We recently ran the latest in our series of workshops for accountants, lawyers and financial services firms on how they can start leverage AI to give their firms a competitive edge. These are small intimate workshops featuring live demos of Microsoft Copilot in action and presentations from experts running through the practical steps you can take today to start making use of AI in your organisation. Limiting the audience to 12 to 14 attendees allows for lots of lively interaction and discussions.
During the event it struck me that when I speak to people about AI I tend to have the same conversations repeatedly, and I think that here-in lies one of the major issues with the technology. It’s moving so fast that it’s hard to keep up, and therefore people tend to switch off a little bit. They think it’s too hard to understand so they park it to think about when they have more time (the irony!). From a small business owner perspective the technology is settling down into 3 main areas that you need to be aware of, and you need to be taking advantage of to retain a competitive edge.
This is where the software vendor will “bake in” some AI functionality into their product to improve the end users experience. You as the individual have very little control over how this is implemented and so all you can really do is make sure you are positioned to take advantage of it. That includes being aware of it and perhaps being prepared to spend more / upgrade license versions to take advantage of it. At the extreme end, if the system you are using doesn’t evolve to take advantage of AI you might want to start looking at alternative systems that do. A good example of this is the LinkedIn premium feature that offers to rewrite your posts for you. Great for us non-creative types.
These are the AI systems that you can use to make you as an individual more productive. Lots of people mention that they use AI at home for gardening, for cooking and so on. People seem to be comfortable with using AI in their personal life but there is often some resistance to using it at work. Tools like Microsoft Copilot Chat, M365 Copilot and similar from other vendors are examples of individual productivity AI tools. These are almost all Large Language Models (LLM’s) and you work with them using a “chat” type interface. In order to ensure you safeguard your data should use a paid for version of the software (read the t’s and c’s), and it’s the cost of these that seems to make people hesitate. Quick ROI calculation – if you’re paying someone £40k per year and they can save 15 minutes per day, that equates to over £1200 of value per year from a system that costs a quarter of that – £300 ish for a copilot M365 license for a year.
Agents are the unsung heroes of AI and they are the way to increase company wide productivity in your business. Where the tools mentioned in 2) above are designed to boost an individual’s performance, an agent is a tool that is created to do a specific task. This could be anything from automating repetitive tasks to streamlining processes. They can draft emails on your behalf or update systems given certain triggers. The possibilities here are huge and the tech is evolving all the while. Most systems allow you to create complex agents without any coding knowledge – you can just tell them what you want them to do and then tweak it to get the desired effect.
We are a Microsoft partner and so we naturally focus mainly on the Microsoft products in this space, but even so new updates are coming out daily and weekly and it’s hard to keep on top of it all. Sometimes it’s easy to forget this when advising people, but it’s our job to try to translate the tech for clients and make it easy to understand.
If you’d like to understand more about how Pro Drive IT can help you and your business get ahead with AI, get in touch now or join us on one of our upcoming events.