In this episode, host Adam welcomes Dani and Alex from PCW Solutions to discuss their business journey, emphasising how they’ve integrated artificial intelligence (AI) into their company’s operations. Alex details the inception and growth of PCW Solutions over the past 21 years, starting from helping domestic customers to managing over 150 business clients today. The conversation dives into their innovative approach to improving workflow efficiency using AI. They explain how they utilised AI to manage and log customer support tickets, reducing the workload on their staff and improving service response times. They also highlight practical challenges and human factors involved in implementing AI solutions, including the need for clear communication and gradual customer adaptation to new technologies. The discussion covers the future potential of AI in Managed Service Providers (MSPs) for automating routine tasks and enhancing customer service. Alex and Dani also share insights into the practical aspects of AI integration and future plans, such as automating outbound calls for ticket resolution.
00:00 Welcome and Introductions
00:21 Background and Business Overview
01:53 Office Location and Expansion
03:27 Exploring AI Solutions
04:08 Implementing AI for Customer Support
08:45 Challenges and Adjustments with AI
11:33 Technical Setup and Future Plans
13:32 The Role of AI in Client Communication
14:11 Client Reactions to AI Implementation
14:35 Solving Client Issues with AI
15:08 AI Accuracy and Staff Testing
15:26 Examples of AI Handling Calls
17:42 AI in Sales and Client Management
19:17 Future AI Implementations
20:53 AI’s Role in MSP Operations
21:38 Challenges and Costs of AI
25:55 Expanding AI Solutions for Clients
26:42 Automating Billing and Future Developments
27:15 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Connect with Alex Hill on LinkedIn by clicking here –https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-hill-64284414/
Connect with Daniel Welling on LinkedIn by clicking here –https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-welling-54659715/
Connect with Adam Morris on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamcmorris/
Visit The MSP Finance Team website, simply click here –https://www.mspfinanceteam.com/
MSP Glossary: MSP Finance Glossary Explained | MSP Finance Team
We look forward to catching up with you on the next one. Stay tuned!
Transcript:
Adam: [00:00:00] Hello, Dani and Alex, welcome to the podcast.
Alex: Hi. Hi. How are you?
Adam: Yeah, very well. As I was explaining earlier, a little bit, redder on the face than I was hoping to be having been out on the golf course this morning and not worn a cap. Anyway, let’s get to, let’s get to business. maybe Dani or Alex, you could start by.
Providing the audience with a bit of background and context here. So just tell us a little about your business, what you do, where you’re based, how big you are, how long you’ve been going, essentially the history leading up to where we are today.
Alex: Yeah, so, I started the business, PCW Solutions. 21 years ago now, when I dropped out of school, I mainly started just helping domestic customers when I was 17, 18. and then later on I started helping business customers. And then when, when I turned 20, I gave up my other jobs and went full-time, self-employed, and then started helping business customers. now we look after over [00:01:00] 150 businesses. and we keep growing every year. We keep taking on new customers every year, don’t we? Yeah. And I keep having to take on more staff every year as well. Yeah. Dani has been, I’ve known Dani for many years. She was my friend way before she started working for me. and yeah. Do you wanna explain? Yeah. So, yeah, I’ve been friends with Alex. I care to remember, to be honest with you. I’m one put up with that’s problem. so yeah, we’ve been friends for 18 years and on and off over the years. I’ve come in and outta the business, helping him with different things. I’ve got an IT background.
So, yeah, we’re just looking at growing the business now, aren’t we? I’m different ways that we can do that, make process automations and so on. So yeah, there’s a team of. Six of us now. Six. Yeah. And we’re looking at, employing more staff as well and apprentices to, to grow the businesses and help us where we need to get to really.
Adam: Are you based?
Alex: we’re based in Abbott Langley now. We were originally in Watford Town Center. and we love the new [00:02:00] building you are in ’cause it’s much, much bigger. Yeah. We’ve had a lot more customers. A lot more customers and a lot more interest as well, I think. The business moving to this location and it being a much bigger building and being our own, I think it’s had a bit of a mind mindset shift for us as well.
