What capabilities should mid-market business leaders be watching right now?

Agent systems are going to be incredibly powerful, both personally and professionally. Companies that can harness the power of AI systems enabling their employees to be more effective and efficient are likely going to be able to capture more value or be more efficient with how they go about it.

The technology moves fast. How should a mid-market business think about when to commit to a tool or approach, and when to hold off?

The technology is moving incredibly fast, making long-term bets on specific applications risky. Instead, I would invest in foundational solutions, such as robust data infrastructure, flexible API layers, and unified cloud environments, that provide a stable base for multiple tools. This modular approach ensures you remain nimble and agile, allowing you to swap out individual AI models or providers as superior versions emerge. Agility is the primary competitive advantage in this landscape; by avoiding vendor lock-in and focusing on interoperable systems, businesses can integrate cutting-edge breakthroughs in months rather than years.

Are there categories of internal tooling most businesses haven't clocked yet?

Probably agentic tools like Antigravity. These look like traditional IDEs for coding, but really you can use them to accomplish almost anything, and almost any role in the business could be using it to enhance their workflows.

Tools deployed, people not really using them. What do organisations that actually crack adoption do differently?

Two things. Firstly they provide real value, and by that I mean the users find it useful and keep coming back over and over again. Secondly, they don't necessarily go after a huge market, they focus and obsess their core users.

If a mid-market CEO said they know they need to do something with AI but don't know where to start, what's the first thing you'd tell them?

The AI systems themselves are some of the best teachers around. They have almost infinite knowledge, they can recast things in different ways to help you understand, and they can answer follow-up questions until you understand. They can even walk you through step by step how to do something. So I'd say, use one of the AI chat systems and start exploring what you would like to know more about.

What's the thing most people do first that turns out to be a waste of time?

People start to realise that the more detailed your prompt is the better the answer you get. But then they start spending a lot of time drafting their prompts. In fact, you can prompt the system to help you design a sophisticated and detailed prompt, which is a huge time saver and opens up ideas you hadn't thought of.

BCG’s AI at Work study confirms what aibl’s research already found

17th July 2026 | AI analysis

I told you so. It’s petty I know, but it feels good when a monster like BCG reinforces a message from your own research.

Back in March, we talked about how the predictors of ROI were the “hard work” variables. Namely, strategic clarity, governance maturity, and cross-functional alignment.

This matches what we learned from BCG’s recent AI at Work Study.

Before we get to that though, it’s worth sharing a topline finding about the headline metric of AI, time saved. Over 40% of frontline workers save a day or more per week, which should be, at the least, a real boost to productivity and potentially to innovation.

Yet people won’t turn that time into gold without guidance. Two-thirds say that they get limited or no direction on how to redirect their time, and over half don’t direct it to what they consider “strategic” work.

But back to the meat of the matter. In the study, BCG breaks companies into two groups based on their approach. The tool-first respondent orgs are the “deploy” group, and they’re contrasted with a “reshape/invent” group, that has rebuilt workflows from end-to-end.

In measure after measure (value captured, proving impact, worker confidence) the latter group outperforms by roughly 20 percentage points.

What separates the two groups are the same types of “hard work” variables we saw back in March; a clear roadmap, employee involvement in redesign, guardrails, value tracking, and reskilling.

But the grind pays off. The companies that have gone through the complex and sometimes uncomfortable process of understanding themselves, their people, and their work are seeing real results and evolving into new businesses in the process.