Find the extended presentation online later
narrativegoldmine.com/notes/working/Introduction-to-Agents
Reading this later?
Each slide has a short summary at the top. Scroll down within a slide, or down this page, for the links, prices and sources behind it. Everything was checked on 29 September 2026.
AI Agents for Small Business
Getting started in Sept 2026
Agentics Foundation · The Bus Station · Dr John O’Hare
The Agentics Foundation
A global, not-for-profit community for agentic AI
- A volunteer-run, not-for-profit community for agentic AI, founded in March 2025 by Reuven Cohen (“rUv”)
- Mission: making AI innovation and education open to everyone through open-source agentic AI systems
- Seven pillars: research, open-source tools, education and accreditation, workshops, regional chapters, AI safety, advisory work for government and institutions
- Free to join. No sales pitch tonight: the software we make is mostly free
Find out more
- Start at agentics.org: it carries the current Discord invite (invites rotate, so use the site rather than an old link)
- There’s a very active WhatsApp community, get in touch with me on LinkedIn if you can’t find it.
A big, active community
- 100K+ members across platforms 52K+ in the LinkedIn group · 130K+ Reddit followers · 3K+ on Discord. Weekly live coding with Reuven Cohen, running every week since April 2024
- Chapters from Halifax to Vienna, Vancouver, Bengaluru and London
Find out more
- To find the LinkedIn group, search LinkedIn for “♾️” agentics, with the quotes around the infinity sign
Free, every week
- Hundreds of hours of free recorded sessions at video.agentics.org
- Live several times a week on YouTube, LinkedIn and the Agentics site, usually in the evening
- Events calendar: luma.com/agentics
Find out more
- Thursday: live coding with Reuven Cohen (about 90 minutes) and the Vibecast
- Friday: AI Hackerspace Live
- Subscribe to luma.com/agentics to get each session in your calendar
Local: West Cumbria
- Ian (manages LEVELS) and I are the Foundation’s ambassadors for the Whitehaven area
Find out more
- LEVELS Whitehaven: the digital and gaming centre in the old Whittles building, funded through Sellafield’s SiX programme
- Want to come to the next session, or host one? Talk to Ian or me, or post in the DreamLab forum (link at the end)
Introduction to me
About Me
Chief Hallucination Officer DreamLab AI Consulting Ltd,
residential training in Eskdale.
Associate Director R&D dreamlab
.Support learning for Saïd Business School
Full portfolio of online AI modules.
Founding member Agentic Alliance
.Link to original
Part 2 ·
What is an agent?
A working definition
- Chatbot: you ask, it answers. One turn at a time.
- Agent: you give it a goal. It plans, uses tools (your email, files, browser, apps), checks its own work, and keeps going.
Think of agents as sheepdogs. You are no longer putting sheep in a pen one by one. Sometimes the best path is a long arc round the field; sometimes it is a structured play with more work up front. That part depends on you.
Find out more
- New this month: agents that live in the cloud. Claude, Microsoft’s Autopilot and Grok Bot all keep working after you close the laptop, and come back to you for approval
- That makes the question less “what can it do?” and more “what have I let it touch?” (Part 6)
- Anthropic’s Building effective agents is a clear, vendor-neutral explanation of agent patterns
The capability overhang
- Very few people use more than a fraction of what current AI can already do
- The unlock is agents: giving the AI your tools, your files and a goal
- It is still fiddly. That is what these sessions and the Agentics community are for
- We have too little time today, just signposts and signals
Working with AI
| Vibe coding | Agentic engineering |
|---|---|
| Flow, fluid and intuitive | Structured, process-driven |
| Little process | Deep planning, test-driven |
| You are the feedback loop | The machine is the feedback loop |
| Ideation and discovery | Iteration and refinement |
| SMEs start on the left. I’m in the middle. The value compounds on the right. |
Find out more
- Try the left-hand column for free: the DreamLab Vibe coding module builds and publishes a small website from plain-English instructions
- The right-hand column is what the Claude Code Mastery module teaches: plans, tests, hooks and sub-agents
Agents running longer
- METR measures how long a task an AI can finish on its own
- That length has doubled roughly every 4.3 months since 2023
- The best models now succeed half the time on tasks that take an expert a full working day or more
- Caveat: half the time is not hand it over. Reliability lags capability.
