What's actually worth using
A shortlist of two or three tools, not twenty. Picked for what your team already does every day, not what's trending on LinkedIn this week.
Output: shortlist + reasoning, on one page.
Every week brings another tool, another LinkedIn guru, another "AI agent" that's going to change everything. You don't need most of it. You need someone honest to point at the two or three things worth your time, then set them up so your team actually uses them.
Every small business owner we talk to says some version of the same four things. None of them mean you're doing it wrong.
ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Notion AI… you've signed up for three of them on your card already.
You don't know what's safe to paste into a prompt, or whether your client info is being used to train a model.
Your team had a play with ChatGPT for a week. Then deadlines hit and everyone went back to doing it the old way.
A big consultancy quoted you a six-figure 'AI roadmap'. You wanted someone to switch on Copilot for your three accountants.
We don't sell "AI transformation." We do six concrete things, each with a thing you can point at when we're done.
A shortlist of two or three tools, not twenty. Picked for what your team already does every day, not what's trending on LinkedIn this week.
What's OK to paste into a prompt and what isn't. Where your data goes. Who owns the output. We write you a one-page rulebook your team can actually follow.
Custom GPTs trained on your wiki. Copilot for your accounts team. An automation that drafts your invoice reminders. We build it, you keep it.
A one-hour session with your team, in your office or on Teams. Real prompts for the work they actually do, not generic 'prompt engineering' theory.
The difference between a useful AI tool and a frustrating one is usually the prompt. We write a starter pack, saved, named and ready to go, for the five or six things you'll do most.
Once you're set up, most clients don't need us monthly. If you want a check-in every quarter to see what's new and what's worth swapping, we'll do that on the same terms as the rest of our work.
Twelve examples we've actually built for clients in the last year. Not slide-ware. The boring useful stuff.
A custom GPT that answers "how do we do X here?" from your existing wiki.
Drop in a Teams transcript, get owners, deadlines and a drafted follow-up email.
Outlook + Copilot prioritises your inbox so the chasers, quotes and complaints float to the top.
Each Monday, a friendly first reminder is drafted for every overdue invoice. You hit send.
Snap a photo and AI pulls out supplier, total, VAT and date, straight into your bookkeeping sheet.
Drop in a PDF statement, get an explanation of what each line item probably is.
Custom GPT trained on your last 50 quotes, drafting new ones in the same format and tone.
Suggests a draft reply to incoming enquiries. Your team reviews and sends, saving 5 min per email.
Voice memo after a call → a tidy CRM note, action items, and a follow-up email.
Holiday policy, remote-work policy, parental leave: first drafts you edit, not blank pages.
Five bullet points in, full job spec out, written for the kind of role you actually hire for.
A custom GPT that answers "where do I find X?" so your office manager isn't Slack support.
Don't see what you do? . Most "I don't think AI applies to us" answers turn into two or three usable ideas.
Here's the gap between what the big consultancies sell and what we actually do every Tuesday, on a 12-person business in Kettering.
Start to finish for a typical small-business engagement. Bigger jobs scale by repeating step 3.
Week 0 · free
Tell us what your team does, what bores them, what slows them down. No deck, no pitch. We'll tell you on the call whether AI can help here.
Week 1 · 4 hours
We come back with two or three tools, not twenty, picked for your team's actual work, your budget, and your data-handling rules.
Week 1–2 · half-day
We set up one workflow end-to-end. Custom GPT, automation, Copilot config, whatever the right shape is. You watch it work before we move on.
Week 2 · 1 hour
An hour with your team on your real work, using the new tool. Prompts saved, docs written, recording sent over. We're done. You own it.
We don't have a partnership we're trying to sell you. The right tool for your accounts team usually isn't the same as the right tool for your sales team.
We'd spent six months "looking into AI" and got nowhere. Two calls and a half-day later, our quoting takes about a third of the time. That's the entire pitch, and they did it for less than a single LinkedIn course.
James R.
Director · Surveying firm, Northants
It depends on the tool. Free ChatGPT trains on your prompts by default; the business tiers don't. Copilot inside your M365 tenant keeps your data inside your tenant. Part of every audit is mapping which tool is OK for which kind of data, and we write you a one-page rulebook your team can follow without thinking.
Honestly, no, not the people we work with. We've never recommended a tool that replaces a role. We recommend tools that take the typing out of the job, so the person doing it spends their day on the parts they're actually paid for. If the pitch is 'replace your accounts team,' it's almost always wrong.
For Microsoft 365 Copilot specifically, yes, and it adds a per-user licence cost on top of your existing M365 subscription. For everything else (ChatGPT, Claude, Custom GPTs, automations), no. We'll tell you on the call whether Copilot is worth the licence cost for your team, or whether a different combination of tools does the same job for less.
A short audit: a call plus a few hours of writing. You get a shortlist of two or three tools you should be looking at, the rules for using them safely, and a written follow-up. You can stop there. About a third of audit clients do.
Yes, we work with several accountancy and legal practices. The audit phase is longer because the data-handling rulebook matters more, and we lean toward private-endpoint setups (Azure OpenAI, on-device models). We're happy to sign your NDA before we even have the first call.
It's the same business, the same engineers, the same way of working. AI Consulting is just one of seven services. If you already use us for IT, we can fold AI work into your normal hours. If you're new to us, the audit is a good way to see how we work before committing to anything bigger.
No. The audit is a one-off. You get the shortlist and the rulebook, we shake hands, you decide. If you want us to build the next bit, great. If you want to take the report and do it yourself, also great. We'd rather you used the advice than felt locked in.
A 30-minute call, free, no slides. We'll tell you on the call whether AI applies to your business, and what the smallest useful next step looks like.
Or call 07871 615500 · weekdays 09:00–17:30