If, like me, you read Matt Shumer’s essay “Something Big Is Happening,” you’ve probably been thinking a lot about AI over the last few weeks.
For many leaders, it’s made them ask, “How do I get my people to use more AI?” I’m seeing ideas thrown around like better prompt training, more tool rollouts, or hiring a Head of AI to drive adoption. You’ve probably seen them too.
For some leaders in service businesses, like the ones I spend my time speaking to weekly, the penny has already dropped that thinking of AI as a productivity tool is the wrong framing entirely.
We’re on the verge of a business model change, not a productivity shift.
Not all agents are created equal
Building an agent or skill to improve your day-to-day workflow is one thing. Building a truly agentic business is something else entirely. The first is real and valuable. Lots of companies are doing it. Automating a QA process, dropping an LLM into a content workflow, using AI to speed up analysis. Sure, these are genuine gains but they’re efficiency improvements layered onto an existing operating model.
A truly agentic business looks fundamentally different. And the companies starting from scratch right now certainly aren’t just layering AI onto the way they work.
They’re building operating models where agents handle the execution from day one, with humans present only for the decisions that genuinely require judgment. That’s a structurally different delivery model, not a faster version of what a service business currently does. The cost base looks different. The org structure looks different. The hiring model looks different. And once it’s built, you can’t close the gap by running training sessions.
I don’t yet know of an enterprise business that has built a truly agentic operating system, at scale. The companies claiming otherwise are usually describing one person running a few agents with narrow domain expertise. That’s a proof of concept, not a business model. The gap between those two things is where the real competitive question lives.
The threat isn’t coming from who you think
What I believe to be true is that the pressure isn’t coming from your existing competitors getting more efficient. It’s coming from new entrants who don’t have your overhead, your legacy systems, or your organizational inertia. They also don’t have your client relationships or your institutional knowledge either, and that matters. When your cost base is structurally higher than that of a competitor, that gap doesn’t stay operational for long. It becomes a pricing gap. For a services business with already thin margins, a pricing gap becomes an existential one fast.
At Brainlabs, our third hire was an engineer — we were building a tech-enabled agency before it was a category. Many people will have first heard of us for our open-source Google Ads scripts.
We’re in a truly privileged position: we understand what it takes to build tech that’s embedded at the heart of how a services business runs. Despite our head start, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit we’re building the plane while flying. We’re also having to make bets on investments and strategies against the backdrop of a landscape that is changing at an unbelievable pace. We’re getting comfortable with these bets by sticking to key principles like LLM agnosticism and building a place, not pitching tents.
Right now we’re using tools like Notion and Claude to rebuild our operating system. Not one-off agents for individual operators but an enterprise agentic ecosystem that leverages our existing context and compounds in intelligence. We’re also totally rethinking our resourcing and hiring strategy.
We know that the gap, between where most businesses are and where this is heading, is actually the window. But it won’t stay open for long.
The mistake companies keep making
Some organizations are responding by creating AI-specific roles like a Head of AI or an AI ethics function. The instinct is understandable, but it’s the wrong move for a specific reason, you can’t outsource a business model change to one person.
If AI is genuinely going to reshape how your business operates, then it has to be built into the core of how your business moves, scaled across your entire org — not a function you hand off.
So, to those asking, “How do I get my people to use more AI?”, I’d say ask harder questions.
It’s: “What does our business look like when agents handle most of the execution?”, “What do we need to build today to get there?” and “How do we price and sell this new business model?”
The businesses that get this right won’t be the ones that added the most tools. They’ll be the ones that asked the hard questions early enough to act on them.
