Our Founding Partner, Paul Bendelow, believes mid-cap C-suites need to put AI capability firmly at the heart of senior leadership development and hiring.
There’s a lot of talk about AI replacing junior and entry-level roles, particularly with the recently released statistics on those young people not in education, employment or training. While the numbers making headlines are about those just starting out, it’s clear from conversations we have at bpe search, that there’s an equally important challenge at SLT level and higher.
Larger corporate businesses have the structure and resources to build dedicated teams focused on AI, both for strategy and execution. SME, entrepreneurial and mid-sized companies, however, tend to work more leanly, and so AI – which often comes under the banner of digital transformation – is sprinkled around the business for efficiency purposes, rather than for long-term growth and gain.
There’s a two-way pull here. Businesses must balance the competing pressures of ‘must move faster’ alongside cost, resource and market pressures. And that’s before we even consider regulatory and social responsibility expectations.
To meet these challenges with confidence, C-suites must be thinking strategically, ensuring that the business is future-fit at all levels. They need strong, experienced and agile senior management that can understand and deliver that strategy. And they may need to stop thinking like a traditional business and start thinking more like a disruptive one – which is often how most mid-cap businesses once started.
Building your AI strategy
Dropping AI into your business here and there to manage efficiencies is not a strategy. It might be useful and it may save some time and money in the short term (although the jury is still out as to how much), but the smartest organisations are developing AI strategies that will have a long-term impact on the business.
This goes all the way to the top. AI and digital fluency is increasingly a given at functional and delivery level: for PMO, product and technical hires it's already a mandated part of the brief. But the further up the organisation you go, the patchier it gets. We're seeing boards and C-suites who are engaged and ahead of the curve, and others who simply aren't interested — treating AI as someone else's problem to solve, rather than a strategic challenge for them to own.
That gap matters. If your senior team isn't asking the question, it's very hard for the rest of the business to answer it.
Keeping pace with change
All this is increasingly tricky in a fast-changing landscape – it takes continuous learning to stay ahead. And it means having people on your team who, if not AI natives, are certainly confident about the technology and the opportunities it presents.
There is a challenge in embedding AI in a mature organisation. Legacy systems, old infrastructure and employee resistance are all much reported. There’s no going back though. AI is here to stay, and C-suites need to lead a clear approach to adopting AI across the business and, most importantly, be clear about the importance of human intelligence, experience, skill and original thought, and how that works alongside AI to improve business performance.
C-suites must also be in a position to anticipate future hiring needs. In some cases, that means developing and supporting emerging talent in the business, being proactive in moving talent within the business, and making AI experience and awareness part of role scopes for external hires. This is important, not least because ambitious senior leaders are immersing themselves in AI and will expect businesses to be interested in using that experience. In the end, your C-suite attitude to AI may be the difference between securing the best up-and-coming leaders, and losing them to the competition.
Assessing your current senior team
Your SLT leads the everyday work of your business. As a C-suite member, you need to have complete confidence in their ability to manage their function area and drive the innovation and growth that meets your goals.
AI is now firmly part of the strategic mix – and you need leaders who understand its potential, its contribution, its risks, and its best use alongside your people.
In our experience, it’s the companies that are taking the time to get this right from the C-suite down that are seeing the most positive results. And they’re not just tech-based organisations – they’re in financial services, retail, CPG, hospitality and SaaS.
As you develop your AI strategy, you need to be confident that you have an SLT that can deliver it. Ask yourself these questions:
How AI-confident is each individual in your SLT? How do you know?
Are you offering development opportunities in this area to support them to lead your strategy?
Are your senior leaders thinking about AI strategically, rather than just as an efficiency engine?
What conversations have you had with your SLT on how to use AI strategically in the business?
Has anyone from the SLT approached you to suggest how AI could be better integrated in your organisation?
As our Partner, Annabel Weeden, says: “Boards and senior leadership teams need to have a balance of skills. Leaders with many years of experience under their belts bring organisational resilience – they know how to survive a crisis and build a better business. The expectation of the next generation of leaders is that they can devise, drive and deliver strategies that blend human expertise and experience with the benefits that AI brings.”
Kim Faura, former MD of Gumtree and founder and CEO of Early Phoenix, an AI-native business intelligence company, says that C-suites should be doing these three things right now:
Get every director a frontier model account, Anthropic or OpenAI, the current one. Not an internal wrapper sitting two generations behind whatever the vendor is actually selling. Give them access to the latest available technology so they can see what’s possible.
