Armand Charbonnier
Preparing
0
One moment
AI & automation consultant · remote
Re-typing, chasing, reformatting, searching. Those hours don’t show up on any line of your accounts, which is exactly why nobody counts them. I automate them. But the first thing I do is tell you what they are already costing you.
14 years of software engineering · 40+ applications shipped
02 Where the time goes
No company ever wrote “re-type this data” into a job description. These tasks moved in on their own, in the gap between two tools that don’t talk to each other, and they stayed there. It’s plumbing.
The same information typed into the CRM, then into the spreadsheet, then onto the invoice. One piece of data, three chances to get it wrong.
Quotes with no reply, unpaid invoices, candidates left waiting. Somebody writes out the same message again, by hand, when they have better things to do.
A dashboard rebuilt by hand out of six exports, and already out of date by the time the meeting starts.
“Who has the latest version of the contract?” Asked several times a day, to people who don’t have the answer.
One at a time they’re trivial. Nobody is going to make a fuss about ten minutes. Added up over a year and across a whole team, they turn into a line of cost, and you are the one who is going to work it out.
03 What it costs you
Four sliders. You put your own numbers in, the page does the multiplication. The arithmetic is yours, I’m only putting it on screen.
An order of magnitude, not a quote. Your real figures come out of the audit, task by task — and some lines come back marked “do not automate”.
The result travels with your message, so there is nothing for you to copy out.
04 How I work
I start with your processes. The technology comes after, and sometimes it doesn’t come at all. We cost each task, automate the ones that pay back enough to be worth the work, and then look at what actually changed. The rest we leave alone.
I interview the people who do the work, not only the ones who describe it in a meeting. Every repetitive task gets costed in hours per month, then ranked by gain and by difficulty.
Short sprints, wired into the tools you already have. Every automation is tested with the people who will actually use it, then put into production and documented. And fenced in. A human sign-off anywhere a mistake would cost you.
A plain dashboard: hours saved, volumes handled, errors avoided, cost per run. We switch off what doesn’t pay, and roll out what works to the next team.
05 14 years on the ground
Large corporates, fintech, start-ups, work abroad, products built alone in a back room. I have watched these tasks settle into every one of those teams. I have also watched automation projects start that were never worth doing. I say so before we start, and I know when to stop.
Insurance · Large account — 2016 › 2018
I recommend nothing I don’t already run on my own machines. My servers, my containers, my n8n automations, my web-scraping jobs, my language-model integrations, and my React and React Native applications in production.
It runs continuously. Recurring checks, environments prepared in advance, technical watch, detailed reports, calendar reminders. I no longer go looking for information at the moment I need it, because it is already waiting.
Images, 3D models, assets, generated on my own machine without going through an online service. Nothing goes off to a vendor, and I keep control of what comes out. When someone asks where the data goes, that is an answer I have already tested on myself.
Every task starts with its test criteria and its documentation, and progress reports itself into the tracker, including while I am away. I build a prototype where I used to read documentation.
Newsletters and daily round-ups on subjects I picked myself. An internal press review, except the subjects are mine. New models and tools get plugged into it as they appear, which is how I compare them over time.
Unreal Engine 5, at the moment. I document the research as I go, and whatever I don’t understand I have explained against my own code instead of going hunting for it in a forum.
Exercises, mini-games, teaching content. All of it set to my level, to what I demand of it and to what I am trying to reach. The content alone would once have taken me months of analysis before any of it could be built.
These are my numbers, not a client’s. I put these setups through my own work before offering them anywhere else. Better to say it than to let you find out.
06 Three ways to start
An audit to find out where to act. A sprint to ship something that runs. A retainer, if you want to keep going without hiring. You can stop after any of the three.
01
What you walk away with
02
What you walk away with
03
What you walk away with
Don’t know where to act yet? That’s exactly what the audit is for.
No published rates. The number gets written after a first conversation, once we both know what we’re talking about.
07 Your questions
Nine questions come up in almost every first meeting. May as well answer them now.
We settle that together before I write a line of code. What can leave the company, what must not. Where it matters, the tools run on infrastructure I deploy and you control. I already run my own that way. It’s the same work.
That’s what I find in most of the companies I walk into. A spreadsheet, a mailbox and one line-of-business application are plenty to start with. We plug into them. Replacement is a different project, much longer and a great deal riskier.
Often that is the right answer. “A tool that already exists on the market” is one of the verdicts the audit returns, and it comes up regularly. What has changed is that the trade-off is worth redoing task by task: what you had to buy until recently can sometimes be built in a few days, and wired into what you already run. Sometimes only, and that is why we measure first.
No. I ship something your teams know how to use, and I document it. If you have a champion in-house, I train them. If you don’t, the retainer can cover it for as long as you want it to.
The time they have not had to get up to speed. I spent months putting these tools through my own work, after 14 years writing software. Where there is a team, I wire up the tooling, frame the models and train the people who will use them. Where there is none, I ship it and document it for them.
Not long ago I was sceptical about my own trade. I now think it will come faster than people say, but you don’t have to take my word for it: the arithmetic holds without my forecast. The hours your team loses today, it is already losing. Starting small now gives you your own numbers, task by task, and those stay true whatever pace the rest of it takes.
Two weeks for the audit, then sprints of a few weeks each. The first automation in production is the goal of the first sprint, not of an eighteen-month plan.
We’ll know fast, because every automation is measured from the start. One that doesn’t pay gets pulled at the next sprint. It’s also why the audit comes before any commitment.
The code, the accounts and the API keys are in your name from day one, the documentation is current, and your champion is trained. If you stop tomorrow, everything keeps running without me.
08 Who’s speaking
14 years of building software taught me that time is rarely lost in the code. It gets lost between the tools, and between the people using them. Independent since 2018, I work remotely, in French and in English, for French SMEs and for one New Zealand start-up.
2018 → today
React and React Native, TypeScript, Node / NestJS, PostgreSQL, Firebase. More than 40 applications shipped, in France and abroad.
Sep 2023 → today
Web and mobile for a varied client roster. React Native, from the first wireframe to the store release.
Jul 2022 – Jul 2023
Embedded developer, key features across the mobile and web apps.
Oct – Dec 2018
Lead developer of an event-management web application for ShowMode Ltd, at the national museum’s incubator.
2016 – 2018
Analyst-developer. Lead .NET developer for the MATMUT group, DDD and Clean Architecture trainer, technical assessor in hiring.
2012 – 2016
Analyst-developer. C# and PHP, .NET MVC, Entity, Zend, SQL Server, cross-platform mobile with Xamarin.
2010
First role. Requirements analysis, specifications, data modelling, a multi-user management tool in VBA, and training the people who used it.
09 Contact
Tell me about the task that eats the most time in your team. I’ll tell you whether it can be automated, and where to start. If the answer is no, you get that too, and it will have cost you half an hour.
First conversation free, no commitment.
I reply within two working days.