AI isn’t coming. It’s here. And you’re already behind.

Three months ago, the Monkhouse & Company CEO Summit was going to focus on sales. Then everything changed. The tools got better. The experiments got bolder. The use cases got real. So we took our own advice. We pivoted. And AI took over.

This is no longer hype. It’s not a future trend. It’s happening now—and if you’re not actively exploring what AI means for your business, you’re going to get left behind.

At our CEO Summit, I hosted a panel with four fantastic founders: Neil Marley (Neologik), Kevin Bradley (Omegro), Pedro Arriaga (PEGO), and John Redman (Modo25). None of them initially founded AI businesses. But every one of them is being transformed by it.

The last 3 months have changed everything

I said this during the panel and I’ll say it again here: more has happened in the last three months than in the entire period since ChatGPT launched.

I now talk to my computer instead of typing. I’ve posted to LinkedIn without lifting a finger, using Claude. I can get AI to find something in my diary, emails, or Google Drive and start working on it instantly using an MCP server. At the Monkhouse & Company CEO Summit, Rob Elkin of Rational Partners built and demoed building software on stage in 30 minutes, using only voice prompts – while he carried on with his presentation!

This stuff wasn’t possible a few months ago. Now it is. If your strategy hasn’t shifted yet, it should.

AI is going to touch every business function—marketing, operations, customer support, HR, legal, even finance. If you’re not actively rethinking where you could be automating or accelerating, you’re falling behind competitors who are.

The truth is, AI isn’t just helping people go faster. It’s enabling people to do things they simply couldn’t do before—things that used to take months of resource, development, and budget. Now, with a decent prompt and an ounce of initiative, you can build functioning prototypes, generate client-ready video, automate content pipelines, or design new interfaces.

And it’s not slowing down. You might have dismissed video-generating AI as useless six months ago—but the quality now is incredible, so revisit that decision. It’s moving that fast. What looked like novelty last quarter will be your new baseline next quarter.

Most companies are dabbling, not adopting

When I ask founders if they’re using AI, lots of them give a vague answer in the affirmative. What I quickly discover on closer examination is that they mean someone in their team is using ChatGPT for a few tasks here and there.

That’s not adoption. That’s dabbling.

Kevin shared how Omegro is tackling this head-on across 39 businesses in the Constellation portfolio. They built a central AI team to move fast and share learnings. When one business leader said AI wouldn’t affect his market, the team built a fully functioning competitor product in 17 days. With a voice interface. Without even speaking to the incumbent team. The product they were challenging had a 10-15 year head start, but the newcomer was very close in terms of quality.

He got the message.

They’ve also started profiling team members to identify who’s genuinely suited to AI-related roles—because it turns out, your best coder might not be your best AI implementer. Sometimes it’s the product manager. Or the QA lead. Or someone in sales who really gets the customer problem.

We talked about using psychometric profiling tools to spot the traits of people thriving in AI environments. Logical thinkers. Fast iterators. People who value output over process. This isn’t about replacing people—it’s about finding the right people to build with these tools.

And once you find them, you need to remove friction. Time block. Train. Incentivise. Because the cost of learning is now almost zero, but the value of applying it is enormous.

Curiosity > coding

Pedro told a story that dropped jaws around the room. He has an 11-person dev team working in traditional sprints, two weeks at a time, building feature after feature.

And then he hired someone with no coding background, just a BA in English literature and a big dose of curiosity. That person now ships more features, faster, part-time, using AI agents. Three a week, while also doing a COO role.

It’s not about knowing how to code. It’s about knowing how to describe the problem, prompt the tool, and iterate quickly. That shift alone will change the shape of tech teams everywhere.

And it’s not just speed. It’s impact. Because this person also does implementation and customer success, they’re building features that actually solve real user problems, fast.

He’s not working with developers. He’s orchestrating them. Virtual agents working overnight. Front-end builders. Script generators. This is the no-code revolution—except this time, it actually works.

AI is breaking your business’s culture

The elephant in the room: if one curious generalist can outpace your entire team, what does that do to morale?

Pedro was honest about this too. It creates a civil war. Longstanding team members feel threatened. Skill sets become obsolete overnight. And while culture normally evolves gradually, AI is ripping up the timeline.

This isn’t a problem with a tidy solution. But you need to be aware of it and intentional about your response. That might mean time-blocked experimentation, internal task forces, or some well-judged pruning.

And we need to talk more about psychological safety. If your team is scared of being replaced, they won’t engage with the tools. If they feel safe to experiment and grow, they will. You need to lead from the front here.

