By Ben McCarthy, Founder, Premier Events
This is the first in a new monthly column about how we actually use AI at Premier, a full-service event agency in Leicester.
Not AI as a buzzword, not AI as a threat to jobs, just the practical stuff we’ve built, month by month, that makes the place run better. Some months it’ll be a big project. Some months it’ll be something small that saved someone twenty minutes on a Tuesday. This month, it’s a timesheet app.
We used to run our timesheets through Deputy. It did the job, but it was a subscription we paid for a tool that didn’t quite fit how we work. We’ve got 15 people across warehouse, technicians, Woodshop and accounts who track their hours worked (the rest are all salaried). They all have slightly different needs, and we were bending our process to match the software rather than the other way round.
So we built our own. In one session, using Claude, I went from a rough idea to a working app. PIN login so people can clock in using their phones without faffing about with passwords. Manager approval built in, so hours get signed off by the right person before they hit payroll.
An export that drops straight into a format our accounts team can use in Xero, no reformatting, no copy and paste. It replaced Deputy completely, and it cost us nothing but time and some Claude tokens.
Here’s the bit I want to land, because it’s the whole point of this column: I’m not a developer. I’m an ex DJ that runs an event agency. What’s changed is that you no longer need to be technical to build the tools your business actually needs.
You need to know your business, know what’s annoying about your current process, and be able to describe it clearly. The building part has got a lot more accessible. That’s a genuinely big shift for businesses our size, who’d never have had the budget or the in-house skills to commission something like this from scratch.
It’s not just been the odd shiny app, either. A smaller example that’s quietly saved us a lot of hassle: working out distances between delegates and a venue.
Many of the brands we work with have a policy that if a delegate lives more than two hours from the venue, they can stay over the night before. We were doing this manually using an excel and Google maps and it was a waste of our peoples time! So I built an automation that does it instantly instead. No drama, no big unveiling, just one less thing on someone’s task list.
That’s really the pattern behind everything we’re doing with AI at Premier. It’s rarely one transformative project. It’s a steady run of small, specific fixes to the parts of the job nobody enjoys, stacked up until they add up to something that actually changes how the place feels to work in. The timesheet app is the headline this month because it’s the most visible, but the delegate distance tool is arguably more typical of how this actually plays out day to day: unglamorous, easy to miss, genuinely useful.
If you’re running an events business and wondering where to start, my honest advice is to start with whatever annoys you most this week. Not the biggest, most impressive-sounding project. The thing that makes someone sigh when they have to do it. That’s usually the one worth fixing first, and it’s usually more achievable than you’d think.
Next month: automating receipt handling so that the money spent is allocated to the correct event!