Less friction. More relevance. Better outcomes.
Faster understanding, greater personalisation and more proactive ways of getting the job done.
AI strategy · business redesign · leadership teams
Build your competitor - the one that could beat you.
Most AI conversations start with the business you already have. I help leadership teams start somewhere else: with the customer, what AI now makes possible, and the business you would build if you were starting today.
30 yearsturning technology shifts into business capability
2× founderbringing start-up product thinking to established businesses
CEO, TheAX.aibuilding AI-native diagnostics and operating methods in practice
Outcome-ledlinking AI and operating-model change to measurable results
The shift
AI is accelerating the experience around your business.
AI compresses the distance between need, understanding, decision and action. That changes what customers expect, what employees can do, and how quickly a business can sense and respond.
More capability at the point of work.
Knowledge, analysis and execution that previously depended on specialists or management layers.
Shorter loops from signal to action.
The ability to understand, decide, execute and learn continuously rather than periodically.
Where AI really is today
7 in 10
firms are now actively using AI.
NBER · 6,000 executives in the UK, US, Germany and Australia · 20269 in 10
firms report no impact on productivity or employment from AI so far.
Same surveyAI adoption is accelerating, but for most businesses it is not yet translating into measurable value on the P&L.
That suggests the next challenge is not where else to deploy AI. It is how the business itself needs to change so AI can improve outcomes, economics and growth.
That is a business redesign question, not a technology one.
Accelerated Experience · AX
Design the organisation for the environment ahead.
Organisations are designed for their environment. When that environment changes, yesterday's design eventually becomes the constraint.
AI is creating an environment of Accelerated Experience - AX: customers, employees and businesses can understand, decide and act faster.
Your strategy defines what you need to achieve. AX helps identify the capabilities your organisation needs to achieve it. The AI Clarity Session brings it all together.
Customer & Direction
Start with the jobs and outcomes customers need, not the products and processes you already have.
Create enough clarity of intent for people to make good decisions without detailed instruction.
Technology, Data & Execution
Design the business around what people, AI and digital systems can now do together.
Put trusted evidence at the point of decision and measure whether outcomes and capabilities move.
Remove unnecessary work and automate or delegate machine-executable work where it creates value.
Organisation & Learning
Move decisions towards the people closest to the problem, with context, guardrails and accountability.
Make assumptions explicit, test them quickly and let evidence change what the organisation does.
Part 1 of the AI Clarity Session focuses on AX1 and AX2 - Customer-centric and Vision-led - to rethink the business around the customer and the outcomes you want to achieve. Part 2 brings in the remaining AX capabilities to identify what the organisation needs to change to make that future state possible.
AI Clarity Session
Don't brainstorm AI use cases. Build the rival first.
The AI Clarity Session starts that redesign process: imagine the organisation you would build for this new environment, then compare it with the one you have and decide what needs to change.
A typical AI use-case session
Improves what you already do.
It asks where AI fits into today’s products and processes. You get faster versions of the current business: incremental gains that may or may not show up on the P&L.
The AI Clarity Session
Asks what a new entrant would build instead.
If you want a step-change in your business, or to be ready for the AI-native competitor coming after your market, you need to see the business it would build, not a list of improvements to your own.
Create the AI-native competitor.
Start with the customer and the job they need done. Design the whole experience from scratch using what AI and today's technology make possible.
Bring your business back in.
See where the competitor removes effort, raises value or creates something different - and where your customers, trust, expertise, data or assets remain an advantage.
See what matters now.
Play the comparison back against your AX baseline to expose the capabilities that matter. The half day stops at clarity; the full day continues into a prioritised roadmap.
Before the session
Each participant completes an AX assessment so the workshop starts with a baseline rather than opinion alone.
Choose the depth
Half day for clarity. Full day to decide what to do.
You will not leave with an AI wish list or blue-sky objectives that get filed and forgotten. You leave with shared clarity on where AI will genuinely benefit your organisation and, in the full day, a prioritised roadmap you can act on.
AI Clarity
Build your competitor, understand where it changes the basis of competition and play the findings back against your AX baseline.
- Shared clarity on how AI could change your market and the basis of competition
- A baseline across the seven AX categories
- Where you are exposed, and the advantages a new entrant could not copy
- A concise findings summary
- No roadmap: stops before prioritising what to do
£1,650+ VAT
£330 per attendee at five participants
Book the half dayAI Clarity & Action
Everything in AI Clarity, turned into a prioritised roadmap your leadership team owns.