At Modo25, John ran a competition. Record yourself using AI to save time. Show the impact. Win a cash prize. It worked. It got people trying. It turned fear into curiosity. 

You don’t need gimmicks. You do need structure. A policy. A champion. A testbed. And some patience.

But even more importantly, you need consistency. One-off efforts don’t build confidence. Ongoing visibility, shared wins, and weekly momentum do.

Train your people, or get trained by your people’s tools

The panel were all aligned on this: leadership teams are, in most cases, the least informed people in the building.

We heard stats like: 70% of UK employees are using ChatGPT daily. 49% don’t believe their leaders know what they’re doing with AI.

If you don’t understand it, you can’t lead through it.

We advise our clients to:

• Create an AI policy
• Build internal AI champions
• Give people the time to play and learn
• Use tools like Delegate to Elevate to find the best use cases

But above all, get curious.

Because if you’re not using AI to lift the low-value, repetitive tasks from your people’s plates, you’re wasting time and money.

And your most talented people will leave. Because they want to work in modern businesses, not ones stuck in last year’s playbook.

And no, they won’t wait for your board to catch up. They’ll move somewhere that already has.

This isn’t about the best model. It’s about the best data.

There was some healthy debate about which tools were best. Claude, Gemini, GPT-4, Grok… everyone had a favourite.

But we landed on this: the real value is in domain-specific models trained on your proprietary data.

That’s where competitive advantage lies. Not in which LLM you pick, but in how you structure, protect, and train your own knowledge base.

SoftBank, after investing billions in OpenAI, believes the models will become commoditised. The value won’t be in the algorithm. It’ll be in the input—your data, your customer knowledge, your internal documents.

And that means the companies who are best at collecting, tagging, cleaning and querying their internal data are going to crush the ones who aren’t.

AI loves clarity. It thrives on structure. If your information is a mess, you’ll get a mess back. But if your business knows what it knows—and how to surface it—you’ll fly.

Is your data fuelling someone else’s model?

Most people are using free or consumer-grade AI tools. That’s a problem.

Because unless you’ve opted out or moved to enterprise-level services, chances are your employees are feeding sensitive business information into third-party models that store and learn from it.

Neil shared horror stories about seeing businesses summarising board papers, customer feedback, internal research, even HR documents with free tools like ChatGPT. That’s a GDPR and confidentiality nightmare.

If you haven’t:

• Implemented a proper AI use policy
• Audited which tools your team are using
• Paid for secure enterprise AI environments

…you’re exposed. And worse, you may be training the very model your competitor uses against you.

Build your own private models. Use internal LLMs. Feed them with structured, validated, context-rich data. That’s how you win.

And if you don’t think your staff are doing it—check your browser history. The temptation to shortcut admin with a free tool is massive. And unless you’ve created a better alternative, they will take it.

The kids are not alright. But they might be.

We closed the panel with a surprising question: what do we tell our kids to study?

Pedro has five kids. John has a daughter about to go to uni. My own girls are still at primary school but will be growing up in a world of tech far more advanced than the one I have had to navigate. We all had thoughts. And the advice was strikingly consistent:

• Learn how to ask good questions
• Develop domain expertise in something you love
• Philosophy, ethics, and language will matter as much as engineering
• Stay adaptable

Because the only certainty is that whatever you train for today will change. Fast.

And maybe this is the golden thread: curiosity, again. It’s about attitude more than skills. The people who will thrive in this world are the ones who stay curious. Who keep learning. Who don’t cling to the past.

We also touched on dexterity. The fine motor skills you can’t automate (yet). That might mean trades come back in vogue. That maybe, just maybe, not every career needs to involve a laptop.

And maybe it’s about combining worlds. AI and plumbing. AI and agriculture. AI and teaching. Whatever you’re doing, do it in a way that understands the tools. Because they’re going to be everywhere.

Don’t wait to be disrupted. Be the disruptor.

This summit panel had some of the best feedback we’ve ever had. Not because everyone went away feeling confident. But because they left curious. Challenged. Motivated.

So what’s next for you?

Start by asking better questions. Where are you wasting talent? Where could AI accelerate value? What data do you own that nobody else does?

Then get your leadership team trained. Pick a use case. Experiment in a controlled way. Test. Iterate. Learn. Share.

And if you want help—if you want to think through the strategic implications, not just the technical ones—book your next strategy session at The Management Lab.

Because AI isn’t coming. It’s already here.

And if you wait any longer, you won’t just be disrupted. You’ll be irrelevant.

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Written by business coach and leadership coaching expert Dominic Monkhouse. Contact him to schedule a call here. You can order your free copy of his book, Mind Your F**king Business here.