These aren't off-the-shelf products. Every tool is built around your business processes, your data policies, and your governance requirements. Generic AI has the features — we add the guardrails that make it safe for business.
The British Chambers of Commerce finds 54% of UK firms say they use AI (self-reported). The ONS’s official figure for UK businesses is 29%. That gap is where we work: not more subscriptions, but the right tools, with the right guardrails, around the right processes.
Current as of 1 October 2026 — Copilot Cowork has been generally available since 16 June 2026, and Chat and Cowork are now two tabs of one Copilot experience. Agents and Cowork are metered in Copilot Credits, and the seeded AI Builder credits in Power Automate Premium and Power Apps are removed on 1 November 2026. What comes in the box has grown; so has the need to scope, budget and govern it. The solutions below are built on that footing.
Off-the-shelf AI doesn't know your data policies, your approval chains, or your compliance requirements. It treats every business the same — and that's exactly the problem.
Data leakage to third-party models. Hallucinations in critical workflows. No audit trail. No human-in-the-loop checkpoints. The risks are real and rarely addressed by default.
Every tool we build is scoped to your business processes, tested with your data, and deployed within your infrastructure. The guardrails aren't an afterthought — they're the starting point.
Chat and Cowork are now one experience, and Cowork’s App skill can build a small interactive app from a description (it may still be rolling out to your tenant). For a task scoped to one person or one team, working on data already in Outlook, Teams and SharePoint, that is usually enough. We will tell you so.
A custom tool earns its place when the workflow spans several systems, runs at high volume, faces customers or suppliers, or when the cost per transaction matters. Those are the cases where metered credits add up and where you need your own approval steps and audit trail.
A common pattern is both: Copilot for everyday knowledge work and one or two bespoke tools for the processes that carry the risk or the volume. The readiness and governance work is the same in each case, which is why it comes first.
AI is one part of what we do. We also run the estate it sits on: identity, endpoints, networks and security. See infrastructure and security and the anonymised case studies.
A structured audit of your processes, data, and team capability. We identify where AI fits, where it doesn't, and what governance needs to be in place before anything gets built. You get a clear, prioritised roadmap — not a vague strategy deck.
Generic readiness checklists miss what matters: your specific compliance landscape, your team's actual workflows, and where the real bottlenecks are. We assess your business, not a template.
Acceptable use policies, risk frameworks, data handling rules, and approval workflows. The guardrails that must exist before any AI tool goes live in your business. Without them, you're one employee mistake away from a data breach or compliance failure.
Template AI policies miss your specific regulatory obligations, data sensitivity levels, and organisational structure. We write policies that actually match how your business operates.
Not a generic email bot. Custom-built to your tone of voice, your approval chains, and your data policies. The AI learns your business rules — not generic patterns. Every draft goes through your review process before anything gets sent.
Generic email AI sends responses trained on the internet. Ours is trained on your communication style, knows which emails need human sign-off, and never sends client data to a third-party model.
Built around your document types, your compliance requirements, and your data residency needs. Not a generic document scanner — a system trained on your specific business documents with proper access controls and extraction rules that match your workflows.
Generic document AI processes everything the same way. Ours knows that your contracts need different handling to your invoices, respects your data classification rules, and keeps sensitive documents within your infrastructure.
Your meeting templates, your action item formats, your data retention policies. Transcripts stay within your infrastructure. Summaries follow your governance rules. Nothing gets shared outside your organisation unless you say so.
Generic meeting AI sends your conversations to third-party servers and stores transcripts indefinitely. Ours runs within your data boundaries, follows your retention policies, and formats outputs to match how your team actually works.
Any repetitive business process turned into an AI-powered workflow — including agentic AI agents that execute multi-step tasks across your tools. Unlike generic automation platforms, every workflow is scoped to your business rules with proper error handling, audit trails, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints where they matter.
Generic automation tools connect apps. Off-the-shelf agents follow generic playbooks. We build agents and workflows that follow your business logic, your exception handling, and know exactly when a human needs to step in — the 2026 differentiator most SMEs are missing.
Most AI readiness assessments take two to four weeks end to end. That covers stakeholder interviews, a process and data audit, opportunity scoring against your specific workflows, and a prioritised roadmap. Larger organisations or those in regulated sectors may need longer to map compliance obligations, but you'll have a clear scope and timeline before any work starts.
Yes — and a lot of our work starts there. Since 15 April 2026, Microsoft has restricted Copilot Chat in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for non-Premium users, which is forcing many SMEs to re-evaluate their AI stack. We're now helping businesses get more from existing Copilot licences, layer custom tools on top where the off-the-shelf product falls short, and put governance around what their teams are already doing.
With Copilot Premium also offering model selection (OpenAI or Anthropic's Claude) from April 2026, there are more options than ever — but choosing the right mix still depends on your specific workflows.
Off-the-shelf AI gives every business the same features. Our custom tools are scoped to your processes, your data policies, and your approval chains — with guardrails built in from day one. You get audit trails, role-based access, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and data residency where it matters.
Generic AI has the features. Bespoke gives you the controls.
Yes. Agentic AI — autonomous multi-step workflows that execute across your tools — is the dominant 2026 trend, but only 11% of UK SMEs use technology extensively to automate operations. The opportunity is huge and the field is wide open.
The April 2026 Copilot Studio release took multi-agent orchestration to General Availability, with the open Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol and expanded governance controls. Microsoft Copilot Cowork reached GA on 16 June 2026. That changes what's possible for SMEs this year — but the 95% failure rate on custom AI pilots is a reminder that tooling alone doesn't make agents safe or useful.
We design and deploy agent workflows scoped to your business rules, with proper checkpoints, error handling and audit logging so the agent stays inside the lines you set — whether that's on top of Copilot Cowork, Claude Cowork, or a bespoke stack.
Foundations work (readiness, governance) runs two to four weeks. Implementation projects (email assistant, document intelligence, meeting tools, workflow automation) typically run four to eight weeks from kickoff to deployment, depending on scope and integration complexity. With improved tooling in 2026, simpler workflows can sometimes be deployed in two to four weeks.
Most clients begin with a Readiness Assessment or a Governance review. Book a free 30-minute call and we'll help you figure out the right first step.