Find out more
- METR’s own note on the limits of the measure (January 2026): 50% success on a benchmark does not mean you can delegate the task
Part 3 · Agents Now
What launched in the last few weeks
Microsoft Copilot: one app, now with Autopilot
- The new Copilot (25 September 2026) brings everything into one app, in three parts:
- Autopilot: a persistent agent in Microsoft’s cloud with its own identity, memory and inbox. It keeps working while you are offline and you can @mention it in Teams like a colleague
Find out more
- Home: chat and Cowork together, with Word, Excel and PowerPoint built in. Hand it a whole task, such as a tender response
- Code: describe an app, tracker or dashboard in plain English and it builds it, inside your own Microsoft 365
- Copilot Business £16.10 per user per month (£13.80 until 31 December, excluding VAT). Agent work is billed by usage
When can I have it?
- Home and Code: rolling out now through Microsoft’s Frontier early-access programme. Code reaches Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers in preview later this year
- Autopilot: private preview from the end of September; not self-service yet
- Copilot Chat (without the agents) is free with eligible Microsoft 365 business plans
How a small business turns it on
- You need at least one Microsoft 365 Copilot licence (Copilot Business is the SME version, up to 300 users)
- Your admin opts in: Microsoft 365 admin centre → Copilot → Settings → Frontier → choose who gets access (allow about three hours)
- Personal, Family and Premium subscribers can opt in themselves from Word, Excel or PowerPoint on the web
What it costs
- Everyday Copilot stays on the flat per-user price. Cowork, Code and Autopilot use Copilot Credits: $0.01 each, or $200 a month for 25,000 (Microsoft prices credits in dollars)
- Usage billing is off by default on existing tenants; admins set spending limits
- From 2 November 2026, new Copilot Business licences bought through a reseller (CSP) have pay-as-you-go switched on by default. Check yours
- Bundles: Business Standard with Copilot £18.10, Business Premium with Copilot £22.10–£24.60
Before you let Autopilot loose
- Each Autopilot is effectively a new member of staff with its own account and email address. Microsoft has not yet published how it asks for approval or how its actions appear in audit logs
- Microsoft’s governance layer is Agent 365, which lists every agent in your tenant with its identity and permissions
Links
- The announcement · UK pricing · Business plans and add-ons
- Frontier programme · Admin: turning on Frontier · Copilot Credits explained
Anthropic Claude
- Anthropic’s desktop agent, Cowork, merged into Claude itself on 16 September 2026
- Hand it real work: it plans, uses your files and connected apps, and returns a finished report, spreadsheet or deck
- Runs in the cloud, keeps going after you close the laptop, and can run on a schedule
- Claude in Chrome (generally available since 26 August) reads pages, clicks and fills in forms, but will not buy things or handle card details
- Pro £18 a month (£15 a month billed annually); Max from £90
Find out more
- Cowork and scheduled tasks reached Pro and Max first; Team is now supported, Free is not
- Claude Opus 5.5 (22 September) costs about 40% less to run than Opus 5 for the same work
- A scheduled task example: “every Monday at 8, pull last week’s sales from the spreadsheet and draft the team update”
- Cowork is now Claude · Getting started with Cowork · Claude in Chrome · UK pricing
ChatGPT Work
- Researches across your connected apps and files, and produces documents, spreadsheets, slides and simple websites
- Scheduled tasks can be triggered by events in Gmail or Slack
- Included in paid plans; Plus about £20 a month, with a cheaper Go plan at £8
- In the UK, though some features (public publishing, the expanded beta) were held back from the UK and EEA at launch
Find out more
- Event triggers: a new Gmail message, an @ChatGPT mention in a Slack channel, or activity on a GitHub pull request
- Rolling out to Pro and Enterprise first, then Plus and Business; not on Free or Go
- The Atlas browser closed on 9 August; its agent features moved into ChatGPT
- ChatGPT release notes · Pricing
Google Workspace: Cheap
- Gemini built into Gmail, Docs and Meet on every business plan
- Business Starter £5.90, Standard £11.80 per user per month (annual)
- Workspace Studio: build simple agents that automate everyday work without code
- Gemini Spark (Google’s personal agent) and Chrome auto-browse are not in the UK
Find out more
- Workspace Studio (9 September) builds multi-step workflows across Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Chat and Calendar. It is on Business Standard and above, not Starter
