Every conversation I have about AI at the moment reminds me of 1978.
In March that year, the BBC aired a Horizon programme called “Now The Chips Are Down”. I was fourteen, already hooked on the early microcomputers, and it felt like someone had opened a window into the future. I’ve remembered it for nearly fifty years and watched it again a few times since. It’s still on iPlayer if you fancy it.
The programme showed the marvels of the new microprocessors. Word processors that could out-produce a room full of typists. Industrial machines running accurately, twenty four hours a day, with no breaks and no bad moods. A tractor ploughing a field with nobody in the cab. Clearly some kind of sorcery.
Then it moved into a studio discussion, led by Richard Kershaw, about what all this was going to do to British industry and society. Could Britain afford to fall behind America and Japan? Whose job was it to retrain everyone? How many jobs were going to vanish? There was even a moment where the panel reassured itself that nobody would much mourn the loss of the really boring jobs. Shop assistants, apparently.
Having lived through it, what actually happened was slower than the panel feared. Slow enough that we adapted. We did lose some businesses. If you made or repaired mechanical typewriters or cash registers, it was not a good decade. But software boomed, and whole industries appeared that nobody in that studio had thought of.
Then I lived through the arrival of the World Wide Web, and heard the same conversation again in different words. “Why would I want a website? Our customers know where we are. If they want something, they’ll pick up the phone.” I heard versions of that from perfectly sensible business owners. Today a company either has a website or it probably isn’t a company any more.
AI feels like both of those at once. The microprocessor put a computer on every desk and in every home. The internet connected them and changed how we buy, sell and talk to each other. AI is going to do something on that scale, and it isn’t going to ask permission first.
Right now, only a small minority of businesses are using it in ways that genuinely move productivity. I think a lot of people have tried it in a fairly simple way, or listened to someone who did, and concluded that it’s a slightly unreliable way of writing text. That’s produced a bit of a backlash. Honestly, if that was all I’d seen, I’d have concluded the same.
But that isn’t all it is.
In my own business, AI is saving me hours every week. Not “helped me draft an email” hours. Real work that I or somebody else used to sit down and do. Some of it now runs on its own, at set times, whether I’m at my desk or not, at a cost that would be an insult to offer a human being.
So here’s my message. This is a genuine opportunity and it’s available now, not at some point in the future. Don’t file it under passing trend. AI isn’t going to damage your business. Your competitors who take it seriously before you do will manage that quite nicely on their own.
One action. Pick a task in your week that’s repetitive, that you resent doing, and that you’d struggle to justify to a stranger. Spend an hour finding out whether AI could do it. If the answer’s no, you’ve lost an hour. If it’s yes, you’ve just found some back.