So we’re starting to look at different strategies, aren’t we, of how we can attract larger businesses. So it’s been really good that, or we’re thinking, oh my God, we’ve gotta afford this big building. Let’s find new customers. Let’s find more customers.
Adam: Yeah,it’s really interesting. I can, un understand your sentiment there. When we moved to a larger, better office, there was, a lift, a lift in sort of. Who we thought what we were, you know, what we were, what we stand for. Maybe we can appeal to bigger customers now. and I think that lifted the whole workforce actually.
Plus it was a much better place to bring customers,and sort of say, look, hang on here, we are actually real. we’re a brunch of guys come, we meet the guys, you know, these are the awards on the wall, et cetera. All that good stuff.
Alex: Well as.
Adam: Absolutely. and you [00:03:00] mentioned location just to sort of cut this piece off.
why is it a better location? Are you, is it a bigger urban area or,
Alex: Bigger office. It’s a bigger office, much more parking. We’ve got 11
parking bay before we only had two or three. What? The town center, the problem with the town center is you’ve got in and out the town traffic. Whereas where we are, we’re right by all the remotes with no traffic.
Adam: Yeah. Okay, good. sounds good. Of course, you can tap into the Hall of London there as well, can’t you?
Alex: Yes.
Adam: okay. So, we’re having,we’ve invited you on the show because I was very interested and intrigued about how you’re exploiting AI at the moment. And, you know, we’re all trying to understand what this thing is, how to actually use it.
I don’t think there’s any one person in the world that understands everything about this stuff, right? So it’s all about just trying to piece things together and make sense of it and,and exploit it as appropriate. Right. So talk to me about how you started to think about ai. and we’re gonna dig into this specific example in a moment, but kind of how did [00:04:00] you lead up to it?
What was your thinking around ai? How did you start to navigate getting your head around it with a view to making some changes?
Alex: genuinely what started it was we’re a very close office here, and I turned around to my team and I said, how can I make more money out of you? I literally said, what can I do for you guys to make me more money? how can I get you fixing more problems? And they said, well, our biggest issue is we’ve still gotta answer the calls. so we are having to pick up the phone, break the customer’s details come up anyway. Then we’ve gotta log a ticket, then we’ve gotta save that ticket. Then we’ve gotta get back to what we were doing. So they kept getting distracted and, and so I thought, okay, what do I do? And I looked at an answer system, but they were charging like a pound of call with the quantity of calls we get, it was just very expensive. And then also they wouldn’t actually log a ticket, they would just send it through email to us. so then I thought, well, everyone’s talking about this ai. Surely AI can somehow. Make a phone, receive a phone [00:05:00] call, and log the ticket for us and even transfer the calls over to the agent working on the ticket, and that’s what we invested in and implemented and got
Adam: Okay, so you weren’t heavily involved in AI playing with lots of things and doing loads of things, and then it was like, okay, there’s 10 things I can do, but I’m gonna pick this one thing. It was more actually, no, we can improve our workflow. or we need to improve that workflow. How can we do it?
Oh, AI can possibly do it. That was the kind of approach,
Alex: We were looking at, I’d mentioned copilot to you a few times before. She, my colleague keeps, Dani keeps saying all the time, oh, you should use chat, pt, gt. Yeah. For, oh, I keep saying gp, GPT. Gt. PGTP. she keeps
Adam: Alex.
Alex: use. I know she keeps telling me to use co-pilot it, telling me to use chat. What? He just gets the letters. That’s my, it should be chatt. Gtp. That’s why it should be, I dunno why, but it should be G [00:06:00] tp. So we’d had discussions before about. Because I, he wanted me to come into the business and look at improvements that could be made and I said, well, look, there’s, we can use AI as a tool to do that.
First of all, copilot obviously within Microsoft 3 6 5 makes it life a lot easier. We do use chat GPT quite a bit, not obviously putting. In, but we do use it a lot. And, and then, yeah, the phone system, just like a really obvious way to, that would improve.