- “Gemini in Chrome”, the assistant side panel, has reached some UK desktop users; auto-browse, which acts for you, is US-only
- UK pricing · New agentic features in Workspace
Meta Muse: agents go mass-market
- Launched 8 September 2026: a personal agent that books, buys, emails and fills in forms across Gmail, Shopify, OpenTable, Expedia, PayPal and more
- Web, iOS, Android and inside WhatsApp
- 2.8 million downloads in two weeks; overtook ChatGPT as the top free app in the US
- Free tier, Power $20 and Max $100 a month
Find out more
- Downloads had reached about 3.4 million by 28 September (Sensor Tower)
- Expanded to Canada on 18 September. Still no UK date, and no official UK waitlist
- Video above: Mind the Product, “Muse: Meta’s new personal AI agent. How much control would you hand over?”
- TechCrunch on Muse’s take-off
Meta Muse: the announcement
Grok Bot: Musky Cloud Agent
- From xAI and Cursor (launched 11 August 2026): always-on agents, each with its own cloud computer, that sign into your apps and websites as you, even ones with no API
- Works through long jobs on its own and messages you when it needs approval
- 418,000 weekly users after its first month; business controls from 3 September, shared Team Bots from 28 September
- Included in Cursor Pro ($20) and SuperGrok ($30) a month; available in the UK
Find out more
- “Logs in as you” is the powerful part and the risky part: whatever the bot can reach, a hidden instruction in a web page might reach too (see Part 6)
- The business version adds single sign-on, audit logs and central billing
- Grok 4.7, the model behind it, launched on 21 September
- xAI · Cursor · Bloomberg: 400,000 users in a month
The UK is at the back of the queue
| Available to a Cumbrian SME today | Not in the UK yet |
|---|---|
| Claude (with Cowork) and Claude in Chrome | Meta Muse |
| ChatGPT Work and Codex | Gemini Spark |
| Microsoft Copilot Cowork (Autopilot in preview) | Chrome auto-browse |
| Google Workspace Studio | Some ChatGPT Work features |
| Grok Bot (Cursor, SuperGrok) | |
| Perplexity Comet (free browser) | |
| Manus, Zapier and Make agents |
Also worth knowing
- Zapier Agents (free for 400 activities a month) and Make (from $9 a month, billed annually): no-code automation, now with agents
- Instinct An invite-only, text-based personal life-admin agent that uses a cloud computer to autonomously book, purchase, and resolve digital tasks
- Perplexity Comet: a free AI browser that can fill in forms
- Manus: a general-purpose agent for reports and websites. Bought by Meta, then independent again from 1 September after Chinese regulators objected; current owners undisclosed
- OpenClaw: open source and self-hosted. Powerful, but four serious security flaws were patched in April. For tinkerers, not your accounts.
- Agentbox My own locally run model agnostic harness.
Find out more
- Zapier’s “activities” are not its usual “tasks”: one agent run uses up to 10 activities
- Zapier Agents · Make pricing · Perplexity Comet Agentbox
Optional Demo Report
deploy a ruflo managed mesh using an opus 5.5 queen and sonnet 5.5 sub agents and research agents alongside your web search skills like perplexity. create a pdf report in chapters using the latex skills in the house style and add it to the visionflow repo in the docs directory after compiling and building here using scratch. Check the output using browser automation for visual consistency and ensure it's world class, with relevant diagrams as code using the svg skills or mermaid. inject relevant images from the web, or our previous work recalled from memory or the local projects. build a bib file of citations using the relevant research skills and ensure the citations compile and render. add frontmatter such as index, list of figures, appendices, and bibliography in the house style. Attribute it to dreamlab-ai with the logo from the website. Use LOOM if it helps to ground, but this is a current snaphot type project. use this tool from our dreamlab partners online in browser automation https://bearings.peterwoodbridge.workers.dev/explore?q=ai to find any applicable opportunities against the research subjects, but don't over index on that as it might be time sensitive. you can assign a parallel agent to the task up front and take whatever it's managed to get when the rest of the document is ready for rendering, the do a final prose sanitiser sweep and push. Add a direct web link as a qr code to the end of this presentation and push as soon as you are done so we can pick it up online. the url will be into the docs of the visionflow repo not here.
