News + Thought
AI for Leaner Business Growth
Last Friday, our management team gathered for one of our quarterly gatherings down in Bournemouth, and it was glorious.
The temperature reached a balmy 20 degrees with a gentle breeze, the views across the coast of the English riviera were endless, and ensconced by the unmistakable blend of opulence, serenity and miami glamour that is the spectacular hotel The NICI - the stage was set for a brilliant day ahead.
Ambition vs Friction
We were there to do more than bask in the beautiful surroundings, though. It was a day of focused strategy - chiefly among which was about how we can better integrate AI into our working practices as an agency. While discussing, there was one thing that struck us all last week: most businesses are ambitious enough, it’s friction that holds them back.
We’re talking about small inefficiencies that sit inside processes. Repetitive tasks that invisibly eat up time. These are things that don’t feel important individually, but collectively slow everything down.
The more we talked about it, the clearer it became that the way we integrate AI - both for ourselves and for our clients - isn’t really about replacing people or reinventing everything. It’s just about removing that friction.
Think about the amount of time that gets spent switching between tools, updating things in multiple places, chasing information, or doing checks that a system could just handle in the background. None of it is difficult work, I admit, but as a time burden it adds up. And it’s exactly the kind of thing AI is starting to take care of in the background, without much fuss.
What that does, in practice, is free people up. Not in some abstract “focus on high-value work” way, but in a very literal sense - less time spent on repetition, more time spent actually thinking, deciding, and improving things. It pushes you further up the value chain.
And this is where it gets particularly interesting for ecommerce. Because ecommerce doesn’t grow in a straight line. It grows in layers. Products, channels, content, customer journeys, reporting. Every new layer adds complexity, and if you’re not careful, that complexity compounds faster than the revenue does.
So the opportunity isn’t just to “use AI in ecommerce”. It’s to use it to stop complexity scaling at the same rate as everything else. Cleaner operations. Less manual upkeep. Fewer tiny inefficiencies sitting underneath the surface of otherwise solid performance.
We’re still early in how all of this plays out properly, but it already feels like one of those shifts where the winners won’t necessarily be the ones doing the most - but the ones doing the least unnecessary work.
More on this next week, as we unveil a new solution for the best and brightest in this space.
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