Leading management consulting firm Baringa wanted to empower its employees with AI, helping them to save time when drafting documents.
Baringa adopted Azure AI Foundry, leveraging Azure OpenAI to build an internal Gen AI platform.
The firm has accelerated document drafting by 50%, driving time savings of up to three days per document, and empowering employees to focus on delivering value for clients.
“Azure AI Foundry feels like an accelerator with quality built in. We’re able to create documents rapidly and precisely, whilst also considering the tone of voice, almost the personality of the document.”
Pete Shannon, Director, Technology, Media & Telecoms, Baringa
Baringa, an award-winning global management consulting firm, delivers strategic guidance, operational assistance, and technological expertise to help clients transform and reach their business ambitions.
Working in energy and resources, financial services, consumer products and retail, technology, media, and telecoms, pharmaceuticals and life sciences, government and public sectors, the firm is widely recognised for technological innovation, earning accolades from Forbes and the Financial Times, and standing out as one of the few management consulting firms recognised for AI expertise.
“AI and digital are key to our clients’ strategies. Using our expertise in these areas, we’re helping our clients transform, focusing on specific industry use cases where we can really drive value,” says Kelly Hume, Lead Partner, Solutions and AI Lab at Baringa.
Leaning on its 13-year partnership with Microsoft, Baringa is now harnessing AI to empower its workforce, building a bespoke internal platform for document drafting—‘Baringa Labs’—using the advanced capabilities of Azure AI Foundry.
“As part of our AI strategy, we are optimising and expediting our internal work so we can be more value driven,” says Kelly Hume.
Looking to enhance operations using AI, Baringa identified a need to reshape its document drafting processes, enabling consultants to spend less time drafting documentation, and more time delivering for clients.
As Kelly Hume explains, “We want to create really robust, detailed documentation with a fraction of the effort, using our internal data and knowledge in a way that is optimised through AI.”
Leveraging its in-house AI and Responsible AI teams, the firm decided to create a generative AI (Gen AI) platform for its employees. Baringa considered several different providers but found what it was looking for in Azure AI Foundry—a unified platform for building and deploying AI applications and agents, using the latest Large Language Models (LLMs).
“We chose Azure AI Foundry as it allows us to take projects beyond POC and into production in a secure, scalable, manageable, but also flexible way,” says Jack Irvine, Manager, AI Solutions & Engineering at Baringa.
“Now, our internal teams can create a great first draft document within half an hour, which previously would’ve taken days,” says Kelly Hume.
Using Azure AI Foundry, Baringa developed ‘Baringa Labs’, a Gen AI platform empowering employees to navigate large amounts of information and create documents rapidly. This innovative solution is transforming the firm, driving 50% faster document drafting and time savings of up to three days per document.
“Azure AI Foundry feels like an accelerator with quality built in. We’re able to create documents rapidly and precisely, whilst also considering the tone of voice, almost the personality of the document,” says Pete Shannon, Director, Technology, Media & Telecoms at Baringa.
The Baringa Labs platform offers modules for smart drafting and general productivity. When creating document drafts, users can extract key information from its internal knowledge base, inputting a theme and answering questions before the tool generates a document that aligns with their vision. It also offers suggestions to enhance the document, according to the user’s specific needs.
Kelly Hume elaborates, “It pulls data from our knowledge base, such as insights and know-how built from lessons learned over years of delivering services, without having to spend hours searching for those things. Then, it creates a well-structured, formatted document.”
“Now, our internal teams can create a great first draft document within half an hour, which previously would’ve taken days.”
Kelly Hume, Lead Partner, Solutions and AI Lab, Baringa
To build a quality solution that empowers employees, Baringa’s AI experts required access to advanced LLMs. Azure AI Foundry delivered, offering almost 2,000 models, including powerful OpenAI models accessed through Azure OpenAI.
Pete Shannon highlights, “Being able to access the latest LLMs boosts adoption and compliance. This is brilliant from an enterprise, employee, and end user perspective.”
Baringa Labs currently runs on OpenAI GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, and GPT o3-mini, all cost-effective models optimised for low latency. They enable developers to build AI solutions with natural language processing (NLP), capable of calling multiple APIs and analysing large volumes of contextual data.
“We found that other cloud providers couldn’t provide the performance to perform OCR on documents quickly. With Azure AI Foundry, we could process something in a second, compared to 15 minutes from other providers,” says Edward Sharkey, AI Lead at Baringa.
To optimise processing capacity for each model, Baringa leveraged Azure AI Foundry’s provisioned throughput units (PTUs) offering, which allows organisations to define the throughput required during deployment. This enabled Baringa to ensure its models delivered the performance, speed, and low latency needed for success. In addition, the company gained a clearer view of costs compared to standard token-based consumption models, with discounts available through flexible reservation options.
Azure AI Foundry also provides Baringa with a unified platform for AI innovation, enabling seamless integration of Azure OpenAI for model access and fine-tuning, and Azure AI Search for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), allowing LLMs to interact with internal documents and surface insights.
Operating within this centralised, cohesive environment empowered Baringa to build and scale Baringa Labs across the business in just a few months.
“Azure AI Foundry delivers all these tools in a stable setting where we can launch beyond the POC, giving us a single home for all our AI R&D that other providers don't seem to be doing at the moment,” says Jack Irvine.
Since Azure AI services sit within Microsoft Azure, Baringa can rest assured that data is protected. Built on enterprise-grade network infrastructure and hardware, Azure services are compliant with global data regulations, offering out-of-the-box security controls, alongside customisable options.
“Security was a major factor in our decision,” says Terence Martin, Head of Architecture at Baringa. “Our cyber team is satisfied and we’re able to maintain our accreditations.”
50% faster document drafting
Together with Microsoft, Baringa has empowered its workforce through a remarkable AI transformation, eliminating the burden of information gathering and document drafting, and allowing employees to spend more time delivering value for clients.
In addition, Microsoft's commitment to releasing the latest LLMs within Azure AI Foundry positions Baringa to evolve alongside AI, ensuring its employees always have access to cutting-edge technology as capabilities accelerate.
“As these new models roll out, we can easily introduce intelligence into our solutions by updating directly within Azure AI Foundry,” says Edward Sharkey.
This internal innovation allows Baringa to lead by example—demonstrating its AI expertise to clients and reinforcing its position as a forward-thinking partner.
Edward Sharkey emphasises: “We’re deepening our relationship with Microsoft, broadening our capabilities, and highlighting the value we bring. We expect this to proliferate into our client engagements and serve as a showcase of what we’re able to achieve using AI.”
Discover more about Baringa’s Digital & AI expertise on LinkedIn.
“Azure AI Foundry delivers all these tools in a stable setting where we can launch beyond the POC, giving us a single home for all our AI R&D that other providers don't seem to be doing at the moment.”
Jack Irvine, Manager, AI Solutions & Engineering, Baringa
Follow Microsoft