What parts of the data journey can PTR help with?

PTR supports the full data lifecycle: collecting, storing, preparing, and serving data for analytics and reporting, whether it be BI or AI.

What are the primary risks of adopting automated decision systems?

Autonomous agents can miscalculate contexts, leading to financial or reputational liabilities. To mitigate this risk, consultants build hybrid architectures that blend flexible, probabilistic AI models with rigid, deterministic policy rules, ensuring all automated actions remain traceable and compliant.

What is the role of human-in-the-loop (HITL) in decision engineering?

For high-consequence, legally sensitive, or highly uncertain scenarios, systems use human-in-the-loop configurations. The decision system processes messy data, surfaces alternative perspectives, and calculates risks, leaving final authorisation to human domain experts.

How do organisations keep data secure while enabling BI and AI?

There are a number of features and services that help to keep data secure and compliant: - Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) - Row-Level and Object-Level Security (RLS/OLS) - Encryption - Data loss prevention (DLP) - Governance tools auch as Microsoft Purview - Auditing and monitoring Security must be continually reviewd and solutions must evolve as data volumes and AI use cases expand.

How do cloud platforms support modern BI and AI data management?

Cloud platforms provide: - Unified storage (like OneLake) - Scalable computing - Integrated governance tooling - Real‑time data streaming - Built‑in machine learning environments This helps to remove silos and enable end‑to‑end analytics and AI on a single platformmsuch as Microsoft Fabric, Azure and AWS.

How does AI change the way organisations manage data?

AI consumes extremely high volumes of high‑quality, labelled data. To ensure quality, trustworthy data organisations must focus on: - Metadata and lineage tracking - Bias detection - Model-ready datasets - Continuous monitoring for data drift - Stronger privacy and compliance controls

Do I need AI as part of my BI strategy?

AI can enhance BI with data profiling, cleansing, predictive analytics, machine learning, and natural language capabilities — but whether you need it depends on your goals.

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

AI is technology that reads and analyses data to find patterns, trends and answers like a human would, but much faster. It can act as your researcher, assistant, analyst and writer.

Why should businesses consider adopting Power Automate and AI Builder?

If teams spend time on repetitive manual data entry—like typing invoice details—automation can free staff for higher‑value tasks, speed up operations, and improve accuracy.

What kinds of processes can be automated using Power Automate and AI Builder?

Common use cases include: Invoice processing Receipt scanning Form processing Document classification Object detection Prediction modelling Business card reading Language translation / sentiment analysis

What can Power Automate do?

Power Automate can automate simple or complex workflows, including: - Notifications and email automation - Document routing and approvals - Integrating data across systems - Automating tasks in Microsoft 365, CRM, ERP and 3rd‑party platforms

Who is Power Automate designed for?

It is intended for: - Line‑of‑business users (“citizen integrators”) who want to create automations without coding. - IT professionals who want to empower teams with self‑service automation while focusing on more advanced integration tools.

What is Power Automate?

Power Automate is a cloud‑based service that enables users to build workflows that automate time‑consuming business processes across applications and services.

What is Microsoft AI Builder?

AI Builder is a tool within the Power Platform that allows organisations to train AI models to automate targeted tasks, improving accuracy and efficiency in business workflows.

Process Automation & Agentic AI

What is Process Automation & Agentic AI?

Process automation is the practice of automating repetitive, rules-based activities so they happen reliably, consistently, and without manual effort — moving data between systems, processing documents, triggering approvals, and keeping records up to date - these are just a few examples.

Agentic AI takes this a step further. Rather than following a fixed set of rules, an AI agent can interpret a goal, reason about how to achieve it, and take actions across your systems to get there — asking for input or approval where it needs to. It's the difference between a workflow that does exactly what it's told, and an assistant that can work out how to get something done.

The two work best together, and they share something with everything else we do: they only deliver real value when they're built on high quality, well governed data. Get that foundation right and automation becomes dependable and AI becomes trustworthy. Get it wrong and you may simply make mistakes faster.

