Why I Believe AI Is Massively Underhyped, Not Overhyped
Most business owners I speak to fall into one of two camps. Either they think AI is overhyped nonsense that will blow over, or they get so overwhelmed by the sheer number of tools available that they end up doing nothing at all.
I want to make the case for a third position: AI isn't overhyped. If anything, most of us are still underestimating what it means.
Think about it this way. AI is like having access to a million of the world's brightest scientists, working around the clock, for little more than the cost of the electricity to power them. That's not an incremental improvement to how we work. That's a fundamental shift in what's possible.
If you need convincing, consider the AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol match. Go is a game humans have played for over 2,000 years. In one match, AlphaGo made a move, move 37, which was so unexpected commentators, and even Lee Sedol himself, assumed it was a system error. It wasn't. It was a genuinely new strategy, one no human had discovered in two millennia of play, and it won AlphaGo the game. Its successor, AlphaGo Zero, learned entirely by playing against itself and then beat the original AlphaGo 100 games to nil.
This isn't confined to board games, either. There's a well-documented case of AI diagnosing a patient's blood cancer from test results that several specialists had already reviewed and missed. The AI spotted a pattern across symptoms, weight loss and lab results that pointed to multiple myeloma, weeks before traditional methods would have caught it. That's not AI replacing doctors. It's AI extending what human expertise can catch.
The Problem Most Businesses Actually Have
Here's the real issue I see time and again: it's not that businesses don't want to use AI. It's that they don't have a strategy for it.
Without a clear framework, effort gets scattered. You end up with a dozen tools bolted onto your business, none of them talking to each other, and no real sense of whether any of it is moving the needle. Business owners struggle to answer basic questions: which tasks are eating the most time? Where would AI make the biggest difference? What should I actually stop doing manually?
That's the gap the AI Algorithm is built to close.
Understanding the Six Ds of Technological Transformation
Before we get into the framework itself, it's worth understanding how transformative technology tends to unfold. I think about it in six stages: Digitalisation, Deception, Disruption, Dematerialisation, Demonetisation and Democratisation.
Digitalisation turns physical processes into digital ones. Kodak invented the digital camera and then failed to back it, effectively handing its own industry away. Anything still done on paper or by hand in your business today is a candidate for this stage.
Deception is the quiet phase of exponential growth, where progress looks slow because doubling from a small base still produces small numbers. 3D printing spent years looking like a technology that had stalled, until it hadn't.
Disruption hits when the digital version simply outperforms the old one. Airbnb owns no property and became the most valuable accommodation platform in the world. Sometimes disruption arrives from a direction nobody expected; weather apps alone are estimated to have cut car wash trade by 25%, simply because people stopped washing their cars before forecast rain.
Dematerialisation, demonetisation and democratisation follow from there- think of how the camera, phone and iPod merged into a single smartphone, how Google Maps made paid sat-navs redundant overnight, and how YouTube put video production in the hands of anyone with a phone.
Once you see this pattern, it's much easier to spot where AI is about to do the same thing to your industry.
The AICEO Framework: Analyse, Ideate, Create, Engage, Operate
This is the practical heart of the AI Algorithm- five areas where I'd encourage every business owner to systematically ask, "could AI do this better, faster, or instead of me?"
Analyse — turning chaos into clarity. AI can process far more data than any of us could manually, spotting patterns in pitch decks, competitor research or market data that would take a human days to surface, if they surfaced them at all.
Ideate — supercharging your creativity. Rather than starting from a blank page, AI can generate ten directions in seconds, which you then refine. For something like a book cover design, that's the difference between weeks of back-and-forth and minutes of iteration.
Create — production at the speed of thought. Instead of another talking-head advert, AI-generated imagery paired with strong copy (animal-based adverts, in particular, consistently outperform) can be produced, animated and split-tested in minutes rather than weeks.
Engage — transforming how you interact with clients and prospects. AI coaching tools, drawing on your own knowledge base, can now deliver genuinely personalised guidance without eating into your calendar. And perhaps surprisingly, people are increasingly comfortable opening up to AI before they would a human advisor.
Operate — breaking through operational bottlenecks. From email systems that categorise and prioritise your inbox automatically, to agentic AI that can book a restaurant or a train ticket on your behalf, this is where AI starts handling the routine work that quietly consumes your week.
How to Actually Implement This
Strategy without action is just a nice idea, so here's where I'd start.
List out where your time and your team's time genuinely goes each week. Look for the patterns, where are you analysing information, creating content, or managing routine admin that follows the same steps every time? Those are your highest-impact starting points.
The mindset shift that matters most is this: stop treating AI as a fancy search engine. It isn't one. It's a capability multiplier that can perform actions and operate independently within the boundaries you set it, not just hand you information and leave you to do the rest.
A simple example: instead of manually sorting hundreds of emails a day, AI can categorise them, surface only what's genuinely urgent, and give you a weekly digest of everything else- saving hours you didn't realise you were losing.
Or think about lead magnets. Where you might once have offered a free book or blog post, you can now offer prospects a custom piece of software, built from nothing more than a written description and a spreadsheet of requirements. That's a dramatically higher-value offer, built in a fraction of the time it would once have taken.
The Businesses That Will Win From Here
The businesses that come out ahead over the next few years won't be the ones treating AI as a bolt-on tool. They'll be the ones who've worked through a framework like the AI Algorithm, systematically, across every part of how they operate, while their competitors are still doing by hand what AI has already made unnecessary.
That gap compounds. The earlier you start closing it, the wider it becomes in your favour.
