AI PRODUCTIVITY BOOST!

At my company we have seen a rise in AI initiatives being driven across different business units. Recently the IT teams were asked to come up with internal business use case ideas. Personally, I think this should be opened up to the whole organisation so that we can build a broader pool of ideas about how we actually plan to use AI to improve productivity, one of the most important and measurable metrics for the business.

I began thinking about what I could propose. Most of my work focuses on the integration side of AI, particularly how it can be embedded into the apps and tools we use every day. My aim is always to get as much value and functionality from AI as possible to support users in their day-to-day work.

I have recently been brought into a new project where our IT applications team, along with teams from other regions, has aligned on an initiative to achieve the following:

• Improve transparency of the company’s application landscape

• Ensure mandatory fields are correctly populated in application registration tools

• Support data quality, security, standardisation and harmonisation

• Reduce, clean up or consolidate applications where possible

My role in this involves using a Power BI dashboard to identify applications that are missing required information and then contacting application managers to help them make the necessary updates.

This is not a one-off activity. New applications are created and deployed every day, and if they do not meet the criteria set by the team running the initiative, they will be flagged on the report. The criteria for application registration can also change regularly, which means we often have to contact the same managers multiple times to request new information.

This is where AI comes in. I proposed an idea that, by combining a workflow tool such as Power Automate or Power Apps with an AI solution like M365 Copilot or an internal GPT model, we could automate this entire outreach process. AI can follow the rules set by the team, and when the criteria change, we simply update the AI boundaries and instructions. It can also adapt its outreach, for example by including specific information security contacts for certain business units when needed.

This solution alone could save an individual around five hours of manual outreach each week, allowing them to focus on other tasks that require more meaningful input. The effort required to build the solution would also be relatively low, especially compared to some of the more complex AI proposals being discussed across IT.

This is something I am keen to pursue, and I will make sure to share another blog post in due course with an update on how the idea progresses.


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