actually works, supported by a phone call to the people who built it. You never open an account with an AI company, never manage a key, never keep track of which model is current. That is what I have spent the last two years building, because I needed it for my own company first.
Two Klamath Basin businesses bought it and have been running on it since earlier this year. It works. One thing to know up front: if the internet drops, your records are still there on your own network, but email and the AI assistant come back when the connection does, the same as any email. Out where the connection is poor, we work out what fits before anything is installed — a satellite link, or a unit that can run its AI on the box itself.
What it costs
The smaller system is $3,500 installed and $300 a month for up to three users. The larger one, built for up to around thirty people, is $6,500 and $450 a month for up to five users; additional users are $100 a month each. The one-time price covers the appliance, the setup, moving your existing records over and training in person. The monthly covers support for the software and the hardware — if a drive fails we replace it and the system keeps running — plus updates, monitoring and an allowance of AI use. Set that against one part-time hire, or against the pile of subscriptions it replaces, and the arithmetic is not close.
Why I am asking now
I am Troy Miller. I publish Klamath Living, and I build business software here in Klamath Falls. The problem with what I built is that every installation still runs through me personally, which means it reaches about four businesses a year. I have applied to the Klamath County Economic Development Grant to fix that: to package the system so it can be installed repeatedly, to write the documentation and the training, and to hire and train one local technician to do the installing. If it is funded, four Klamath County businesses get the system during the project year. The grant covers the equipment and the setup; the business pays the monthly service like any customer, so the test is a real one.
Before any of that is built, I want to hear from the people who actually run businesses here. Not a sales pitch, and not a survey with a hook on the end. What is the real problem in your business — the thing that eats your evenings, the job you keep meaning to get to, the software you pay for and do not use? If a system like this existed, and someone local set it up and looked after it, what would you want it to do?
I am especially interested in businesses outside Klamath Falls itself — the ranches, the shops and the operations out in the Basin, where the nearest technical help is a long way off. That is who this is built for, and who usually gets asked last.
It takes two minutes. Your answers shape what gets built, and if the grant is awarded they shape how the four pilot places are chosen. If you would rather just talk, call me — (541) 205-3750.