There has been so much coverage and hype over AI in recent months that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. If you’re busy running a small or medium-sized business, it’s hard to make time available to review the options and understand where this technology can be applied to your business to make things easier, more efficient or simply save costs.
Here we give you some real-life use cases to provide food for thought, explain why using an AI consulting service makes sense, and outline the AI consulting support that we can provide to help you get started and make AI a reality.
With the highly powerful Microsoft AI technology offerings at your disposal, there are many opportunities that we can guide you with. One of the most powerful tools is Microsoft Copilot Studio which allows organisations to create, publish and host their own custom AI Copilots to assist customers, employees or partners with a wide range of business functions.
Let’s look at some examples of how Microsoft’s AI toolkit can be implemented:
Internal Microsoft Copilot Agents – use cases
Copilot Agents can be published internally (for example within your Teams or SharePoint instance) and can support employees using your own curated data (so you know that it is accurate). They can also be combined with generative AI to take action.
Here are examples of some of the jobs they can undertake:
- Search your HR documentation to generate and deliver answers to staff questions
- Search your IT information to provide IT support desk responses.
- Automate repetitive tasks such as summarizing lengthy documents or creating a presentation from outline information
- Streamline HR onboarding processes to ensure all steps are completed and documentation is correct.
- Build a Finance collections agent that analyses real-time payment patterns and risk scores to detect disputes, delays, etc.
- Build a Sales and Marketing agent which carries out campaign performance analysis & insights. This can be developed to score potential leads based on a propensity to buy a certain product, and rate your customers based on historical conversion rates and account data.
External Microsoft Copilot Agents – use cases
As well as using Microsoft Copilot Studio to build internal agents, there are many applications for external facing use too. For example, at Compete366 we’ve built our own agent to allow our website visitors to ask questions of our website blogs and deliver the information in seconds.
Here are some other typical use cases:
- In Customer Service build your own AI-powered chatbots to handle customer enquiries, process transactions, and provide 24/7 support – with all responses based on your own curated content.
- For inbound sales enquiries, your own AI agent can assist with all types of sales enquiries, provide product information and support your marketing campaigns.
- Branding control – use a AI Agent to scan your marketing materials to ensure they adhere to your brand guidelines and any regulatory standards for your sector.
- In e-commerce an AI chatbot can answer common customer questions, guide users to relevant resources, or even process simple transactions, 24 hours a day.
What can an AI consultant help with?
Strategy and planning – firstly you will need to establish the business area that you wish to implement an AI agent to help with – and what your objectives are.
Implementation – establishing a plan of action, preparing and cleaning data for AI agent training, building your AI agent and starting with the automation of routine tasks.
Integration and Training– ensuring your team is trained on how your new AI implementation will work and how it is integrated into other aspects of the business.
Scale to new areas – once you have gained confidence in the initial implementation, your consultant can help you to scale out AI into other adjacent or new areas of your business.
Why use an AI consultant?
Getting Started
The possibilities with AI are endless, but sometimes getting started is the hardest part. Do you have a specific area of your business where your team are spending time on repetitive, low-value tasks? These are ideal opportunities to see what AI can offer, and here at Compete366 we can help to make that initial idea into a reality.
Selecting the right AI tools
With a wide array of AI options, an AI consultant can make sure the correct tools are selected, and that the planned solution is scalable, affordable and fit for purpose. With extensive knowledge of what’s available, they will also support you to integrate AI with the existing technology in your business.
Limiting Risk and Security
As with any new technology, there is always an element of risk and security to be evaluated and managed. Using an experienced and authorised AI consultancy supports teams to experiment with — but limit — what AI agents can possibly do. Why? Because what they can’t do is just as important as what they can. Limiting their scope of activity is key to avoiding risk. Areas that a consultant can help with include:
- Compliance with legislation – for example Data Protection / GDPR considerations
- Safe handling of potentially sensitive information (such as financial transactions),
- API security – this is how data is retrieved and shared between AI applications and you need to be confident in the security around data sharing.
What Next?
Our expert team of Microsoft consultants have successfully delivered AI projects, and Microsoft has recognised our expertise through our Microsoft technical certifications and customer experience with Solutions Partner Designations for Azure – Data & AI and for Modern Work.
If you’re considering how you can get started with AI in your organisation and need some advice and support please get in touch.
And if you’re interested in finding out more about Microsoft Copilot Studio, we have a previous blog post which provides information on specific elements and licensing considerations.
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