About us
A small consultancy. Thirty years in.
Network Essentials is a small IT consultancy based on the Ceredigion coast at Aberporth. We work with a small number of clients across South and West Wales — practical IT support, the kind of platform depth that only comes from doing this for a long time, and an honest take on what AI is actually for.
From the director
I started in business IT in 1996, when a typical small business was still working out whether to bother with Windows NT and the internet was something most offices reached through a modem on a phone line. I’ve been at it ever since.
In that time the technology has changed beyond recognition — networks gave way to the cloud, the cloud gave way to mobile-first, and now we’re in the middle of the agentic-AI shift that’s about to change how a lot of office work happens. But the underlying questions a small business asks haven’t changed much at all. Will it work? Will it keep working? Will someone answer the phone when it doesn’t? That’s the work I’ve been doing since 1996, and that’s the work I still do.
I’ve kept Network Essentials deliberately small. One director, a handful of clients, deep specialism over scattershot service. It means I know the platforms I work on — VisualFiles for law firms, the Microsoft estate end-to-end, and now agentic AI — thoroughly rather than superficially. It also means the AI question — which every business is asking right now — gets a serious answer instead of a sales pitch.
— Jeff English, Director
AI, plainly
AI is reshaping how SMEs work. We’re already using it.
There’s a lot of talk about AI right now and most of it is noise. What’s real is that the new generation of tools — Claude, Copilot, ChatGPT, agentic assistants — can do useful work for a small business when they’re set up properly. We know, because we’re using them ourselves.
Take this website — built with an agentic AI tool, directed by our director. Not because it’s a stunt — because it’s the fastest, most accurate way to build a website in 2026, and we wanted you to see that working before we tell you anything about it.
If you’d like to know what’s worth doing with AI in your business — and what isn’t — that’s a conversation we’d like to have.
Where we are
We’re based at October Cottage in Aberporth — a working office a few minutes from the Ceredigion coast. Most of our work is remote, which means we work happily with businesses across South and West Wales (and a little beyond when the work suits). For local clients, on-site visits are part of the deal.
Want to talk?
Send a message and we’ll come back within one working day.