What's underneath this weeks headlines?
What I learned at Oxford Module X
Last month I joined alumni from the Oxford AI for Business Symposium (a.k.a. ‘Module X’), together with members of Oxbridge-AIx, for a panel discussion on agentic AI.
I want to be clear about who was in that room, it wasn't people who needed convincing that AI matters. They had already taken one of the most rigorous executive AI programmes available. Many of them were mid-process, actively working to help their organisations and ecosystems make the shift. They were serious, senior, and engaged.
And yet the questions they were still asking told me more about the real state of enterprise agentic AI than any analyst report I have read this year.
Where is this actually working versus where people think it is working? What is the one thing large organisations consistently get wrong? What will surprise us most in the next twelve months?
These are not beginner questions. They are the questions of people who have moved past the hype and are now confronting the operational reality. And the fact that they were still being asked, in that room, at that level, was its own signal.
My answer to the question about what organisations consistently get wrong was this: it is not underestimating the technology. It is overestimating the readiness of the organisation deploying it.
The pressure to move fast is real. In many of the businesses we speak with, the investment thesis has already been shaped by AI vendor promises. Boards have been sold rapid financial gains. Management is pushed to find cost reductions before the data is clean, the processes are redesigned, or the governance is in place. Agentic tools get deployed on top of broken infrastructure that was built for human workflows. The happy path works. The exception path is where the damage shows up.
What will surprise people most in the next twelve months? My answer was feedback loops. Not a smarter single agent, but small teams of agents discovering their own resources, testing actions in the environment, and learning from the consequences. That is when the gap between organisational readiness and agent capability becomes genuinely dangerous for the unprepared.
The room at Oxford reinforced something Jamie and I have been seeing consistently in our client work. The framing problem is not solved by more technology literacy. It is solved by structured thinking about what agentic AI actually changes — in customer relationships, in operations, in governance, and in the assumptions buried inside every business process you currently run.
That is a harder problem than installing a tool. It is also a more important one.
How We Found Our ICP — And Why We Are Telling You
I want to be transparent about something, because I think the openness is useful.
When Jamie and I were planning Trusted Agents, we did not just ask ourselves who might want what we do. We used a framework from the book Levers by Ryan Tansom — specifically the W3 method — to pressure-test our assumptions.
The three questions are simple. Who do you believe your customer is, and what data do you have to prove it? What do they actually buy from you — not what you sell, but what they buy? And why do they buy it?
They sound obvious. They are not. Most businesses answer them from instinct and stop there. The discipline is in checking the answers against evidence, and then being honest about what the evidence says.
Here is how we worked through them.
Who. We kept returning to the same profile. Not the CTO. Not the CDO. Not the transformation programme lead who has already been given a budget and a mandate. The person we consistently found ourselves most useful to was earlier than that — and more interesting. The innovator inside a medium to large B2C organisation who can see the shift coming, has been given or has taken on the responsibility for making sense of it, and is surrounded by people who are either dismissive or paralysed. Personally ambitious. Intellectually ahead of the organisation. Carrying the weight of a technology shift that their peers have not yet fully registered.
In Geoffrey Moore's terms — and this matters for how we think about timing — this person is an innovator operating inside an early or late majority organisation. They are not a startup founder. They are not a frontier AI lab. They are someone trying to move a complex, regulated, human-filled organisation toward a structural shift that the organisation does not yet have the language to discuss.
What. This one took us longer to answer honestly. We do not sell implementation. We do not sell model selection. We do not sell proof of concept factories. What our clients actually buy — when we were rigorous about it — is clarity, orientation, and the confidence to move their organisation forward before the window closes. They buy the thinking, the framing, and the shared language that allows them to have conversations internally that they could not have before. They buy the stage before the formal programme. They are buying the conditions that make everything else possible.
Why. Because they need to become the internal leader who turns agentic AI confusion into credible next steps — without sounding like they are repeating vendor hype. The personal stakes are real. This technology shift is moving faster than any they have managed before. The organisations that get the framing right early will have a material advantage. The leaders who create that clarity will be remembered for it. The ones who wait for consensus will be managing someone else's roadmap.
We are sharing this reasoning because we think it matters. If you have read this far and recognised yourself in that description, that recognition was not accidental. It was the result of Jamie and I asking hard questions about who we are genuinely useful to — and being honest about the answers.
The Demand Signal and the Capacity Question
Something has shifted in the last few months.
The conversations we are having with banks, travel companies, and retailers have changed in character. Twelve months ago the questions were exploratory — what is this, where is it going, should we be paying attention. Now the questions are operational. What does this mean for our customer relationships specifically. Where are our processes exposed. How do we brief our board without either overhyping or understating what is coming. How do we move hundreds of people from awareness to a shared point of view without creating chaos.
That shift in the quality of the question tells us the market has moved. Leaders who were watching are now feeling the pressure to act, and they are looking for something that most of the market is not yet providing — not a vendor pitch, not a generic AI literacy programme, but a structured way to think clearly about what agentic commerce actually changes, and where to direct attention first.
That is the gap Jamie and I have been working in. And it is getting busier.
We work with a small number of partners who extend what we can offer. Warren Hutchinson and his team at ELSE London bring deep customer experience expertise to the engagements where journey design and service redesign are central. Dr Joanna Michalska at Ethica Group works with us where governance, ethics, and organisational accountability are in focus. Bernardo Crespo works with us to serve the fast-growing Spanish-speaking market. These are people we trust and have chosen carefully — because the quality of what we deliver depends on it.
We are also working on a way to scale Trusted Agents that does not dilute what makes the work valuable. That is not a solved problem yet. We are not going to grow a pyramid of consultants and call it the same thing. What we deliver works because of the depth of thinking Jamie and I bring directly to each engagement. Protecting that while meeting growing demand is a problem worth solving carefully.
What that means in practice, for now, is that our capacity is finite. We are getting booked. If the shift described in this edition is landing close to home — if you are the person in your organisation who has been asked to make sense of this, and you are feeling the weight of that responsibility — the right time to reach out is before you have everything figured out, not after.
That is exactly the stage we are built for.
The Stage Before the Programme
There is a particular moment that many of the leaders we work with describe in almost identical terms.
They can see the shift coming. They have enough context to know it is serious. But their organisation has not yet developed the shared understanding needed to act — no common language, no agreed point of view, no internal momentum. They are not blocked by a failed pilot. They are earlier than that. They are trying to create the conditions that make good decisions possible, before anyone is ready to make them.
That is a specific and demanding place to be. It requires moving executives who are sceptical, peers who are distracted, and teams who are waiting for direction — all at the same time, without the authority that comes with a formal mandate or a signed-off budget.
It is also exactly the stage Trusted Agents is built for.
A two-hour executive briefing gives leadership teams a precise, grounded understanding of what agentic AI means for their customers, their operations, and their competitive position — without hype, without vendor agenda, and without the organisation having to commit to anything yet.
A four-week strategy sprint takes that understanding and turns it into a shared point of view, a risk map, and early planning assets that internal leaders can actually use.
Where the work needs to go further — into product design, customer journey redesign, or go-to-market implications — we scope that as a four to eight week engagement, shaped around what the organisation specifically needs.
If any of this matches where you are, we offer a free thirty-minute conversation. No agenda other than understanding your situation.
Reach us at shift@trustedagents.ai
