Here's the uncomfortable truth about business transformation in 2025: your real competition isn't the tech giants everyone obsesses over. It's the company right next to you that started adapting yesterday while you're still scheduling meetings to discuss planning cycles.

Brett StClair knows this landscape intimately. With senior roles at Google, Barclays digital product leadership, and AdMob under his belt, he's spent his career watching how technology actually moves from shiny prototype to real operational impact. Now as Co-Founder of Teraflow.ai and voice behind the Rebel Technologist platform, he helps organizations navigate the messy reality of modernizing technology when you're dealing with legacy systems, risk committees, and people who really liked how things worked in 2019.

In a recent conversation with the AI Speakers Agency, StClair broke down why most companies are thinking about AI transformation completely wrong, and why the planning approach that worked for decades has become actively dangerous.

The Tenfold Return Problem

StClair points to a dynamic most executives recognize immediately: "Most businesses don't want to change because of the pain that's involved, so they're looking for a return on investment that needs to be a tenfold return because the pain they're going to face is vast."

That calculus made sense when technology evolved predictably. But we're in different territory now. "This moment in time is bringing a huge ability for us to use AI to get that tenfold improvement, and that improvement is really coming through productivity," StClair explains. "This disruption that we're seeing, this fear of being disrupted, is truly being empowered by one technology, and that technology is artificial intelligence."

The phrase making rounds in tech circles captures it perfectly: It's not AI that will disrupt humans and society, but the humans who use AI to disrupt others who don't. "That's becoming a very plausible term that we're seeing more and more," StClair notes.

Why Your Five-Year Plan Is Already Obsolete

When asked how business owners should futureproof their organizations as AI adoption accelerates, StClair delivers a reality check about traditional planning cycles.

"Previously, businesses spent five to ten years literally planning ahead. What will the next five years look like? How will we put plans in for the next ten years?" he says. "I'd love to go back and speak to those businesses that had a ten-year plan put in place five years ago. I bet that plan is extremely different. The objectives might have been reached, but how they achieved those objectives is going to be vastly different, and we're only seeing an acceleration of that."

His advice is blunt: "If you've got a plan to deploy AI in your business over the next three years, that's just too slow. You need to be thinking about what you can do in the next year."

So what can businesses actually count on? StClair identifies two certainties that will reshape everything: "The first is every human will end up having their own personalized AI. It will be as ubiquitous as a mobile phone in all our pockets. If every human is going to have their own AI, then every business will have its own AI."

Initially, this means a proliferation of different AI models and tools within organizations. Over time, StClair predicts it will consolidate "into one AI source, one large language model for that business."

Marketing to Machines

The implications get interesting fast. "If we know that each individual will have their own AI, how does that impact the world of marketing?" StClair asks. "How do we market as businesses now to personalized AIs? How do our personalized AIs know what's good for us and what products it could be purchasing for us?"

Think about your daily to-do list. "Picture all those to-do lists that you used to have to get your head around, plan for the day, and whoever executed those to-do lists were deemed successful," he explains. "Well, actually, AI will now do those to-do lists for you. If AI is doing those to-do lists, if you're the business on the other end of it, how are you responding? How are you automating those experiences?"

The shift is fundamental: "It's no longer about building fabulous experiences for humans but building fabulous experiences for humans and their AI."

Beyond Moore's Law

When discussing practical challenges businesses face deploying AI at speed, StClair doesn't hesitate: "Speed. Speed is possibly the number one challenge, not just by a few centimeters when crossing the finish line, but meters ahead of every other challenge."

The pace of change has broken old benchmarks entirely. "What artificial intelligence is proving to us is that not only is the technology accelerating faster than we've ever seen before, in fact it's no longer Moore's law, but Moore's snail pace law," StClair says. "Eighteen months for processing power to double, that's way too slow."

The compounding effect is staggering. "When you add software engineering into the space, you're doubling that pace of output or the pace of innovation. Now we're adding artificial intelligence, multiply that by a thousandfold."

The evidence is everywhere: "There are now tens of thousands of large language models which are incredibly expensive to compute, need vast sums of data, and yet it's accelerating faster than we've ever seen before. That is resulting in this plethora of AI tools. These AI tools can solve any productivity issue, whether it's in your personal life or whether it's in your business life."

The Competitor Next Door

This brings StClair to his central point about competitive dynamics. "Speed is the big differentiator. If we know that AI is going to disrupt us, and it's not going to be our business being disrupted by AI, but another human or another business, the question is how fast is your business moving? How fast is your business adapting to this change?"

The practical questions matter immediately: "Have you got your data assets in check and ready to be consumed by AI? Do you understand the problems that you need to solve?" StClair has become so focused on speed that he's developed a one-day course to get businesses started immediately.

"It's no longer about waiting years to make the change or months after you've been to an event or workshop and you're back at work," he emphasizes. "Why? Because it's not the Googles or the Facebooks that are going to disrupt you. It's not the industry. It's the competitor that is literally your neighbor."

His final question cuts through all the strategic planning rhetoric: "What have they been doing? Whatever they've been doing, they started yesterday. Have you started yet? Speed is, hands down, the biggest challenge for businesses."

In other words, while you're scheduling another committee meeting to discuss AI strategy, someone else is already building theirs. The disruption everyone fears isn't coming from Silicon Valley. It's coming from whoever moves first in your own backyard.

This interview with Brett StClair was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Cyber Security Speakers Agency.