At the recent Hays Women in Tech Connect event, Box UK’s Chief Solutions Officer, Allie Brock, shared a story that began with curiosity and ended up reshaping how we think about work. What started as playful experiments with AI has grown into building assistants that actually make teams faster, sharper, and a bit less bogged down in the repetitive stuff.
So, what are AI assistants?
Think of them as digital sidekicks. They listen to your prompts, answer questions, and can even handle simple tasks for you. Unlike AI agents, which go off doing things on their own and plug into wider systems, assistants are more straightforward — you ask, they respond. Which means they’re easy to use, even if you’ve never touched a line of code in your life.
Smudge the Border Terrier (yes, really)
Allie’s journey into custom assistants didn’t start with business strategy. It started at home, with her Border Terrier, Smudge.
She’d received a complex microbiome report for Smudge — pages of scientific detail that were hard to translate into something practical. So, she built Smudge’s Healthchecker: an AI assistant that could break down the data into plain language and suggest which foods might support her overall health and wellbeing.
What began as a personal experiment turned out to be a glimpse of something bigger: assistants that can take overwhelming, technical information and make it simple, useful, and actionable. A curiosity project… that quickly showed how AI could boost consistency, creativity, and productivity in all sorts of contexts.
Allie also zoomed out to the bigger picture. Imagine a workplace where assistants handle the repetitive tasks — so people can focus on strategy, problem-solving, and those big ideas that actually move things forward.
Of course, it’s not all sunshine. Benefits include productivity, consistency, capacity, accuracy, and trust. But there are risks too: over-reliance, bias, compliance issues, even user frustration. The answer? Careful training, governance, diverse data, and secure environments.
That balance — combining vision with practical steps — is exactly how Box UK works with organisations to build digital products and platforms that last.
Your turn
Allie wrapped up with a challenge: if you could build your own assistant, what would it be?
Maybe, like Smudge’s Healthchecker, it’s something personal — a way to make sense of complex information and turn it into clear, practical steps. Or maybe it’s a work-focused helper: a personal organiser that frees up headspace, a content tool that keeps you consistent, or a backstage assistant that quietly saves your team hours each week.
The point is, you don’t have to be technical. You just have to spot those moments where a little clarity, consistency, or support could make life easier — and let curiosity take it from there.
Curiosity → Transformation
At Box UK, we take sparks of curiosity (and sometimes big strategic goals) and help turn them into digital platforms that scale. From discovery to design, delivery to ongoing support — our role is to help you build solutions that are inclusive, resilient, and ready for what’s next.
Want to dive deeper into our session? Explore the resources from Allie’s Women in Tech Talk
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Hayley is an experienced, business focussed HR leader, with 15+ years professional experience working with start-ups and scaleups across a number of industries including renewable energy, manufacturing, retail and technology.
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