AI is moving quickly, and for businesses deciding when and how to adopt it, waiting for the technology to settle may no longer be the best approach.
Jamie Watts, Managing Director at Mysoft, shares how Mysoft is already using AI across the business, where customers are beginning to see value and the four practical steps organisations can take to start exploring AI responsibly.
His advice for businesses considering where to begin is simple: start now.
A Changinag Market
Putting AI to work across the business.
At Mysoft, AI is already being used across a range of teams and processes.
In pre-sales, it can support discovery and scoping. Within marketing, it is helping with content production. During delivery, AI can support minute taking, identify actions from discovery sessions and accelerate the production of specifications. Within support, it can help teams analyse complex datasets and problems.
The value isn’t simply in completing individual tasks faster. Jamie highlights three areas where Mysoft is seeing a wider impact: speed, consistency and pace of innovation.
Information from meetings and discovery sessions can be turned into minutes, actions and follow-up notes much faster. Outputs can be delivered to a more consistent standard across different teams, while new ideas can be explored and prototyped with less upfront investment.
AI for Sage Customers
Innovation across the Sage ecosystem.
Customers are also beginning to experience AI through the technology they use every day.
Both Sage X3 and Sage Intacct are introducing AI capabilities, from insights to Copilot and other assistive features, while solutions across the wider Sage ecosystem are developing their own AI functionality.
Jamie highlights Nectari as one example, where natural language capabilities can support dashboard development.
It reflects how quickly the technology landscape is evolving. New capabilities are appearing across the Sage ecosystem, creating more opportunities for organisations to explore where AI could improve the way their people work.
Getting Started
Four steps for adopting AI.
For Jamie, businesses shouldn’t wait for AI to stop changing before they begin exploring it.
His advice is straightforward: “The future is already here. It’s a great time to adopt.”
But starting now doesn’t mean introducing AI everywhere at once. Jamie identifies four areas that can help organisations take a more considered approach:
01
Establish the rules of the road.
Governance and frameworks should come first.
Businesses need a clear policy around what employees can and cannot do with AI. That includes establishing appropriate boundaries, understanding where particular tools can be used and ensuring people know the rules before AI becomes embedded within everyday work.
02
Learn in a low-risk environment.
Before applying AI to important business processes, people need an opportunity to understand how the technology behaves.
Jamie suggests experimenting with AI personally or through low-risk projects. The objective is to become familiar with the technology, learn how to communicate with it effectively and understand its limitations before applying those lessons to business-critical work.
03
Give it a real problem
Once those foundations are in place, the next step is to apply AI to a meaningful challenge. Large data migrations, data cleansing exercises and complex datasets are examples where AI could help tackle work that would otherwise require significant human time.
This stage is also where businesses begin learning how to evaluate AI-generated outputs properly. How do you determine the quality of the data? How do you sense-check an answer? How do you know whether the output can be trusted? These are important skills to develop, but Jamie’s advice is equally clear:
Don’t begin by experimenting in a live production environment.
04
Iterate, iterate, iterate.
AI adoption isn’t a one-off project.
The tools will continue to change, as will the ways organisations use them. Businesses therefore need to continually reassess the technology available, how it is being used and whether their people have the right skills and support.
Continuous improvement becomes part of the AI strategy itself.
BUSINESS IMPACT
Speed, consistency and the pace of innovation.
One of the most significant opportunities AI creates is the ability to test and develop ideas faster.
For Mysoft, that means being able to ideate, prototype and explore new concepts with less investment required from both Mysoft and the customer before deciding whether an idea is worth taking further.
That changes the economics of innovation.
Ideas that may previously have required significant time and resource to investigate can potentially be explored much earlier. Businesses can learn faster, make decisions sooner and continually improve what they are doing.
For Jamie, this pace is one of the most exciting aspects of AI.
LOOKING AHEAD
The biggest change could be the pace of change itself.
Predicting exactly what AI will look like several years from now is difficult, and that is precisely what makes the current period so significant.
Sage continues to develop its AI roadmap across its product portfolio, while the wider technology landscape is advancing at an extraordinary rate.
As Jamie explains, capabilities that would have been difficult to imagine only two years ago are already available today.
For business leaders, the takeaway isn’t that every organisation needs to implement every new AI capability. It’s that organisations need to start building the governance, experience and skills that will allow them to respond as those capabilities develop.
Starting now doesn’t mean having all the answers. It means putting the foundations in place, experimenting responsibly and developing the ability to recognise where AI can genuinely create value.
Because if the next two years move anything like the last two, the organisations already learning how to use AI will be better positioned to take advantage of what comes next.
HEAR FROM JAMIE
Watch the Full Conversation.
Hear directly from Jamie Watts, Managing Director at Mysoft, as he discusses how Mysoft is using AI today, the benefits being seen across the Sage ecosystem and his four practical steps for businesses looking to start their own AI journey.