AI Is Accelerating. What Should a Founder Do Right Now?
A team meeting without a team? That might actually be what companies look like in the not-so-distant future. What follows will probably unsettle a lot of managers. Some will push back and say AI is just another overhyped bubble. But the reality is that this technological revolution is happening faster than most of us were willing to admit even a few months ago.
The increasingly aggressive rise of high-performance, surprisingly accessible tools you control through plain language — so-called vibe coding — is already moving off the desks of developers and tech enthusiasts and into real-world business situations.
Computers talk. They respond to instructions with near-zero latency, simulate emotions, and can read them too. They're gaining the ability to make phone calls, place orders, process payments, collect critical data, design their own workflows, and debug their own mistakes. They don't need sleep. They don't take vacations. They operate millions of times faster than the average thinking, acting human.
The probability that any of this bypasses how companies are run? Zero. It's going to reshape everything from the ground up. How sales works, how you relate to customers, possibly your entire business model, the makeup of your team, and what it even means to be human in this new world. The social ripple effects will be real. Business owners will face pushback from the people who helped them build the company for decades. People who are part of the DNA of the business. And now, out of fear of the unknown, they're acting like the AI revolution simply doesn't exist.
But everyone can feel it: change is inevitable.
The pace of development is compounding. What was science fiction a year ago is table stakes today. Semi-autonomous agents already exist. What's still missing? Long-term memory without hallucinations. Full legal accountability for decisions. Robust error recovery. But those barriers could fall one by one. In a matter of months.
What to Do as a Founder Right Now
This isn't a question of whether to adapt. You have to. It's not even about whether you have a technical background. It's not really about whether you have an AI strategy. Both matter, and neither is the whole story. What you need to do right now comes down to these steps:
- Build your data infrastructure. AI can't create something from nothing. If your CRM is a mess — half-filled fields, emails buried in personal inboxes instead of the system, no consistent process — then AI will confidently generate garbage. eWay-CRM integrated with Microsoft 365 gives you exactly this infrastructure: all your data in one place, readable and structured. Without it, you don't stand a chance.
- Understand how AI actually works. You don't need to write code. But you do need to understand how to communicate with AI tools. What information they need. How to give them directions. If you have a technical background — great. If not — bring in a consultant or a senior who does.
- Have a hard conversation with your team. And here's the one leaders don't want to touch. You have an employee you trust, someone who's been with you for twenty years, and now they're watching a chatbot do their job. It's not comfortable. You can't promise them security — because no one has that guarantee. But you can be straight with them. You can say: "This change is coming. We have two options: we adapt together, or the competition gets there first and it gets a lot worse for everyone." It's hard. But it works.
- Start experimenting. Pick one agent. Set it up for one thing — say, automated follow-up for cold leads. Watch what happens. Learn from it. Don't unleash a robot on the part of your business that depends on your brand and your customers' trust. Start where a mistake won't cost you millions.
Your Adaptation Strategy
The real risk isn't that a robot will replace you. The real risk is that a three-person team running AI agents will outperform your traditional fifteen-person team by a factor of ten.
In the end, the winners will always be the people who understand processes, data, and customer psychology — not the people who know how to write the best prompts. If you have a technical background, you have a natural advantage here. You intuitively get how systems work. Use it.
If you don't you're not out of the game. You just need to learn faster. Find people who will break it all down for you.
Your CRM today is basically an archive of the past. Tomorrow it needs to be the data layer powering your agents. Without solid contact records, clearly defined sales stages, and consistent logging of customer interactions, even the best agent in the world won't perform. Build it now, while you have time. It only gets harder later.
Waiting is the most expensive mistake you can make.
