the SME alpha
In the EU, 99% of businesses are SMEs, yet few have the BI infrastructure that give large corporations their edge: claude can close that gap by operating as an on demand data and operations team.
Core trick
Persistent per-company memory feeds specialist agents that run background monitoring and generate on-demand dashboards from uploaded CSVs.
Description
In the EU, 99% of businesses are SMEs, yet few have the BI infrastructure that give large corporations their edge: claude can close that gap by operating as an on demand data and operations team.
I built Alex, an AI native COO for SMEs, available via WhatsApp, Telegram, and web. It uses persistent memory and specialized agents to manage company data, connecting to spreadsheets and CSVs while learning how the business operates; a monitoring agent evaluates key trends in the background, identifying optimization opportunities and surfacing risks before they escalate. Through conversation and software generation on demand, it reshapes dashboards, plots, and produces executive reports in real time, while deep dive agents run research pipelines in sandboxed environments, delivering statistical analysis and recommendations, with all tool calls streamed for full interpretability. Alex enables a flexible intelligence layer for millions of small businesses, unlocking value where it matters most.
README excerpt
<p align="center">
<h1 align="center">alex</h1>
<p align="center"><strong>The AI operations team your SME never had.</strong></p>
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<em>Data scientist. Business analyst. Operations strategist.<br/>Always on. Always sharp. Built on Claude.</em>
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## The Problem
**99.8% of EU businesses are SMEs.** In Italy alone, 4.4 million small and medium enterprises form the backbone of the economy — manufacturing, retail, agriculture, services. They produce 67% of the country's GDP.
Yet most of them operate like it's 1995.
No data team. No BI tools. No dashboards. Decisions made on gut feeling, spreadsheets passed around on WhatsApp, and financial reviews that happen once a quarter — if at all. The owner is the CEO, CFO, COO, and HR department rolled into one person who's too busy running the business to analyze it.
Meanwhile, large corporations spend millions on Palantir, Tableau, and armies of consultants to extract insights from their data. **The intelligence gap between big business and SMEs has never been wider.**
## The Thesis
What if every SME could have a world-class operations team — a data scientist, a business analyst, and a strategy consultant — available 24/7, for the cost of an API call?
**That's Alex.**
Alex is an AI-native COO agent that connects directly to a company's data and operates as a knowledgeable business partner. Not a chatbot. Not a dashboard. A coworker who knows every number, flags problems before they escala