If you were starting your business today, you'd build it completely differently
Most businesses are trying to add AI to what they already do. They’ve got it backwards, and it’s going to cost them.
I want to explain why, and what to do instead. And I’ll be upfront: this leads somewhere, to a thing I build for businesses called a Business Brain. But the idea stands on its own even if you never speak to me, so stick with it.
The two ways businesses are getting this wrong
There are two things I see companies doing with AI right now. Both feel sensible. Both are dead ends.
The first is just telling the team to “use AI more.” No structure, no plan, just a vague instruction to get on with it. Everyone opens ChatGPT, has a fiddle, and nothing really changes except a lot of slightly-better-worded emails.
The second is more thoughtful, and worse. The switched-on owner looks at their existing processes and asks which ones AI could automate. Reasonable question. Wrong question.
Because you’re taking a system you already know will be obsolete in a few years, and hoping a bit of AI polish will keep you competitive with businesses that were built for this from the ground up. You’re tuning up a horse and cart while the other lot are building a car.
The businesses to actually worry about
Here’s the uncomfortable part, especially if you’re established and comfortable.
Somewhere near you, someone is starting a business today with no baggage. No legacy processes, no “this is how we’ve always done it,” no software they’re stuck with because they’ve paid for it. They get to assume AI from day one and build everything around that assumption.
That business is your competition in a year. And they’re not going to be faster than you by a little. They’ll be faster by a lot, because they never had to unpick the old way first.
Mark Cuban put it bluntly: there are going to be two types of companies, “those who are great at AI, and everybody else that they put out of business.” I think he’s right, and I don’t think “great at AI” means what most people assume it means.
The exercise that fixes it
So here’s the thinking I’d take any business through, new or old. It’s a thought experiment, and it’s deliberately extreme, because the extreme version is what forces the right answer.
Imagine no human in your business is allowed to touch a computer.
Every task that happens on a screen is handled by AI. Not most of it. All of it. Now work backwards from there and ask three questions.
1. What would the AI need to know?
To do every job in your business, what would it have to understand? The information on your website, in your documents, in your systems, and crucially, the stuff that only lives in people’s heads. The things your best person “just knows.”
Answering this tells you how to structure your company’s knowledge. What needs writing down, organising, and making readable, so the work can actually be done from it.
This is the Business Brain, and it’s the foundation. Nothing else works without it. I’ll come back to it.
2. What would it need to touch?
Which tools, which software, which systems would the AI need to plug into to get the work done? This tells you where things need connecting up, and where your current software is a dead end because it simply won’t talk to anything.
A lot of businesses discover here that the tool they’ve used for a decade is the thing holding them back.
3. What judgement would it need?
This is the hard one, and it’s the one nearly everyone skips.
What wisdom, instinct and nuance does the job actually require? The decisions your experienced people make without thinking, the “it depends” calls, the reading-between-the-lines. Most businesses assume this part can’t be handed over, so they don’t even try.
They’re wrong, and more wrong every month. A great deal of it can already be captured, if you document the decision framework and gather enough real examples of an expert working through it. That’s how judgement gets encoded rather than lost.
The point isn’t to replace people
Let me be clear, because this is where people get the wrong end of the stick.
This isn’t about firing everyone and running a company of robots. It’s about deciding, deliberately, where a human belongs and where one doesn’t.
The shift is in the starting assumption. Instead of assuming humans do all the work and looking for gaps where AI might help, you flip it. Assume AI does all the work, build every system around that, and then find the places where a human genuinely adds value. Then you pour your energy into those places, and that becomes the thing that sets you apart.
Because here’s the trap. If your plan is that your edge will be “we’re good at using AI,” remember that in a few years everyone still trading will be good at using AI. The ones who aren’t will be gone. Being good at AI won’t be a differentiator. It’ll be the price of entry.
The differentiator is what you choose to keep human. For me, that’s the judgement and the relationship. The client deals with a person who actually knows their business, not a support queue. Everything underneath that, the repetitive graft that used to need a room full of people, runs on systems. So the human part is the good part, and none of my time gets eaten by the rest.
Where I’ve done this myself
I’ll not dwell on it, but for context: this isn’t theory I read somewhere. It’s how INKON is built, and it’s why one person can run it.
I had a decent idea of what AI could do, and thirty years of design, SEO and marketing behind me, so I built the whole thing on the AI-first assumption from the start rather than bolting it on afterwards. The systems do the heavy lifting that used to need a full agency. My judgement sits on top. That’s the whole model, and it’s why the work is fast without being thin, and why I can keep prices honest.
Then I spent the last year learning how much further it goes than I first thought. It keeps moving. That’s rather the point. If you want to see where it all ends up, I’ve painted the fuller picture in what your business will look like a year from now.
Start with the brain
If you do just one thing from all of this, do this.
Go back to question one. Everything else, the tools, the automation, the judgement, depends on the AI being able to understand your business. And right now, most of what makes your business good isn’t written down anywhere. It’s scattered across inboxes, half-finished documents, and the heads of a few key people who’ll retire or leave one day and take it with them.
Getting that organised, structured and readable is the first move, whatever you do next. It’s the thing I build for businesses, and I call it a Business Brain: an organised, AI-ready picture of everything your business knows, so the work can actually be done from it.
You don’t have to have the rest figured out. You just have to start with the brain. Everything else gets built on top.
Want to see what a Business Brain would look like for your business? Book a call with me, no charge and no hard sell, and we’ll map out your first step. It’s exactly what our AI consultancy is built around. Or just email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself.