Can you share the story behind founding Pro Drive IT? What inspired you to start the company?
Pro Drive IT was originally started with the vision of delivering ‘process-driven IT’ (hence the name) to SME businesses, to give them the capability of a large internal IT team but without the associated cost.
After the current ownership took over the business 8 years ago, we decided to focus our expertise on the professional and financial services sectors, helping businesses use technology to operate smarter and more efficiently whilst ensuring they meet their compliance obligations.
We passionately believe that when managed properly, technology creates a better working culture and allows firms to thrive and get ahead of their competition in what is becoming an increasingly crowded market with skyrocketing client expectations.
What were some of the key challenges you faced in the early days of Pro Drive IT, and how did you overcome them?
Our key challenge in the early days of Pro Drive, which still exists now, is that we are continuously innovating in the way we provide our services. It certainly isn’t and never has been, a traditional IT support service. As a result, it can often take firms some time to understand how significantly this will improve their business operations and culture – and not everyone is ready for it.
How is Pro Drive IT leveraging AI, and what opportunities or challenges does it present for your business and clients?
Pro Drive has been using generative AI systems internally in our business for some time – these include chat tools such as ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot suite, and custom applications built on it, as well as a custom system built on an AI platform to help our service desk team respond to and process client requests much faster.
Examples of where we use generative AI includes researching technical problems, assisting with writing reports and marketing content, notetaking of meetings, diary and workload management, answering queries on work procedures and policies and enabling us to become Excel super users! Check out the video here for a recent webinar we ran on some simple uses of Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant which would save most business huge amounts of time.
How do you attract and retain talent, especially in such a competitive and fast-evolving industry?
Being a services business, especially one dealing with the most critical component for most firms after their people, it’s essential to us that we have a motivated, high-performing team. We believe we have this and so do our clients, as evidenced by our NetPromoter score which is consistently around 90 (a world class level for those not familiar).
So how do we do this? We continually invest in our people with regular one-to-ones, absolute transparency around performance and targets and having an open book on how the company is performing along with our short, medium and long-term goals, which our staff also help shape.
We also trust our staff with a high degree of autonomy both in the work that they do and how they manage their time. We measure their performance based on results and not the time they spend doing them and allow them to plan their working day with their colleagues to give them some flexibility to help with their work life balance, of course within the constraints of running a client facing business! This blog on our website from Debbie in our Sales Support team explains it better than I can!
Finally, we operate a 9-day working fortnight which we adopted a couple of years ago. This came about from trying to help give our staff more balance with the additional responsibilities of people supporting technology services that the Covid-19 pandemic brought. What we quickly found was that by allowing our staff to have a better work life balance, not only did our efficiency improve, but our output exceeded what we achieved with a traditional working week. This was a win for our staff, the business and ultimately our clients too.
What role do you see AI and other emerging technologies playing in the future of IT services?
It’s difficult to make any concrete predictions around AI when even the experts admit the pace of change is so rapid, they are struggling to predict exactly how business and the people working in them will be impacted. However, we are already seeing considerable automation in the way IT services are delivered and generative AI will accelerate that. This will mean, as in many other services businesses, that many of the tasks done by engineers now will not be necessary in the future.
At Pro Drive, we see this as a massive opportunity to bring a more personal experience to our service, and we are already adapting by sending our staff to see our clients face-to-face as their time is freed up by automation. Many businesses are becoming increasingly ‘remote’ as technology allows them to operate this way, and the IT services sector is more guilty than others in this respect.
We are firm believers that business is all about people, and the best way people interact is in person – so whilst it may seem contradictory, our belief is that AI and automation will bring back the human touch to business, which I am sure many will see as a positive thing!