How can PTR help?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Replace slow, error-prone manual steps with automated workflows that connect your systems, move your data, and run your routine processes reliably around the clock.

AI Agents & Agentic Workflows

Design, build, and deploy AI agents that can reason over your data, make decisions, and take action across your systems — with the right human checkpoints built in.

Copilots & Conversational AI

Give your people and customers a natural way to ask questions and get things done, with assistants grounded in your own data, documents, and business logic.

Data Integration

The first barrier to consuming your data, is getting it out of all the various systems, repositories, and files where it sits to begin with.

Data Governance

Ensure data is trusted, secure, discoverable, and fit for purpose—across analytics, operational systems, and AI initiatives.

Data Platform

A robust, scalable infrastructure is the foundation of a successful data practice.

Technologies

We specialise in building data solutions in the Microsoft ecosystem. We have been a Microsoft partner since 2005, currently holding Solution Partner designation for Data & AI in Azure, with certifications held across the team in Microsoft Fabric, Azure, and Power BI so you can be confident that our knowledge and skills have been tried and tested.

Microsoft Power Platform

A powerful suite of low/no-code tools, empowering you to build your own custom bnusiness applications, integrations, and automations

Microsoft Copilot Studio

Build, customise, and deploy your own copilots and AI agents, grounded in your business data and connected to the systems your people use every day.

Azure AI Foundry

Design and run bespoke, enterprise-grade agentic solutions, combining large language models with your own data, orchestration, and the controls to deploy them safely at scale.

Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is a unified analytics platform, an evolution of several existing Microsoft analytics products consolidated into a single administrative environment and licensing model which makes licensing, development, and administration much simpler.

Why choose PTR?

We have been helping our clients for over 35 years wrangling with data of all shapes and sizes from hundreds of different systems and platforms. We take the time to listen and learn everything we can about you, your business, your people, your data estate, and your aspirations to design and build practical and scalable solutions that deliver real return on investment.

How do we work with you?

Whether it's purely strategic advice, implementation and development work to spec, fractional data engineering support, or a fully outsourced data function, we offer a range of flexible engagement patterns to suit your business, budget, and need.

Pay As You Go

DAY RATE

£1,250/day

Flexible delivery as and when you need it

No Commitment
Time and Materials
Use us when you need us

Fixed Project Fee

PRICE

£On Request

Everything locked in up front

Fixed Deliverables
Fixed Fee
Clear timescales

Retained Service

FROM

£1,095/month

Cost effective and flexible resource augmentation

12 Month Agreement
Minimum 1 day/month
Discounted day rate
Predictable monthly billing
Flexible delivery
Easy top-up
Discounted training

What does this look like for you?

Everyone is different so we tailor our approach to reflect that by listening to you, understanding where you're starting, where you're aiming for, and what your priorities are. This is just an example of what a typical journey often looks like with us, yours may be different but the starting point is the same - a chat!

1 Hour - An introductory call with one of our solution architects to learn about your requirements and help us identify the best next steps for you.

Typically 3-5 days - A deep dive investigation of your business systems and data estate, your people and their skills, and your business needs and aspirations. We use this to put together a solid technical strategy and implementation plan for you.

Typically 5 Days - Particularly with larger projects, it is useful to demonstrate the technical feasibility and business value of a project before committing to long term spend. Not always necessary, but can help to firm up some variables and to measure consumption demands which can be difficult to predict in cloud environments.

Typically 10-20 Days - This really will be different for everyone and can vary widely, but we aim to work in short cycles that deliver quick results with scope for iterative onward development and flexibility to change requirements.

Typically 3-5 Days/Month - Once people get an appetite for data, it tends to keep growing and with it, requirements keep evolving. Our retainer service enables you to keep a highly skilled data team on hand to respond to those changing requirements under a predictable billing model to suit your budget.

Free Discovery Workshop

Data Discovery Project

Proof of Concept/Value (PoC/PoV)

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Retained Consultancy Service

Process Automation & Agentic AI Consultancy Services