This blog is based on the recent seminar we held at Microsoft in Reading, entitled “Smarter Business: Leveraging AI – Productivity”. The event was a resounding success, bringing together industry leaders, company directors, and senior managers to explore the transformative power of AI for productivity & profit.
The State of UK Productivity
AI promises to deliver improvements in productivity. Currently the UK ranks 11th out of 16 European countries in terms of productivity. If you start by calculating your current productivity, you will have a benchmark against which to measure improvements and calculate your ROI on AI investments. A typical way to measure productivity is ‘revenue per employee. This metric shows how much revenue each employee generates.
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A Glimpse Into The Future of AI
Several AI tools are at the forefront of the transformation, including Microsoft Copilot, Copilot for 365, ChatGPT, and Google Gemini. These tools can be used daily to seek advice, create documents, analyse data, and more.
The particular benefit that Copilot brings is the extent to which it integrates with the Microsoft Office Suite. Microsoft see Copilot as ‘democratising’ ability. As an example, once complex Excel formulae were the preserve of the specialist, now Copilot makes them accessible to all.
Copilot is a great example of how Microsoft are delivering against their mission statement to ‘Empower Every person & Every Organisation On The Planet To Achieve More’.
AI in Business Operations
The 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report from Microsoft and LinkedIn, highlights that 75% of knowledge workers now use AI at work. Of this number, 78% bring their own AI tools to work! This widespread adoption is driving significant improvements in work quality and productivity, though if outside company control, there are risks.
We recommend that you
- Introduce legitimate company AI tools rather than risk employees compromising security by using their own.
- Align AI to your business strategy. Address your goals, pain points, and capabilities. Identify where you can make efficiencies, save time, and boost creativity
- Undertake a review of your data governance to ensure that documents are correctly labelled to protect confidential information.
- Appoint an AI champion or committee to oversee adoption and training
- Manage the transition and new style of working that AI will bring to your employees
Power Platform & AI
The Power Platform is a suite of Microsoft products that allows businesses to create custom applications, automate workflows, analyse data and build dashboards, and produce engaging user web experiences. Key benefits include reduced development costs, improved customer experience, and faster response to organizational demands. Certainly they are examples of AI for productivity & profit. The key components are:
- Power Apps: A suite of apps, services, connectors, and a data platform that provides a rapid application development environment to build custom apps for your business needs. You can create both canvas and model-driven apps.
- Power Automate: Used to be known as Microsoft Flow. This tool helps you automate repetitive tasks and workflows between your apps and services to synchronize files, get notifications, collect data, and more.
- Power BI: A business analytics tool that allows you to visualize your data and share insights across your organization. It helps in creating interactive reports and dashboards.
- Copilot Studio or Power Virtual Agents: This tool enables you to create powerful chatbots that can engage with your customers or employees without the need for coding.
- Power Pages: A low-code development and hosting platform ideal for building modern, data-driven websites. It allows you to design, configure, and publish websites quickly.
Real World Applications
Forrester in their recent research claimed that Power Platform has over the last three years, significantly reduced business app development costs by 74%, decreased the effort required to build and maintain bots by 80%, and achieved a 502% return on investment. Additionally, it also highlighted a 50% reduction in the time to handle customer support requests and a 33% reduction in time to market.
Looking Ahead
As we look to the future, it’s clear that artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to be a game-changer for businesses. One of the most compelling reasons for this is the impressive return on investment (ROI) that AI offers. Microsoft’s own data along with third party research, claims that for every $1 a company invests in generative AI, the return on investment (ROI) is $3.70. Read more.
Our seminar provided a platform for leaders to gain practical knowledge, share experiences, and explore new opportunities. We are excited to see how our attendees will implement these insights to drive innovation and growth in their organisations. We all agreed that there are opportunities for AI for productivity & profit.
If you haven’t started on your AI journey yet, start now. Don’t lose the opportunity to gain competitive advantage. As Stanford Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, recently stated, “AI won’t replace managers, but managers who use AI will replace those who don’t.”
Contact us to find out more. Our consultants will explore with you what productivity improvements AI could bring to your business.
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We want to hear about your challenges. Talk to us! Our consultants can audit your systems, plan changes, implement improvements and support your people.
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