Get personally close to the agentic tools rather than the chat box. Use Claude Code if you have the technical appetite for it, and Cowork or the equivalent if you don’t. This is not a stylistic preference: Anthropic's own usage data from June this year shows agentic sessions running at meaningfully higher autonomy than chat, and about two thirds of that gap comes from how people delegate rather than from the tasks being different.1 Chat teaches you what AI can say. Watching it plan and execute a piece of work end to end teaches you what your business could look like.
Stop treating AI as something to be understood and start treating it as something to be shipped. The most useful question a board can put to its senior team is not "do you understand AI?", because everyone says yes. It is "what have you personally built or changed with AI this quarter?" You find out very quickly who has read about it and who has used it.
Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your SLT in the context of the future strategy of your business will help you see whether you need to bolster the team with an AI specialist, or improve your development programme to support your strategy.
Adapting your SLT hiring strategy
Anticipating future SLT requirements is part of a wider strategic workforce planning project. Many businesses are already adopting a future planning approach, looking at the strategy for the next 5-10 years and beyond, understanding the impact that AI may have on the workforce and what new roles or structures need to be adopted.
Our Retail, Travel and D2C Partner, Rachel O’Sullivan, is seeing this trend in practice.
“In the past 12 months, I’ve placed a candidate in a strategic workforce planning role at a major UK airport. The business, which has plans for significant growth over the next 10 years, has a fundamental understanding of the way workplaces are changing. For example, where AI is managing everyday airport processes, the people who originally had those jobs can be upskilled, developed and be given productive roles elsewhere. Like everything with AI, future workforce planning is about human-centred organisations that use AI strategically to achieve business goals.”
At Unit4, one of our clients and a leader in enterprise cloud applications, the ‘Self-driving ERP’ vision is framing their ERPx platform. Unit4 says ERPx delivers a 30%+ reduction in time-on-task and 50% automation of routine ERP workflows as targets.
The strategic development of AI is playing a critical role in internal innovation that drives fast-moving product development that makes clients’ lives easier. In addition to ERPx, the company has developed AVA, a flagship conversational AI agent built natively into Microsoft Teams. It handles natural language queries and automates workflows across finance, HR, procurement, and project management.
And just last month (July 2026), the company launched the ‘AI for Your World’ initiative - a commitment-free trial for mid-market customers, giving them full access to both ERPx and Ava.
As Unit4 CEO, Simon Paris says:“At Unit4, we are putting a big focus on learning, on ‘upskilling’. Starting with an AI learning festival. Everyone across Unit4, regardless of their role or tenure, will see real use cases in action and receive hands-on training with AI basics, prompt engineering, practical tools and practical, actionable examples.
The idea isn’t to make everyone an AI expert overnight, but to make sure we all see opportunities to use AI in the flow of our work and lives, and to have the tools to execute AI’s potential, and to augment our own.”
Kim Faura, who will be the speaker at our next private round table event on September 30th, says mid-caps shouldn’t shy away from being disruptive.
“A global enterprise builds an AI department largely to route around its own governance. A mid-cap does not need one and should not build one. Instead, the senior team must be visibly obsessed with AI, because nobody in a mid-cap company changes how they work because of a memo. And there are two things that nobody tells you. One is that the technology is uneven. It is strong on some tasks and quietly poor at others, and it rarely tells you which is which.
And the second is not to trust your own instincts in terms of efficiency. In a controlled trial, experienced developers estimated they had been 20% faster using AI tools, but the evidence showed they were 19% slower.That’s a forty point swing between perception and actuality. If you’re going to claim a productivity gain from AI, measure the evidence, not the feeling.”
And Faura has a cautionary word about AI studies. “Rigorous studies take roughly eighteen months to run and publish, so the good evidence is always measuring tools that have since been replaced. That’s why you need to be doing, not reading. Four weeks of your own data will tell you more than anything you read.”
Building an AI-ready SLT
We believe that mid-cap C-suites should be driving AI strategy, adoption and testing. That includes assessing current SLT capabilities and direction, and building a workforce planning strategy that redefines the way you’re doing business from now on.
Working with our clients across all sectors, we’re supporting organisations to frame role scopes, ask the right questions and find the talent that’s ready to drive growth using AI the right way.
There are several ways you can connect with bpe search. Our experienced partners have built a valuable network and community with plenty of experience and insight. Talk to us about tapping into that community to help you make the best decisions.
If you’re interested in joining September’s private breakfast round table discussion, From AI Ambition to Action: Making AI Work in the Real World and hear more from Kim Faura, contact Paul Bendelow at paulbendelow@bpesearch.com.
Is your senior team ready to lead through AI?
Building an AI ready organisation starts with having the right leadership capability in place. Speak to Paul Bendelow about assessing your senior team, shaping future leadership requirements and finding the people who can turn AI ambition into meaningful business change.