Adam: Yeah. that’s quite interesting. So I think what we’re saying to the audience here is you weren’t like some kind of AI genius, right. Ready? Just to go, hang on a second. Let’s do something really fancy with that. okay. So take us through, step by step. What do you need to do? how does this thing work and now how’s it different?
Alex: So I started looking at, ai, things like ai, voice chats and ai. I was like, well, hold on. I can [00:07:00] get an AI assistant to talk to and it’ll talk back to me. How do I put that on a phone? So I started thinking about how to add it to a phone system. Then I found one and I basically said to it, right, you are an IT expert working for PCW solutions. I need you to diagnose a problem and email me a ticket ’cause I can’t do the API integration, all that. But I just wanted to see what it could. So I said to, you’re gonna repair problem. You’re gonna log a ticket, find out what the problem is and email me the ticket. That’s it, really. So I called it up and I said, and she said, hi, it’s Lucy from PCW Solutions.
How can I help you? I said, oh, I’ve got printer problem. Then she turned around. She went, oh, okay. What’s the problem you’re having? I went, oh, it’s flat dead. It’s not working. She went, oh, so there’s no power went. Yeah, there’s no power. So in the thing on my command, the next thing I said was, take their details and send me an email. She went, okay, so have you tried unplugging it from the wall or can you try different power socket? I’m [00:08:00] like, I didn’t tell you to start diagnosing the fault. Like, I don’t wanna fire my staff. I just wanna make their jobs easier. And so she was starting to try too much. She was starting to she asked me what the make of the printer was, so I was like, oh, that’s handy.
Finding out the make of the printer. Then she was talking about unplugging it and plugging it back in again to check the power and all of this. I thought, okay, I’m starting to see how it can work, but I don’t know how to do all the development stuff. So then I’ve got developers involved. we ended up paying quite a bit.
It was like nine or 10 grand. but now what the I AI system can do is incredible. And, and during the development process, one of the things they said was, right, we are ready. We believe the system’s ready. Can you put it live? Can you test it to your customers? And we found the biggest problem with the AI phone system was humans. humans. were the biggest problem. and so basically, the problem with humans is when they hear a phone system, they automatically think it’s [00:09:00] dumb. it’s just a, some push, one for this, two for that, blah, blah, blah. they don’t realize how much potential she has, how much she can do, and the system we’ve installed now is so advanced. She can even fix customers that say things wrong. So customers are giving something wrong, as in I literally heard the call myself and heard the customer give his email address wrong. She told him it correctly. She corrected him. Yeah, it is really smart. ’cause what we had at the beginning was people ringing in hearing that it was not a real person.
So don’t wanna speak to an agent. I wanna speak to somebody in support trying to bypass the solution. And then I think once they realized they weren’t going to get anywhere with that and they were just being, she was saying, oh, okay, well I’ll log a ticket for you and like, really enforcing that. No, this is the process that we’re following now. Are you an existing customer? Are you a new prospect? And then directing them down the appropriate channel, it meant that [00:10:00] we are not well, well the boys aren’t even wasting time with. Sales calls coming in anymore ’cause it’ll just go through to a different part of the system. So it is been really good, isn’t it? Well, the amount has changed since then. So now the, one of the problems we found is the worst part is. Taking down customer’s details ’cause that’s long-winded. So the last thing I wanted, I didn’t want a system where every time someone calls up, they’ve gotta give their name, their email address and phone number.
’cause no one wants that. They’re already a customer. I should know that already. So we basically said to her, if someone calls in on a mobile. Look up their details in our CRM system. And if you find them, tell them, yes, you’re an, I found you, you’re an existing customer, Alex, how can I help? What’s the problem you’re having?
