Byte-sized AI: Something special is happening in the UK!

I’m back for another Byte-sized AI issue, and as promised here are my three things:

Something techy from the news
Something that made me laugh
Something that you can do to improve how you work

Byte-sized Ai: IT consultancy in Kent at its best

The one item of news:

UK AI is coming fast!

The UK is doing something a bit special. The global average for businesses adopting AI to some extent is around 13%. It’s 21% here, according to BearingPoint. That’s a good thing in my view, but I suppose it would be!

It’s important to note that the data is based on businesses over £500m revenue, but these things tend to disseminate quite quickly down the supply chain. And the UK has a productivity issue to grapple with. AI is not ‘the solution’, but it is part of the solution. Since the 80s our productivity growth has been slowing for various reasons, but a lack of investment in tooling and efficiency has been a big part of it. I’m feeling optimistic about the rate of adoption being a good sign for the future.

The one thing that made me laugh:

What do you desire?

In town planning, architecture and software there is a thing called ‘desire paths’. Basically people will go the way they want to go, and it’s better to plan to support that than to try and force people to go ‘the right way’.

Anyway, while preparing to explain this in a session I discovered that there is a whole Reddit all about desire paths in the real world. There’s something enjoyable about people asserting their preference over planners’ wishes!

The one thing you can do next week:

One search bar to rule them all!

In my journeys around our customer offices I’m always surprised by how little used microsoft365.com is. It’s there waiting for you, filled with wonders and delights. And a search bar!

OK, I may be overselling a search bar, but it is pretty handy.

That one search box can launch apps like Copilot, SharePoint, OneDrive, Forms… etc. It will also show you your most recently worked on files, most frequent SharePoint sites and more. And that’s before you put in a search term! Put in a person’s name and it will bring you their information:

Put in a more general term and here’s all the categories of things it will find:

That messages tab covers both Teams and Outlook, and Files gets basically everything from SharePoint, OneDrive, email attachments, Loop components (more on these next week), OneNote notebooks…

Honestly, it’s really useful and saves a lot of time otherwise spent shuffling through folder structures and so on.

If you are interested to find out how AI, automation and all things clever can help your organisation why not take a look at Future Workplace, our super special IT consultancy service that can supercharge productivity, business efficiency and so much more.