The scaling playbook is being rewritten for the AI era
We’re in the midst of a major surge in company creation. More than 850,000 firms were registered in 2024 with Companies House, and 2025 is expected to be even bigger as the barriers to launching continue to fall. The real challenge now isn’t starting, it’s scaling into something that lasts.
Too often, “scaling” is treated as a proxy for size: bigger teams, more layers, and headcount milestones framed as strategic progress. Growth becomes visible, but not necessarily effective.
With momentum of startup growth behind us and 2026 growth goals ahead of us, now is the moment for founders to rethink what scaling should actually look like – and to rewrite the playbook accordingly.
Hiring isn’t scale, it’s a symptom of inefficiency
Hiring isn’t necessarily a stamp of success but rather a symptom of inefficiency. It shows where startups have run out of leverage and need to borrow capacity from elsewhere.
We’re in a time of great business transformation, moving into a new era that isn’t defined by how many people you manage, but rather by how effectively you can amplify the people (and tools) you already have. This shift, toward leaner, flatter organisations feels like a long-overdue course correction.
The new playbook: ‘Vision and Velocity’
How we build companies is being rewritten in real time. AI isn’t just changing how we work, it’s redesigning the entire system. Automation and intelligence are flattening hierarchies, killing middle management, replacing layers of coordination with direct impact. What once required 50 people can now be done by 10, faster, cheaper, and sharper than ever before.
I see many firms moving toward what I’d define as the “Vision and Velocity” structure, a flatter operating model that connects strategy directly to action.
- Leadership/strategy layer – sets vision, direction, defines outcomes, removes blockers
- Team/execution layer – builds, ships, learns fast, owns results
The vision comes from the top, but velocity increasingly lives inside the teams that are wielding agents. These aren’t just tools anymore, they’re autonomous workflows that take on the repetitive, low-leverage tasks that usually slow people down.
That’s the shift in action. Teams that work alongside AI agents are collapsing the distance between decision and delivery: research gets done in minutes, first drafts appear instantly, and processes run themselves while people focus on judgment, creativity, and relationships.
Tips to rethinking hiring
The leaders who will thrive in the next decade won’t be the ones with the biggest teams, they’ll be the ones who build the most leverage. This is especially true in early stage ventures. Success is built on leaders who don’t wait, don’t overstaff, and don’t overprocess. They build leverage, get stuck in, and show real progress fast. Big thinking still matters but doing the work matters more without hiding behind teams or titles.
That means rethinking who and how startups and scaleups hire:
- Look for AI-native problem solvers: the next generation of high-impact operators will be the ones who know how to work with AI, not around it. Candidates should show how they would use AI to solve a real problem they’ll face in the role. Someone who can pair judgment with agentic AI workflows will outperform someone who relies only on manual expertise
- Curiosity compounds faster than credentials: a curious operator who constantly experiments with new tools (especially AI) will outperform someone relying on what worked five years ago. Hunger to learn is now a core competency. As AI accelerates everything around us, the people who stay curious will be the only ones able to keep up with and capitalise on the pace of change
- Hire people who can sit in the uncomfortable: you need people who can handle tension with clarity, honesty, and maturity. Progress comes down to who’s willing to have the hard conversation first and that’s where emotional intelligence becomes the real superpower. AI can’t read a room, defuse tension, or build trust. The leverage shifts to those who can stay calm under pressure, communicate clearly, and bring maturity into messy moments
- Hire doers, not tellers: good interviewers can be dangerous, especially in a world where candidates can use tools to automate job applications or use AI to help prepare them on how to tell a great story. But once you realise you’ve hired a storyteller instead of a builder, act fast. Don’t let narrative replace outcomes. Look for people who show progress in days, not quarters, people who’ve shipped a product or closed a customer themselves. Execution is the new signalling
AI is enabling small teams to do extraordinary things but only when those teams are made up of people who think like owners and act like builders. Tools alone don’t create leverage; people do. The advantage goes to those who pair human judgment with autonomous workflows, who move quickly, learn relentlessly, and step toward problems instead of away from them.
In the end, AI won’t decide the future of work, the people who know how to turn it into leverage will.
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