A big announcement

PLUS: Pitching precision, overwhelmed mid-market leaders and goodbye to capital letter

From the aibl team

What a week. Monday we approved our new aibl branding (bold colours and we’re all in on small letters). Wednesday we launched the new site and the most exciting bit is that today we’re ready to announce the details of aiblLIVE London 2026!

Join us in London for a packed day that’s built around doing, not talking.

This is not a normal B2B event. There won’t be a main stage, no 45 minute keynotes, no long dull aimless panel debates.

Our guiding principle is that every session be oriented around action, whether that’s forming your 90-day AI plan in a guided adoption journey, building agents live on site or learning from operators who have built AI workflows in the real world.

There’s also a discovery zone that’s a learning-led environment where you can have focused, consultative conversations and make sense out of the cacophony in the AI vendor universe.

Newsletter readers are the heart of aibl’s community. We want you there and we’re willing to bribe you. You can take advantage of the first ticket release and attend for only £399. Thats a huge 60% off and gets you access to all session, all consultations, all workshops, and unlike most events these days we even include you lunch and refreshments throughout the day. So use some of that spare Q4 budget and book your space today.

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Playbook of the week

Nobody likes paying to clean up data. The pitch is ‘precision’

Why your AI tools are failing and how to get leadership to finally fund the ‘boring’ foundational work.

A Head of Ops at a mid-market CPG firm watched an expensive AI initiative fail when leadership bought a shiny ‘Sales Co-pilot’ and plugged it into the company’s disparate systems, expecting magic.

Trust collapsed within the week. Asked about the status of customer X, the AI confidently reported that they were at high risk of churn. This led to concern and a hail of alarmed emails, which confused the account manager since the customer had signed a three-year renewal two days earlier. The AI was looking at an old, un-merged CRM record.

The tool was shelved and the company’s wider AI initiatives were tarred with the brush of failure. The primary issue was inconsistent, scattered, and contradictory data. While some executives naively thought the AI could instantly clean, merge and classify data, the reality was messy.

Read on to learn more.

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NEWS

Even though aiblLive London 2026 is live, we’re still collecting real-world wins, misfires and everything in between. If you’ve got a case study that deserves a spotlight, we want to hear it.

Drop a line to John@aiblmedia.com

1. 75% of Chief Procurement Officers See Change in the WindThe latest Ardent Partners and Zip piece on procurement AI readiness adds another angle. Procurement leaders can see what’s coming. Many of the tools they use already ship with AI features, yet the basics still trip them up. Data quality is mixed, ownership is unsettled, and teams aren’t confident judging the outputs. Three-quarters of CPOs expect AI to shift their function within a few years, but most are still patching the foundations. It’s a reminder that progress is less about appetite and more about the prep that makes any of it workable.
2. Mid-Markets are Trying to Keep Pace and It’s Overwhelming ThemAn interview with Unisys CEO Mike Thomson pushes the point further. Mid-market companies are trying to keep pace with enterprises despite running far leaner teams. They’re being asked to modernise infrastructure, strengthen security, and pick up new technologies at a rate that would stretch much larger organisations. The constraint isn’t willingness. It’s bandwidth. Thomson talks about sequencing, the right partners, and clearing space inside the business – all themes we hear repeatedly in AiBL interviews. Overloaded teams can’t take on anything new until the day-to-day stops swallowing all their time.
3. Mid-market Leaders Should Consider the Operational Tax of Adding to the Stack“Attackers thrive in the seams between systems.” A BizTechReports interview with Blackpoint Cyber’s Manoj Srivastava highlights the issue of mid-market IT teams having plenty of security tools but struggling to mesh them into something coherent, which leaves openings for attackers. He makes the case that it’s not a product problem, but rather the absence of a unified view that pulls scattered signals together. Different field, same pattern. These firms aren’t short of technology, but their capacity is strained to pull it together and make it work.

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PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT OF THE WEEK

We checked out Gumloop this week. It’s a no-code automation platform built around a visual canvas, which makes it easy for non-technical teams to spin up simple workflow agents. It’s handy for mid-market teams stretched thin on engineering time but overloaded with admin. People use it for quick wins like lead enrichment, document batches or keeping the CRM tidy.

Treat it as a safe place to try things out rather than a place to run anything critical. It’s young, the feature set around complex flows and scale is still developing, and security expectations should stay modest for now.

Use it to test ideas and run a few small jobs. The results will tell you whether it’s worth taking further. There’s a 14-day trial that’s not too limited to play.

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Quote of the week

“The risk and the opportunity both come from the same place, which is the gap between what’s possible today and what people think is possible. Most of the hype debate boils down to that. Either you’ve seen what the tech can do, or you haven’t.”

Josh Wohle, Co-founder and CEO at Mindstone