There is one question I keep hearing from business leaders, and it is reshaping the way I think about what comes next: “What if you started from scratch, knowing what AI can do today – how would you design your business?” It is a question worth sitting with. Because for most companies, the honest answer reveals a gap between where they are and where they could be. Not a technology gap. A mindset gap.
A year ago, I made the case that AI transforms advertising when humans and AI work together. AI is a threshold technology – it builds quietly until it crosses into everyday usefulness. We have now crossed that threshold. But too many businesses are still using it to optimise, not reimagine.
I think about it like a caterpillar entering metamorphosis. When it enters the cocoon, it does not grow wings; it dissolves completely and rebuilds something entirely new from the raw materials of everything it consumed. That is the kind of transformation AI demands: not bolting new tools onto old structures, but being willing to rethink how the whole organism works.
If we take the UK as an example, it is the third-largest AI market globally, with a government-backed investment pushing companies to scale. But the data tells a different story: too many businesses are still deploying transformative technology to do the same things they have always done, just slightly faster. That is an expensive treadmill dressed up as innovation.
The cultural change
What I’m seeing across the region is that AI is, above all, a culture change. And that is where the real tension lives. CFOs want incrementality. They are asking teams to do more with less and pointing at AI as the tool to get there. CEOs see a bigger strategic bet. CMOs are caught in the middle, trying to prove long-term brand value while delivering short-term efficiency gains. The three roles are looking at the same technology and seeing fundamentally different things.
Meanwhile, AI-native competitors are emerging overnight – building from that blank slate from day one and disrupting entire categories before established players have finished their pilot programmes.
Three things make agentic AI genuinely different: proactivity, the ability to take autonomous action and multi-modal intelligence. Agentic AI reasons, plans and proactively orchestrates complex, multi-step strategies. It stops being a search engine and becomes a colleague. A genuinely different category of capability, and for businesses serious about growth, treating it as a minor upgrade means leaving opportunity on the table.
While AI can automate the creative process, it cannot automate creativity itself. When AI handles the complex, iterative, data-heavy work of personalisation at scale, people get back what technology will never replicate: genuine creative instinct and emotional storytelling. The kind of human connection that actually builds brands. The businesses that get this right are competing differently.
As Aesha Karunakaran, CEO of Protein Milkshake, put it after using Meta’s AI business assistant: “… it gives me back time to focus on creativity and my customers, unlocking growth at a level that simply wouldn’t be possible without it.”
As these agents take on more responsibility, measuring and optimising their output becomes just as important as managing a human team. That is a new discipline, and the businesses building it now will have a significant head start.
The great equaliser
More than one million businesses are already using AI agents on WhatsApp and Messenger, evolving from simple chatbots into proactive Business AIs that know your customers, remember their preferences and help them buy. Globally, we’re already seeing what this unlocks at scale.
Take Movida, one of Brazil’s largest car rental companies. Using Meta Business Agent, they brought their entire booking journey – from vehicle selection to pricing and payment – into a single WhatsApp conversation. In one month, Movida saw a 44% increase in daily bookings, with 85% of conversations resolved entirely by the AI agent. For the customer, it feels like chatting with a helpful store associate – one who is there at any hour, knows what you like, answers in seconds, and never leaves you waiting.
What strikes me about this moment is what it means for businesses of every size. Agentic AI does not care about the scale of your brand or the history behind it. We no longer live in a world where the most sophisticated targeting, the deepest market analysis and the most responsive customer strategies belong exclusively to large organisations with the budget to match.
A startup in Manchester can now access the same strategic intelligence, the same responsiveness and the same capacity to adapt and personalise at scale as any global enterprise. I genuinely believe we will see single-person billion-dollar companies, thanks to these tools. They give every founder the same reach and capability that only the largest companies had before. That is the real opportunity here: to compete and win on equal terms.
The businesses that treat agentic AI as a back-office efficiency tool will find, quietly and gradually, that they have handed the future to those who demanded more from it. This is already playing out.
The UK has the talent, the government backing and the entrepreneurial energy to lead this shift. What we cannot afford is to sleepwalk through it, optimizing yesterday’s processes with tomorrow’s technology and calling it progress.
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