From four hours to under one for a presentation

In a consulting firm, time is what you sell, and every hour that does not land on a client is an hour lost twice. This firm has more than a hundred consultants working with clients, on different projects and in different countries. Sooner or later, all of them have to build a presentation. Many have to write proposals.

A well-made presentation, in the firm’s style and to its guidelines, could take four hours. It almost always started from the last one: copy it, change the content, fix the layout that had broken along the way. Everyone with their own method, and results that only partly looked alike.

Proposals had the same problem from the other side. They were mostly written by managers, starting from those already sent. Standard sections were rewritten every time, revisions piled up, and every proposal prepared from scratch was an afternoon taken from clients already active.

On the timesheet, all this time had a precise name: unbilled time. Hours when a consultant is not assigned to a client, and that the firm pays for without being paid.

• Presentations already laid out in the firm's style
• Proposals ready to review instead of ready to write
• More hours on the client, fewer hours nobody bills

Templates first, agents second

We started from the material, before the agents. We collected the presentations and proposals the firm considered well made, drew out their structure and style, and turned them into rules: how a presentation opens, which sections a proposal has, which parts always stay the same and which change from client to client.

The presentation agent

The first agent works with Copilot in PowerPoint. The consultant gives it a topic, a document or even just notes, and gets back a presentation already laid out in the firm's template. What is left is the work no agent can do for them: checking the content is right for that client.

The proposal agent

The second agent works in Word. It draws on the history of proposals, organised in SharePoint year by year, and prepares the draft with the standard sections already written and the points to decide highlighted. The manager reviews and decides.

Inside the permissions that already exist

Everything stays in the firm's Microsoft 365 tenant. Copilot works on documents through Microsoft Graph, with the permissions of whoever makes the request, and never shows anyone a file that person could not already open. The agents' instructions are the same for everyone, so the style stays consistent even when a hundred different people are doing the work.

Today a presentation is done in three quarters of an hour, an hour at most, against four before. Multiplied by more than a hundred consultants, that is weeks of work a year going back to clients, and presentations that finally look alike, in the good sense.

For managers the gain takes another form. Faster proposals mean more time on projects and fewer hours spent without a client to log them against, which means more hours turning into revenue.