There has been more noise about AI in the last two years than almost any other subject in business technology, and most of it has not been particularly useful if you run a ten- or twenty-person business in central London and need to decide where a few thousand pounds of subscription budget should go. So below is a short list of the tools we have seen pay back across our client base in recruitment, schools, accounting and professional services over the last twelve months, with the costs as they stand, and with the bits the vendors tend to leave off their homepages.
For context, the British Chambers of Commerce published research with Atos in March showing that 54% of UK SMEs now use AI in some form, up from 35% the year before, 25% in 2024 and 23% in 2023. The same research found that 95% of those firms had seen no change in their workforce size over the year. AI for small businesses in the UK is moving fast, then, but the doomier version of the story has not landed in most businesses yet.
Microsoft Copilot Business
If you are already running Microsoft 365, Copilot is usually the first AI conversation you will have. The version aimed at small and medium businesses is currently £13.80 per user per month on annual billing under a promotional rate Microsoft has extended to 31 December 2026. The standard list price is £16.10. It works inside Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams and PowerPoint; runs on top of your existing Microsoft 365 licence; and is capped at 300 users, so it is sized for the businesses we typically work with.
The use cases range from summarising a Teams call you missed, writing a first draft of an email you have been avoiding, or pulling a presentation together from a Word document you wrote a few weeks ago, in line with what Microsoft has published and what we have seen ourselves.
What does not get said often enough is that Copilot is reading from your existing SharePoint and OneDrive, and if those are a mess (which most are), it will surface old policies, abandoned drafts and forgotten subfolders with the same confidence as anything else. We have watched it cheerfully quote a contract template that had not been used in two years. So before you roll Copilot out across the business, run a small pilot with five to ten of your heaviest writers, give it three months, and then decide.
Xero and the AI you have already paid for
Some of the most useful AI in your business this year is already inside the software you pay for, because most vendors have been adding AI features into standard subscriptions over the last twelve months without making a great deal of noise about it.
Xero is the clearest example. From March, all UK Business edition customers got AI-powered receipt capture and bill extraction included as standard, at no additional cost. Photograph a receipt with your phone, or forward a supplier PDF to a Xero email address, and the data lands in the right place. There is a more ambitious assistant sitting above that called Just Ask Xero, which handles reconciliations and will answer natural-language questions about cash flow.
For a lot of our clients, this has been the AI that saved time this year, particularly for whoever runs the bookkeeping. The wider point is to look at the subscriptions you already have. Sage, HubSpot, Microsoft Bookings, your HR platform. Most of them have added meaningful AI features in the last year, and in most businesses nobody has switched them on.
ChatGPT Business
If you have people whose main job involves writing (marketing, sales, HR, bid responses, client communications), then a paid chat tool is usually worth the seats. ChatGPT Business is $20 per user per month on annual billing (roughly £16 at current rates, or $25 on monthly billing), with a minimum of two seats. OpenAI’s Business terms commit in writing that workspace conversations are not used to train their models.
The usefulness shows up in unglamorous places. One of our clients uses it to summarise long supplier contracts before signing them. Another runs first drafts of board reports through it and then edits properly. A third uses it for rewriting job specs that came out too formal the first time round. A two-hour writing job will often turn into a twenty-minute editing job.
The setup work that needs to happen first is governance, rather than the tool itself. Decide what your team can and cannot paste in before you hand out seats: client commercial terms, payroll details, anything personal, and anything covered by NDA. Most of the data incidents we have seen with these tools come from somebody pasting something they should not have, rather than from anything the platform did.
Zapier
The last one sits a little apart from the others because it is less about generating content and more about wiring your existing tools together so that information moves between them without anyone copying and pasting. Zapier bills in US dollars regardless of where you sign up, and the Professional plan starts at $19.99 per user per month on annual billing (roughly £16), or $29.99 on monthly billing.
In a business of fifteen people, a surprising amount of daily time loss comes from the same piece of information being moved by hand from one system to another. A new website enquiry needs to go into the CRM, onto the email list, into a Slack channel, and onto somebody’s calendar. Zapier strings those handovers together so nobody has to do them.
Be realistic though. Somebody in the business has to spend a few hours setting workflows up and tinkering with them until they work properly. If you do not have that person, Zapier will sit unused alongside everything else.
What we keep telling clients
The businesses we know that have got proper value out of AI this year have all done broadly the same thing. They picked one tool, gave somebody internal the explicit job of making it work, and held their nerve for three months while it bedded in. The frustrated ones have usually bought two or three tools at once and never given any of them long enough to settle.
AI, Unlocked is happening on Thursday 24 September at South Place Hotel, London, where our AI expert speaker, Sydney, will walk through specific case studies and numbers from real businesses. Doors open at 4pm, the talk runs from 4:30 to 5:15, and there’s networking with drinks until 7:30. Full details and registration are on the event page.
If you can’t make it on the day, or would rather talk it through one to one, book a call with our team and let’s start making sense of it.
