Your team may be using AI. The question is whether anyone’s in charge of it.
Nobody announced it. There was no policy meeting, no training session, no sign-off. But somewhere, somehow, AI has quietly become part of how your team works.
Customer emails drafted with ChatGPT or Claude. Meeting notes summarised in seconds. A prospecting template built in minutes rather than hours.
None of it flagged. A lot of it useful. All of it happening with or without you.
For most small businesses, that’s where AI adoption starts—not with a strategy, but with individuals finding shortcuts and not mentioning it.
This creates a problem that has nothing to do with the technology.
The risk with AI is when you have no shared understanding of how to use it well. No common baseline for what good looks like, what needs checking, or who’s accountable when an output turns out to be wrong.
That gap between informal use and applied capability needs closing. And the North East TechNExt Festival, with Sage, Google and Multiverse, is your shortcut to doing so, if you live in Newcastle or the surrounding areas.
Free AI skills for your future
16 June 2026 at Sage, Cobalt Business Park, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Join this practical, hands-on session which will focus on simple, proven ways SMEs are already using AI moving beyond—and how you can apply the same approaches.
Book your place
From shortcut to skill
The difference between AI as a time-saver and AI as something your business can genuinely rely upon comes down to judgment: Knowing when to trust an output, when to question it, and when not to use AI at all.
That judgment comes from practice—and from seeing how other businesses in similar situations are applying these tools.
On 16 June, techUK, Sage, Google and Multiverse are running a free, full-day AI skills session in Newcastle as part of the North East TechNExt Festival, aimed specifically at small and medium-sized businesses.
It’s practical by design. You’ll work through prompting techniques that improve results immediately, identify where AI can reduce effort in your existing workflows, and see real examples of how other businesses are using it for repeatable, day-to-day tasks.
The afternoon covers what needs to be in place before you think about scaling—processes, data, defined outcomes, human oversight.
All you need to bring is yourself and your laptop. You should expect to leave with something you can use.
What applied AI looks like
Tyne Chease, a UK food business, used Sage Ai to automate part of its invoice chasing process—something it had been doing manually, every week.
The result was straightforward: the business was paid up to seven days faster, around 14 hours of admin time saved every week. No technical rebuild. No transformation programme. One routine task, improved with AI, with a clear and measurable outcome.
That’s the version of AI adoption that sticks. Not the one built on hype, but the one built on identifying a specific problem and testing whether AI can help solve it.
Building the baseline
If your team can’t make the Newcastle session, have a look at the AI Skills Boost hub.
It’s a free government-backed initiative, delivered in partnership with organisations including Sage, offering short, practical courses designed for everyday business roles. Courses take as little as 20 minutes and cover the foundational skills people need to use AI confidently and responsibly at work.
It won’t replace the experience of working through real examples in a room with other business owners. But it gives your team a shared starting point.
You’ll get the most from AI if you have the judgment to use it well. The Newcastle session is a good place to start—and you’re invited. But be quick. Places are strictly limited.
Free AI skills for your future
16 June 2026 at Sage, Cobalt Business Park, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Join this practical, hands-on session which will focus on simple, proven ways SMEs are already using AI moving beyond—and how you can apply the same approaches.
Book your place
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
