Insights
Practical AI for Midlands SMEs
Written for firms of twenty to fifty people — manufacturers, engineers and technical businesses across the East and West Midlands. No transformation programmes, no enterprise budgets.
- Manufacturing
AI on the shop floor: where it earns its keep
Three applications that genuinely pay in a smaller factory, and the honest prerequisites for each.
- Resourcing
Do you need to hire someone for AI? Almost certainly not yet
A full-time AI hire in a 30-person firm is usually the most expensive way to answer a question you have not asked yet.
- Operations
Handling enquiries with AI without sounding like everyone else
The chatbot is the obvious answer and usually the wrong one. What to do instead.
- People
The hardest part of AI in a family firm is not the technology
Thirty years of undocumented knowledge is an asset and an obstacle at once. How to handle both honestly.
- Delivery
Why most SME AI pilots quietly die
They do not get cancelled. They just stop being mentioned. Five structural reasons, and the fix for each.
- Data
Your ERP has been collecting evidence for nine years
The answer to "our system is too old" is usually no, and a migration is the most expensive way to avoid a reporting problem.
- Compliance
The EU AI Act applies to you even though we left the EU
Transparency duties are already live. High-risk obligations land in December 2027. Brexit changes none of it.
- Governance
Your staff are already using AI. You just cannot see it.
Banning it does not work and never has. What a workable one-page AI policy contains.
- Operations
Quoting is the most expensive thing your engineers do badly
The highest-value AI application in most engineering SMEs, and the one most likely to be done badly.
- Investment case
How to work out whether an AI project will pay for itself
Most AI business cases fail because they count the licence and forget the change. Here is the arithmetic that actually holds up.
- Getting started
Where to start with AI in a 20-person business
Not a strategy document. A 90-day sequence that ends with one working thing and evidence of whether it paid.
- Funding
Made Smarter: the £20,000 most Midlands manufacturers never claim
Up to 50% match funding to a £20,000 cap, fully funded leadership training and free digital internships — and a deadline of March 2027.