Stood still while AI races ahead? Join 80% of businesses doing exactly the same. (nowt)

According to the ONS, just 1 in 5 British companies were using any form of AI as of June 2025. Meanwhile, tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are advancing at a frankly bonkers pace. And if you are using them - but only as a kind of posh Google - there’s a good chance you’ll soon be outpaced by a competitor who actually understands what these tools can do…

I took a bit of time off recently for a few family-related challenges, and, for the sake of my own sanity, stayed out of my regular feeds of AI updates.

As I started to ease my way back into the day job, I figured it was time to refresh myself on anything I might’ve missed in the time spent untethered from my desk.

And it made me realise something that’d been bubbling away at the back of my mind for months: that the rate of development in the generative AI space is rattling along at breakneck speeds, and even I feel like Indiana Jones in a mining cart, hanging on for dear life, braced for the latest developments as they hurtle towards me.

Racing towards the holy grail of AI

But for all the astonishing advances in model capability, most companies are - at best - stuck scratching the surface of what these products could do two years ago.

So what happened in the world of AI?

In the few short weeks since I’d been out of the AI bubble, OpenAI had released or scheduled at least four major new products - o3 Pro, Codex, Record and Agent - the kind of substantive updates we might have previously expected on a far slower schedule. Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini and Notebook products had also seen big releases, and Anthropic’s mighty Claude Opus had dropped.

Which is fascinating, albeit exhilarating, for someone giddily immersed in this stuff like me.

It’s my job to jump into the mine cart, whip on the fedora, speed towards the latest functionality drops and start to map what these might mean to the companies I work with, in the hope that we stumble on a couple of holy grails along the way. (Yeah, I know, I’m mixing up my franchise entries here…)

With Agent and Codex, the promise of true agentic workflows is finally here, across ‘lite’ business administration and coding tasks. Record lets us can capture and interrogate business conversations using the true power of a pro-grade LLM (as opposed to the recent slew of fancy note transcription services), and o3 Pro shows us that multi-stage reasoning models are being levelled up at an alarmingly rapid rate.

And if that last paragraph makes little or no sense, I’m imagine, like many of the businesses I talk to about generative AI, you’re at the Sausage Blogging stage.

AI adoption is lagging, productivity is in reverse, yet the tools are advancing exponentially

Here’s some sobering stats.

According to the Office for National Statistics, as of June 2025 just 1 in 5 British businesses are using some form of AI in their business.

1 in 5.

Again, from my experiences in working with businesses of all sizes, if you distilled that further into how many companies are 1) really digging deep on the capabilities of these models, and 2) starting to align their use of AI with achieving their strategic goals, I’d hazard that number starts to look far lower.

And yet, in the UK, we also have a productivity problem, which is showing little sign of uptick: in the first quarter of 2025, productivity dropped 0.2% on the same period in 2024.

Blimey.

Maybe I’m oversimplifying things, but surely the answer to improving the latter comes from increasing the former? If we invest in knowledge and training in using AI tools in enterprise, productivity gains inevitably come. And they’re often substantial…a recent client reported clawing back 7k+ person hours per annum following some hands-on training work.

So, why is business adoption OF AI so slow?

Companies face genuine barriers: lack of knowledge of what the tools are capable of, data protection concerns, endless procurement cycles, unclear ROI figures, and the understandable fear of ‘hallucinations’ or misinformation. The response? Painfully slow adoption. All of those concerns are absolutely addressable.

But meanwhile, staff are experimenting under their desks (oo-er), pasting sensitive questions into free accounts, staying under the radar. Leadership teams continue to deliberate, write policies, and wait.

Which side of the AI gap do you want to be on?

Here’s the challenge.

If I take a couple of weeks away from my desk, return, and feel overwhelmed by the bonkers volume of updates that have arrived whilst I looked the other way…what about those 80% of businesses that haven’t even dabbled with this stuff yet?

Because while adoption of AI crawls along at a glacial rate in the majority of businesses, there are some companies seeing huge gains by simply deploying some of the basics in a more strategic fashion.

And while adoption in most businesses is slow, or indeed non-existent, the rate of advancement of these tools is exponential and disruptive.

Will it be you, or one of your competitors that realises that first?

Ready to stop dabbling and start doing?

If you’re curious about AI, and want practical help making it work for your business, why not talk to me about THE AI ADVANTAGE: a range of workshops and services designed to fit where you’re at, whether that’s leadership strategy, team training, solving a real-world business challenge, or getting ongoing guidance. Or all of the above.

Clients have called my sessions "the best workshops I’ve ever been on” and they’re designed to immerse you and your team in how to get the most out of the tools, and how they can fit into your day-to-day operations.

Interested? Let’s have that chat, one-to-one.

The AI agent that cracks on with work (rather than JUST chatting about it)

ChatGPT’s Agent can take control of a virtual desktop window and take on some tasks for you…

ChatGPT Agent landed in my account late in July 2025, just a couple of days after OpenAI officially announced it. As ever, I wasted no time whatsoever before mucking around with the little blighter.

