Service · AI consultant for Australian businesses
AI consultant for Australian businesses, M365 Copilot, custom GPTs and AI automation.
An AI consultant practice built around practical AI in M365, Xero, Salesforce, Jira and HubSpot, plus custom automations for the workflows that bleed time. SDS is the AI strategy consultant Australian businesses bring in for Copilot rollouts, custom GPTs and Power Automate flows that compound: hours back per week, fewer manual handoffs, cleaner data downstream. AI consultant Sydney is in our DNA, AI automation Sydney is what we ship.
Highlights
What we promise on this service.
60 days
Typical Copilot adoption window
5–20
Hours per week saved per automation
Your tenant
Where the model runs
What's included
Every engagement covers these as standard.
Practical AI built into the systems your team already uses. Copilot rollout, custom GPTs and Copilot Agents, Power Automate / Zapier / n8n workflow automation, document processing, RAG search, and an AI governance framework that does not kill innovation.
- M365 Copilot rollout, licence sizing, governance, security review (Copilot reads everything a user can read, including stale shares), prompt training tailored to your roles, adoption metrics. Most clients land 70%+ active use inside 60 days when we run the rollout properly.
- Custom GPTs and Copilot Agents, bespoke assistants tuned to your processes, knowledge base and tone. Built on your tenant, governed by your conditional-access policies, behind your existing identity. No data leaves your control plane.
- Workflow automation, Power Automate, Zapier, n8n, Make depending on your stack. We instrument the manual handoffs (sales-to-finance, support-to-engineering, vendor onboarding, supplier invoice intake) and quantify the time saved before vs after.
- AI integrations into Xero / Salesforce / HubSpot / Jira, invoice classification, lead routing, ticket triage, response drafting, deal-summary generation. We build the integration, you keep the data ownership.
- Document processing, invoice OCR, contract clause extraction, PDF data capture, email triage. Off-the-shelf where it works (Azure Document Intelligence, Google Document AI), custom pipelines where the volume justifies it.
- Vector search & RAG, internal knowledge bases made searchable in natural language. Built on Azure AI Search or pgvector + Postgres, behind your auth, with citation back to the source document so users can verify.
- AI governance framework, an acceptable-use policy that doesn’t kill innovation, approval workflow for new AI tools, data-classification guidance, and quarterly reviews of what staff are doing.
- Measurement, every automation gets a baseline (manual time / error rate / cycle time) and a quarterly check-in. The ones that don’t pay back get retired; the ones that do get scaled.
How we work with you
Onboarding and the first 90 days.
A clear path from signed contract to steady-state managed service. Each stage has named owners, defined inputs and a documented hand-over.
See the 90-day plan →01
Stage 01
Discovery
Review your existing environment, risks, documentation and vendors.
02
Stage 02
Stabilise
Address any urgent risks, recurring issues and quick wins.
03
Stage 03
Optimise
Fine-tune systems, improve user experience and remove bottlenecks.
04
Stage 04
Plan
Agree a roadmap for the next 12–24 months. Reviewed quarterly.
Quick answers
Things people ask before signing.
The most common questions on this service. If yours isn't here, send it through — we reply within one business day.
Will our data leak into the public training corpus if we use M365 Copilot?
No. Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 (the licensed product, not consumer Copilot) is bound by the Microsoft Services Agreement and does not use customer prompts or responses to train foundation models. We confirm the data-handling boundary in writing on day one and validate the tenant settings during rollout, it’s the most common misunderstanding we see.
How do we know which workflow to automate first?
We baseline before we build. The first engagement is a two-week discovery: we shadow the highest-friction processes (sales handoff, finance close, support escalation, customer onboarding), measure the manual time, and rank by ROI. The first automation typically pays back inside 90 days. We don’t build the rest until the first one’s value is proven.
Are custom GPTs / Agents secure enough for actual business use?
When built on Microsoft Copilot Studio or the equivalent in your existing platform, yes. The agent runs in your tenant, inherits your identity (Entra ID), respects your data-loss-prevention policies, and is subject to your conditional access. Avoid building agents on free third-party platforms that store the prompt history off-tenant; that’s where the leaks happen.
What about AI hallucinations, what happens when the agent makes something up?
Two layers. First, we build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) where the answer is grounded in your source documents and cited inline; the agent says "I don’t know" rather than inventing. Second, every customer-facing or compliance-relevant output goes through a human review gate during the first three months; we relax that gate as the agent’s accuracy is observed.
Do you build everything custom, or use existing tools where possible?
Existing tools where possible, custom where it pays back. Most workflows have an off-the-shelf SaaS that solves 80% of the problem at 20% of the cost, Power Automate for M365-native, Zapier for SaaS-to-SaaS, n8n for self-hosted, custom code only where volume or unique business logic justifies it. We’re vendor-agnostic; we tell you what makes sense for your scale.
How do you charge for AI work?
Discovery + roadmap is a fixed-fee engagement (typically $4,500–$8,500 for an SMB). Implementation is project-based at our standard $120/hr rate; quotes include the build, integration, testing, and a 30-day stabilisation window. Ongoing optimisation comes through your managed support pool (or the vCIO retainer if you have one).
Find your first automation that pays back.
Tell us the three workflows that frustrate your team most, and the systems they touch (M365, Xero, Salesforce, etc.). We come back with an estimate of hours saved per week, the platform we’d build it on, and a fixed-fee discovery cost, usually under $5K to scope properly.
No vendor pitches. Vendor-agnostic AI advice.