Getting cheaper
- Claude Opus 5.5 (22 September): Anthropic says it costs 40% less to run than Opus 5
- OpenAI’s new GPT-6 Sol and Luna models (22 September) are priced below the last generation
- Business AI now costs £6–£16 per user per month in the tools you already use
- Chinese coding plans (such as Z.ai GLM) are cheaper still, but think hard about where your data goes
Find out more
- API prices per million words-in-pieces (“tokens”), in and out: GPT-6 Luna $0.10 / $0.50, Sol $2 / $10; Grok 4.7 $2 / $6
- The catch: agents use far more tokens than chat, which is why Microsoft, Zapier and others now bill agent work by usage. Set a spending limit before you start
Part 4 · Where UK small businesses are
Adoption: a third, and shallow
- 35% of UK firms with 10+ staff now use AI, up from 12% in 2023 (ONS, July 2026)
- 28% of micro firms (0–9 staff), 49% of large firms
- Only 1 in 10 adopters use AI “extensively”
- Sector matters: information and communication 58%, construction 13%
- Business surveys run higher (BCC 54%, Lloyds 61%) because they ask differently. The direction is the same.
Find out more
- The government’s own AI Adoption Research (January 2026) found 16%: the spread comes from how “using AI” is defined
- Lloyds (March 2026): the North West ranks third for AI investment
- ONS: AI in UK businesses, 2023 to 2026
What is holding firms back
- “No identified need” (71%) and limited skills (60%): DSIT, January 2026
- Concerns rated serious: ethics 80%, cost 76%, unclear regulation 72%
- Agentic AI is the hardest to implement: 32% of firms report significant barriers
- 92% of small firms still worry about data security, copyright and liability (FSB, 2026)
- Only 7.5% of SMEs are “very confident” they understand the benefits (Lloyds, September 2026)
Find out more
- The same FSB survey found 55% of small firms now use AI, up from 20% in 2023. Worry and use are rising together
- DSIT AI adoption research · Lloyds Business Barometer
What the evidence says it is worth
- UK government trials: 19–26 minutes a day saved on email, drafting and searching for information
- HMRC’s randomised trial: 2–3% of the working week, about an hour
- Customer support: new staff 34% more productive with an AI assistant (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2025)
- The sober view: a Danish study of 25,000 workers found 2.8% of hours saved and no change in pay
Real, modest, and largest for the least experienced. Not magic.
