Hi there,
Almost every business owner we meet has the same instinct. AI isn’t landing, so the answer must be a better tool. A different model. The one everyone’s posting about this week.
It almost never is.
The tools are already good enough. What’s missing is the bit nobody enjoys writing down. A decision about who in your business is actually allowed to use AI, on what, and where the line sits. That’s a strategy. Most businesses don’t have one.
This week in AI
The EU moved on the AI Act. On 7 May the institutions reached provisional agreement to push the main high-risk deadline from August this year out to December 2027. Worth knowing, with one catch. It isn’t law yet. Until it’s formally adopted and published, the original 2 August 2026 date stands as written. If you trade into the EU, the honest position is plain. Plan for August, expect December 2027, watch the next few weeks.
One part isn’t moving. The AI literacy obligation has applied since February 2025 and the changes leave it alone. In plain terms, your people need to understand the AI they use. That’s a policy question, not a tooling one.
The other story worth your time wasn’t a model launch. It was the quiet shift from AI you chat with to AI that goes and does the task. Everyone’s calling these agents. They’re useful. But agents aren’t your constraint. Whether the people around you have room to act at all, that is.
The practical bit
Everyone is buying agents. Almost nobody is building agency.
Here’s the pattern in owner-led businesses. The owner holds every decision. Nothing ships without a sign-off. The team is careful, busy and waiting. Then AI shows up and everyone assumes it will make all of that quicker.
It won’t. If your people couldn’t act before, handing them a chatbot doesn’t change who’s allowed to decide. You’ve put a faster engine in a car with the handbrake on.
A real AI strategy isn’t a shopping list of tools. It answers four things.
- Who’s allowed to use it, and on what. Say it out loud. “Anyone, for drafting and research. Nobody, for client data until we’ve agreed how” is a strategy. Silence is not.
- What your AI actually knows about the business. A model is only as good as the context it’s given, and so are your people. If the useful stuff lives in one person’s head or inbox, both stay stuck.
- What the guardrail is. One page. What’s fine, what needs a check, what never goes near a model. This is where the AI Act literacy point lands too, so you cover both at once.
- Where you begin. Not a company-wide rollout. Pick one process or one small group, give them clear permission and a clear boundary, then watch what they do in a fortnight. Widen it from there.
You don’t need to get this perfect. You need to make the call. The businesses pulling ahead with AI aren’t the ones with the best tools. They’re the ones who decided early to trust their people with them.
Free resources
Foundry Fundamentals: Prompting 101
A free, beginner-friendly course on getting real work out of AI. If you’ve started using a chatbot but feel like you’re not getting your money’s worth, this is the fix. Stop treating it like a search engine and start briefing it like a sharp new assistant. Seven short modules, real business examples, one thing to try after every lesson.
New here? You’ll set up a free community login on the way in.
What’s on
The sessions below ran in June 2026. For what is coming up, see upcoming events.
One month today. Two sessions, same venue. Come for the morning, the afternoon or both.
Build Along with AI
9 July 2026 · White City, London · 11:00 to 13:00
A working session, not a talk. You leave with the start of your own AI strategy and a one-page policy you’ve written yourself, not a deck about someone else’s.
£49 early bird
£99 standard
Free virtual waitlist
The AI Foundry Live
9 July 2026 · White City, London · 13:30 to 16:30
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.
Speaking this time: Mahdi Shariff, founder of Humble AI, and Hannah Morris of Let’s Trailblaze.
Free, uncapped
The tools were never the hard part.
If AI feels stuck in your business, don’t start with another tool. Start with one honest sentence about who’s allowed to use it and what for. That sentence is the strategy. Everything else follows it.
Next week, the one line in an AI policy that starts the most arguments, and why it’s usually the one to keep.
Hit reply and tell me the one process you’d hand to a small group first. I read every reply.
Know an owner sitting on the handbrake? Forward this on.
Understand first. Then act.
Richard