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.