On 18th June, at the very start of the UK’s first mini heatwave of the year, DeeperThanBlue hosted an in-person event at The Victoria in trendy Sheffield suburb, Neepsend.
Guest speakers Carolyn Shepherd, Duncan Payne and Mark Ketteman joined attendees to explore the exciting potential of Agentic AI in a business context, and to offer practical insights on how it can be used meaningfully and effectively. Real-world examples were shared, including Duncan Payne’s take on how AI is revolutionising movie production and dubbing, as well as thought leadership from IBM, a global pioneer in enterprise AI.
AI: A Year in Review
The event kicked off with a look back at the key developments and milestones in the AI space in 2025 so far from Stephen Birch and Chris Booker from DeeperThanBlue.
Chris observed that the AI world has progressed ‘even further and faster’ than they had envisaged, and dubbed 2025 as ‘the year of agentic.’ To demonstrate the speed at which the use of AI is growing, he pointed out that the IDC – the International Data Corporation – expects 1 billion new AI and low code applications to be developed and running by 2028.
He explained that, unlike AI assistants or generative AI, AI agents can reason, plan and execute with minimal human input. They can operate autonomously on tasks, access information on their own, and interact with other software applications including other agents. ‘Agents act more like a digital employee than a passive assistant,’ Chris continued. ‘They operate based on intent, context and longer-term memory. They will collaborate with one another and form a business process.’
While AI chatbots can be rigid and fairly narrow in scope, AI agents are pre-trained, reactive, and proactive. They are goal-orientated, adaptive and self-improving. The future will see AI agents helping with finance, HR, calendaring, email, travel, logistics, procurement, lead generation, campaign execution, and customer support, with multi-agent systems coordinating across teams and departments to solve complex business challenges.
Chris also outlined some of the business impact of agents, such as efficiency, customer experience, and always-on business operations, with ‘9-5 businesses’ able to respond to people 24/7. AI agents also allow rapid scaling without additional headcount and can be considered a new ‘digital workforce’, giving businesses a competitive edge in agility and innovation.
‘AI harnessed correctly has the potential to help and support SMEs to help grow, scale up and accelerate their productivity. We are particularly interested to hear further details of the new AI Adoption Fund announced in the recent Spending Review, and how this may benefit organisations across Sheffield and South Yorkshire.’
Louisa Harrison-Walker OBE, Chief Executive, Sheffield Chamber of Commerce
AI that Lands: Where Strategy Meets Human Experience
Next up, Carolyn Shepherd, Founder of Emmeline.AI, asked the question ‘Why is AI not delivering results?’ Her answer is that people need to catch up. ‘People are not moving as fast as we’d like them to. It’s quite scary to a lot of people – most people go to work, do their thing and don’t give a lot of thought to business processes.’ But once people have got their fears of AI out of the way, they can open their minds to learn something new.
Carolyn has found that the people who didn’t start using AI simply lacked confidence, even to ask questions to a machine, because they would be afraid of asking the wrong thing. The solution, she argues, is to build people’s confidence through stories so they can see people like themselves using AI to automate the tasks that drain them.
‘Start by asking yourself, “What’s one task that drains you?” Then, ask ChatGPT, or whichever AI tool you and your employer favours, “Help me reduce or automate this task,” and see what becomes possible.’
‘The pace is gathering and AI agents will soon be swarming,’ Carolyn added. So, it’s time to get involved. Carolyn compared thinking about AI to thinking about electricity, in the sense that it would be strange to ask people, ‘What’s your electricity strategy?’ Just like electricity, AI will be a fundamental and embedded thing in our lives and work – something we don’t need to think about. Therefore, we need to focus on the outcomes we want, not the strategy itself or the tools we use to achieve these outcomes.
‘At Business Sheffield, we’re aware that AI is a subject generating a lot of interest, but also uncertainty, among local businesses. Some are already using AI tools to improve productivity and streamline operations, while others are still unsure about where to begin.
‘We see the opportunities, and risks, that AI presents, and we’re actively reviewing and updating our support to help Sheffield businesses make best use of it. Our workshop content is regularly updated to ensure it stays relevant and practical, including recent sessions that explore how AI is being used in different industries, real-world case studies, and tips for using AI effectively and responsibly.’
