Rethinking your idea in the age of AI

As the founder of an EdTech company in an emerging economy in Africa, I believed I understood what it took to build impactful, scalable digital solutions.

So, in 2023, after extensive market research, I co-founded a social media and design venture in the UK, aimed at helping small businesses to grow online.

But just as we got started, something shifted. Automation and AI were evolving faster than expected, quietly disrupting service models, client expectations and how value itself was delivered. I didn’t fully grasp it at the time, but what I’d built was already becoming obsolete.

Evolve or vanish

It reminded me of the early 2000s when businesses either reinvented themselves for the internet or vanished. Facebook, Amazon and Google were born not from certainty, but from embracing change.

Today, AI is reshaping the business landscape with the same force. And like the dot-com era, this moment demands that entrepreneurs rethink what they’re building, who they’re building it for and how it will scale in an AI-driven world.

According to Statista, AI adoption has surged globally, with 72% of organisations integrating AI into at least one business function by 2024, up from 55% the previous year. Even more notably, 65% of companies now use generative AI, marking a leap of over 30 percentage points in just one year.

The shift

In the UK, this trend is particularly evident in the B2C e-commerce sector. By 2023, nearly 50% of organisations were actively experimenting with AI, and 24% had already fully implemented it.

This shift highlights a growing reliance on AI to enhance customer experiences, streamline operations and gain a competitive advantage. These numbers aren’t just statistics, they are signals. Signals that customer behaviour is changing, signals that businesses built on manual effort, not leverage, are increasingly overtaken by AI-native competitors who can deliver faster, better and more affordably.

I felt this shift even more deeply through TechXplora, our EdTech platform. We launched it as a quiz and assessment learning tool for students aged 10 to 18, a clear and urgent need at the time.

With over 3,000 students using it every school term, we believed we had achieved product–market fit, but that confidence soon began to fade. We started noticing a change, students weren’t engaging the same way.

The once-positive feedback we received was becoming inconsistent. Why? Because they’d discovered ChatGPT. Students now get answers in seconds, complete assignments with ease and access insights that once required a tutor.

Our solution

AI had expanded their access to knowledge and shrunk their patience for traditional learning tools. It became clear: the problem wasn’t that our product lacked value. The problem was that our users had changed quickly. We paused, re-examined and decided to pivot.

We are redesigning TechXplora to embrace a more immersive experience through gamified modules to maintain engagement and adaptive question banks powered by AI. It became a digital learning journey that doesn’t compete with generative AI but uses it to deepen learning. That journey taught me something powerful: ideas don’t fail because they’re bad. They fail because they’re too slow to respond to change.

Is your business model built for a pre-AI world?

Whether you're running a creative agency, launching a coaching programme or building the next big app, ask yourself these vital questions:

• Are you solving a problem that AI now solves more efficiently?

• Are your customers already using AI tools behind the scenes?

• Does your model rely on manual delivery in a world that values speed and scale?

These are uncomfortable questions but necessary ones. Ignoring them is far riskier than confronting them. What we’re witnessing isn’t just AI automation or augmentation, it’s a redefinition of value.

In today’s AI-powered economy, clients want more than your service. They want your speed, adaptability and insight. They want tools, not templates. Conversations, not campaigns. Transformation, not just transactions.

Rethinking to thrive

If you’re preparing to launch or scale, here’s a checklist to rethink your idea in today’s AI landscape:

• Problem relevance: Does the problem still exist, or has AI solved it better?

• Solution edge: Can your solution be enhanced by AI, or is it being replaced?

• Human moat: What can’t AI replicate? (eg story, trust, community, emotional insight)

• Delivery efficiency: Are you leveraging AI to improve speed, personalisation, or cost?

• User expectations: Have your users’ behaviours or preferences changed since ChatGPT became public?

If you’re feeling unsure about the answers, that’s okay. Awareness is your greatest advantage. It’s a business clarity moment; hence, the most dangerous thing you can do now is build too far in the wrong direction and the second most dangerous? Do nothing at all.

Just like during the internet boom, not everyone will survive this wave. But those who do will have one thing in common: they didn’t just move fast —they moved smartly. So, before you launch, scale, or double down on your idea, pause. Rethink your model. Re-meet your customers. Redesign for a world that’s evolving faster than ever before.

• Ellen Bishop: I'm sure there's an AI tool for that

• The hidden costs of doing nothing: Why digital inaction is riskier than change

• Tech hub