Building Boldly with AI: How Founders Are Rewiring Work for Speed, Trust & Impact

Building Boldly with AI: How Founders Are Rewiring Work for Speed, Trust & Impact

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Across industries, AI is no longer a side project, it's actually becoming the operating system for work itself. But while the tools move fast, organisations don’t always keep pace. At a recent Think & Grow roundtable, a group of founders and operators came together to share real stories about what it actually takes to embed AI, not just in your product, but in your people, processes, and performance.

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The key takeaway: The next wave of competitive advantage will be won by organisational boldness over tools. Read the rest of the highlights to find out why. 

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1. Speed vs. Safety: Organisations Aren’t Wired for AI Velocity

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Nearly everyone in the room shared stories of friction between the pace of AI capability and the slowness of internal systems to accommodate it.

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“The tools are ready, but the business isn’t,” one founder admitted. “Legal, finance, IT all need to catch up. Otherwise you’re flying with one wing.” A key blocker was trust. Not just in the tech, but between teams.

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“Our engineers trust AI, they review its code and ship it,” said one attendee. “But the rest of the org isn’t there yet. The moment something breaks, it’s turned off.” In regulated industries, the tension is even sharper between intelligent automation and the need to demonstrate robust compliance.

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2. Engineering Is Leading the Charge. Can the Rest Keep Up?

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AI adoption in engineering is already widespread. At several companies in the room, 100% of new code is written by AI, then reviewed by humans. But getting other functions, like product, marketing, finance or ops, to follow is harder. “They’re not used to being measured by output alone,” one participant said. “It feels uncomfortable to say: ‘I prompted a model, and the work’s done.’ But that’s the new reality.” Founders are starting to rethink performance frameworks, incentives, and job scopes, moving toward outputs and away from effort-based metrics.

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3. From Prompting to Autonomy: The Real Future Is Agentic Work

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The roundtable wasn’t about prompt engineering. It was about delegation. Multiple attendees spoke about training agents to handle full workflows, not just assist in tasks. “Our agent does procurement across seven categories, based on five years of historical data and Slack complaints,” said one founder. “It makes better decisions and doesn’t churn.”

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Another company’s goal is to remove prompting altogether. “I don’t want to prompt, I want an agent that understands our backlog, reads tickets, writes code, and ships a fix, all autonomously.” This isn’t hypothetical because it’s already happening in AI-native companies. And it’s pushing others to rethink how work gets assigned, monitored, and valued.

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4. AI as a Coach: Training People to Train the Machine

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Rather than replacing workers, AI is becoming a force multiplier in coaching employees, testing outputs, and unlocking faster upskilling. “Our VP of Finance has GPT-4 open every time she’s building a model,” one participant shared. “It’s like having a second brain on hand for speed and confidence.”

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The future of work might look less like AI doing the job, and more like AI as partner and mentor, helping people stretch into new roles and responsibilities faster than traditional training would ever allow.

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5. Culture Is the Hard Part, Not the Code

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While tooling was discussed, the room kept returning to culture as the primary challenge. “People feel guilty when the AI does the work,” one founder said. “They say, ‘I didn’t really do anything today’ even though the outcome was delivered.” That discomfort needs to be addressed head-on. It’s not enough to deploy tools - leaders need to reframe what good work looks like, and create a culture that values impact over effort.

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Final Takeaway: The AI Advantage Isn’t Technical. It’s Organisational

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The companies moving fastest with AI share one thing: they're redesigning how work gets done. Not just layering AI on top, but rethinking roles, trust, incentives, and risk tolerance from the ground up. “We’re not optimising,” one founder summed up. “We’re evolving. That takes a very different mindset and a very different kind of leadership.”

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As AI capabilities explode, the real question for founders and operators becomes: How bold are you willing to be?

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We are Think & Grow, a people-led growth consultancy, helping tech companies across the globe grow their team and business. From growth strategies to talent solutions, we craft bespoke plans to scale smartly and conquer new markets. Let’s build legacies and reshape industries together, find out more at www.thinkandgrowinc.com.