
Thoughts and ideas on how to build tools, automate workflows and speed-up the workplace.
The rise of AI chat is a fundamental transformation in the way that we interact with software systems. The ability for software tools to interpret and respond to natural language inputs introduces a huge range of possibilities, including advanced information search and retrieval, agentic workflows, intelligent automations, and much more. However, to date, many businesses have struggled to take advantage of this within their internal tooling. In large part, this is because many major AI vendors only offer their products as cloud solutions.
Ronan McQuillan
Oct 23, 2025
Since its launch in 2022, ChatGPT has transformed huge aspects of our daily lives, including in the context of business processes. However, at a practical level, many organizations still struggle to implement AI tools in a way that drives real value. Part of the issue here is that, while hugely powerful, ChatGPT isn’t always the exact right fit for the needs of large, security-conscious organizations. Today, we’re exploring one important element of this by checking out the market for open-source ChatGPT alternatives.
Ronan McQuillan
Oct 22, 2025
IT helpdesk chatbots are possibly the most widespread real-world use case for agentic AI. On the one hand, IT teams face ever-growing demand for services. On the other, the majority of service interactions are highly repetitive tasks, often requiring fairly basic actions to resolve. This means that IT support workflows are uniquely well-positioned to benefit from intelligent self-service automation tools. Today, we’re diving deep into how we can achieve exactly this, including when and where chatbots are used, the benefits they offer, the specific technical considerations we’ll need to keep in mind, and the practical implementation challenges we might face.
Ronan McQuillan
Oct 21, 2025
Chat UIs are fast becoming a critical part of how we interact with all kinds of software systems. In the age of AI, natural language interactions are increasingly replacing more structured, static UIs in a huge range of apps and workflows. We can’t overstate what a fundamental change this is to how users interact with software tools. Today, we’re diving deep into everything you need to know about serving chat interfaces to your users.
Ronan McQuillan
Oct 16, 2025
It’s a fact of life that colleagues don’t stick around forever. However, when people leave our team, it can create huge admin workloads across IT, HR, finance, legal, and the leaver’s own department. If we don’t get this right, we risk several issues relating to workloads, operational continuity, payroll, information security, internal communications, compliance, and more. In the first part of this in-depth guide to employee onboarding processes, we’re outlining everything you need to know about developing robust systems to manage colleagues leaving your organization.
Ronan McQuillan
Oct 13, 2025
AI forms are becoming an increasingly critical component within all sorts of workflows. After all, forms are some of the basic building blocks of how we empower users to interact with data and processes. With the ever-growing prevalence of AI, it only stands to reason that form-building would be one of the areas that’s most impacted. What’s tricky, though, is that the term AI form can refer to a few fairly different things, depending on context.
Ronan McQuillan
Sep 26, 2025
AI form builders have exploded in popularity over the past couple of years, offering a fast, easy way to output working data collection tools. Because of this, we now have a huge number of AI form generators to choose from, including from most of the big names in the form builder space more broadly. However, it’s also important to note that this comes as part of a wider rush for SaaS brands to implement AI functionality.
Ronan McQuillan
Sep 26, 2025
Dynamic forms are a powerful, flexible solution for adding additional logic to our data collection workflows. The idea is to enable us to present forms with different schemas, depending on our needs in a given situation. As we’ll see later, this can be based on a few different types of logic. However, this is something that can be quite difficult to achieve, even with many of the top dedicated form builders.
Ronan McQuillan
Sep 23, 2025