Find out more
- DWP’s Copilot evaluation (January 2026) measured 19 minutes a day; the cross-government trial (June 2025) found 26 minutes, self-reported
- The Department for Business and Trade found “no robust evidence” of higher productivity, and some tasks (scheduling, images) took longer
- DWP trial · HMRC trial · Brynjolfsson et al. · Humlum and Vestergaard
The catch: AI can intensify work
- Harvard Business Review, February 2026: people using AI worked faster, took on more tasks and worked longer hours
- Juggling several AI threads at once feels productive but adds strain
- The fix is a team “AI practice”: agree what you use it for, and when you stop
Find out more
- The study followed one US tech firm of about 200 people, so treat it as a warning sign rather than a general rule
- HBR: AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
Part 5 · What agents can do for your business
Admin and email
- Triage the inbox, draft replies, chase invoices, summarise long threads
- A weekly report assembled from your spreadsheets on a schedule
- Meeting notes turned into actions and follow-up emails
- Evidence: the UK government trials’ biggest savings were email drafting (25 minutes) and finding information (26 minutes)
Find out more
- Try it this week: Claude’s scheduled tasks, ChatGPT Work’s Gmail triggers, or Copilot Cowork in Outlook can each run a “Monday morning summary” for you
- Start with read-only access to your inbox. Let it draft; you press send
Quotes, tenders and compliance
- Pull together a bid pack from past proposals, CVs and case studies
- Check a tender against its requirements before you submit
- Keep policies, risk registers and method statements up to date
- Locally: Sellafield’s supply chain (the LINC scheme, the quarterly SME Forum) runs on exactly this kind of paperwork
Find out more
- These are illustrations: there is no rigorous study of SMEs using agents for tenders yet
- Microsoft’s own example for Copilot Cowork is an RFP response. Keep a human reading every page before it goes out
- How to do business with Sellafield Ltd
Marketing and customers
- Draft posts, newsletters and product descriptions in your voice
- Answer routine customer questions with a human signing off
- Research competitors and suppliers, with sources
- Evidence: marketing is the top use among BCC members who use AI (72%)
Find out more
- If a chatbot talks to customers in the EU, the EU AI Act now requires it to say it is an AI (Part 6)
Finance, bookkeeping, HR and operations
- Categorise transactions, reconcile, and flag anomalies for your accountant
- First drafts of job adverts, onboarding packs and rotas
- Stock, suppliers and orders: agents that watch and nudge rather than decide
- Keep a human signature on money, contracts and people decisions
Find out more
- Microsoft’s Code, Zapier and Make can all build a simple “watch this and tell me” tracker without programming
- Using AI to screen CVs is “high-risk” under the EU AI Act, and a new automated-decisions regime applies in the UK
Things I have seen built this year
- Vitrine: phone photos in, a walk-through 3D archive out
- Solar on a Cumbrian hillside: a whole site planned in 3D before anything is built
- West Cumbria in Minecraft: real map and height data turned into a world you can walk around
- A research paper: The Copy Ceiling, on arXiv this month
All of them were built by one or two people working with teams of AI agents.
Vitrine: photos in, walk-through 3D out
- Built with an agent team for the University of Salford’s XR Lab
- Drop in phone photos or video; it builds an explorable 3D “Gaussian splat” archive, processed locally with nothing uploaded
- Used to preserve an immersive art installation before it was taken down
Find out more
- A companion tool lifts individual objects (a chair, a prop) out of a captured room as clean 3D models: open source at vitrine-object-sidecar
Planning solar on a Cumbrian hillside
- A Blender pipeline, written with coding agents, turns aerial photos and Environment Agency LiDAR into a lit 3D model of a real site
- Checks winter sun angles, shading and how the panels sit against the fells before anything goes in the ground
- Explore it yourself in a web browser: fairfield-solar-webgl
Find out more
West Cumbria in Minecraft
- Real Environment Agency LiDAR heights and OpenStreetMap data, turned into Minecraft worlds with the open-source arnis tool
- The coast to the fells at 1:10, and the Eskdale valley at 1:4
- A way into maps, data and planning that young people already understand
Find out more
- The same height data feeds the solar model on the previous slide: one dataset, several uses
- Free, public data: Environment Agency LiDAR and OpenStreetMap
Research: The Copy Ceiling
- On arXiv, 21 September 2026: arxiv.org/abs/2609.24885
- The question: when you give an AI your own documents to work from, does it reason over them, or just copy them back?
