Article by B4 AI Expert, Marnie Wills, AI Strategist and founder of Business With AI Strategist

Here is a question I put to every room I speak to, and it catches people off guard every single time.

Are you building the next Uber or are you still running the taxi company?

Before you answer, know this: there is no wrong answer.

Taxi companies still exist. They have adapted, adopted new technology, streamlined how they operate. Many are thriving. They just look different to how they looked ten years ago.

And then there is Uber. They did not just adapt. They changed the entire market. Then lockdown hit and they launched Uber Eats. Now they are moving into driverless vehicles. They are constantly building new products and services to meet the market where it is going, not where it has been.

Both models work. But only one of them is shaping the future of its industry.

The Question Underneath the Question

When I ask this in workshops, what I am really asking is: where do you want to sit in the next three to five years?

Are you the business leader who is using AI to do the same things a bit faster? Or are you the one rethinking what your business could look like entirely?

Both are valid. But they require very different levels of strategic thinking.

The taxi company approach says: we are going to use AI to save time on admin, draft emails quicker, maybe summarise a few meetings. Useful. Sensible. A good starting point.

The Uber approach says: what if we built an AI tool that our clients could use? What if we trained an AI model on twenty years of our expertise and made it available inside our programmes? What if we created an entirely new service that did not exist six months ago?

That is the difference between using AI and building with AI.

This Is Not About Technology. It Is About Mindset.

The biggest barrier to AI adoption is not the tools. It is not the budget. It is not the skills gap. It is the mindset gap.

Too many business leaders are still approaching AI with the question: can AI do this for me?

The better question is: can AI do this with me, better?

That single word, “with”, changes everything. It keeps your domain expertise in the room. Your knowledge of your clients, your market, your industry. AI does not have that. You do. And when you combine twenty years of hard-won experience with the most powerful technology we have ever had access to, that is where the competitive advantage sits.

I call it amplified intelligence. Not artificial. Amplified. Because that is what it does when you use it strategically. It amplifies what you already know.

The Numbers Tell the Story

When the internet arrived in the 1990s, for every job it displaced, it created 2.4 new ones. Smartphones and social media followed the same pattern. Jobs were lost. More were created. The landscape shifted, but the people who moved with it came out ahead.

AI is following exactly the same trajectory, only faster.

54% of UK firms are now actively using AI, up from 35% just a year ago. And 95% of SMEs using AI report no negative impact on their workforce. The jobs are not disappearing. The job descriptions are changing.

Here is the number that should really make you pause: 64% of the jobs that Gen Alpha will do in the future do not exist yet. Gen Alpha started entering secondary school this year. We are not talking about a distant future. We are talking about the young people sitting in our classrooms right now, heading into a workforce we have not even imagined.

The businesses that are thinking about this now are the ones that will shape those roles. The ones that wait will be filling them.

What This Looks Like in Practice

I work with business owners across Oxfordshire and beyond, and the pattern is always the same. Most people are at what I call Level 2 on the AI Maturity Map: they are using AI a few times a day, threads are building up, but there is no real system.

The shift happens when they move to Level 3: building AI co-workers. Not just chatting with AI, but creating customised projects with their own knowledge bases, their own instructions, their own tone of voice. An AI assistant that knows your business, your clients and your market. That is when it goes from a novelty to a genuine operating system.

One client in cybersecurity now dictates emails, LinkedIn posts and client notes while driving between meetings using a voice tool customised to his writing style. His team is no longer waiting on him. Another client, a community interest company, built a grant-finding tool that matches funding opportunities to their criteria automatically. An interior designer built a mood-board assistant that generates client-ready visuals in minutes.

None of these people are technical. They are business owners who decided to build, not just browse.

So, Which Are You Building?

Here is what I would challenge every B4 member to do this week.

Sit with the question for five minutes. Not the technology. Just the question.

Are you enhancing your taxi company or are you building something new?

If you are enhancing, brilliant. Make sure you are doing it strategically, not just reactively. Get your AI co-workers set up properly, with real training data and custom instructions. Stop using AI like a slightly smarter Google and start using it like a team member who never sleeps.

If you are building, even better. Think about your intellectual property. Think about the products and services you could create that do not exist yet. Think about your industry and where the gaps are. Because someone is going to fill them. It might as well be you.

Either way, the one thing you cannot afford to do is nothing.

The Blackberry was brilliant. I loved mine. But I still had to switch to a smartphone eventually. And the people who switched early did not just keep up. They pulled ahead.

AI is exactly that moment, happening right now, only moving faster than any technology shift we have seen before.

The question is not whether your business will be affected. It already is. The question is whether you are the one shaping what comes next.

Image: Marnie is pictured at B4’s Corum Quarterly at Blenheim Palace in June 2026 where she facilitated a brilliant discussion with Blenheim’s Head of Innovation, David Green, and 50 business leaders from Oxfordshire.