Your AI problem is political, not technical

PLUS: The firms with zero ROI are nearly as bullish as the winners.

From the aibl team

This week we’re wrapping up our reporting on the growthLIVE roundtables in London. From here through the summer, we’ll look ahead to what’s on stage at aiblLIVE in October.

As I look back at the interviews, articles and events of the last few months, I’m struck by how this moment feels so familiar and alien at the same time. It’s familiar because we’ve all struggled with data, skills and internal politics at every phase of the digital revolution. You’ll find valuable takes on these issues in our lead article below.

AI is fundamentally different in a number of ways (these tools make judgements, take actions and program themselves for starters) but in terms of how we feel about the technology, I think it comes down to proximity. It’s easy to grow sceptical of a technology or trend if it’s abstract. AI is (or should be) part of our everyday as business people, so even as integrations go slowly or disappoint, we don’t lose our sense of its power and potential.

The data we’re sharing this week reinforces that. Enthusiasm for AI seems to transcend the barriers some leaders are hitting.

The software works better than the companies buying it

Last week’s growthLIVE roundtables produced some of the most candid thinking we’ve heard from mid-market leaders on AI adoption. Sessions ran under Chatham House Rule, so observations are anonymised.

The data problem is more often political than technical

Across the roundtables, leaders described legacy databases in a state of advanced decay. Marketing teams working from client lists with an 18-month decay rate, resulting in records that are nearly obsolete almost before a campaign launches. One participant cited a database still carrying contacts who would be 130 years old.

Just as damaging is the power structure around the data. Centralised revenue operations teams trying to consolidate data are running into active resistance from departments unwilling to surrender administrative control. Some technical teams have found workarounds, using open-source frameworks like Model Context Protocol to connect isolated systems directly to AI engines without API coding. Board and IT sign-off is still required before anything connects.

One marketing leader described her engineers building repositories and AI workflows freely. Her own team manually re-uploaded PDFs every time something changed on the front end, because they hadn’t been trained on developer tools. She didn’t dress it up: her commercial team were dinosaurs, watching their engineers drive flying cars.

aibl’s Research: AI sentiment holds strong across the UK mid-market

Just before we launched the survey to leaders in the UK’s mid-market, we added a final question. News hits this market constantly, and there’s so much we can’t predict about the trajectory of AI. We wanted a simple way to gauge sentiment, separate from the detailed findings.

Our answer was an AI vibe check. We asked for a quick, instinctive response to the question ‘When it comes to AI, we’re…’, with answers ranging from bearish to all-in.

For all the frustrations and concerns that companies and individuals feel about artificial intelligence, the vibes are strong.

Among companies reporting positive AI ROI, 78% are positive. But even among those who haven’t measured any ROI yet, the bullish share is strikingly close: 67%.

Product spotlight of the week

Instantly is gaining traction with mid-market sales and BD teams running outbound at scale without adding headcount.

A small sales team has limited bandwidth to find leads, warm inboxes, write personalised sequences, and handle replies. Individually manageable, together they eat the week.

Its AI Sales Agent reads your website, finds matched prospects from its B2B contact database, and writes personalised outreach automatically. On the inbound side, the AI Reply Agent handles incoming responses, classifies intent, and books meetings without manual intervention.

It fits best for teams running high-volume cold email across multiple domains. The unlimited email accounts model avoids the per-inbox costs that make competitors expensive at scale. It’s built purely for email outreach, so teams wanting LinkedIn in the same workflow will need a separate tool. The warmup scores in the dashboard can look healthier than they are, so test deliverability independently before scaling up.

Outreach plans start from $47 per month, with AI agent features on a separate credits subscription.

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