Most SaaS vendors have made the pivot to be an AI powered SaaS service. If you’re already on the platform, it’s usually fine. The improvements are welcome. It’s not too often the AI addition is getting in the road of how it’s already being used.
Naturally Ohnyx has been on the journey with Microsoft’s Copilot. Looking at 2025 as a whole Copilot has shown improvement. The quality is inconsistent, but pull in files to generate summaries, cross analysis from within OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint is quite handy.
Enterprise level organizations – the government, banks etc – benefit from AI. A 1-2% improvement across 1000’s of people is a decent gain. A PwC report showed revenue per employee jumped 27% in AI exposed industries between 2018 to 2024. This is a measurement of large enterprise.
It’s a different story at the small business level. The government has some 200+ AI use cases now. A small business won’t find it’s ROI through scale like enterprise. And over investing in AI can show a negative return, such as 8 disconnected AI tools which adds to training overhead, administration, subscription creep, and context switching. Think instead about a well integrated system, driving and supporting every day workflows. Handling document intake, extracting data, drafting reports, and then pinging clients or staff with an update.
An example might be a broker converts their existing client list into a database. An AI agent monitors renewal dates and triggers a workflow a month or two out. Pulls the clients policy terms, updates against market rates, drafts a comparison report highlight key points, and sends it to the broker. A small business may find the scale benefits this way through allowing the policy per broker ratio to increase.
Most of what was just described is automation. The AI part kicks in for pattern recognition, drafting, summarising. Tasks which previously needed a human in the loop. Anyone on Microsoft 365 already has the backbones for automation available to them.
If you’re an owner or manager feeling pressure to explore AI, it’s normal to feel unsure about where it actually fits in amongst the marketing hype. The use cases and statistics are often enterprise scale, and the practical path for a 10-20 person business isn’t obvious.
Start with the workflows that already frustrate you. The ones with manual steps, repeated tasks, or information that sits in someone’s head until they remember to act on it. That’s where automation pays off. AI just makes it possible to include steps that used to need a person, such as reading a document, drafting a summary, reporting back with data, spotting what’s changed.
You know when AI is working when it’s taken stuff off your plate.
Citation
The main PwC AI Jobs Barometer page: https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/artificial-intelligence/ai-jobs-barometer.html
The full 2025 report PDF: https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/artificial-intelligence/job-barometer/2025/report.pdf
The press release with the 27% stat: https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2025/ai-linked-to-a-fourfold-increase-in-productivity-growth.html
