Scaling the North East Support Directory through Open Source Fine-tuning & Autonomous Agent deployment, to accelerate opportunity discovery & ingestion beyond the regional support ecosystem

Finding _relevant_ business opportunities can be a time-consuming, overwhelming task. Navigating opportunities to discover the right type of support, at the right time, whilst comprehending the varying complexities of eligibility requirements is no easy feat. NESD CIC is embarking on a project to change that by utilising AI to offer a suite of self-service discovery tools that makes finding relevant growth opportunities as easy as asking a question.

By outsourcing the discovery and comprehension of available opportunities to fine-tuned AI models, it enables users to receive personalised, curated recommendations relevant to their own circumstances and objectives, as well as be able to easily query and identify opportunities using a natural language interface, whenever it's convenient to them. This scalable, self-serve tool can support growth-minded, aspiring and existing entrepreneurs and organisations alike to more quickly and reliably identify suitable opportunities that can align with their growth plans.

Simultaneously, the recommender algorithm improves lead quality by recommending only to those whom are eligible, therefore reducing the number of ineligible applications that cost both organisation applicants and evaluators alike a great deal of time and effort.

This AI-powered tool can benefit both business advisors and organisations directly to identify suitable opportunities to enable their growth. And thanks to the platform's opportunity demand tracking analytics, local authorities, grant-making bodies, finance providers and business support organisations can understand opportunities are in high demand, and which of those are 'cold' areas of provision.

These insights can help to inform future service delivery and grant provisions so that any capital and investment is bet put to use to match where the need is.