How a professional services firm cut month-end from 2 weeks to 2 days
Month-end close
2 days
85% reduction
PM admin time
Under 2 hrs/week
80% reduction
Recovered capacity
Redeployed to growth
Identified in Tier 1 audit
Adoption spread
Company-wide
AI Champions model
The Frustration
The COO knew the finance team was drowning. Month-end close took 14 days. Three people spent their entire week compiling reports that were outdated by the time they were finished. Project managers were spending 10+ hours a week on meeting notes, action tracking, and status updates. The COO had raised AI in six consecutive leadership meetings. Each time, the response was the same: “We’re not technical enough for that.”
The Turning Point
A £1,000 AI Opportunity Audit revealed that the business was losing over £400K per year in recoverable capacity across just three departments. The board-ready business case got sign-off for the full engagement in one meeting.
The Approach
Started with the finance team — highest pain, most measurable impact. Taught them to automate data consolidation and exception flagging. Then moved to the PM team: AI-summarised meetings, auto-generated action tracking, status updates compiled in minutes instead of hours. Each department had an internal AI champion trained to keep adoption spreading.
This engagement used our AI Opportunity Audit → Embedded Partner tier.
The honest bit
The finance director insisted on checking every AI output manually for the first month. It actually slowed things down initially. But it built the trust needed for the team to let go. By month two, they’d stopped checking and started improving the workflows themselves.
The Results
Month-end close
85% reduction
PM admin time
80% reduction
Recovered capacity
Identified in Tier 1 audit
Adoption spread
AI Champions model
“We thought we weren’t technical enough. Turns out we didn’t need to be. Our people just needed someone to show them what was possible with the problems they already faced.”
Chief Operating Officer
Professional services firm, 350 employees
Why it stuck
The Tier 1 audit gave them the numbers to get internal sign-off. The embedded engagement gave their people the skills to sustain it. The AI Champions programme meant adoption spread faster than we could have pushed it.
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