If you're not familiar with what Agent's all about, let me give you a bit of a low down.

Agent is a new bit of functionality in ChatGPT which is capable of undertaking work on your behalf. You feed it a well-written prompt, Agent fires open an onscreen virtual machine and cracks on with the task before your very eyes.

Essentially, ChatGPT Agent moves things beyond simply gathering intel and research by actually doing some of the work for you. It proactively chooses from a set of skills like navigating websites, running analysis, creating slide decks and spreadsheets, and securely handling logins when required.

So...first thing I did?

Channelled my inner narcissist and got Agent to pull together a spreadsheet of online mentions about me and Diagonal Thinking. An OK start...but no mention of a certain video I made with OpenAI. Colour me a big head.

Next: I uploaded flight tickets and accommodation details for an upcoming family holiday and asked Agent to knock up a relaxed day-by-day itinerary in a spreadsheet, complete with a deck to pitch the whole break to the family. And blimey, Agent did a decent job. Bonus is that you get to watch Agent getting on with its / your work via a visual of the browser window and terminal.

For someone like me, who regularly watches the robot vac clean around my feet, it's strangely captivating.

One really cool feature is that you can schedule Agent, something we caught a glimpse of when ChatGPT Tasks first appeared earlier this year. Therefore, once you're happy with how Agent's taking on a given activity for you, you can set it up to repeat them on a regular basis. Which kinda fries my mind with possibilities.

Imagine practical scenarios: businesses trawling regularly for tenders can now automate weekly searches across key sites, organise the results into a Google Sheet, and even have them ranked automatically according to how closely they match company credentials and past projects. Automating this kind of weekly grind could significantly reduce unnecessary busywork. And anyone who's attended my AI Advantage workshops knows that reducing churn is genuinely one of my favourite things. Unlike raindrops on roses...

I’ll report back on whether the family signs off on Agent’s holiday planner, or as is more likely, they roll their eyes with the usual level of indifference. Watch this space.

Anyhow, if you're curious about AI and want practical help making it work for your business, let's talk about THE AI ADVANTAGE. These tailored workshops and services are built exactly around your needs: leadership strategy, team training, real-world business solutions, or ongoing guidance. Or all of the above.

Clients call my sessions "the best workshops I've ever been on," designed to immerse your team in practical AI applications and day-to-day tools.

Interested? Let’s have that chat, one-to-one.

Why businesses need mainstream support to deploy AI in their operations

Those of you that know me will be aware I’m a proud northerner.

Been there (The Hacienda), got that (webbed feet), and bought the t-shirt (my favourite being the ACR:MCR tee, grey marl, day-glo orange print. I digress).

Possibly the best job I ever had - before larking around enthusiastically about AI - was supporting Manchester’s creative community and I’ll bang the drum about The North’s myriad charms to anyone that will listen. Just don’t talk to me about football, right?

But I read something that genuinely made me feel a bit worried recently about the North’s economic future, care of digital sector trade publication, Prolific North.

And yes, of course, it’s all about AI.

A stat that stopped me in my tracks

According to a new research paper by ANS (in association with YouGov), 37% of businesses in London are currently incorporating AI into some of their business practices…compared to just 18% of businesses in the North.

18%?

Crikey.

As a trusted colleague pointed out, the ratio is likely skewed by the dominance of larger companies headquartered in London; where AI initiatives might be mandated and deployed from a centralised business unit.

Which, in many ways, starts to make that stat even more sobering. Because companies that are ahead of the curve with integrating AI into their operations are ultimately going to see returns grow at a far faster rate than those not doing.

So, if 82% of companies in the North aren’t embedding AI in their operations…why exactly is that?

If I were to hazard a guess, based on two years of working with organisations of all sizes around AI, I’d maintain that training and knowledge on how to apply the tools in their operations simply aren’t available at scale.

Well, except with those I’ve worked with. (Cheeky wink emoji).

I often talk about the Sausage Blog conundrum when it comes to AI deployment. It’s full of sweeping generalisations, but it chimes with what I hear and experience in the field, so humour me.

It goes a bit like this:

• Board in a medium sized business (let’s say they’re a sausage factory) starts to feel strategic pressure to ‘do’ AI

• MD hasn’t really used it much, so passes task to marketing, ‘because it’s digital…’

• Marketing Director uses it to write a blog…about sausages…to ‘…see how it performs’

• The AI-authored sausage blog isn’t very good. Funnily enough

• Marketing director reports back to board about the ropey nature of the sausage blog

• A prevailing view of AI is formed: it’s not very good

• ❌ AI removed from board agenda

Where it’s going wrong with AI

Now, I’m a systems and process nerd. I’ve built and run successful businesses - and advised 100s - and for me, when we tidy up the backend to take the grunt out of our operations, we free up capacity in our people so they can get on delivering the value stuff they’re actually good at.

What are the pain points and the time killers? What are the operational activities we regularly repeat from scratch that really should be automated?

AI is a dream when used to support precisely those kinds of tasks.