And it would actually say their name, back to ’em again. But then one problem we came across is that a lot of customers, they work for companies and they have landline numbers. So if they called on a landline number, you can’t exactly say, hi Alex. ’cause it could be anyone in the company. [00:11:00] So then we had to think of, so I told the system, only look up the number if it’s a mobile number. And I didn’t quite realize how many people call on landlines. So nearly every other call was, can I have your name, your email address, and your phone number? And customers hated it. And so in the end, we told her if they called on a landline, the first question is, what’s your mobile number? And then when they give their mobile number, she looks up their details, even if they called on a landline number and says, oh, I found you, Alex. what’s the problem you’re having today?
Adam: Okay. Got.
Alex: And so she does that
Adam: So can I just, go back a little step and then we’ll dig into this a bit more. So there’s a bit of, in terms of creating this, you, we,you’ve got an existing PSA system. Yeah.
Alex: yes.
Adam: And, there’s some commercial ai,VoIP solution or agent, or.
Alex: Solution. So there’s multiple levels, sis, there’s about. 1, 2, 3, 4 parts to make it work.
Adam: So four [00:12:00] commercial pieces of
Alex: applications To make it work.
Adam: plus some human dexterity and skill
To
join these
Alex: get it all to work.
Adam: to create your solution.
Alex: Yes. And it took about a month and a half to do it,
Adam: Who, found the applications? Was that you or was that your developers or A bit of both.
Alex: so I found. Actually I found the main application, but I think it was, I watched some YouTube videos and things like that. That’s what gave me the idea. So I found our PSA is obviously one application. I found, the voice application and then the voice application worked really well with this phone provider.
So then I contacted the phone provider and our current phone system literally just diverts to them. and then the developers told us about, the fourth part to send the text messages and things like that.
Adam: And did you use AI in order to help you find these apps and work these out as well? You
Alex: no. So we used the developers to give us the advice on what to do. If you knew that chat. [00:13:00] GPT would’ve given them the answers, I’m sure we would’ve done that as well. Yeah. Save myself eight ground. Yeah.
Adam: So in essence, your solution is a replacement for, well, part of the replacement of a dispatcher, isn’t it?
Alex: Well, it can. So the next thing I was gonna get to, I’ll get to it later on, but one of the next things we’re planning on doing is having it make outbound calls, not marketing one, because that’s
illegal.
Adam: sure. But, but this is, you know, part of what you’ve just been talking about that, you know, the dealing with the interruption to engineers, which is making them less productive, right?
Because they don’t like to be interrupted. they’re deeply trying to fix some problem and then, hang on a second, they’ve gotta switch what they’re doing and start to, you know, speak to a client.
So, So, you know, that’s traditionally part of the value of a dispatcher, right? To provide that role and let engineers just be, and, certainly makes a lot of sense that specific, use case. and, oh, I’ve just forgotten what I was gonna say. but what,you talked about, you know, rolling it out to your clients.[00:14:00]
How there was a little bit of pushback there naturally,and clearly a little bit of concern potentially around, actually, do you know what? I don’t wanna talk to a robot. I just wanna talk to a human. That’s why I’m using you guys in the first place kind of thing. for me, these things solve themselves once they see the value of it, right?
So once they could see, actually, do you know what? My ticket gets closed quicker because these guys are now more efficient. I get it and I’m gonna have to give my mobile. And then do you know what they want to, they wanna take a few details and I know, and then I can email sent back within minutes telling me my ticket’s logged.
Right. And that’s, and is that kind of what you’re seeing there?
Alex: Yeah, so what we ended up doing to solve the biggest problem, which was people not wanting to give their details, was we sent an email to all our customers basically saying, we are launching a new AI phone system. If you click this form. And update your contact details. just your name, email address, and phone number. You’ll update it in our CRM and you’re done. You’re set up, you’re ready to go. so we send that out to our customers. [00:15:00] Any, we’ve had a couple of, the customers that try it, the customers that actually follow through and follow what she’s saying, love it. They think it’s brilliant. you know, the way she, do you know what’s funny?