- Across ten models, the grounded answers never beat a plain “copy from the documents” baseline
- The business lesson: measure what the AI adds beyond your own material
Find out more
- Full title: The Copy Ceiling: An Input-Exposure Control for Ontology-Grounded Generation over Curated Corpora, John J. O’Hare
- The paper is being revised; the arXiv page will carry the latest version
Bigger: a whole platform, built by agents
- VisionFlow: 18 months of continuous agentic engineering, 930+ source files
- Teams of people and teams of agents working in the same space
Part 6 · Risks and rules
Data protection: you stay responsible
- The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 is fully in force from 19 June 2026, with a new regime for automated decisions
- ICO on agentic AI: you are responsible for what your agent does
- Do not give an agent data “just because it might be useful”
- Do a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) where the risk is high
- ICO agentic AI guidance: consultation opening now, final version due this autumn
Find out more
- The ICO’s words: “AI agency does not mean the removal of human, and therefore organisational, responsibility for data processing”
- ICO on the Data (Use and Access) Act · ICO Tech Futures: Agentic AI · ICO guidance pipeline
Security: agents can be tricked
- Prompt injection: hidden instructions in an email or web page can hijack an agent. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre says it “may never be totally mitigated”
- Real example: EchoLeak, a single email that made Microsoft 365 Copilot leak data without a click
- OWASP’s Top 10 for agentic applications: goal hijack, tool misuse, privilege abuse, memory poisoning
- The principle is least agency: give an agent the fewest permissions that do the job, and a human sign-off on anything that matters
Find out more
- It matters more now that agents run in the cloud under their own identities (Autopilot) or log in as you (Grok Bot, Claude in Chrome)
- The NCSC and its Five Eyes partners published joint advice on adopting agentic AI carefully in April 2026: least privilege, human in the loop
- Short and free: NCSC: prompt injection is not SQL injection · OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications · NCSC: AI and cyber security
Selling into Europe? The EU AI Act
- Applies to UK firms whose AI systems or their output are used in the EU
- Since 2 August 2026: chatbots must say they are AI; deepfakes must be labelled
- High-risk uses (CV screening, credit scoring) are delayed to December 2027
- In the UK there is still no AI bill. Watch this space: pressure for one returned this month.
Find out more
- On 14 September Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights called for a UK AI law; the government still prefers sector regulators
- EU AI Act overview
Copyright and where your data lives
- The government dropped its proposed text-and-data-mining exception in March 2026: there is no copyright reform coming soon
- Do not assume AI output belongs to you. Check the vendor’s indemnity.
- Cheap providers can mean your data leaves the UK: ask where it is processed and whether it is used for training
- Manus’s ownership changed hands twice in a year. Know who you are handing your files to.
Part 7 · How to start
Three first steps
- Pick one painful, repetitive task. Not “AI strategy”: the invoice chasing, the weekly report, the tender pack.
- Start in a tool you already pay for. Microsoft 365 Copilot or Google Workspace Gemini first; Claude or ChatGPT for the heavier lifting.
- Write the rules down. What it may touch, what a human signs off, what never goes in.
Find out more
- On Microsoft 365? Ask your IT provider about the Frontier programme, and set an agent spending limit before 2 November
- Write your rules on one page: which accounts the agent may use, what it may send without asking, and who checks its work
A ladder, not a leap
- Chat: ask questions and draft things
- Assistant in your tools: Copilot in Outlook, Gemini in Gmail
- Agent: Claude with Cowork, ChatGPT Work, Copilot Cowork. Give it a goal and your files.
- Automation: Autopilot, Grok Bot, Zapier or Make agents that run without you
- Agentic engineering: your own agents, built properly and tested
Most of this room will get real value from rungs 2 and 3.
