u/IgniteAISolutionsUK

Generic AI training at one company: 11% uptake.

A company-wide licence at an unrelated firm, different sector: 11.5% active use.

Same number twice, from opposite directions.

The cause underneath is the same. Nobody connected the tool to the job sitting in front of the person.

Training that opens with “here is what the tool can do” gets you 11%.

Training that opens with “show me the thing you did 4 times yesterday” gets people building before lunch.

What was the uptake on your last rollout, measured a month later?

An MSP gave me their working estimate from the field: 25 to 30% of Copilot licences go unused where the rollout arrived without enablement. Their number, not mine, and it matches what I walk into.

Warren Buffett put it well. "Price is what you pay. Value is what you get."

The licence is the price. The hours a person actually saves are the other half, and most businesses I meet can quote the first to the penny while having never measured the second.

Pull your licence report this week and count the seats with no activity in 30 days. That number is your real starting point.

Every engagement hits the same wall, and it is always the process mapping.

I ask someone to walk me through a task they do forty times a week. They can't do it without really thinking about it. Yet, if I said, "show me how you do this step by step". They know it inside out.

Getting it into words is the hard part. It's also the most valuable.

That is normal. You cannot see a process you are standing inside.

Here is what one looks like written down.

Quote to invoice at a small engineering fir:

Enquiry lands in a shared inbox.

Someone reads it and decides who prices it.

Prices come off a spreadsheet.

Details get rekeyed into the quote template.

Quote goes out.

Chase.

Chase again.

Job won.

details rekeyed into a job sheet.

Work happens.

Variations agreed on site.

Job sheet walks to accounts.

Someone rekeys it into the accounts package.

Invoice raised, sometimes a fortnight after the job finished.

Same customer name typed four times. Five handoffs. Five systems.

Let's say that is 90 minutes of admin per quote and you run 12 a week. At £25 an hour, 828 hours and £20,700 a year on quoting alone. Close to half a person.

That is the number people expect to see. Times this by 4-5 people in this role, your now over £100,000...

Then there is the money that never reaches an invoice. The variation agreed on site and never written down. The quote sent on day six when the customer bought on day three. The job priced off a spreadsheet last updated in March, the broken formula thats miscalculating. The hours on a job sheet nobody transferred.

On a chain that touches money, every handoff is a place where the margin falls out.

Quote to invoice is usually the first thing worth rebuilding, and it is almost never the one people nominate.

Three ways to get the map out of your head:

Dictate it. Talk through the task out loud while you are doing it, phone recording. The transcript is your first draft. Messy, and it works.

Record your screen. Move between systems the way you actually do, narrating as you go. This one catches the steps people forget to mention, and those are usually the expensive ones.

Or work through the 3-5-4 Process. I have built this into an interactive tool this week so anyone can map their own business without me in the room.

→Three signs of friction

→ five questions that map the workflow

→ four decisions about what to automate.

At the end it puts a yearly cost on the task and shows you how much of that sits in the automatable box. 45 minutes. No email needed to see your number. It runs in your browser and blocks names and contact details as you type, so nothing identifiable reaches us even by accident.

Start with the chain that touches an invoice. Count the handoffs before you count the minutes.

Link to my

App in the comments. Any Feedback is much appreciated.

REPOST if others will find this valuable

An MSP gave me their working estimate from the field: 25 to 30% of Copilot licences go unused where the rollout arrived without enablement. Their number, not mine, and it matches what I walk into.

Warren Buffett put it well. "Price is what you pay. Value is what you get."

The licence is the price. The hours a person actually saves are the other half, and most businesses I meet can quote the first to the penny while having never measured the second.

Pull your licence report this week and count the seats with no activity in 30 days. That number is your real starting point.

AI is going to change everything for my company - WRONG

Most companies think you can just drop Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini into their organisation and tell people to use it, and then everyone is going to be more productive. It's much harder than people think.

You cannot systematise what isn't mapped. So before we touch AI systems we need a single honest answer to one question for each individual person:

What does a full week of your admin actually look like right now?

Not the ideal week, the real one. Every recurring task, every one-off email fire, every thing that takes time you shouldn't be spending. Looking for information, searching for HDMI cables, answering the door to contractors. you dont think about all of this but it all eats your day.

We're talking about inplementing AI systems to fix problems, great, but they can't fix things they dont know how what your trying to fix and how you currently fix it.

You cant impliment things like Claude Cowork systems and apply to your business in undigitised (made that word up) processes that don't exist yet in the AI tool as if they're nearly there. They're not.

So here's what I want you to do. One task. Right now.

Open a new message in your preferred LLM and say:

"I want you to help me with this task that I do every day. I'm gonna walk you through it step by step as I do it, and then I want you to help me find more efficient and effective ways of doing it and how much of it you can help me with. Which means I no longer have to do it. Ask me any questions if you're unsure and need clarification"

Then brain dump every admin task you and you touch in a typical week. Don't organise it. Don't filter it. Just list it raw, you can do it in batches, paste in SOPs, dictate it, give example work whatever, be messy

That becomes the inventory.

From the inventory, you can build a prioritised systematisation plan. From that plan you can build routines that AI can help you with one at a time, in order of highest time saving first.

Sixty percent reduction in admin is absolutely achievable, but it must be built properly, not randomly.