Even I tested my staff. I played them a phone call. I said to my staff, what was that customer’s problem? And the staff turned around, they told me what the problem was. I went, no, you got it wrong. And the AI got it right. You know? And so what happened? So I’ll give you an example of a phone call. So someone will, someone called in and, they, for example, their number wasn’t registered. So, the person said, oh, my name’s a Alex, and my email address is alex.gmail.com. Yeah, you heard that right? It was gmail.com. He read it out wrong and she turned around and I looked at the transcription. She definitely heard that dot. She turned around and went, okay, so it’s alex@gmail.com. So she got it right even though he said it wrong. and then, another example was, he said his name was like [00:16:00] alex@gmailuk.com and she repeated it as gmail.com. She didn’t quite say the UK bit correctly. Then when he repeated his email address back at her, he went@gmail.com. He didn’t say the beginning bit. He just went@gmail.com. gmail uk.com, sorry. And she turned around and went, okay, so it’s alex@gmailuk.com. So she knew to put the two together. You know, she’s really clever and, I know you’re gonna tell me, I’m talking about it like human. no. I was just gonna, I was just gonna say, have we still got her using Sun’s voice? Yeah.
She’s now using Sun’s Voice now, we cloned one of our manager’s voices as well. and so basically, when she logs a ticket, now what happens is someone will call in, they’ll give their mobile number. She’ll say, how can I help you? They’ll say, oh, for example, I’ve got a printer problem. The printer’s, printing black lines.
I don’t know what to do. You know, I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried changing the cartridge, and they’ll blabber on for like a minute and a half and then she’ll go, okay, so you’ve got a printer problem where the printer’s, printing black lines in your print and you need that [00:17:00] fixed and you try changing the cartridge and that hasn’t worked. It’s like, yeah, she just summed up your two minute bit in 10 seconds and she’ll go. Is there anything else you wanna add to this ticket? You can say stuff like, oh yeah, can you call me after three o’clock in the afternoon? She’ll say, okay, so I’ve locked a ticket, with the printer problem, and we’ll call you after three o’clock in the afternoon. this is your ticket number and you’ll receive a text and an email with this ticket number, and then she goes and texts you the ticket number and she goes and emails you the ticket number as well. If it’s a, a ticket for a new member of staff, or you are getting rid of a member of staff, she will then also email you a form to fill in to fill out all the details We need to create a new member of staff.
Adam: Yeah. That’s cool. That’s very cool. That’s very cool. and is this, for all, inbound calls? So a sales call, a client account call.
Alex: We do. If it’s sales, it comes through to us, but if we don’t answer it quick enough, it goes through to her. And once
again, with
Adam: that’s an
Alex: say, yeah.
Adam: overflow. That’s an overflow [00:18:00] facility. Okay.
Alex: Yeah, but she’ll say, are you an existing customer? They’ll say, no, we’re, I’m a new customer. She’ll take their details and then she’ll say, it is great to have you looking around and looking at coming on board with us.
We’re, we are always excited to take on new customers. what I can do is I can organize a sales rep to give you a call back, either Dani or Alex, what day or time would work for you, and then they give the day or time, and then it checks Dani’s calendar and it says, I can get you in for two o’clock on Wednesday, if that’s okay. And it books it, it sends a calendar invite out to Dani and to the new prospect.
Adam: Wow.
Alex: and then if you call in with an existing ticket, she’ll say, have you got an existing ticket? You say, yes. You take, give the ticket number. She’ll say, oh, I can see Ben is currently working on this. would you either like to leave a message to add to the ticket or do you want me to pass you through to Ben now and then she’ll pass the call over to
Adam: Okay, so there’s a lot of moving parts here. There’s a telephone system piece and there’s like what?
Alex: The text message
Adam: Text message system and then like two other kind of AI software agents [00:19:00] in the mix as well.
Alex: Yes.
Adam: a lot of
plus some API connectivity and
Alex: Yeah. To our PSA
Adam: yeah. Into your PSA, yeah. No. Fascinating. Sounds like 10 K was a great investment on that one.
Alex: Well, we do have to pay per minute, but it works out about 10 p.