- A shared vision of where AI will really benefit your organisation, in practical terms
- A measurable baseline across 21 AXAT dimensions, so you know where you are
- The gap between where you are and what competing will require
- A prioritised, achievable roadmap: what to protect, build, test and stop, with owners
- Agreed next steps, so work starts the following week
£2,250+ VAT
£450 per attendee at five participants
Book the full day →Prices cover up to five leadership team members, delivered remotely. Additional attendees are £50 each per session, up to eight in total. On-site delivery is available, with travel and accommodation charged at cost. Every session includes a check-in 14 days later to see where you are after reflection.
Want the detail?
The session overview covers the AX model, AXAT, the competitor exercise, workshop structure, outputs and the full-day planning method.
About Robert
I advise from inside the change.
- Now
- CEO & Co-founder, TheAX.ai
- Experience
- 30 years turning technology shifts into business capability
- Perspective
- Founder, operator, consultant and product leader
- Based
- Wiltshire · working UK-wide
AI is not primarily a technology implementation problem. It is a business, product, service and organisational design problem.
I have spent 30 years helping organisations turn successive waves of technology into business capability - from ERP and early cloud to SaaS, low-code and now AI. I have founded two SaaS businesses, led product and operations in venture-backed scale-ups, run a 35-person consulting practice and advised leadership teams across government, telecoms, SaaS, financial services and consulting.
For the last decade, the consistent thread has been capability: what an organisation needs to be able to do to produce an outcome, what is preventing it, and how people, process, data, technology and governance need to change together.
Today I am also building TheAX.ai, so the questions I help leadership teams answer are the same ones I have to answer as a founder: what has genuinely changed, what should be redesigned, where AI creates leverage and how to know whether it is actually improving the business.
I deliberately take on a small number of direct advisory engagements because I enjoy the work, and because it keeps me close to the reality of using TheAX.ai in live settings. It means I experience the product in the same way our customers do - using it with real leadership teams, real constraints and real decisions to make.
Facilitated, not presented.
My work is often most useful before there is a plan - when you and your leadership team need to step back, challenge the assumptions you are carrying and work out what you really think.
I have facilitated leadership teams across start-ups, large enterprises and government departments, and published research with universities and industry bodies on organisational capability development.
My role in the room is not to tell you and your team what to think. It is to create the structure, challenge and space for the right conversation - helping you surface assumptions, explore different possibilities, make the difficult trade-offs and reach decisions you can own.
The aim is not an interesting workshop. It is to help you and your team get somewhere you would have struggled to reach on your own, then turn that thinking into practical action and outcomes.
Evidence
The method is new. The pattern isn't.
Across different technologies and different businesses, my work has followed the same discipline: giving leadership teams the space to step back, challenge assumptions and consider what they would do differently. But it does not stop as an academic exercise. I then help turn those ideas into practical changes that can be delivered, measured and connected to real business outcomes.
13% → 2%
Customer churn
Redesigned the customer-success operating model. Close rates also moved from 30% to 70%.
£10m p.a.
Improvement opportunity
Capability and cultural assessment across a 4,000-person civil service.
£2m
Pipeline
Created a new annual recurring revenue pipeline in two months by repositioning the proposition around what the product did best.
50%
Valuation uplift
Rebuilt and repositioned an ageing product into a modern B2B SaaS proposition, contributing to a 50% valuation uplift in 12 months.
Growth
Practice turnaround
Reset strategy and proposition for a 35-person consulting practice after years of decline.
30 clients
AI-native platform
Built an AI-native software business from concept to clients in eight countries in its first year.
Questions
Before we talk.
Is this another AI use-case workshop?
No. A use-case session finds ways to improve what you already do, which usually means incremental change that may or may not reach the P&L. This session deliberately avoids starting with AI. It starts with the customer and the business you would build today, then uses AI only where it changes the experience or materially strengthens a capability required for an outcome.
Why build a fictional competitor?
Because redesigning your own business directly tends to pull today's products, roles, systems and constraints into the discussion. The competitor gives the team permission to think from first principles before bringing the realities - and advantages - of the incumbent back in.
Is it remote or in person?
Remote as standard, using a shared online whiteboard. It can run on site, with travel and accommodation charged at cost. The full day can be one day, or two half days no more than a week apart.
Do you need to be advanced in AI already?
No. The point is to work out what AI should mean for the business before making large technology commitments. Existing data, technology or governance constraints can then be addressed because there is a clear reason to address them.
Do you build the AI solutions too?
I can make sure it gets built. My focus is helping you decide what to change, why it matters and how success will be measured. For delivery, I have access to experienced people who build AI solutions, and I can put together the right team for what you need.
Start with a conversation
Let’s talk about what this could mean for your business.
If this has raised questions about your strategy, your organisation or where AI could create real value, let’s have a short conversation. You can find out more about the approach, talk through what is changing in your business and decide whether an AI Clarity Session would be useful.