Hi there,
Something odd showed up in the data this week. Over half of UK businesses are now using AI, yet nine in ten of them say it has made no measurable difference to the size or shape of their workforce. Either AI is the most oversold tool in a generation, or most businesses are using it for the wrong things.
This week in AI
The British Chambers of Commerce published Powering Productivity, its biggest study yet of how UK firms are actually using AI. Adoption has jumped from 23% in 2023 to 54% now, but 95% of those businesses report no change in headcount and 86% say job roles have not changed. For a business owner, that is the gap worth paying attention to. Plenty of firms are paying for tools. Very few have changed how the work actually gets done, which is where the productivity gain lives.
Stanford also released its 2026 AI Index. The headline finding: nearly 90% of executives say AI has had no measurable effect on productivity or employment in their organisation. Capability has raced ahead. Deployment has not. In plain terms, the tools are ready. Most businesses are not, because adoption without training or workflow redesign is just licensing by another name.
The practical bit
The Anchor Habit
If your team uses Microsoft 365 Copilot and the summaries feel vague, here is the single biggest fix. Add an anchor to every prompt.
An anchor is a name, a project, a topic or a keyword. Something specific that tells Copilot where to look.
Weak “Summarise my emails from the last five days.”
Strong “Summarise emails from Sarah and the finance team about the Q3 budget review from this week.”
The weak prompt asks Copilot to decide what matters across your entire inbox. It guesses. Sometimes well, often not. The strong prompt tells it exactly where to look, and the answer gets dramatically better for no extra effort.
Try it on your next three Copilot prompts. People, projects, topics, timeframes. Any one of them counts. The more anchors, the sharper the result.
That is today’s whole tip. One habit, thirty seconds, better output on every prompt you write.
What’s on
The sessions below ran in April 2026. For what is coming up, see upcoming events.
Build Along with AI
Thursday 4 June · White City, London
A hands-on session where you leave with a one-page AI roadmap and a draft AI policy for your business.
With guest speakers
Mahdi Sharif
Humble AI
Hannah Morris
Let’s Trailblaze
Join the free Foundry community
Peer discussion, weekly resources and first access to events and sessions. No fee, no pitch.
Adoption without strategy is just spending. Strategy without adoption is just paperwork.
Most businesses only have one, and this week’s data tells you which.
Here is the part that does not get said enough. The businesses that will look smart about AI in twelve months are not the ones with the best tools. They are the ones who sat down this year and wrote a page. A page that says what they are trying to get out of AI, who owns it, which jobs it touches first and how they will know it worked. That page is the strategy. Not a deck. Not a framework. A page.
It is the cheapest, least glamorous thing you can do with AI this year. It is also the thing that decides whether the money you spend on licences, training and time turns into a return or just a line in next year’s P&L you cannot account for.
Pick a week. Pick an hour. Write the page. Or come and write it with us on 4th June.
Hit reply and tell me which bit of this actually got you thinking. I read every one.
Know someone stuck in the 95%? Forward this on. That’s how this list grows.
Understand first. Then act.
Richard