AI audit report
Prepared for a precision engineering firm with 38 staff. This report shows where AI is the right tool for the business, where it isn't, and what I'd do first.
Summary
Five jobs take up about 60 hours of the team's week. AI is the right tool for three of them, and together those would give back roughly 29 hours a week. For one of the three you should buy a tool you already have access to, and for two it is worth building something. One job needs a spreadsheet fix and no AI. The last is a chatbot you've been quoted for, and I'd turn it down.
Before any of that, there is a risk to close. Staff are already pasting customer drawings into free AI tools, and you have no rules covering it. That comes first in the plan.
How I judged each idea
Every idea had to pass four tests before I'd recommend spending money on it.
- The job happens often enough for the saving to matter.
- The information the AI needs already exists and can be reached.
- A person can spot a wrong answer before it causes harm.
- We can measure the result against how things work today.
How ready you are
| Area | What I found | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Data and documents | Job files are digital but spread across three shared drives | They need bringing into one place before any assistant can use them |
| Tools you already pay for | Microsoft 365, with no AI licences switched on | Copilot can be added per person, so you can test with a few users first |
| Skills | Two people use ChatGPT daily and most have never tried it | A short session on safe, useful habits would lift everyone |
| Rules | No policy, and customer drawings are being pasted into free AI tools | The biggest risk I found. Fix this first |
Where the hours go
These figures come from the team's own estimates, checked against one week of work.
| Job | Who does it | Hours a week |
|---|---|---|
| Finding tenders and quote requests, reading them, and drafting responses | Estimating | 26 |
| Searching old job files and quality records for how a part was made last time | Engineers | 14 |
| Checking material certificates against the order and drawing | Goods-in and quality | 10 |
| Building the weekly production report from three spreadsheets | Production manager | 6 |
| Answering enquiries from the website and by phone | Office | 4 |
| Total | 60 |
Where AI is the right tool
A one-page policy and a list of approved tools
People are using AI whether or not you've agreed to it. A short policy sets out which tools are approved, what must never be pasted into them, and who checks AI output before it goes to a customer. A draft written for your business is included with this report.
- Cost
- Included in the audit
- Time to put in place
- About two weeks
- How we'd measure it
- Every member of staff has read and signed it
An agent that finds and prepares tenders and quote requests
Each morning an agent checks the public tender portals and your customers' supplier portals. It picks out the work that matches your machines, materials and tolerances, and turns each opportunity into a one-page brief covering what is being asked for, the deadline and the documents required. For the bids you choose to chase, it drafts the compliance answers from your past submissions.
Safeguard: your estimators decide what to bid for and set every price. The agent never submits anything.
- Time now
- 26 hours a week
- Time after
- About 12 hours
- Fixed price to build
- £6,500
- How we'd measure it
- Estimator hours per bid, and bids sent per month
An assistant that answers from fifteen years of job files
Most "how did we make this last time" questions have an answer somewhere in your job files, drawing notes and quality records, but finding it means asking whoever has been here longest. You don't need a custom tool for this. Once the files are in one place, the Copilot add-on to the Microsoft 365 you already pay for can answer in plain English and link to the documents it used. I'd trial it with five engineers before you buy more licences.
Safeguard: your files stay inside your own Microsoft account, and every answer shows where it came from so the engineer can check it.
- Time now
- 14 hours a week
- Time after
- About 5 hours
- Cost
- £2,500 fixed for setup, plus licences
- How we'd measure it
- Twenty real past questions, timed and marked by a senior engineer
Automatic checking of material certificates
AI reads each certificate as it arrives and compares the grade, batch and test results with the purchase order and the drawing. Anything that doesn't match is flagged before the material is booked in. Because a missed mismatch is expensive, I'd run it alongside the manual check for a month before anyone relies on it.
Safeguard: quality signs off every flagged item, plus a sample of the ones that pass.
- Time now
- 10 hours a week
- Time after
- About 4 hours
- Fixed price to build
- £4,500
- How we'd measure it
- Mismatches caught on 200 certificates, against the manual check
Where AI isn't the answer
Weekly production report
This is a spreadsheet problem. Linking the three files so the report fills itself in is an afternoon's work, and I'd be wasting your money if I built an AI tool for it.
The website chatbot you've been quoted for
A supplier has offered you an AI chatbot for the website at £9,000 a year. The site brings in about four enquiries a week, and they come from buyers who want to speak to an engineer. A chatbot would get in their way, and at that volume it would never pay for itself.
The first 90 days
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| Weeks 1 to 2 | Adopt the AI rules and run a short session for staff on safe use. Start moving job files into one place. |
| Weeks 3 to 8 | Pilot the tender agent with the estimating team and measure it against today's hours. |
| Weeks 6 to 10 | Trial Copilot with five engineers on the tidied job files. |
| Weeks 9 to 12 | Run certificate checking alongside the manual check. Review all three results and decide what to keep. |
Whether the first pilot pays
The tender agent, run as a six-week experiment
We agree the measures before I build: estimator hours per bid, and the number of bids sent each month. If the agent does not bring the weekly total down from 26 hours to about 12, you will see it in the numbers.
The sum: 14 hours saved a week, at an illustrative £30 an hour, over 48 working weeks comes to about £20,160 a year. The build is a fixed £6,500. Running costs are passed on at cost, and I'd estimate them in the proposal.
Want this for your business?
The audit is a fixed £950 for teams of up to 20 people, and larger teams like this one are quoted individually. If you go ahead with a build within 30 days, the fee is credited in full.