Let’s get one thing out of the way. Ai isn’t coming.
It’s here.
In fact, it’s been here for quite a while now and if your business is still wondering whether Ai is something you should be looking at, the train hasn’t just left the station — it’s a fair way down the track.
That doesn’t mean every business needs to suddenly plaster Ai over everything it does. Far from it. But it does mean there are now better, faster and much smarter ways of doing many of the things businesses have been doing the same way for years.
And that’s where things are getting interesting for us at LukeTom.
We’ve changed too
Over the last few years, we’ve completely remodelled the way we work and what we’re capable of delivering.
We’ve been designing and developing websites and online systems for over 25 years, so we’ve seen plenty of technology come and go. But Ai is different.
It’s not simply another tool to add to the toolbox. Used properly, it allows us to rethink the toolbox altogether.
We’re now combining our experience in web development, UX, databases and bespoke web applications with Ai to look much deeper into how a business actually operates.
And quite often, what we find behind the scenes is a bit of a jumble.
A spreadsheet over here. A separate piece of software over there. Someone manually copying information from one system into another. Another spreadsheet that only Dave knows how to use. A client portal that hasn’t changed since 2014. And three different people spending hours every week doing jobs that really shouldn’t take hours.
Sound familiar?
Sometimes the best website project isn’t really a website project
Increasingly, clients are coming to us with problems rather than specifications.
Instead of saying, “We need a new website”, the conversation might be:
“We’ve got all these different systems and none of them talk to each other.”
That’s a much more interesting conversation.
Because with the technology now available to us, we can look at those individual processes and start bringing them together.
We can build bespoke web applications and intelligent systems that replace outdated processes, automate repetitive work and give teams one central place to actually get things done.
The aim isn’t to use Ai because Ai happens to be the latest buzzword.
It’s to make things simpler.
If something currently takes ten steps, can we make it three?
If somebody spends two hours every Friday compiling information, can the system do it in seconds?
If customer information exists in four different places, why can’t it exist in one?
That’s where Ai and modern web development start becoming genuinely useful.
A good example — Stover Financial Planners
We’re currently working with Peter Blackburn and the team at Stover Financial Planners on exactly this kind of project.
We won’t give too much away just yet as the project is still in development and we’ll be publishing a full case study once everything is live.
But it’s a great example of where our work is heading.
We’ve been helping Stover rethink and rebuild the way their client-facing systems work, including the development of a completely new client portal and a much more joined-up system behind it.
Processes that previously involved separate systems, different sources of information and a lot of manual input can be brought together into a far more streamlined environment.
The result?
Less duplication. Less jumping between systems. Less manual admin. A better experience for their clients and, importantly, hours of time saved for their team.
That’s technology actually doing something useful.
We’ll share the full Stover Financial Planners case study soon.
Ai doesn’t have to mean robots running your business
There’s still a misconception that adopting Ai means completely changing how your company operates or handing everything over to a machine.
It doesn’t.
For most businesses, some of the biggest wins are far less dramatic.
It could be improving an existing customer portal. Automating a repetitive admin task. Connecting systems that currently operate separately. Making information easier to find. Building a better internal workflow. Removing unnecessary data entry. Or simply taking something that is painfully slow and making it ridiculously quick.
Sometimes the technology behind that will involve Ai.
Sometimes it won’t.
What matters is choosing the right technology to solve the problem.
“But we’ve always done it this way…”
Possibly the most dangerous sentence in business.
Technology has moved incredibly quickly and the gap between businesses embracing it and businesses ignoring it is only going to get wider.
If your company is still relying on systems, spreadsheets and processes that were frustrating five or ten years ago, they certainly aren’t going to get any better with age.
You don’t need to change everything overnight.
But you do need to start asking questions.
- Why do we still do this manually?
- Why are we entering the same information twice?
- Why don’t these systems talk to each other?
- Why does this take three hours?
- Why are we still using that spreadsheet?!
Those questions are often where the best projects begin.
So, are you getting on?
The Ai train has left the station.
Actually, it left a while ago.
But that doesn’t mean you’ve missed it. It just means standing still probably isn’t a great strategy anymore.
At LukeTom, we’re embracing what Ai and modern web technologies allow us to do, not because we want to replace everything that came before, but because we can now build things that simply weren’t practical or affordable a few years ago.
Faster systems. Smarter workflows. Better client experiences. Less repetitive admin. And technology that fits around the way a business actually works.
So if there’s a clunky process in your business that everyone moans about, a collection of systems that refuse to talk to each other or a spreadsheet that has somehow become responsible for half your company…
maybe it’s time we had a chat.
