Your employees got to AI before you did. Most leaders haven’t noticed yet.

PLUS: The shadow AI signal your governance framework is probably misreading

From the aibl team

growthLIVE is wrapped, and thank you to everyone who made the time. 60 senior Sales, Marketing, and RevOps leaders at the Arding Rooms in London, and the format held its line on practical content throughout. One standout for me: a speaker walked us through an agent they’d built without any coding experience that cut a quarter of their account managers’ daily admin. The roundtables gave people a chance to share war stories with others facing the same challenges — we’ll cover that in a write-up next week.

Also in this issue: 71% of UK workers are already using AI tools that their employers haven’t approved. Over half do so weekly. Ali Wright is SMB Director at Microsoft UK, and her read on that figure is that most organisations are further into AI adoption than their leaders realise, because their employees got there first. The piece covers what to do about that, and why companies that roll out AI officially and still don’t see results tend to find the blocker is change management, not the technology they chose.

Following from Ali’s interview, we look at the issue through the lens of our Mid-market survey data and compare AI failure rates from firms with high and low levels of unapproved AI.

Before I go, a reminder that next up for us is aiblLIVE, 20th October at Convene Sancroft in London. Early bird tickets are available until 30th June. Register here.

That’s growthLIVE wrapped.

“Don’t start with AI. Start with your biggest blind spot.
Then build the agent that solves it.”

We brought 60 Sales, Marketing, and RevOps leaders together at the Arding Rooms in London. Five sessions, five roundtables, and a room that wasn’t short of opinions. The most honest conversations happened off the record, which is exactly how it should be. We’ll be sharing key takeaways from the day soon. If growthLIVE resonated and you want the full day, aiblLIVE is on 20 October. Five tracks, 1,200 mid-market leaders. aiblLIVE

Your employees are already using AI. The question is whether you know about it.

Ali Wright, SMB Director at Microsoft UK, talks to small and mid-sized business owners across the UK every day — and what she’s seeing is moving faster than most leaders realise.

Ali describes a progression from AI as assistant (writing emails, transcribing calls) through pre-built agents handling specific tasks, toward autonomous agents running whole processes with humans still in the loop. Most businesses are somewhere in the middle, and while their leaders are still working out the plan, their employees are already moving.

According to Microsoft research, 71% of UK workers are using AI tools their employer hasn’t approved. Over half do so weekly. Nearly one in four are putting finance-related data into those tools.

The instinct is to treat this as a compliance problem. Ali’s view: find out what’s actually in use before deciding what to do about it. “Assume it’s already happening,” she says.

Microsoft has worked with customers who found multiple tools they hadn’t known about, brought in by employees using what they know from home or filling a gap where no approved option existed. The risk is in that gap: tools operating without security guardrails, potentially training on the organisation’s own IP.

Watch the full video interview:

aibl’s Research: The loud and clear signals of Shadow AI

In keeping with our lead article, we went into the data from aibl’s Mid-market AI survey and dug into unapproved AI.

Any reasonable, governance-minded company wants to minimise ‘shadow AI’, and our research supports that view. Leaders who report higher levels of unapproved AI also report higher rates of AI-related failures, across every dimension we measured.

Product spotlight of the week

This week the aibl team has been tracking Replit, which is picking up traction with mid-market operations and functional leaders sitting on a backlog of internal tools they need built and no dev resource to build them.

A finance team wants a commission tracker. Legal wants a contract analyser. Ops wants a vendor portal. All three raise tickets, none get prioritised, and the spreadsheet workaround runs another quarter.

Replit’s Agent lets non-technical staff describe what they want in plain English and builds, deploys, and hosts it in the browser without involving engineering. Most tools take hours rather than weeks.

There’s a free Starter plan with daily Agent credits worth trying before committing — enough to get a feel for what’s possible. Paid plans start at $20 per user per month on the Core plan, with $25 of monthly AI credits included.

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