18 01732 759725 Practical starting point In many respects Lanier South West is a typical, well-run, 12-person MPS provider serving a local area – the BS (Bristol), BA (Bath) and TA (Taunton) postcodes – with a core offering enhanced by sensible diversification. This begs the question: what prompted Calum to dive into the fast-moving world of AI, develop new skills in-house and then launch a whole new business with UK‑wide reach? “I saw something about AI voice on social media and my first reaction was ‘Telesales’,” he explains. “How can we use this to communicate with our customers and communicate with prospects? And how can I do that without spending more money on staffing? I had an online conversation with somebody, then went away and thought about it and, with more research, realised we could do it ourselves.” Calum quickly decided the best starting point was not telesales but the processing of incoming service calls, where AI could help provide a better service through round-the-clock assistance and cover when someone is ill, on holiday or simply away from their desk. Over the next six months he and Lanier South West’s in-house IT expert developed an AI Voice bot fully integrated with the cloud-based Vantage Online software the company uses to manage operations, including meter readings and billing, contract administration, help desk and field service management. This API integration, which is also configured into a text-based chatbot on Lanier South West’s website, enables the AI agent to log incoming service calls and relevant details provided by the caller straight into Vantage Online, providing an experience that Calum says is both more fluid and potentially more informative than registering a fault via Vantage Online directly. “With Vantage Online, you have to set up a login for the end user and when they log in they have to fill out a form to log a call. With our bot, people just need to provide their device’s serial number to log the call. There’s no format to it. It’s fluid. You can also ask it for other things. If, say, you’ve got black lines on copies, it will give advice on “I assumed everybody was investing in AI,” he says. “But someone in our industry told me that wasn’t the case. He said people tend to think AI is ChatGPT or Copilot and will use it for simple things like finding some very basic information or writing an email, but they’re not integrating it into their internal systems to make them better. I was surprised. I genuinely thought the younger guys would be looking at this and doing all the running.” They haven’t been – at least not in Cheddar, Somerset – giving 56-year-old Calum Smith an opportunity to take what he has learned from developing AI for his own business out to other small businesses across the UK. Early days Lanier South West’s roots go back to 1968 when Calum’s parents, Maurice and Helen Smith, set up Norset Office Supplies in Cheddar. In the 1970s they switched focus to electrostatic photocopiers and, in 1976, became a Sharp dealer – the first company in Somerset to specialise in plain paper copiers. In 1992, Norset adopted Lanier South West as its trading name, having entered into a partnership with the Harris/3M organisation, then known as Lanier (UK) Limited, and taken on its full range of copiers, fax machines, voice products and document management systems. For the last 15 years, Lanier South West has majored on Toshiba devices, which now account for around 95% of its MFP sales, with Develop supplying the remaining 5%. Alongside Toshiba MFPs, Lanier South West sells complementary products like PaperCut software for schools and Foldr document management software from Selectec. Just before Covid, it added VoIP telephony to its offering, giving it not just a new source of recurring revenue but a broader customer base to go after. “I thought that telephony business would all come from our existing copier customers, but it hasn’t. It’s come from a mix. It’s bringing in new customers, and new customers that don’t have copiers as well. And it’s allowed us to go back to existing customers that might not want a new copier and have something else to talk about,” says Calum. Like many business owners, Calum Smith, Managing Director of MFP and VoIP telephony provider Lanier South West, has been exploring how he can use AI within his operations to boost productivity, improve customer service and potentially create a new revenue stream. Unusually, he and his colleagues have done this so successfully – and generated such a level of interest from existing contacts in the managed print services (MPS) industry – that Calum has now set up a separate business, AI Voice Solutions, to develop AI phone agents for services businesses in other sectors and other parts of the country. He seems more surprised than anybody that what he describes as “a little company in the south-west” should be at the forefront of this next wave of automation. After developing an AI voice agent to help process its own service calls, a Somerset managed print service provider is now offering its AI expertise to other service companies across the UK Leading by example AI Calum Smith
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