Hi there,
Scott here this week. A small experiment to try in your business. Ask three people on your team what “using AI more” actually means. You will get three different answers. One will say faster emails. One will say better customer insight. One will mention that thing they saw on LinkedIn last Tuesday. None of them will be wrong. All of them will be different.
Most AI conversations in business right now are like that. Everyone is talking. Almost nobody is talking about the same thing.
This week in AI
A piece of UK research worth a careful read this week. The government’s own AI Adoption study found that 60% of UK businesses cite limited AI skills as the single biggest blocker to adoption. Not budget. Not regulation. Not vendor lock-in. Skills. Adding to that, 71% of businesses say they have not identified a clear use case for AI in their organisation. Read those two numbers together and you get the real story of UK AI adoption in 2026.
It is also why the headlines keep getting louder while the results stay quiet. Spend on AI is up. Pilots are running everywhere. But most teams cannot articulate what they are actually trying to do with the tools they have bought. That is not a technology problem. It is the problem the rest of this issue is about.
One small piece of context. The same study reports that companies which have invested in proper AI training are three times more likely to be restructuring how work gets done. Training does not just teach the tool. It changes the shape of the work. Which is the bit nobody is talking about loudly enough.
The practical bit
The Use Case Audit
A ten-minute exercise that almost no business does and almost every business should. Open a blank page. Two columns.
Column 1. What AI tools are we paying for?
Every subscription. Every licence. The Copilot rollout. The ChatGPT Team account. The thing your marketing person signed up for last quarter. The free trial that quietly converted. Everything.
Column 2. What are we actually using each one for?
One sentence per tool. What it actually does in your business this week. Not what it could do. Not what the sales deck said. What it is doing.
The audit is in the gap. Tools with no sentence next to them are not earning their licence. Tools where the sentence is vague are the ones where nobody has been trained properly. Tools where the sentence is sharp are the ones quietly producing value.
Do this once. Three decisions usually fall out of it. Something to cancel. Something to train on. Something to do more of. Ten minutes. Three decisions. That is the whole exercise.
Go deeper
How does your AI strategy actually score?
Most UK business owners would land in stage 2 or 3 of five. The audit takes ~15 minutes and tells you which box to fix first.
What’s on
The sessions below ran in May 2026. For what is coming up, see upcoming events.
Build Along with AI
Thursday 4 June · 9:00am to 12:30pm · White City, London
Get your AI Strategy built out before lunchtime. Hands-on and interactive workshop.
The AI Foundry Live
Thursday 4 June · 1:30pm to 4:30pm · White City, London
Our quarterly free live event. Two short talks from guest speakers, then time to compare notes with other UK business owners over an afternoon coffee.
With guest speakers
Hannah Morris
Let’s Trailblaze
Mahdi Sharif
Humble AI
Join the free Foundry community
Peer discussion, weekly resources and first access to events and sessions. No fee, no pitch.
AI is not one thing. It is at least five things stacked under the same word.
Speed (doing what you already do, faster). Quality (doing it better). Capacity (doing more of it). Capability (doing things you previously could not). And insight (seeing patterns in what you already have).
When a leader says “we need to do more with AI” without saying which of those they mean, the team makes its own guess. The marketing person picks speed. The finance person picks insight. The ops person picks capability. Six months later everyone has done something different and nobody is sure why the strategy did not work.
A useful Tuesday-afternoon exercise. Write those five words down. Speed. Quality. Capacity. Capability. Insight. Walk into your next AI conversation and ask which one you are actually trying to move. That is the entire conversation, right there.
Hit reply and tell me which of the five your team is actually trying to move. We read every one.
Know someone whose AI conversation is going in circles? Forward this on. That’s how this list grows.
Ask better questions, get better results.
Scott