Find your first AI win

Because "should we do this?" and "can we do this today?" are different questions, and blending them into a single number gives the wrong answer at both ends. A business losing fifteen hours a week to manual admin but with scattered data has the largest opportunity of anyone — a single blended score would rank it poorly and tell it to wait, when in fact it should be first in the queue with a couple of foundations tidied. Equally, a well-organised business with almost nothing repetitive to automate would score well on a blended scale while having little to gain. Keeping the axes separate makes the actual advice visible.

Six questions feed opportunity — team size, hours lost to repetitive admin, enquiry volume, meeting load and content pressure — because those determine how much there is to win. Six feed readiness: how organised your data is, what platforms you run, whether you have an agreed position on staff AI use, when file access was last reviewed, leadership appetite and current AI usage. Each answer carries points, and each axis is expressed out of 100. The sector question scores nothing; it only shapes which use-cases are recommended.

Because it is the step most Copilot rollouts skip, and the one that causes the most damage. AI assistants inherit your existing permissions rather than creating new ones — so if access has drifted over the years and staff can technically open files they were never meant to see, the assistant will find those files and present them helpfully. Reviewing permissions before licences are assigned is short work. Discovering the problem after a staff member asks the assistant about salaries is not.

Because most businesses already have AI in use that nobody approved. Staff who are not given a sanctioned tool tend to use their own, and consumer accounts generally carry different data-handling terms to business ones. That means client details, pricing or personal information can end up with a service your business has no agreement with and no visibility of. A written position is the cheapest control available, and if you do not have one our free policy generator will build a one-page draft in about two minutes.

It is a sizing figure, not a quote, and it is deliberately conservative. It works from the midpoint of whichever admin-hours band you selected, assumes 46 working weeks rather than 52 to allow for leave and public holidays, discounts the theoretical saving because recovered time is never converted to productive work one-for-one, and assumes only about 60 per cent of a repetitive task can genuinely be automated. It is there to tell you whether the prize is worth a conversation. For a proper payback calculation including build and running costs, use our ROI calculator.

No. The quiz runs entirely in your browser — nothing is stored or transmitted unless you choose to fill in and submit the contact form at the end. Your answers clear when you close or refresh the page.

Then that is the honest answer and it costs you nothing to have found out. If there is not much repetitive work and the foundations are not there, spending on AI now would most likely produce a tool nobody uses. The result will say so plainly rather than manufacturing a reason to sell you something. Come back when the volume of repetitive work grows or when you move to a cloud platform.

We help Hunter Region businesses put practical AI to work — email triage, document extraction, support chatbots, meeting summaries, knowledge search, Microsoft 365 Copilot rollouts and AI-powered content through our Lyfeforge platform. A typical engagement starts with a short scoping call, then a fixed-scope pilot on the top-ranked win from your shortlist, tested against your real data before you commit. Send your result through and we will come back with a concrete first step.