Robert Lawley, Service Manager at Business Sheffield
How AI is being used in the film industry
Duncan Payne is Head of Software Engineering at ZOO Digital, a Sheffield-founded company that provides cloud-native media localisation services globally. ZOO Digital works with clients such as Netflix, Facebook, and Disney.
ZOO specialises in dubbing and subtitling film dialogue from one language to another, and one significant challenge in this area is finding professional voice actors, particularly where child voice actors are involved, due to the strict legal limits on the amount of time that children can work. Duncan shared an example of one child actor who could work for one hour per week, and explained that one hour of recording would produce just 10 minutes of usable audio.
So, ZOO worked with the Speech and Hearing Research Group at the University of Sheffield to take a recording of a grown-up’s voice and use AI to make it sound like a child’s. This means changing both the pitch and the style of delivery. It took lots of training data and examples of speech from both adults and children. The project was supported by Knowledge Transfer Partnership, a UK government-funded program that facilitates collaboration between businesses and universities (or other knowledge-based institutions) to drive innovation and growth.
Duncan believes AI is going to revolutionise the media industry, but that there is no intention to replace real actors; in fact, AI is going to create new job prospects for people. Skilled human talent will remain crucial, especially for premium entertainment content, and the roles of creative professionals are likely to transform, he explained.
‘AI presents a game-changing opportunity for businesses of all sizes and sectors, no matter where they’re based. By adopting intelligent automation, leveraging data-driven insights, and delivering more personalised customer experiences, organisations can significantly boost productivity, drive innovation, and remain competitive in a fast-moving landscape.’ Kir Nuthi, Head of AI and Data at techUK
AI Agents: Unlocking new levels of business productivity
‘Right now, we’re at an IT inflection point, and a social inflection point, that reminds me of the early to mid-nineties with the invention of the World Wide Web,’ began Mark, Solutions Engineer for Digital Business Automation at IBM. ‘The big inflection point was the “dot-com boom.”’ Mark told the story of when he met with the marketing director of a major retailer in 1996 to present the idea of e-commerce to them. Were they interested? Absolutely not. They said their company ‘would never sell anything online’. Mark’s point being: we need to embrace new technologies like AI.
Always ahead of the curve, IBM began working with Agentic AI in 2017 and created an internal tool called AskHR to rationalise its HR system. This is IBM’s digital assistant for employees, designed to empower HR professionals to focus on higher-value tasks. 1.1 million automated tasks mean that 94% of employee enquiries are handled by AskHR, which is out now and available for organisations to adopt. It means HR staff can ‘do what they came into HR to do’: more human stuff rather than answering basic questions about annual leave and payslips. In this instance, it’s not a case of taking the human out of Human Resources; it’s more a case of maintaining the human connection where it really matters.
Mark also gave us a demo of IBM watsonx Orchestrate, a digital labour automation tool that enables workers to delegate repetitive, time-consuming tasks to a personal digital worker, powered by AI. Mark used it to scrape the public-facing content of the University of Sheffield website, which took approximately five minutes, before asking questions about booking accommodation (in both English and Chinese) via an internal equivalent of ChatGPT. The agent then responded in both languages using embedded translation functionality, and guided the user through a booking process which could be completed through the AI agent.
Summing up the insights
Sheffield has become the digital forge, the crucible in which elements are combined to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. While the tech and the experts are ready and waiting, the catalyst for change will be the people. Business leaders, technical experts, the people whose jobs will be improved with appropriate solutions where AI agents can be brought together to optimise and automate business processes.
Getting these people on side through a process of education and AI literacy training, getting them to contribute to the strategy by defining the problems they need solving, is key to acceptance and establishing AI as another tool in the toolbox.
Many use cases are starting to emerge, but the key is for organisations to take their first steps on the AI journey in a small yet impactful way, measure its value and be ready to scale up.
The full event write-up is available to read at: https://www.deeperthanblue.co.uk/beyond-the-chatbot-how-agentic-ai-is-revolutionising-business-operations/
Organisation email: [email protected]
