Acuity AI Advisory

Evidence of Work

Most AI engagements start with a tool. Ours start with a question.

What's actually happening here? The answer is rarely what the brief said.

Ten engagements. Legal services, food retail, property tech, financial services, energy, public sector, professional bodies, international government. The same methodology each time: diagnose before prescribing.

1,525

Hours of senior solicitor time recovered

One Irish debt recovery law firm. Audited, not estimated.

€560k

Margin recovered in seven days

Independent food retailer. Diagnostic only. No technology deployed.

2 days

Monthly management reporting eliminated

One energy investment firm. Governance framework live in four weeks.

€250K+

Gulf government mandate won on Acuity IP

Cited as key differentiator in the winning bid.

When the problem is operational

Finding the value hiding in plain sight

Legal services — debt recovery

1,525

Hours of senior solicitor time recovered annually

A new Revenue Commissioners contract meant 33% more volume with no new headcount. Before recommending anything, Acuity audited the actual process — timed walkthroughs of every workflow stage, self-reported estimates cross-validated against M365 system data. The audit found 1,525 hours of senior solicitor time lost annually across seven categories of manual work: court area lookups, conflict checks, batch postal runs, figure re-verification, automated chasing. None of it required a lawyer. All of it was consuming one. The automation programme was built entirely within the firm's existing M365 environment.

1,525 hours. No new hire. No new systems.

Professional services — compliance automation

96%

Reduction in VAT cycle-chase time

Four-stage VAT reminder cycle across 100 clients — 400 individual emails per cycle, half a day of senior fee-earner time at each stage, a manual suppression list, and a steady stream of “I already sent it” replies clogging the inbox. Acuity built CommSync: each batch fires in seconds from the handler's own M365 mailbox, with a one-click client confirmation button that removes the client from the cycle automatically. 120 hours of annual admin reduced to under 4. The same engine handles Payroll, Corporation Tax, and Annual Returns cycles using identical architecture.

115 hours of senior fee-earner time returned to the practice per year.

Food retail — independent operator

€560k

Margin recovered in seven days

A food business operating on margin without understanding why. Acuity ran the diagnostic across supplier terms, product mix, and pricing — and identified €560,000 in recoverable margin in seven days. Supplier renegotiation. SKU rationalisation. Pricing correction on items priced below cost. No technology deployed. No implementation programme. The work was finding what was already there.

€560,000. Seven days. Clear thinking and the right questions.

Property tech — cross-border transactions

100%

Cross-border VAT cycle automated end-to-end

A cross-border property transaction platform was managing VAT calculations manually across multiple jurisdictions — every calculation, every reconciliation, every cross-jurisdiction adjustment handled by a person. Compliance risk was rising as volume rose. Acuity designed and built an automated workflow inside the platform's existing stack that eliminated the manual process entirely. VAT calculations now generate, reconcile, and post without human intervention.

Manual VAT process eliminated. Compliance risk reduced across multiple jurisdictions.

When the problem is governance

Boards that need to act, not just understand

Energy — investment & asset management

4 wks

Governance framework live across three business functions

Two days of monthly manual effort to produce the management board report. Three teams — investment, asset management, finance — using AI inconsistently and without governance cover. Acuity ran five stakeholder sessions under Chatham House rules, surfacing what people actually did and where the real friction was. Governance and opportunity assessment ran in parallel, not sequentially. The management board report cycle was redesigned around an automated pipeline. A full governance framework — AI policy, three-stage tool assessment toolkit, regulatory alignment across EU AI Act, DORA, and GDPR — was operational within four weeks.

Two days of monthly manual effort eliminated. Framework live across three functions.

Financial services — PRA/FCA-regulated bank

6

Intelligence gaps mapped. One architecture to address all of them.

Institutional memory carried in heads, in folders, in minutes — rarely searchable. Strategic intent agreed in one meeting quietly disappears from later agendas. Monday begins from cold. Board packs running to 200–400 pages. Acuity mapped six distinct intelligence gaps and designed a single intelligence layer: meeting memory agents on Copilot Studio, a Graph API-powered meeting replaceability rubric, workstream context files, a CRAFT prompting framework, and a data sovereignty architecture reviewed against residency requirements.

“You couldn't have done better. Absolutely nailed it.”

Head of Communications, PRA/FCA-regulated Nordic bank

Public sector — newly-established state regulator

Seventeen people. No CIO. A hard statutory deadline: from December 2026, the regulator gains compulsory information powers over retailers and processors. The real risk wasn't technical — it was adversarial. Submissions engineered to exhaust processing capacity. Ten thousand PDFs where a clean CSV would do. Acuity designed and delivered a full board and senior leadership session for twelve people — 38 slides, three leave-behind frameworks, a live 2027 enforcement scenario stress-tested in the room before the frameworks were finalised. Content was adversarially tested through competing AI systems before delivery.

Three frameworks adopted into the IoD Ireland national director education programme. First bespoke external delivery of the “Governing in an AI World” programme.

When the problem is institutional

Member organisations that need tools, not theory

Professional body — director membership

Fifteen practitioner tools across five categories. Built to a brief no incumbent owned: AI governance for the Irish director as a member-led, principle-based, ongoing CPD entitlement. Each tool — HTML landing page, Word document, Excel workbook — delivered in a co-branded design system built from scratch. Acuity was subsequently selected as the delivery partner for the institute's first bespoke external governance programme.

“Designed beautifully.”

Programme Director, IoD Ireland

Professional body — regulated legal profession

Members using AI without clarity on whether they were breaching professional obligations. Acuity built two practitioner tools anchored to existing conduct obligations — not a new compliance layer. Vendor-neutral by necessity. Evergreen by design. Mapped to personal professional liability rather than corporate risk frameworks. Live across the full membership. A regional rollout to small-to-medium practices followed.

“The AI resources have been the most viewed since launch.”

Solicitor Services Executive, Law Society of Ireland

When the mandate is international

IP that wins competitive bids

Government — Gulf region innovation & AI strategy

Acuity IP was embedded in the winning proposal for a major Gulf government customs authority innovation mandate — AED 1–2M scope covering innovation strategy, a rapid experimentation platform, and three physical innovation labs. The Rapid Experimentation Framework — a five-phase methodology for moving ideas from concept to validated pilot within existing IT and cyber governance — and the Innovation Agent Suite were embedded directly in the bid and the kick-off delivery materials. The same advisory work anticipated client concerns that surfaced unprompted at kick-off, validating the approach before implementation began.

“Key differentiator.”

Managing Director, global risk advisory firm — post-pitch

The sectors are different. The pattern is the same.

Diagnosis before prescription. No vendor relationships. No platform to implement. Every engagement starts from the same position: what does this organisation actually need?

The answer is rarely what the brief said. The number that matters is rarely the one that's visible at the start. The work is in finding it.

Bring us a problem worth solving

Every engagement on this page started with a conversation. No pitch, no proposal until we've spoken.