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Byte-sized AI: Eleven at once

By Nick Ellis, AI and Innovation Lead | Published 10 Sep 2026

I’m back for another Byte-sized AI issue, and as promised here are my three things: 😁

  • Something that you can do to improve how you work
  • Something techy from the news
  • Something that made me laugh 

Byte-sized Ai: IT consultancy in Kent at its best

📰 The one item of news:

Eleven at once

This is not industry news as such, but it’s too big for the tip section and too significant to leave out.

I’ve spent this morning doing something that would have sounded ridiculous a year ago. I’ve had 11 AI sessions running at the same time, each one getting on with its own bit of the work!

The number’s not really the point. What took the effort was stopping the AI sessions tripping over each other. So I asked the AI to plan the work properly: break the project into tasks, work out which tasks would need the same piece of information, then group them into “waves” – sets of tasks that can safely run at the same time. Finish wave one, start wave two, and so on. It did the planning, and then a room full of the same AI carried out its own plan.

Why does this matter to you?

Because you’ve almost certainly got a job that looks exactly like this.

Take a quarterly board pack – finance narrative, sales update, ops update, risk register, exec summary. Five pieces of writing, five Copilot chats, all going at once. The risks are the same. Finance and sales both need a revenue figure, and if they each go and find their own, you get two numbers and a very awkward board meeting. Plus, the exec summary can’t be created until all the other sections are complete.

You don’t have to work everything out yourself though. Paste the list of sections and file sources into Copilot and ask:

“If I gave these to five people to write at the same time, what would go wrong?”

It’ll spot the problems. Then ask it to sequence the work so nothing conflicts. Two prompts, and you’ve got the same method I used.

You can see a visual example of what I mean below:

Running several AI sessions at once — the board pack

Future Workplace

Running several AI sessions at once without them tripping over each other

A quarterly board pack, written by five Copilot sessions in parallel. The work is split into waves. Sessions in the same wave don’t share a source, and each wave only starts once the previous one has finished.

Elapsed: 0 min
1Independent sections

Three sections that don’t depend on each other. Each has its own source; the brief fixes the one they share.

Waiting
AFinance narrative
Source: management accounts v3
Queued
BSales update
Source: CRM export · revenue figure from mgmt accounts
Queued
COperations update
Source: incidents log, last quarter’s pack
Queued
2Dependent section

Needs the finished finance and ops sections, so it has to wait for wave 1.

Waiting
DRisk register
Source: wave 1 outputs, incidents log
Queued
Waiting on: Finance narrative, Operations update
3Pull it together

The summary draws on all four sections. A final session then checks the pack for inconsistencies.

Waiting
EExecutive summary
Source: all four sections, CEO’s leadership notes
Queued
FConsistency checkfinal pass
Reads all five sections; flags any figure that appears twice with different values
Queued
Waiting on: Risk register
Where they’d have collided: finance and sales both need a revenue figure. Without a shared brief, they’d each pull their own from different places and the numbers wouldn’t match. The brief tells both to use management accounts v3 for Q2, so they do.
Queued Working Done Elapsed time is illustrative, not measured.
Select Technology Future Workplace · AI, automation and bespoke software for SMEs

There is a catch.

Somebody still has to read five documents and decide whether they tell one story - and that somebody is you 🫵. It's less like getting an assistant and more like suddenly managing a small team, which is a different job and not everyone's idea of a good time. But it's the direction things are going, and I'd rather you heard it from me than found out the hard way.

😂 The one thing that made me laugh:

Something that made laugh

Or at the very least go hmmmm.

Remember the things you learned at school and college? And how they apply to your current role?

At no point in my 80s and 90s schooling did anyone teach me the skills to discuss “we should run this through a deterministic wizard before we release it to AI”. In fact, I’m pretty sure no-one mentioned wizards, deterministic or otherwise, at all.

💡 The one thing you can do next week:

Forgetful Colpilot

Word can make a really good scratchpad (think of it as a shared notebook) for Copilot. Have Copilot do what you need, and have a file in SharePoint or OneDrive called copilot-scratchpad.docx (or whatever you fancy). In the prompt tell it to store a report of what happened in that file, then in future prompts include “check /copilot-scratchpad.docs”.

This gets over the problem of Copilot forgetting what it did last week.

If you are interested to find out how AI, automation and all things clever can help your organisation why not take a look at Future Workplace, our super special IT consultancy service that can supercharge productivity, business efficiency and so much more.

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Nick Ellis

AI and Innovation Lead

Nick Ellis is the AI and Innovation Lead at Select Technology. He is the driving force behind our Future Workplace service,  which enables SMEs across all industries to use AI and automation to enhance business operations

Throughout his career he has been instrumental in helping organisations across London and the South East, to unlock the power of AI and automation to build smarter workflows that remove manual administration and connect systems. He has helped organisations replace inefficient tools with simplified processes, freeing up teams to focus on what they do best and enabling business growth without increasing costs.

With over 30 years’ experience in business technology, spanning FTSE 500 organisations and SMEs, Nick specialises in Microsoft 365, cloud software, AI solutions, and business intelligence.

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