Digital Planning delivered an ‘AI in Action’ workshop to show how AI can be used to cut workloads in repeated processes while keeping humans in control.
Digital Planning moved to the Advanced Technology Innovation Centre in 2025 to work at the centre of the region’s innovation landscape.
The AI workshop, run by Chief Technology Officer Robbie Lewis, for ATIC tenants at Loughborough University, focused on defining the business problem before using AI to draft and structure work to improve productivity.
The workshop builds on Digital Planning’s latest research into why tech projects stall.
As an accredited Zoho partner, Digital Planning demonstrated how a free Zoho Desk account can support repetitive CRM enquiries.
Zoho is a cloud-based suite of business software – essentially a big toolkit of apps you can use to run most parts of a company from one system.
For CRM enquiries, the AI workflow used generates draft replies for every new customer ticket, reducing response times but receiving final human review before sending.
A second demonstration showed how meeting‑capture tools and Model Context Protocol (MCP), a public source that connects AI agents securely to other systems, can turn a short discovery call plus a brief into a structured proposal in under an hour, highlighting the contradictions and decisions needed for the client.
Managing Director Mark Underwood said: “We ran this workshop so business leaders could walk away understanding how to set up at least one safe automation for a workflow they already manage.”
Key takeaways for SMEs investing in AI
The workshop explained how to use AI for low-risk workflows by:
- Framing AI investments around specific problems.
- Building a basic knowledge base to improve AI output.
- Designing prompts that describe your business.
An AI-first approach allows AI to handle repeated jobs while employees stay accountable for final outputs and gain extra time to focus expertise elsewhere.
Throughout the session Robbie underlined the importance of safe AI usage. He advised leaders to understand where data is stored and check how vendors process information before scaling AI.
Data protection and vendor reviews are supported by ISO 27001, which sets out systematic information security management, and by the emerging ISO 42001 standard for auditable AI management systems that log agent decisions.
Digital Planning already holds ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 and is one of the first to work towards ISO 42001.
