Our Head of Content, David Dahdah, captures how AI is moving in fast, reshaping business from the foundations up and challenging leaders to build for what’s next.
There’s a moment, every so often, when the future doesn’t just knock on the door.
It sits on the couch, picks up the remote, settles in, and asks when you’re doing the groceries next.
That’s what AI is doing to business.
Not gradually. Not politely. It’s moved in and is reshaping the foundations while we’re still standing on them.
In our recent AI CARAMBA! roundtable, I sat alongside industry leaders, marketers and BDMs who aren’t theorising about AI. They’re living the transformation, and it shows. The stories shared weren’t about tech upgrades or cool experiments. They were about survival, reinvention, and a complete rewiring of what it means to run a company.
Mostafa Hamdy told us how Birdeye didn’t just adopt AI. They became an AI company. This wasn’t a branding exercise. It was a full-blown pivot; new engineers, new architecture, and new ways of thinking.
In 2024, their AI ranked fourth globally for what it does. That kind of leap doesn’t happen by dabbling. It happens when a business decides to be reborn.
But while some are sprinting ahead, others are still paralysed by fear. Barry Gaines captured this tension perfectly. He spoke to the very human concern that AI is here to replace us. It’s not. The tragedy isn’t that AI might take your job. It’s that it might take away your potential if you don’t let it amplify what you do best.
For many of us, the instinct is to wait, and see what happens. But the reality is that AI is moving faster than any technology before it. That includes the internet.
And just as with cybersecurity, regulation will lag behind.
Mostafa made a grim but accurate comparison. The rules will come, but they’ll come after the damage is done. The companies that build responsibly now (those who treat ethics and privacy as infrastructure, not PR) – they are the companies ones who will last.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But there’s a reason I’m not cynical. I believe we’re part of a once-in-history generation.
We’ll remember the world before AI, and we’ll shape what comes after. We’re the bridge between the old and the new.
That gives us an unmatched advantage.
We must be the ones who can see where the human element still matters most, and where machines can carry the weight.
And make no mistake, this technology isn’t just improving old systems. It’s unlocking business models that couldn’t exist before.
I spoke about DoNotPay, which started by contesting parking fines and now offers legal automation at scale. That kind of evolution isn’t about digitisation. It’s about reimagining what a service even is when AI removes the cost of delivery.
But here’s the real dividing line: it’s not who uses AI. It’s how they’ve built for it.
The businesses with AI-native infrastructure like real-time inference, vector databases, embedded memory etc. are pulling ahead fast. Everyone else is still trying to duct-tape AI onto legacy systems. And those systems are starting to buckle.
If that sounds harsh, it’s because it needs to be.
This isn’t about hype. It’s about the future of work, the future of competition, and the future of trust.
I said during the session that open source AI will soon be good enough for most business tasks.
The differentiator won’t be access.
It will be customisation. Businesses that invest in proprietary models, tailored to real problems, will carve out defensible ground.
But there’s one caveat. If we don’t solve the data ethics piece – if we don’t follow the lead of groups like Anthropic, who prioritise consent and privacy – then industries won’t just change. Some will erode entirely.
Trust is oxygen for business post-COVID.
AI isn’t a trend. It’s not a new feature on your dashboard. It’s a full-system upgrade, and it’s infrastructure in the same way as the plumbing and electricals are.
Pretending otherwise won’t buy you time. It’ll cost you relevance.
We’re not in the phase of “early adoption” anymore. We’re in the phase of consequences.
So the question isn’t whether AI fits into your business.
It’s whether your business still fits in a world shaped by AI.
You should think about that.
David Dahdah
David Dahdah doesn’t do fluff. As Head of Content at The Big Smoke, he’s part strategist, part storyteller, and part chaos engineer. He fills his days helping businesses cut through noise with clarity, edge, and results. He’s obsessed with the future of AI, allergic to jargon, and always chasing the sweet spot where creativity meets commercial impact.