What it costs
| Option | Per user, per month | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Google Workspace Business Starter | £5.90 | Gemini included |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot Business | £16.10 (£13.80 until 31 December) | Plus your Microsoft 365 licence; agent work by usage |
| Claude Pro | £18 (£15 annually) | Cowork included |
| ChatGPT Plus | about £20 | ChatGPT Work included |
| Zapier Agents | free to start | 400 activities a month |
Find out more
- Prices are per user per month; Microsoft’s exclude VAT
- Also: ChatGPT Go £8; Claude Max from £90; Grok Bot via Cursor Pro $20; Business Standard with Copilot £18.10
Free help, in Cumbria and nationally
- AI Skills Boost: free short AI courses for every UK adult
- BCC AI Academy through the Cumbria Chamber of Commerce
- Made Smarter North West (manufacturers): match-funded grants up to £20k, digital roadmaps, funded digital interns
- Help to Grow: Management, and the Business Growth Service at business.gov.uk
- TechFirst is piloting AI apprenticeships for young people in the North West
- Sellafield: the SME Forum, the LINC scheme and the Tech Radar
- The LEVELS digital centre in Whitehaven
- Start at cumbriachamber.co.uk and business.gov.uk
Find out more
- Eagle Labs Community
- AI Skills Boost: free courses from Google, Microsoft, IBM, AWS and others, 20 minutes to 9 hours, on the AI Skills Hub
- BCC AI Academy: from £169 + VAT per licence for Chamber members (£199 for non-members), up to an “agents” level
- Made Smarter North West: grants up to £20,000, 50% match-funded, for manufacturers with up to 249 staff: madesmarter.uk
- Help to Grow: Management: 12 weeks, 90% funded, £750 per person, new cohorts from November
- Business Growth Service: business.gov.uk, phone 0800 998 1098
- Sellafield: register for LINC and ask about the SME Forum: doing business with Sellafield
- Cumberland Council’s small-business grants (UKSPF) closed in February 2026 and no successor has been named. There is no general AI-adoption grant for SMEs in England at present
For the curious: going deeper
- Terminology first, then GitHub, Docker and VS Code
- An agent “harness”: Claude Code, Codex, or a low-cost plan such as Z.ai’s GLM
- Self-guided course material at dreamlab-ai.com/workshops
- And the Agentics live coding sessions every week
Find out more: a self-guided path
- Set up: Infrastructure (GitHub, Git, VS Code, an API key) · VS Code as your AI command centre · VS Code pathway · Visual version control
- Talk to AI directly: API access · Vibe coding
- Use a harness: Claude Code Mastery (11 chapters, about 6 hours) · The Codex ecosystem
- Local models and your own documents: Local AI · RAG systems
- Containers: Docker for AI development
- Agents: Specialised agents · Orchestration and safety
- Ship it: QA and automation · Publishing
GitHub Copilot, unified: from 28 September, Copilot Chat on github.com, GitHub Mobile and the Copilot cloud agent become one “agent sessions” experience, on by default. Hand it an issue and it works in a cloud sandbox and opens a pull request. Note that chat history is now kept for the life of the account, not 28 days, and opting out removes Copilot from github.com and Mobile altogether. GitHub’s changelog
Microsoft’s Code, in the new Copilot, uses the same GitHub Copilot technology for non-programmers.
Join us
- agentics.org · the Discord · the LinkedIn group (“♾️ agentics”)
- Free videos at video.agentics.org
- Next West Cumbria session: talk to Ian or me tonight
Questions?
What’s Next
- dreamlab-ai on LinkedIn
- dreamlab-ai forums
- https://dreamlab-ai.com/community/join/lBEv2eNvgBDLjTNo
Sources
- Agentics Foundation: agentics.org (25 Sep 2026); June 2026 newsletter; London chapter
- Microsoft: the new Copilot, 25 Sep 2026; Partner Center, September 2026; Copilot pricing (UK); Copilot Cowork GA; Copilot Credits
- GitHub: unified Copilot and cloud agent
- Claude: Cowork is now Claude, 16 Sep 2026; Claude in Chrome; pricing
- OpenAI: ChatGPT Work; release notes
- Google: Workspace pricing (UK)
- Meta Muse: Meta newsroom, 8 Sep 2026; TechCrunch; Reuters, 23 Sep 2026
- Grok Bot: Bloomberg, 22 Sep 2026; xAI
- METR: time horizons; limitations
- ONS: AI in UK businesses 2023–2026
- DSIT: AI adoption research
- BCC: Half of SMEs using AI; Lloyds: Business Barometer, 9 Sep 2026
- Evidence: DWP Copilot trial; HMRC trial; Brynjolfsson et al.; Humlum and Vestergaard; HBR, Feb 2026
- Rules: ICO on the Data (Use and Access) Act; ICO Tech Futures: Agentic AI; NCSC on prompt injection; OWASP agentic Top 10; EU AI Act
- Support: AI Skills Boost; Made Smarter North West; Doing business with Sellafield
- Built this year: The Copy Ceiling (arXiv 2609.24885); vitrine-object-sidecar; fairfield-solar-webgl; arnis