Features

I spent eight years working for a small British manufacturer in Oxfordshire. The sort of outfit that, like so many brilliant UK manufacturers, makes astonishing kit in an unassuming shed tucked away in the beautiful countryside. I’ve lost count of the number of days I’ve watched vanish: chasing a work order hidden in someone’s desk, sitting in a meeting that should have been an email, or typing the same numbers into two systems that hate each other. So I started Mithryl with a goal to turn that chaos into usable knowledge and give teams their time back.

In just over a year, AI funding went from explosive to cautious optimism. After the staggering $108 billion poured into AI startups in 2024, 2025 has shown the emergence of a new pattern.

Enterprise AI is facing a severe reality check. Amidst a massive rush of investment, a recent MIT study has delivered a sobering finding: 95% of corporate generative AI pilots are failing to progress to scaled adoption and deliver measurable financial returns.

UK SMEs say specific Government initiatives designed to help them survive and grow don’t go far enough, according to new research from Bibby Financial Services (BFS).

America is the land of promise for many small British businesses. The population is generally fairly well off and there’s almost five times as many people as there are in this country. The potential to sell many more of your products and services there is enormous.

In Germany, physics curricula include almost no breadth requirements; students take only physics or closely related courses. In my cohort, entrepreneurship wasn’t presented as an option at all. Where university spin-outs do occur, they frequently address extremely narrow problems. These observations reflect a broader European issue: cultural and structural barriers discourage technical talent from founding companies and from working on actual problems that scale.

In a tough economic climate, we hear a lot about ‘productivity’, often reduced to a statistical measurement associated with the economic output of a country or region. Because of their relatively small size, mathematically, startups don’t contribute significantly to the macroeconomic productivity figures.

For most startups, the Cloud is not optional. It’s the backbone of rapid experimentation, product iteration, and go-to-market execution. Platforms like AWS make it possible to launch with minimal upfront investment and scale globally in a matter of weeks. But while the Cloud lowers barriers, it also introduces complexity.

Any business in the startup phase is under immense pressure. Limited budgets, high expectations, and the relentless pace of early growth can put pressure on every function of the business – particularly marketing. So the recent explosion of AI, promising automation, scale, and cost reduction, has left many founders wondering whether AI can take the place of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) within their business?

With the Government’s new Growth and Skills Levy on the horizon, the way small businesses access training and upskilling is set to change. At a time when skills shortages are biting hard and business owners need straightforward, affordable ways to develop their people, this reform is a chance to get things right for SMEs, which make up 99% of the UK’s business community.

Just a few days ago, a conversation with a seed-stage startup revealed how a CEO snapped during a call and let emotions take over. It wasn’t a discussion about downsizing, pivoting, or negotiating with investors, nothing that could justify an aggressive reaction. It was a routine meeting on quarterly goals that suddenly went wrong, leaving the team disbalanced, demotivated, and somewhat lost.

The AI talent war is here. The majority of executives (68%) report that the skills gap within their organisations is moderate to severe. The current AI tech job landscape is uneven and competitive, prompting firms to discover new tech hubs for sourcing AI expertise.

Intangible assets, particularly intellectual property (IP), now constitute a significant portion – around 90% – of the S&P 500’s market value. This is a substantial increase from the 32% seen in 1985. Nevertheless, the importance of these assets is still often underestimated and overlooked by management and market participants.

Burnout has become a silent epidemic in modern workplaces. Leaders across every sector are seeing rising absenteeism, falling engagement, and talented employees walking out the door, often without any warning signs.

As founders, our personal resilience is the foundation on which everything else is built. In the early stages of a startup, you are your brand. Your energy, attitude, and clarity directly influence the culture, direction, and ultimately the success of your business. That’s why taking care of your mental wellbeing isn’t just a personal priority – it’s a business strategy that requires an investment of your time.

Great businesses don’t begin with balance sheets, boardrooms, or venture capital. They start with an idea – often a small, simple spark of inspiration that grows into something significant through determination, discipline and persistence. The journey from idea to product is rarely glamorous or straightforward. It’s messy, relentless and sometimes unforgiving. Yet when tackled with clarity and courage, it becomes one of the most rewarding adventures an entrepreneur can undertake.

As a small business owner and a business that also provides services direct to businesses (some of whom also happen to be small and startups), one of the things that I found the most stressful and that contributed to poor mental health when I first started out, was the amount of bad advice that exists and that is promulgated aggressively from other small businesses trying to make a quick buck from small businesses and startups. 

There’s an old saying in engineering circles: “automation gives you speed, but agency gives you freedom.” In the twenty years I’ve spent building systems – from personalising e-commerce at Jio to designing AI-assisted cancer diagnostics at Zedsen, and most recently crafting an AI-driven ERP in Europe – I’ve seen organisations climb the ladder from digitisation to automation. But something new is stirring. We are on the cusp of a new organisational form: the agentic organisation, where multi-agent AI systems don’t just support teams – they become active members of them.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve worked with a wide range of young people and businesses and it’s clear that there’s a hang up around the word networking and what that means. There’s a belief that it’s having to sell, or awkwardly exchange business cards, and that it’s an ‘old fashioned’ way of doing business. Yet when I worked at Professional Liverpool on LeadHere, for those in the earlier stages of a business or career, I saw how a simple introduction could super-charge the career of a younger person.