W&G Baird has been printing books for more than 160 years. From its base in Antrim, the award-winning commercial printer produces books, magazines, catalogues and large-format work for customers across the UK and Ireland.
And throughout that time it has been committed to remaining at the leading edge of technology.
In 2026, the company set out to build a genuine, in-house AI capability that would give the business a durable competitive advantage.
Cranmore was brought in to help.
The problem:
Like many businesses that grow by winning work, W&G Baird used a lot of resource finding the right opportunities, and then qualifying them quickly enough to act.
Contracts were scattered across multiple sources. Sifting them was manual, repetitive and time-consuming. It often fell to senior people whose time was most valuable.
W&G Baird also had a broader ambition. It did not want to buy a black box. It wanted to understand AI, to adopt it deliberately, and to hold the capability inside its own team — so that the advantage compounded over time rather than renting it from someone else.
What Cranmore delivered
Cranmore’s role had two strands that reinforced each other.
The first was capability. Cranmore provided structured training and hands-on support to help W&G Baird adopt Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, across the business. It was a deliberate programme designed to move Claude from a curiosity to a working tool that staff reached for, with the materials, guidance and support needed to make adoption stick.
The second was a solution to the tendering problem itself. Working alongside the W&G Baird team, Cranmore designed and built an agentic tender collation and assessment tool using Claude Cowork.
Rather than a person manually hunting for and reading through opportunities, the system gathers tenders, collates them in one place, and assesses each one for viability, surfacing opportunities worth pursuing and filtering out the ones that are not.
The judgement that once consumed hours of senior time is now done in a fraction of it.
Cranmore then supported the rollout end to end, providing further structured staff training and materials so the tool landed as part of how W&G Baird actually works — not as a pilot that sits on a shelf.
The result is a system in live, production use, owned and run by W&G Baird’s own people.
The results
The deployment is already delivering measurable value:
- Around 10 hours per week returned to key senior staff, who no longer spend that time manually searching for contracts. That is time redirected from administrative sifting to winning and delivering work.
- A 20% uplift in qualified opportunities. By finding more of the right tenders and assessing them consistently, W&G Baird is putting more genuinely viable work into its pipeline than before.
Both numbers point the same way: less effort spent finding opportunities, and more good opportunities found. For a business whose growth depends on the quality of its pipeline, that combination is exactly the competitive advantage W&G Baird set out to build.
Just as importantly, the capability now lives inside the company.
W&G Baird did not just get a tool; it got a team that understands how to use AI and a platform it can extend to the next problem.
“W&G Baird is committed to staying at the forefront of technology, and this deployment of Claude demonstrates our ability to mobilise the latest AI tools. Cranmore’s expertise in AI was instrumental to the success of our deployment, which is already delivering clear ROI and opening a range of new and exciting opportunities for our business.
“Working with Cranmore, we’ve put Claude into production and it’s already handing our senior team up to 10 hours back every week and lifting our qualified opportunities by some 20%.
“Cranmore’s expertise was instrumental — this is delivering clear ROI and opening genuinely exciting opportunities for W&G Baird.”
David Hinds, Director, W&G Baird
