AI saves time and delivers efficiencies at Advania

Just over a year ago, Advania UK decided to roll out Microsoft Copilot to all of its 1,000-plus staff to gain the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI).

The channel player was not alone in adopting Copilot, but it was among a more select number of firms that made the decision to allow all staff to access the technology.

Advania UK’s CEO, Geoff Kneen can point to several examples of where AI has improved efficiency and life for its staff in the year since it rolled out Copilot.

“It’s gone really positively. My decision on it was relatively straightforward, in the sense that work is very different than it was even just five or six years ago, with the complexity that people are dealing with and the amount of data we’re all dealing with on a daily basis,” he said.

“One of my favourite stats around AI is that everybody in every organisation spends circa 20% of their time looking for information. That means a fifth of all of our wage bills are spent on us looking for something. So, from one perspective, the simple use case for AI is the kind of really intelligent search they can do for you. In its own right, that should pay for itself, never mind the actual element of where it can get generative,” Kneen added.

“If this can help our people spend less time looking for data and more time just using data, they will be more effective at their jobs. They’ll have more time for our clients and will be able to add more value. So, it was a decision on quite a high-level premise like that,” he said.

If [AI] can help our people spend less time looking for data and more time just using data, they will be more effective at their jobs

Beyond the efficiencies to be gained by reducing data search times, Kneen revealed more specific examples of where AI has made a positive impact.

“With 100% trust in all of our people that they would utilise the technology, we then started to look at the use cases on a role-by-role basis,” he said.

That process showed how roles like that of the head of solutions architecture had benefited from being able to use AI in a way that ultimately led to the production of solution designs for clients. The technology helped build a library of previous documents and accelerate the time it took to navigate through templates to find the material to support a fresh pitch.

“One of the other roles that’s been transformed is that of a service delivery manager [SDM]. Service delivery managers used to have to collate a massive amount of data and produce that into the monthly service report for our client, which left them less time to analyse the data and work on the value-add pieces, which are: What should we do about this data? What innovation can we deliver that would improve this data? Copilot allowed our SDMs to automate the collection of all of that, get it down into a process that doesn’t really take any time, so they can spend their time analysing what the data is telling them,” Kneen added.

Another interesting example is the cross-referencing of CVs, which meant that some candidates were highlighted as having the right attributes for roles that they might previously have missed out on because they might not have applied for that position.

“I could go on with a number of cases, both from our perspective and from our clients’ perspectives. We’re getting a significant amount of value out of the investment in AI. We’ve done both things – we’ve got Copilot, and then we’ve got a private ChatGPT implementation that is democratised across the whole organisation,” he said.