The Association of Business Mentors is proud to have received a Highly Commended award for Best Use of Technology and AI at the Memcom 2026 Excellence Awards.
The award recognises our Interactive Mentoring Planner, designed to make the beginning of every mentoring relationship clearer, faster and more valuable.
The story began with a simple problem. As our work supporting the Government’s flagship national business support programme, Help to Grow: Management Course grew, we could see that the start of a mentoring relationship carried disproportionate weight. A good start builds trust, sets expectations and focuses attention on the real business issues. A weak one can leave both parties unsure what happens next.
Too often, mentorship contracting was inconsistent. Some business owners were unclear about their role. Important opportunities and challenges did not always surface early enough meaning that the time-limited mentorships didn’t always get to some of the most impactful areas. Promising matches could lose momentum before the first meaningful conversation.
Our first instinct was modest: replace a paper contract with a better digital version. But listening to mentors and mentees made the real need clear. We did not need a shinier form. We needed a tool that helped people start well.
That is how the Interactive Mentoring Planner was created.
Built in-house by a small ABM team led by Ben Jacobs and Steve Dent, the planner is automatically sent to both mentor and mentee as soon as a match is made. It arrives with key details already in place, so it does not feel like another administrative hurdle. Instead, it helps both people agree how they will work together, identify priorities, explore business challenges and set clear next steps.
The planner has evolved to include pathways for new, established and returning relationships, alongside goal planning, progress tracking and automations that reduce duplicated administration.
Technology only works when people use it. So, we made the planner useful, intuitive and low-friction, embedding it into training, onboarding and delivery.
The results show why that decision mattered.
The planner has now been used by 3562 UK small and medium-sized businesses. In a comparison across the programme, just 0.4% of relationships using the planner at the new stage remained unengaged, compared with 19.8% of those that did not. In a like-for-like comparison of active and completed relationships, average mentoring time was 18% higher with the planner: 7.5 hours compared with 6.35.
Quality has improved alongside pace. Complaints and support issues fell by 23%, while independently measured satisfaction with mentoring rose from 84% to 93%.
There is a wider benefit, too. Each quarter, the planner captures anonymised insight from business owners. This gives ABM a live view of the pressures and opportunities facing UK SMEs, from strategy and cash flow to leadership, systems and practical AI adoption. That evidence informs insight reports requested by the Department for Business and Trade and gives ABM world-leading insight into the needs of SMEs and the topics that SMEs are discussing with their business mentors.
Highly Commended is a welcome recognition. But the real achievement is that the planner gives mentors and business owners a shared starting point for focused conversations.
That is technology at its best: not replacing human judgement, but giving it a better place to start.
Ben Jacobs
Chief Operations and Technology Officer, ABM
