One year ago, Headstar, alongside AAG IT Services and Cyber Alchemy, welcomed businesses to the heart of Sheffield for a business insights dinner. Here’s what we learned.
What Made the Business Insights Dinner Unique?
A select group of business leaders were invited to The Mowbray, a private event space in Sheffield, for an evening designed to elevate operational and security acumen. Hosted in partnership with Sheffield-based Cyber Security firm Cyber Alchemy and Sheffield-based IT Services provider AAG IT Services, our Business Insights Dinner combined a three-course dining experience with actionable business intelligence.
Each course of the meal was sponsored by and preceded by one of the partner hosts, where the focus was placed on a key pain point for those in the room. This meant that guests engaged with presentations on the financial best practices, latest AI business tools and cyber defence strategies for forward-thinking organisations.
Hidden risks in finance: what leaders need to look for
Our Headstar presentation, The Dark Art of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), showcased to business leaders how financial risks often stay hidden in plain sight.
The session focused on three core areas:
- Uncovering hidden risks in margins, revenue recognition, debtor recovery and stock that can quietly erode performance.
- Building integrated, forward-looking reporting so leaders can act early rather than react late.
- Spotting practical warning signs that indicate when financial controls, visibility or leadership have slipped.
Why this matters for your organisation
For business owners and funders, the message is clear: you can’t rely on instinct alone. You need finance data that is transparent, challengeable and future-focused.
More than that though: a finance leader does far more than protect the bottom line – they help shape the company’s culture, values and long-term direction, as well as ensuring financial transparency throughout the organisation.
Growing organisations should routinely ask themselves: does our finance structure still match the scale and speed of the business? When decision-making relies too heavily on a single individual, or when reporting is fragmented, blind spots grow quickly. It is well documented that the wrong CFO or FD can massively impact performance and literally cost businesses millions.
Leaders can reduce risk by focusing on three practical areas:
- Ensure reporting is consistent, integrated and forward looking so that financial and operational data inform each other, enabling early action rather than reactive crisis management.
- Introduce robust governance and encourage healthy financial challenge, making numbers accessible, transparent and open to scrutiny rather than confined to a single individual.
- Build a finance team that matches where your business is now, with the right mix of skills, capacity and leadership to keep up with growth and support the wider strategy.
When organisations get this right, everything becomes easier to manage. You get clearer information, better decision making and a far stronger handle on performance at a time when financial transparency really matters.
Harnessing AI for Business Efficiency with Microsoft Copilot
At the Business Insights Dinner, Charlie Griffiths, Director of Technology and Innovation at AAG IT Services, demonstrated how Copilot transforms everyday M365 work into measurable time savings and improved focus. Since then, a wave of UKbased evidence has landed to back that up.
What the latest UK data says
- Crossgovernment trial (20,000 staff): The UK Government Digital Service found users saved ~26 minutes per day, with 82% saying they wouldn’t want to go back to preCopilot ways of working. The strongest gains came from drafting, summarising, and finding information faster.
- Global context from Microsoft & LinkedIn’s Work Trend Index: 75% of knowledge workers now use AI at work; leaders see AI as imperative but still need a plan to scale value.
Bottom line: When Copilot is deployed with governance, training and changemanagement, organisations see tangible time saved and employees report higher satisfaction.
UK business case studies you can point to
- Vodafone (trial → 68,000 users): Early users reported 3–4 hours saved per person, per week on drafting, summarising and searching (enough proof for a rollout to most of the workforce).
- Hargreaves Lansdown: Financial advisers expect to complete client documentation 4× faster, with staff reporting 2–3 hours saved per week and 96% finding Copilot useful for daily tasks.
- Taylor Wimpey: First major UK housebuilder to adopt Copilot; teams highlight accessibility gains and “remarkable” new ways of working embedded across Outlook, Teams, Word and Excel.
- University of Manchester: Reported “phenomenal” time savings and strong adoption across teaching and backoffice functions during phased Copilot deployment.
Remember that although these figures look appealing, the success is built on being ready to adopt Copilot. Without the right enablement (prompting skills, data readiness, usepolicy), trials did fall by the wayside and were reported as unsuccessful. The biggest pitfalls have been when training is limited and the data that Copilot has access to hasn’t be cleansed, the time in verifying the Copilot’s output typically offsets the time saved in drafting at this point.
Key point: Plan adoption with governance and upskilling from day one. Ensure your business is ready to adopt Copilot first.
Where Copilot pays off fastest (and how to make it stick)
- Email & meetings: Studies show sizeable cuts to time spent processing email and catching up on meetings, often hours per week.
- Drafting and summarising: Firstdraft PowerPoint creation, summarising lengthy docs, and turning transcripts into structured documents all offer quick wins.
- Analyse: Analysing sales data can quickly turn into a time-consuming task, with Copilot in Excel, you can use the AI to break down the insights immediately.
Horrible Histories: Cyber Security Edition
Neil Richardson, MD & Co-Founder of Cyber Alchemy, delivered a memorable “Horrible Histories: Cyber Security Edition.” Through real-world and historical examples, Neil illustrated how scams and security breaches have evolved, and what modern businesses can do to protect themselves.
All with the help of a special narrator in David Attenborough (showing just how powerful AI can be for scams)!
So, exactly what scams were discussed?
19thcentury roots → 21stcentury inbox
- The Spanish Prisoner → advancefee scams: A 1800s con promising riches for “helping” a prisoner maps directly to today’s email advancefee frauds—same psychology, new medium.
- The Great Gold Robbery (1855): Even Victorianera heists exploited weak controls and duplicate keys. Okay, maybe that was a physical robbery; however, the principle remains today. Duplicate keys? Think reused or weak passwords. Insider collusion? Think successful phishing attacks, or comprised vendors. Lack of segregation of duties? Think poor role-based access control (essentially employees having access to data they shouldn’t, or permissions they shouldn’t).
What this means for leaders now
- Assume you’ll be compromised, so design for containment: you do this by enforcing least privilege access, applying conditional access policies, requiring device health checks, (and more)!
- Train your employees: conduct regular phishing and social engineering training and verify supplier interactions through callbacks
- Scrutinise your supply chain: Make sure every company, tool, or service you rely on is safe and trustworthy. If one of them gets hacked, it could affect you too.
Why Events Like This Matter
At Headstar, events like our Business Insights Dinner aren’t just about sharing knowledge – we always want attendees to leave with practical insights, action points, and a renewed focus on driving business growth. If they made new connections with the people they dined with too, even better!
Keep an eye-out for Headstar’s programme of upcoming events this year, including next week’s Finance Futures: The Executive Summit and March’s HerFinance Circle: Confident Conversations event.
Ready to elevate your finance function and leadership team?
Contact Headstar to discuss how the right finance leadership can support your next stage of growth, or to learn more about our upcoming events.
