Could AI change the way your business works?

There used to be an insurance broker on every high street. You’d walk in, answer a few questions, sign some forms and walk out covered. The travel agent next door worked the same way. Book your holiday, hand over a cheque, done.

Most of those businesses are gone. A few survived, and it’s worth asking why.

One of our clients, an insurance broker, found a niche in young drivers with poor licence histories. He became an expert in that niche then expanded from that base. Another client, a villa holiday company, grew at around 60% a year through the early internet era, going from a small office to national television advertising, because it moved with the market rather than waiting to see what happened.

They didn’t survive because they were better at doing what they’d always done. They survived because they understood what their customers needed next and were prepared to change with them.

Accountancy went through its own version of this. Value Added Services were almost unheard of when I was a trainee. Everything was compliance. Then cloud software like Sage and Xero took over huge amounts of the manual work accountants used to do. It didn’t make accountants redundant. It freed them up to spend more time on the things that actually help a business: planning, forecasting, spotting problems before they cause problems.

AI is the next shift, and it’s a bigger one.

The future of us

I’ve just finished reading a book called The Future of Us by Ant Morse, which explores what the technological revolution we’re going through could mean for our daily lives and the economy. It got me thinking about what this means for businesses.

It’s quite possible that, over the next 12 months, we’ll see some of the biggest changes in the shortest amount of time we’ve ever experienced. AI is going to completely transform the way we live and work. The last change that felt this fundamental was probably the arrival of the internet 25 years ago. Before that, perhaps the Industrial Revolution.

We evolved and now we need to evolve again.

The real question isn’t whether things will change

Every business, ours included, is going to have parts of its work automated over the next few years. That’s not a threat in itself. What matters is what you do with the time it gives back.

If a task that used to take a day now takes an hour, you have a choice. Fill the extra time with more of the same, or use it to do something the business actually needs: a proper look at your numbers, a conversation about where you’re heading, a decision you’ve been putting off.

The businesses that come out ahead won’t be the ones with the most advanced tools. They’ll be the ones that use the time those tools create to think harder, ask better questions, and build stronger relationships with the people they work with.

And there’s another question worth asking. Even if your business continues to work, does it still work for you?

The business you built five, ten or twenty years ago may have been designed around what you needed then. Is it still giving you the income, freedom and future you want now?

Treat your business like a product

Here’s a way of thinking about it that has stuck with me. Picture your business as a product, not a fixed thing but something with a roadmap, that needs research, development and regular improvement.

Would you expect a 20-year-old car to match a new one on safety, efficiency or performance? No. Products move on because the people using them expect them to.

So ask the questions a product team would ask. What’s becoming more valuable to your customers? What parts of what you currently do could be automated, and what would you do with the time that frees up? What would make you genuinely harder to replace?

If you started this business today, would you build it in the same way?

Look at how customers buy from you, how you deliver what they pay for, where your people spend their time and where your profit actually comes from. Some of those things will still be right. Some won’t. The important thing is finding out which is which before the market does it for you.

We’ve seen this with our own clients. One business had grown successfully, but too much of the day-to-day still depended on the owner. As the business got bigger, that became a constraint. Growth meant more work, more people and more decisions landing on the same person.

Rather than simply adding more people and carrying on in the same way, we helped them look at how the business actually worked. Where was the owner’s time being spent? What could be delegated? What could be automated? And where could technology, including AI, take some of the repetitive work out of the business?

The result wasn’t simply greater productivity, it was a business that could grow without everything continuing to come back to the owner and therefore would be much more valuable when sold.

That’s an important distinction. The point of technology isn’t to make everyone work faster so they can fit even more into their day. It’s to change what the business is capable of doing, and give the owner freedom to focus on the business or have a greater work/life balance.

None of this means chasing every new tool. It means being honest about where your business stands today and deliberate about where it needs to be in three years.

And perhaps the biggest question of all:

If your business stays exactly as it is for the next three years, will you be happy with where it ends up?

If the answer is no, give yourself some time to work out what needs to change. Our Strategic Planning Day helps you step back, challenge how your business works and build a practical plan for the future you want.

Find out more about our Strategic Planning Day.