Looking Down The Table

There was a moment yesterday, chairing a two-and-a-half hour session with around a dozen Angel Investors Bristol members, where I stopped mid-sentence and just looked at the room.

Around that table were people whose backgrounds span computational statistics and machine learning research, scaling software businesses from five to one hundred and fifty people, building and operating technology platforms, investing in and advising early-stage companies across multiple cycles. People who understand this technology from the inside, in ways I simply do not.

I am not a technologist. I come from manufacturing, from corporate finance, from the work of transforming businesses under pressure. AI, for me, has always been about the downstream implications: what does it mean for the people running businesses, the people employed by them, the consumers they serve, and the investors trying to make sense of it all.

So sitting in that room, watching those conversations unfold, was genuinely energising. Not because the framework we built is perfect, or because we have answers nobody else has. But because a group of people with genuinely different vantage points on a complex problem decided to spend five months working it through together - rigorously, honestly, and with real disagreement along the way.

The project grew legs, as these things tend to. What started as an attempt to build a shared investment lens for AIB became something more integrated: a framework that runs from the technology stack itself, through the history of value creation in previous technology waves, defensibility mechanisms, foundation model economics, systemic and geopolitical risk, and the economic scenarios most likely to shape the next five to ten years.

The thing I keep coming back to is this: almost everything we produced applies as much to a manufacturer or a professional services firm as it does to a technology startup. AI disruption is environmental, not sectoral. The questions that matter - who is your end customer and what happens to their spending if the economy compresses? Does your business model rely on friction that AI is dissolving? Is your leadership team capable of evolving at the pace the environment will demand? - apply to every business walking through a door right now, not just the ones with AI in the deck.

That shift in thinking has changed how I approach my advisory work. It has changed the questions I ask founders and business leaders. And it has given me a framework for the economic scenarios I have been thinking about for the past two years, grounded in a body of research I could not have produced alone.

Yesterday's session was the first time the full group - contributors and broader AIB membership together - had seen it as a complete piece of work. The response from the people who had not been part of building it made the five months feel worthwhile.

The next step is publishing. The full framework will be available shortly under the AIB banner, for founders, investors, and business leaders who want a more honest lens on what the next few years might actually look like.

With enormous thanks to the contributors and to Angel Investors Bristol for the space to do this work.