We first featured Andrew Longman and his startup, Geppetto, in a Company Spotlight in the Spring of 2025. Then, Promptable was an early-stage concept: a broad AI-powered automation platform aimed at helping SMEs increase productivity in order to scale. Less than a year on, Promptable has launched as a clearly defined product with a focused use case, following a significant pivot and the arrival of a new cofounder.

The Sheffield-based startup has refocused its AI powered technology on a widespread but often overlooked challenge: how organisations manage, access and maintain their operating documentation. 

Alongside that shift, Andrew has been joined by Chris Muscroft, who brings nearly 30 years of experience in the technology sector. Chris’s insight and experience has given new clarity and direction to the business, which had stalled in its progress despite Andrew’s technical proficiency and ambition.

“The original proposition wasn’t sound fundamentally – it wasn’t aimed at a specific problem,” Andrew explains, reflecting on Promptable’s early iteration. “I wanted to build an automation platform that could solve productivity challenges really generally. But, we were going month on month without really getting anywhere.”

From broad automation to a manufacturing-led use case

While technically ambitious, Promptable’s original broad scope made it difficult to clearly articulate who the product was for and what specific problem it solved.

That began to change after Andrew connected with Chris Muscroft through Sheffield Digital’s mentoring scheme.

“Chris didn’t get it for ages, either”, remembers Andrew. After completing the six-month mentorship programme, Andrew asked Chris to come on board, recognising the value he could bring to the company, even without a clear proposition. He adds, ”It took us three months of sitting down and saying, ‘What is it that we’re selling?’ to realise what the problem we actually wanted to solve was.”

Chris has more than three decades’ experience working alongside services, finance and the manufacturing industries. Much of his career has focused on implementing large-scale systems – including ERP platforms – where a detailed understanding of how a business actually operates is essential.

“One of the key areas in any system deployment is understanding an organisation’s operating model,” Chris says. “That means their procedural documentation, their compliance measures, and how work really gets done on the ground.”

Chris had encountered the same recurring issue, particularly in the manufacturing sector: documentation that exists, but is outdated, fragmented, or effectively inaccessible to the people who need it most.

“For dozens, if not hundreds, of organisations I’ve worked with, the documentation is either really poor, or decent but inaccessible,” he explains.

This insight proved pivotal. While Promptable has potential applications across many sectors, manufacturing quickly emerged as the most compelling place to start, particularly due to the scale of documentation involved, the safety-critical nature of operations, and the resulting risk created when information is hard to find or interpret.

Making operational knowledge usable, secure and measurable

Promptable uses AI to provide secure, instant access to operating documents — including standard operating procedures, compliance manuals and health and safety guidance.

This means that employees can ask simple, natural-language questions and receive accurate, referenced answers drawn from their organisation’s own documentation.

One Sheffield-based manufacturer Promptable is working with holds vast quantities of safety-related data. “They’ve got five gigabytes just of health and safety,” Andrew says. “Thousands of pages.”

Without a tool like Promptable, employees either spend valuable time searching through folders and PDFs or rely on informal, verbal knowledge-sharing, approaches that negatively impact productivity and increase the risk of accidents.

“It’s either slowing their work down or they’re doing it unsafely,” Andrew explains. “We just provide an instant interface to finding those answers.”

Security has been a core consideration from the outset. Unlike public AI tools, Promptable is designed so that sensitive internal documents stay private and are never seen by 3rd parties.

“Businesses are rightly worried about throwing internal documentation into ChatGPT,” says Chris. “Promptable uses AI in a way that doesn’t let providers keep or learn from our customers’ information, so their data remains secure. That was the key.”

The platform also allows organisations to measure how AI is being used internally, addressing a growing concern that ad hoc AI adoption makes it difficult to assess the impact on productivity.

“Everyone’s using different tools in different ways, and you can’t measure productivity gains,” Andrew says. “Promptable gives a structured way to measure value, securely – like using analytics from the platform to understand who knows what, and who doesn’t.”

Both founders are clear that Promptable is not about replacing staff or removing human decision-making and expertise from internal processes.

“This doesn’t replace heads of HR, compliance or manufacturing,” Chris says. “It enhances what they deliver. It replaces friction, not people.”

Andrew adds: “It’s about empowering people to work faster, safer and more compliantly.”

A Sheffield community-based collaboration, with more to come

With all eyes now firmly on the Promptable product launch, customer adoption and diversification into new markets, Andrew is clear that collaboration – and Sheffield’s tech ecosystem – played an important role in reaching this point.

“I don’t think we’d be here without it,” he says of meeting Chris and bringing him on board. “Having someone else with skin in the game forced us to answer, ‘What are we actually selling?’”

Promptable launched this month with several pilot customers in the manufacturing sector, some of which have come through Business Sheffield’s Innovation in Action scheme. 

The duo are optimistic about expanding beyond manufacturing into other operationally complex sectors, having identified opportunities in logistics, hospitality, retail and healthcare.

To extend their reach during this early phase, Andrew and Chris are running a special pilot offer, with 50% off for the first three months, with every 12-month commitment. Head on over to the website for more on that.

For now, the focus is on building sustainably, delivering immediate value, and making their AI technology profitable. Chris comments,

“I like businesses that make money. Prove the problem, prove the solution.” He adds, “Everyone says AI is the future, very few can say exactly how. This is us making it tangible.”

The partnership, the Promptable platform and the startup’s next steps will be explored further when Andrew and Chris appear in conversation with Mel Kanarek at the Sheffield Digital AGM next month.

You can discover more about Promptable and request a demo, on the website: promptable.co.uk/ and stay up to date on LinkedIn.