Why should we pay for an assessment when everyone else does one free?
Because a free assessment is a sales meeting wearing a costume, and it's priced accordingly. Ours takes ten working days of real technical work — tenant review, permission analysis, data sampling, integration mapping — and produces a document with commercial value even if you take it to a different supplier.
The fee is credited in full against your first project, so if you go ahead it costs you nothing. If you don't, you still own a roadmap you can act on. We think that's the fairer arrangement for both sides.
We bought Copilot licences and it's underwhelming. Why?
Usually one of two reasons. Either Copilot can't reach your content — it lives on personal drives, a file server or in WhatsApp, so there's nothing for it to reason over. Or it reaches too much: Copilot respects existing permissions but makes them searchable in plain language, so years of quiet oversharing becomes visible the day you switch it on.
Microsoft ship Data Access Governance reporting and SharePoint Advanced Management for exactly this. Most businesses discover they exist only after something surfaces that shouldn't have.
Does our data have to stay in the UAE?
Not universally, but it does for several sectors and it constrains everyone. Under the UAE PDPL, cross-border transfer needs either an adequacy determination from the UAE Data Office or approved safeguards such as Standard Contractual Clauses. Electronic health data must remain in country under Federal Law No. 2 of 2019, and Central Bank standards require financial institutions to hold customer and transaction data within UAE borders.
This is an architecture question, not a paperwork question, and it's much cheaper to answer before a migration than during one.
Do we have to fix everything before we automate anything?
No, and we'd push back on anyone who told you otherwise. Some workflows — inbound phone and messaging agents in particular — can go live on a messy estate in a fortnight and start returning value immediately. Others genuinely can't be built safely until permissions and data are sorted. The whole point of the assessment is to tell you which is which before the budget is committed rather than after.
Are you a Microsoft partner or just another AI agency?
The work is Microsoft-first because that's where fifteen years of delivery experience sits: Dynamics 365, SharePoint, Power Platform, Azure and M365 migration. We build AI agents too, but on foundations we're prepared to stand behind. Plenty of firms in this market can wire up a chatbot; very few can also fix the permission model underneath it.
How big does a company need to be for this to make sense?
Roughly twenty to five hundred staff, though the real qualifier is complexity rather than headcount. If you're on Microsoft 365, have data in more than one place, and someone owns IT even part-time, the assessment will pay for itself. Under twenty staff with a single clean system, it usually won't — and we'll tell you that on the first call rather than take the fee.
What if the assessment says we're not ready?
That's a successful assessment. It means you found out for the cost of the assessment instead of the cost of a failed project, and you have a costed, prioritised plan for getting ready. Gartner expects 60% of AI projects to be abandoned through 2026 for want of AI-ready data; every one of those had a business that would have paid a great deal to know in advance.
