About
Built for the gap between buying Copilot and using it.
Most of the value sits in that gap. FiveForward is here to do the work that makes Microsoft Copilot and the wider M365 suite something staff actually rely on.
I'm James Wilkinson, the person behind FiveForward.
I've been working with AI since 2022, long before Copilot existed in its current form. I've watched the models get more capable, the tooling get more enterprise-friendly and the rollouts get more ambitious. When Microsoft brought Copilot inside the M365 suite, the interesting question stopped being 'what can AI do' and started being 'how do we get people actually using it properly'.
That second question is what I do for a living. Copilot rollouts, training programmes built around real work, Power Automate solutions that handle the dull repetitive jobs and the SharePoint groundwork that holds it all together.
What I keep seeing, in organisation after organisation, is that the ones struggling with Copilot aren't struggling with the technology. They're struggling with the gap between what the tools can theoretically do and what their team actually needs help with on a Wednesday morning. That gap is mostly invisible in a procurement cycle and mostly invisible in a demo. It is decisively visible six months in, when usage data is flat and nobody quite wants to say so out loud.
Why FiveForward exists
I started FiveForward because the consultancy I kept wanting to recommend didn't quite exist. The big firms are great if you have eight figures and time. The hourly contractors are great for a specific task. There was a gap in the middle. Someone senior enough to give you a real answer, focused enough to actually deliver it and committed enough to stay until it works.
That's where FiveForward lives. It's deliberately small. I don't want to be a sixty-person agency. I want to be the person you call when the rollout is stalling, the board conversation about it is starting to get awkward and you need someone who's seen this exact problem before and can tell you what to do.
Who FiveForward is for
UK organisations that take Copilot seriously. Accountants, law firms, financial advisors, consultancies, in-house operations, HR and IT teams at mid-market businesses. Anywhere staff productivity is the thing that pays the bills and Copilot has to fit around real client work, real internal processes and real people.
I don't work with organisations looking for a vendor to deliver a slide deck and disappear. That's a perfectly legitimate market. It just isn't what FiveForward is for.
Where we're based
FiveForward is based near Colchester in Essex, working with organisations across the UK. Most engagements run in a hybrid model with on-site days where they help (especially for training cohorts) and remote work between them.
How we work
Five principles that show up in every engagement.
01
Train people, not just licences.
The licence is the easy part. Real adoption is a programme. Sessions, homework, champions, follow-up. We treat it that way from the first call.
02
Build for the team you have, not the team you imagine.
Automations and agents fail when they're designed for an idealised workflow. We watch how work actually happens before we build anything.
03
Document like we're leaving tomorrow.
Every flow, agent and SharePoint structure is documented so your team can maintain it without us. Consultancy lock-in is bad practice.
04
Be honest about what Copilot can't do.
There's a use case for Copilot in your organisation. There's also one where it's the wrong answer. We'll tell you both, even when it costs us scope.
05
Measure what matters.
If we can't agree what success looks like in numbers or specifics, we shouldn't be starting the engagement. Vague goals lead to vague outcomes.
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