But here’s the rub.

Unless someone’s guided you through these tools, in context to your business, you’re likely fumbling around applying it to the lowest hanging operational fruit you can find (or sausages) then judging the results of a phenomenally advanced and rapidly developing set of technologies based on the outputs…of - frankly - an offaly unfair assessment. Apologies.

I appreciate this might sound like me banging my own drum (guilty as charged), but let’s be clear: If companies outside London - and SMEs in particular - are going to close this worrying AI gap, AI support needs hard-wiring into the public sector business support infrastructure. Believe me, I’d be saying this if it wasn’t my field.

Of course, we can’t fix the whole system overnight. But if you want to get your own house (or sausage factory) in order, I can help.

If you’re serious about getting ahead

If you’re curious about AI, and want practical help making it work for your business, why not talk to me about THE AI ADVANTAGE: a range of workshops and services designed to fit where you’re at, whether that’s leadership strategy, team training, solving a real-world business challenge, or getting ongoing guidance.

Or all of the above.

Clients have called my sessions "the best workshops I’ve ever been on” and they’re designed to immerse you and your team in how to get the most of the tools, and how they can fit into your day-to-day operations.

Interested? Let’s have that chat, one-to-one.

Critical Thinking, Curiosity and Clarity: The Real Skills We Need in an AI World

Saturday morning. I’ve a fresh coffee in one hand and I’m trying desperately not to think about AI. Because, y’know…weekend.

I look up and there’s an interview on the BBC’s Breakfast programme on what schools should be doing to adapt to world where AI is becoming increasingly widespread.

Bang. My ‘not thinking about AI at the weekend’ thing went right out of the window the moment a question was directed at the interviewee.

“So what are the skills we need to prepare young people with, in order that they can thrive with AI.”

Now, I’m not entirely sure who the educational expert was (I know, I’ve normally got a rigorous attention to detail but, y’know….weekend), but I couldn’t help thinking their response was misinformed.

“We’re actually going to need more traditional skills like maths.”

[cue cappuccino exiting my mouth via my nostrils]

Maths? MATHS?

Maybe if you’re in the sub 1% of the UK involved in developing and shipping AI models. But what about every other member of the workforce that’ll be working with AI day-in, day-out?

Vast amounts of development costs haven’t been sunk into Large Language Models only to have them locked down for use by only the numerically gifted: the clue’s in the name.

Because, as the models advance and become ever more nuanced and capable, it strikes me that ‘technical’ proficiency becomes less and less important for the casual business user.

Forget Maths: Can You Frame the Problem?

In the first couple of months of 2025, we’ve seen ‘vibe coding’ explode: the notion that agentic coding platforms can muster up convincing web applications (and the like) from a couple of well-written prompts. And that feels like a natural continuum of the rate of change we’ve seen since ChatGPT-3.5 first dropped at the end of 2022. You start with the baby steps of HTML versions of Pong, but over time, the complexity of what’s possible ratchets up. Considerably.

So if it’s not maths that we need to be cultivating in the next generation, what skills will we need to thrive in a world powered by AI?

It's Not About Knowing Stuff. It's About Knowing What to Ask + Why You're Asking

At this point in the article, you’ll be almost as pleased as I am to find out there are “three c’s” (classic consultant chat) to consider. Uncanny.

C1: Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is going to be, erm, critical if we’re to grasp the opportunity of working with AI models. To me, this is about fully understanding the business challenges we’re trying to fix. How well do we truly understand the problem, what’s the context, what does a great outcome look like?

C2: Curiosity

Curiosity: what needs to happen to address the challenge - and what are the tools that might help us? Remember when there were four TV channels in the UK, and four ‘go to’ business tools (gee, thanks Microsoft) we used in the office? Things were simpler. But things were boring, too. AI brings not just a myriad platforms to bear, but a myriad ways we might interface with these tools. Could vision, video, or voice input help us solve our challenge in a completely new way?

C3: Clarity

Let me make this clear. Success won’t be found hiding behind corporate bull and waffle. Key word thinking is out, as are unstructured brain dumps (context dumps, on the other hand…). If you want good results out of your models, clarity is your super skill. How well can you articulate the problem you’ve thought critically about, and how well can you describe the creative solution you’ve envisaged? Simple, really, but clarity doesn’t come easy…

To me, if we can find ways to really develop those skills in the younger generation, we’ll truly capitalise on the opportunities that AI is opening up for all of us.

Of course, if you do need help with your maths, speak to my dog, the AI Maths Tutor…

If you’re serious about getting ahead

If you’re curious about AI, and want practical help making it work for your business, why not talk to me about THE AI ADVANTAGE: a range of workshops and services designed to fit where you’re at, whether that’s leadership strategy, team training, solving a real-world business challenge, or getting ongoing guidance.

Or all of the above.

Clients have called my sessions "the best workshops I’ve ever been on” and they’re designed to immerse you and your team in how to get the most of the tools, and how they can fit into your day-to-day operations.

Interested? Let’s have that chat, one-to-one.