Building an AI-First Organisation at Beyond: What We Are Doing Behind the Scenes

At Beyond, we are in the middle of a shift. Not the kind that comes with a big internal announcement or a rebrand, but a practical, steady evolution in how we think, how we work and how we deliver for our clients. The pace of AI is moving quickly, and we are moving with it, building the capabilities, behaviours and tools that define what an AI-first organisation looks like in reality.

What’s important to say up front is this. We are not new to AI. Our work with clients has included advanced analytics, forecasting, segmentation, optimisation and machine learning for nearly 20 years. It has always sat at the heart of what we do. Long before generative AI existed, we were helping clients understand customers, improve pricing, automate decisions and bring data into the centre of their business.

What is changing now is the technology. The new wave of generative and agentic AI gives us a completely different way to deliver that work. Faster. Smarter. More adaptable. And in some cases, fundamentally rethinking the way we approach problems.

This post identifies what we are doing behind the scenes to become AI-first, and what we are learning along the way.

Starting with curiosity and hands-on experimentation

We didn’t begin by drafting a grand AI strategy. We started with curiosity.

Everyone on the team began using the tools available to them: ChatGPT, Copilot and a growing set of lightweight workflows that helped us plan faster, analyse faster, write faster and challenge our own thinking. These weren’t “projects”. This was day-to-day work, supported by AI in countless small ways.

Very quickly, it changed how we operated. The more we used AI, the more natural it became. And the more obvious it was that this wasn’t a phase. AI was becoming part of our rhythm.

A big early learning is that you don’t adopt AI by talking about it. You adopt it by using it repeatedly until it becomes second nature. That principle guides everything we do.

Building our internal intelligence layer

As the team became more confident, a bigger opportunity emerged. How do we make the entire company more intelligent?

This is where CustomGPT comes in. Rather than treating AI as a blank general-purpose tool, we are building an internal intelligence layer trained on our own methods, case studies, frameworks, project history and sector insight.

This gives us something we’ve never had before: the ability to draw on years of Beyond work instantly and consistently. Not by looking through folders or trying to remember who worked on what, but by asking a model that understands our tone, our approach, our clients and the outcomes we deliver.

This requires structure, discipline and good data management. But each week it gets more accurate and more useful.

Introducing agents into our day-to-day work

We are now moving beyond conversational AI into agents that take on parts of our work end to end.

Some of the agents we use today extract information from documents, tag files in SharePoint, prepare client-friendly summaries, structure data for analysis, generate first drafts of proposals, create project plans from statements of work and clean up content before it reaches our internal systems.

Most are early-stage. They need checking. They make errors. But they also free the team from repetitive admin that consumes valuable time.

One interesting learning is that AI doesn’t hide messy processes. It exposes them. If a workflow is unclear, the agent forces clarity. If data is inconsistent, the agent will highlight it immediately. This pressure to structure our internal work is actually accelerating our operational maturity.

What we are learning as we build our own AI-First Organisation

A few themes are standing out as we scale our use of AI.

You can’t wait for perfect conditions - If we waited for the technology to stabilise, we’d still be planning. Instead, we learn by using it and adjust as the landscape evolves.

Tools change, behaviours stay - Whether it’s ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude or CustomGPT, the underlying capability is the same: working iteratively with AI, not treating it as a novelty.

Good governance grows with practice - It’s far easier to maintain clarity and consistency if you design for it as you go, rather than trying to bolt it on later.

AI lifts people rather than replaces them - Everyone on the team is spending more time on interpretation, storytelling and strategic thinking. AI clears the path for more valuable work.

Structure matters - Agents and advanced models perform best when data, knowledge and processes are organised. This reinforces our investment in high-quality internal foundations.

The direction we are heading

Becoming an AI-first organisation is not a project with an end date. It’s a direction. And a clear strategy is taking shape as we move.

AI supporting every piece of work - From proposals to delivery to insight generation, AI sits inside the process, not beside it.

A growing internal knowledge brain - CustomGPT becomes more useful every week as it absorbs more of our thinking and experience.

Agents automating operational effort - From documentation to data prep to project workflows, we are removing inefficiencies one by one.

AI-powered solutions for our clients - Everything we build internally informs the tools, diagnostics, roadmaps and advisory work we take to clients.

A team that is AI-literate and AI-confident - We expect everyone at Beyond to be fluent in AI. It is not a specialist skill. It is becoming a baseline.

Why this matters for our clients

Everything we are building internally has one purpose: to make us better partners to our clients.

• Faster insight.

• Stronger analysis.

• Sharper recommendations.

• Better use of their data.

• More practical and applicable AI solutions.

• Fewer steps to impact.

We’ve been living and breathing AI for two decades. The difference now is that the tools finally match the ambition. And we are evolving alongside them.

This is not a transformation we will look back on one day and say “it’s finished”. This is how we work now, and it’s only accelerating.

Want to pick our brains about this approach - get in touch!!