Case studies
Agents in practice, and the groundwork beneath them.
Worked examples of agents in accountancy practice and finance, plus the Microsoft 365 groundwork that makes agents dependable.
Worked examples from James Wilkinson's delivery work. Details are generalised and these were not FiveForward client engagements.
Agents in practice
Agents doing real work.
Worked example · Accountancy
End to end, from scanner to filed and logged
About 2 min
A UK accountancy firm with more than 1,500 live clients and a daily stack of scanned post to read, attribute and file.
How a UK accountancy firm built an AI agent that reads, understands and files the post
Incoming post read, split, matched against more than 1,500 live clients and filed by client code in about two minutes end to end, with people involved only when a letter needs judgement.
An agent that runs: it starts when the day's post is scanned and sends exceptions to a person.
Read the worked exampleWorked example · Client acceptance
Of form filling, where drafting used to take half an hour
A few minutes
A UK accountancy and audit practice producing Letters of Engagement and Letters of Representation across multiple partners.
Collapsing letter of engagement drafting from half an hour to a few minutes of form filling
Letters of engagement and representation generated from a form in the firm's CRM into controlled Word templates, so the partner reviews rather than drafts. It is the core of the client onboarding agent.
Client acceptance. The core of the client onboarding agent, and the end of last year's fee ending up in this year's letter.
Read the worked exampleWorked example · Finance and reporting
Per P&L, where reformatting used to take hours each month
Seconds
A UK hospitality group whose central finance team consolidates monthly P&Ls from properties that each report in a different format.
How a UK hospitality group standardised property P&Ls with a Copilot Studio agent
Monthly P&Ls arrived from each property in a different layout. The finance team now runs a Copilot Studio agent on demand to map each one onto the group's standard lines in seconds, and a person checks the output before the figures go anywhere.
An agent people use on demand, with a person checking the output before the figures go anywhere.
Read the worked exampleGroundwork
The Microsoft 365 foundations under the agents.
Client records and licensing done well, so the agents built on top have clean data to work from.
Worked example · Property and professional services
How a property and professional services firm replaced a clunky CRM with a bespoke system inside Outlook
A property and professional services firm replaced a generic CRM and a sprawl of spreadsheets with a bespoke system built on SharePoint, Power Apps and an Outlook add-in.
Worked example · Dynamics 365 licence design
Dynamics 365 visibility in Outlook without buying full licences for everyone
A portable licence-design pattern: full Dynamics 365 for a small number of power users and a lighter Outlook surface for everyone else, all working against the same governed dataset.
Next step
Talk through what a first agent would look like for your firm.
A free 30-minute call with James. No pitch and no obligation.