www.managedITmag.co.uk 25 MANAGED SERVICES because it gives our independent endorsement,” says McAlpine. “The verification badge that we dish out to qualifying MSPs involves an annual humanised assessment that the claims they make are true, in addition to quarterly automation checks of things like ISO, IASME and Cyber Essentials status.” McAlpine has been developing CompareIT for almost two years, the last 10 months of which have involved extensive testing of the search and monitoring platform by SMEs as well as input and feedback from MSPs. “Before we’d even launched there were 250 SMEs using the platform to monitor MSPs and provide direction. We’re also hugely grateful to the MSPs that have done the same as part of our customer advisory board – a community that we’re building to make CompareIT right for everybody.” www.compareit.co.uk It’s far more in-depth and far more intelligent,” says McAlpine. CompareIT for MSPs MSPs can use the platform to find new business by completing a 197-point profile and setting their ideal customer profile to support ICP matching. CompareIT is hoping to have signed up 10% of the UK’s 11,000 MSPs and IT support providers by the end of its second year. There are three packages available: Showcase, giving an MSP a listing and paid for leads; Growth, offering an MSP unlimited lead generation at a fixed price and deeper insights into the SMEs viewing its profile; and Verified, which includes independent endorsement of an MSP by CompareIT and human-based assessments of its claims. “The Verified programme is what a lot of MSPs are attracted to for a business to review what the MSP is doing continuously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” explains McAlpine. “We’re looking at reviews, we’re looking at financials, we’re looking at company changes, we’re looking at sentiment analysis. In addition, it gives you a chance to check your contract, so you can upload your contract into the platform for analysis by AI and manage renewals – How many days ‘til renewal? When would I need to give notice if I needed to move? – all that sort of stuff.” He claims that the contract analysis in CompareIT is far superior to the ‘boilerplate analysis’ you would receive by chucking industryspecific master service agreements into an uneducated AI platform. “It will highlight potentially costly terms or, if there are certain elements of a contract that aren’t covered, it might flag them and give a risk rating (high, medium, or low). A slow finish UK businesses are embracing AI for document creation, but rework is limiting productivity gains If you are like most UK office workers you will already be using AI at least once a day for help with writing business documents, creating presentations, drafting emails and conducting research. Where would we be without it? Pretty much where we started, if new research by Templafy is to be believed. Perhaps even further ahead than we are now with AI. The document automation specialist surveyed 2,000 knowledge workers in the UK and US for its new report, The Business-Ready AI Gap 2026, and found that while AI is playing a bigger role in document creation, 96% of UK respondents have to work on AI-generated business documents after output. The most common issues requiring correction are the accuracy of facts, numbers and claims (cited by 40%), generic phrasing (36%) and formatting (35%). Almost one in five knowledge workers (18%) say they spend six or more hours per week reviewing, editing, validating or correcting AIgenerated documents. Over half (51%) believe reviewing AI-generated content leaves little actual time saved, with 35% saying it can take longer to edit or revise AI-generated documents than create them from scratch. Meanwhile, two in five respondents complain of ‘prompt fatigue’ when an AI-generated business document requires more than an hour of editing or revision. AI productivity tax So where is it all going wrong? The answer, suggests Templafy Co-founder Christian Lund, lies in a failure to connect AI with the context, standards and approved content needed to produce high-quality, consistent documents at scale, resulting in what he calls an ‘AI productivity tax’. “AI is already embedded in how people create business documents, and its potential to improve how that work gets done is enormous. The challenge now is what happens after that first output. If employees still have to spend hours checking accuracy, applying company standards and reworking the result, the productivity gain quickly disappears. AI may be fast to ask, but it is still slow to finish,” he said. “The answer isn’t simply a more powerful model. Enterprises need an orchestration layer that gives AI the right company context, approved content, rules and instructions at the point of creation. That is what turns a fast first draft into a highquality, consistent business document – and gives organisations a repeatable way to scale AI without scaling rework, risk and cost alongside it.” The right content is available now; the trouble is businesses aren’t consistently connecting it to the point of document creation. While 41% of knowledge workers in the UK say their companies provide approved content or reference materials to AI, 42% say their AI tools lack sufficient access to such content. Similarly, while 31% say approved content is automatically applied, 38% say their AI tools struggle to incorporate it. No wonder 51% of UK respondents say they prefer to start from scratch on the basis that it is faster for them just to ask AI. www.templafy.com Christian Lund
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