Make time for AI in 2025

Need a new business plan? Seeking a competitive advantage? It’s as easy as a day’s immersion in AI, says generative AI leader Matt Ensor CMInstD. 

Using AI to sort emails and take board minutes is low-hanging fruit – it is blue-sky thinking where AI can make a real difference and the organisations that will thrive this year are the ones that are able to adapt and change, he says. 

“We talk a lot about productivity but, as the world changes, how, as a board and as directors, do we make sure our organisations remain competitive? The good news is, your market might be changing, but now you have the tools.”

Those tools are AI ‘agents’ and they have been appearing so fast that Ensor skipped a video in his presentation at last week’s IoD Governing AI Forum in Auckland because it was a week old. 

“We’re off the scale. I’m not kidding. Whatever you learned in 2024 around AI, just forget it. It’s a bold statement, but it is true,” says Ensor, a director at Kia Ora AI and chair of the AI Forum of New Zealand’s working group on GenAI. He also holds governance roles across aged care, the arts and technology. 

“DeepSeek has forced the hand of other organisations to release their best. So much has changed in a few months. You wouldn’t even recognise what the new agentic AI does, and most organisations have no idea either.

“No one saw DeepSeek coming, or Manus coming. And 90 per cent of your competitors are just going to do nothing. I can guarantee that because they think they know what they are doing, and they don’t believe they need AI.”

What these new AI agents have done, though, is not only level playing fields, but they have given the ball to the teams which have trouble competing. 

“Research has shown the people who benefit the most from AI are those with less skill, less experience and less knowledge – people with below average competence in a task. Give them ChatGPT, for example, and their performance goes up,” says Ensor.

“So, the average person now using GenAI might suddenly become a higher performer than you are, especially if you don’t use AI or think you know best. If you are the market dominator, your competitor(s) will get more benefit than you from AI. They may well catch up; they may well overtake you.” 

But there is still the need for experience and expertise in organisations because if you don’t understand your market, you can make serious mistakes by trusting AI too much. 

Ensor says it is important to understand what you need to do to remain competitive in 2025 because the game has changed. It does not take much investment.

In a day, he takes people through to developing their own ‘agents’ for work tasks, doing analytics, writing code, creating apps – even creating workflows that would be considered unachievable up until now.

Feed it all your data and IP, prompt it for a review of your accounts, benchmark against your business competitors, ask for a strategy to enhance your business and it will do superhuman things, says Ensor. You don’t need to know code or be a financial wizard – and the tools are available now.

Trying to find the best deal for your business and changing contracts? The AI agent will do it for you and even sign the contract if you let it. “The power is moving suddenly away from the vendor to the clients,” says Ensor. “They can constantly seek out the best deals with no effort.

“AI is great at understanding words, brands and reviews. So, suddenly the qualitative side of your business and your brand can stand out, too.

“What you need is an AI agent that won’t give up until it has delivered what you have asked for. That could be at PhD/postdoctoral level,” says Ensor, highlighting ChatGPT’s Deep Research agent as the flavour of last week. 

It can generate a family history in 20 minutes from online records, something that could have taken a family member years to compile.

While recommending boards have a monthly review of their market using AI, he stresses it is also the board’s role in making sure executives are looking after staff because they will be stressed about AI – even the mention of it, because of job security. 

“If you roll out [Microsoft] Copilot, for example, and you just say, ‘there you go’, that is unfair on your staff. What you need to do is say, ‘this is how you use it and this is what you’re going to use it for’. There should be at least a minimum level of training. Otherwise, people get stressed, especially if they see others mastering it.

“You need to review your systems. It should not be the number one item on your board papers every month but you need to have at least someone on your board, or a committee, that keeps an eye on what is happening because we are now on a steep curve.”

To understand AI as a defining force and harness it for your organisation, go here to download A Director’s Guide to AI Board Governance and Governing in an AI World.