What your business will look like a year from now
The way businesses run is changing quickly, at least for the ones paying attention. I want to paint a picture of what work looks like a year from now for the businesses keeping up. Think of it as a map: here’s where you are, here’s where you want to be, and here’s roughly the road between the two.
I’ll tell it mostly through the lens of marketing, because that’s what I do. I run a marketing agency, so it’s what I know best. But almost none of this stops at marketing. What’s coming reshapes how the whole business runs, and the same shift I’m describing applies just as much to your admin, your operations, your inbox. So let’s talk about what we’re already seeing, and where it’s heading.
Start with the job you hate
Think of your biggest time-suck. The job you dread, the one that eats your afternoon and never quite gets ahead of itself. For a lot of businesses it’s the inbound, the enquiries landing in the inbox, most of them tyre-kickers, a few of them gold, and no quick way to tell which is which without reading every last one.
That’s the job to hand over first. Give the AI the tools and it’ll deal with it, or at the very least sift it: flagging what’s urgent, handling what isn’t worth your time, and putting the ones that matter in front of you ready to answer. I built a tool called Violet to do exactly this, because it was my own biggest time-suck. (Getting the right enquiries coming in, rather than just handling the flood, is the other half of the problem, and it’s a big part of what we do on the subscription.)
Now widen that out. The only reason the AI can deal with your inbound at all is that it has the keys to do it, its own login for the inbox, not a read-only peek over your shoulder. Same story with everything else. Its own account in Slack, so it can answer in the thread rather than wait for you to relay it. Its own access to Notion, to your CRM, to whatever you run the place on, so it can act on what it finds instead of handing you a to-do list. It’s not a clever assistant sat outside the business asking permission for every move. It’s inside, trusted with a proper set of keys, and that’s the difference between something that advises you and something that actually takes the work off your desk.
That access alone already feels like a big leap. It isn’t even the important part.
The thing that knows everything
The important part is what the AI knows.
Everything on your website. Everything in your documentation. And here’s the bit most people miss: everything that currently only lives in the heads of your team. All of it organised and structured so an AI can actually read it. And the AI maintains that knowledge itself: reading every Slack message, every email, every meeting transcript, and quietly deciding what’s new and needs saving.
This is the thing I’ve been calling a Business Brain, and it’s where all of this starts. Back in March I started building my own, documenting every process, every hard-won lesson, thirty years of what I know actually works in design, SEO and marketing, all of it organised so an AI could read it and act on it. That’s what led me to launch INKON in the first place. So this isn’t theory I’m selling you; it’s the thing I built for myself and then decided everyone should have. A year from now that brain isn’t a nice-to-have you bolt on. It’s the foundation everything else sits on. Without it, the AI is guessing. With it, the AI knows your business better than any single person in it.
Get that part right and, honestly, humans end up doing very little hands-on work.
People talk. The AI does the doing.
Here’s the shape of a normal day in a business that’s set this up properly.
People have conversations, with each other, and directly with the AI. They decide what they want, they explain the context, they make the calls that need judgement. Then, once the AI has what it needs, it goes off and does the work you’d otherwise be doing on a computer. Not the thinking. The doing.
That’s a strange sentence to write after thirty years of getting the doing right by hand. But it’s where this is going.
So what’s left for your team to do?
Build and maintain systems. That’s the job, whether it’s the marketing team, the ops team, or just you.
Dashboards that show you what’s actually happening (what’s working, what’s stalled, what needs a decision) instead of you digging through five tools to piece it together yourself. Automations that take any insight or announcement and turn it into a blog post or a social post. Automations that draft the newsletter, send the emails, run the ad campaigns. All the repetitive, time-eating work that used to fill someone’s week, running quietly in the background.
The point of all of it is the same: give people their time back. Once the AI has every tool in your business and everything anyone in your business knows, there’s very little of the routine graft it can’t take off your plate. And remember, the models a year from now will be considerably sharper than the ones we’ve got today. What looks impressive now will look quaint.
This isn’t so far from what we already do on our monthly plans: keep the content coming, keep the busywork handled, keep the whole thing pointed at getting you in front of customers, and free up your hours for the work only you can do. The difference is scale, and how much of the graft moves off the human’s desk.
Someone still checks the important stuff
For the work that matters, there’ll still be a human review stage, for a while yet at least. But here’s the change worth noticing: that human rarely makes the edits themselves. They hand the edits to the AI.
And the AI doesn’t just apply your note to this one job. It takes the lesson, works out what you actually meant, and carries it into every future job. Correct it once, properly, and you’ve corrected it everywhere. The repetitive work gets handled; the judgement gets more of your hours, not fewer.
The bit nobody likes talking about
None of this is free. And it’s getting more expensive, not less, as the models get smarter.
I’d budget at least 20% of your payroll on token costs. Some businesses are already past 50%, and a year from now I don’t think that’ll raise many eyebrows. Big number, I know. But set this up correctly and it’s a drop in the bucket next to what it produces, the same way a good website was never a cost, it was the thing that brought the work in.
I’ll be straight with you here, same as always: the fee you pay us is for our work. What you spend running your own AI is yours, out in the open, no markup hidden in the middle. You should know exactly what you’re paying for.
You’re not behind. Yet.
Here’s the reassuring part. Almost nobody has all of this set up. If you haven’t, you’re not behind, you’re normal.
But you should be moving in this direction, and the first move is the same for everyone: get your business organised so an AI can actually work from it. That’s a Business Brain. Everything I’ve described sits on top of it, and nothing above it works without it.
I’ve spent thirty years putting businesses in front of their customers. Letraset and spray mount, then PageMaker, then the web, and now this. The tools keep changing. The job doesn’t. This is just the next set of tools, and the businesses paying attention are already picking them up.
Want to talk about where to start? 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. Prefer to start smaller? Get a free audit of where you stand today, or just email hello@inkon.co.uk. Either way you’re dealing with me, and I read every message myself.