Yeah. yeah. Okay. next, what we’re planning on rolling out next, although we are, we’re not there yet, we are looking at it. Once we get her fully implemented on the inbound, the next will be on the outbound. what we’re planning on doing is if a ticket’s been open for more than three days, she will call the customer and she will say to a customer, is this ticket now resolved or is there something wrong that you’d like to add to the ticket?
’cause I’d like to close the ticket. And you can say, yeah, the ticket’s all resolved. And she will then go and close the ticket
for us.
Adam: That’s next stage.
Yeah, that’s good. so have you researched whether anybody’s actually providing a turnkey solution for this? Because if
not, they should be,
Alex: yeah, I was looking there isn’t one,
Adam: no. well, every, anybody listening to this podcast, you [00:20:00] might wanna go away and.
Alex: especially if using Halo because that
a lot
Adam: Well, you know, you might wanna go away and create a commercial, product for this because it’s obvious, isn’t it? It makes complete sense.
Alex: Definitely one of my philosophies has always been before we launch any product to the customer, like when we started selling VoIP to the customer, but we started, we don’t just resell someone else’s service, we do it ourselves. We host a platform ourselves. My view has always been on any new product. Try it for myself for a
year first. That’s what I did with VoIP and that’s what I’m currently doing with ai. You know, we’re trying it
out to our customers first.
Adam: okay. And so is this something that, you would implement with a customer if they’re interested? If they had a similar kind of call center kind of service desk, whatever it might be, type of functionality need.
Alex: Yes. We are looking into it. We are looking at how much, now we’ve built one, how much they, we could build a
second one for, and a third one for.
Adam: I’m guessing also then this has extended the AI conversation you’re now having with clients. So [00:21:00] you are now going to your clients, having implemented a, highly efficient use case, you know, solution. and so. You are,you know, you haven’t just researched it. you’ve actually implemented something and you’ve implemented something successfully.
So that’s a great position to have now, to be talking to your clients around, you know, how they might be using ai. And it’s certainly great from a positioning perspective. I mean, what are you hearing with these conversations now? Are you hearing, the, because you are, you know, you can demonstrate this sort of, expertise around this that they are, Seeing it more positively, you know, more willing to have those conversations? Or is there any kind of pushback or.
Alex: I think the biggest. Pushback is the cost. It is a big upfront cost. and I think that the, from my point of view, the only reason I went into doing it is because I’m already pushed to my max with my current staff. You know, if I had staff that were twiddling their thumbs, then I wouldn’t have gone and spent eight, eight grand or 10 grand on a phone system [00:22:00] because I’m already paying my staff to be here.
As I said, my whole aim of this wasn’t to get rid of staff. It was to get more money out of my staff. and so basically, I think when customers start getting pushed to the limit, that’s when they’re gonna start looking at ai. Yeah, I think it will only with, specifically with the telephone solution as well, it will only benefit certain types of business where they’ve got a high level of inbound calls. obviously if it’s not a business that’s doing that, then there’s not really gonna be much interest in it. But I think what it has demonstrated is that as a an MSP. We’re prepared to think outside the box and look for solutions, not just for ourselves, but with other things we’ve implemented for customers, that if you’ve got a problem, come to us with it and we’ll try and figure out a solution for you.
So we are not just your typical MSP, we’re actually creating a bit of a roadmap to automate somebody’s business as well. Yeah.
Adam: Yeah. No, I just think, you [00:23:00] know, it’s great to have a story behind an AI conversation when you’re talking to your clients. You know, you are, you wanna be leading that conversation,and you want them to think of you as, well, you know what, these guys have at least some clue about what this thing is and where it’s going.
You know, a from a security perspective, but also from an efficiency and, you know, and growth perspective. So,
Alex: the good thing is that when, you, what’s the word when you call up the ai, if you are, for example, she knows the context. And so if you call up saying, oh, I’m needing to ask for a new computer. I’ve got a new member of staff starting and I need a new computer. She’ll say, do you have any specifics for the computer you want?
Do you need it to have a 14 inch screen? what size screen do you want? What processor do you want? She’ll ask these questions to the customer, so she understands the context as well.
Adam: Absolutely.
Alex: And then she submits it as a change request, not a problem. So she then, if they ask for a new computer, they don’t submit it as a problem, they submit it as a change request.
Adam: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. we need to, [00:24:00] start to wrap up the call. I’m interested to know what your wider thoughts are now around the future of AI within an MSP context. and, you know, where do you think we might be in a couple of years time? You know, what,how might things look like?
Alex: I feel that, There. AI has a great place in the MSP workplace for basic level jobs, basic level work. I don’t think it’ll ever replace project work and things like that, but when a customer submits a ticket for, I wanna reset my password, or I wanna add a new user, AI could easily take over those jobs. What, like level one sort? Yeah, level one stuff. Yeah. And I think the problem you’ve got is you’ve got a, like we contacted the company that are looking into or doing that already looking at ai, and they came back with a quote and I was just like, that’s ridiculous. You know, the price was just far too high. And the problem you’ve got is when they priced [00:25:00] us. They’re pricing us based on how much time they’re saving the cus how much time they’re saving. My staff, they literally brought up an Excel spreadsheet and said, how long does it take you to do this? How long does it take you to do that? And they’re basing it on UK staff wages.
As I said, a lot of companies now are looking abroad, you know, and I think the ai, the biggest problem with abroad is the accent. That’s the reality of it. People don’t like talking abroad. Now, if my AI phone system can answer the, call my and take the ticket, or they log a ticket via email. I get someone abroad to fix the ticket, and obviously I’ve gotta make sure security’s all there and everything.
I can talk about that in a different time, but my cost is a lot lower. And so if the AI is costing me one and a half grand a month. The amount of work it’s doing is one member of staff’s work where in the uk. That makes sense. Just about abroad, we’re talking what, maybe 300, 400 pound wage. it don’t make sense.
I might as well hire a member of staff to do it. I think look, looking into how, ’cause I’ve worked in process [00:26:00] automation before, which obviously uses a lot of ai. To look at processes and streamlining that. So normally they would be two separate companies or two separate businesses that would do that.
But with what Alex is doing, showing people that we’ve already implemented AI here, I think it would give. Customers, the confidence that if they had a problem, they wouldn’t typically come to us with as well. They might broach that idea with us now. Say, well look, our accounts payable team have got loads and loads of invoices that they just can’t get sorted. Is there a solution using AI that you could help us with? Well, that brings extra project work to the business. So I think it just opens up a whole new conversation. Because we’ve even automated our billing now as well. You know, our billing system goes off to our, where we buy our Microsoft licenses for, automates all of the Microsoft licenses, automates how many computers they’ve got, automates all their phone calls that they make on the VoIP system.
So all our billing is automated as well now. So at the end of [00:27:00] the month, we don’t really have to do any billing, it just does it all
by itself
Adam: Sure. Sure,
Alex: because that used to take me like eight hours. Me and my manager, Sunni, it used to take us about eight hours at the end of the month.
Adam: Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. That’s critical to have that efficient. sounds really good. Sounds look, sounds like you’re doing some great stuff there. and I know there’s some other developments as well that we’d like to talk about probably on a future show, because that’s exciting as well.
And, I’m sure, and you’re happy to take some, so if any, anybody else is interested out there, Alex, you’re ha happy to have some conversations with others if
Alex: yeah, of course.
Adam: so I’ll make sure the details, contact details that on, on, on the, show notes here. and, yeah, really interesting, you know, and really exciting to just sort of unravel what’s going on here.
hopefully we can spend more time on the golf course and less time in the office.
Alex: Yeah,
well
Adam: Maybe wear a cap. I’ll wear a cap though next time.
What did you say? I looked like Dani looked like that lady in the wheelchair off Benidorm. Yeah. Thanks.
Alex: Very complimentary
today.
Adam: she’s [00:28:00] very, look, it’s been a pleasure, Alex and Dani. and, we’ll speak to you very soon.