How organisations are turning AI into business value

Valto is a dedicated Microsoft partner and a Microsoft specialist. Right from the very beginning, we almost sort of considered ourselves a frontier firm. We were helping customers do more through modern workplace, data and AI, cloud and Azure. The partnership with Ingram is vital in creating that Microsoft marketplace so we can actually deliver the Microsoft technology and the Microsoft products to our end customers.

We work closely with Ingram on shaping the digital landscape. This could be anything from helping SMBs adopt the latest security products, to unlocking vital Microsoft funding to enable our customers to engage in AI workshops and Microsoft MCI engagements.

Although we’re an established Microsoft partner and we have a relationship with Microsoft, Ingram also broadens that bridge to Microsoft, if you like, making things a lot easier. Working with Ingram directly really helps us unlock all of the latest features from Microsoft.

We’ve always been helping customers get the maximum capabilities and value from their Microsoft investments. Customers are realising that if you’re not keeping up with AI technology, you’re falling behind. It’s all about helping organisations retain human intelligence while working alongside AI to make improvements across the business.

Dave Buckley:
Like everyone, when AI first emerged, we were using it for mundane administrative tasks such as sorting emails and similar activities. But as we’ve delved deeper into AI, we’ve been using it to streamline internal processes.

AI has taken tasks that might previously have occupied someone for half a day or even a full day and can now complete them almost entirely autonomously within minutes. That removes a significant amount of administration and allows us to focus on more technical work and solving real business problems for clients.

Rob Thomas:
One example of AI technology we created for a customer was in the hospitality sector. They sold a lot of their services through third-party platforms such as Booking.com and similar websites.

We trained AI models using their data, enabling the solution to calculate commissions from hospitality bookings automatically. This saved their finance team tens of hours each month that would otherwise have been spent on reconciliation work.

We also trained the model on invoice data, allowing commissions to be calculated as invoices arrived rather than having to process everything in large batches at the end of the month.

Another example is in financial services. We developed AI agents that gather information from various external sources to support loan application processing. A task that would traditionally take an administrative team several days can now be completed in an hour or two.

Because the information is gathered much more quickly, the data is more up to date, which improves the accuracy of applications. All of this is powered by AI agents and models we’ve built.

Dave Buckley:
We use AI strategically for clients in a number of different ways. The first thing we look to do is identify the low-hanging fruit, focusing on mundane or repetitive administrative tasks that can be automated quickly.

Once that’s achieved, clients immediately start to see the wider potential of AI to streamline operations across the organisation.

The next area I typically look at is how conversations can become the tooling. It’s something I’ve been discussing a lot recently. For example, organisations already record meetings and generate AI summaries, but someone still needs to manually transfer actions into a CRM or another system.

If that meeting summary already exists, why couldn’t an AI agent identify the actions automatically, complete the required follow-up activities and update the relevant third-party platforms and CRM systems without requiring manual intervention?

Rob Thomas:
Looking ahead, I think the next three months will be incredibly busy as demand for AI continues to increase. Over time, many of these projects will evolve into ongoing managed services.

We’re already looking at launching managed services that help customers govern AI agents, manage data and maintain oversight at scale. In the future, organisations may have more AI agents than user accounts.

That means there will be exponential growth in the number of identities accessing business data, making governance and oversight increasingly important.

I believe that long-term management of AI agents, governance and data will become a significant managed service offering for organisations, and that’s ultimately where I see the market heading.