Every industry will be transformed by AI. Not eventually. Now.

Six months ago, tasks that took my team days now take hours. Code reviews, documentation, research, content creation—all accelerated dramatically. This isn’t a gradual shift. It’s a step change, and it’s already reshaping who thrives and who gets left behind.

The speed is the story.

Five years ago, I was still working on “digital transformation” projects. Let that sink in. We were helping organisations migrate from paper forms to databases, building portals to replace spreadsheets, convincing executives that maybe their website should work on mobile phones. That was the cutting edge. Now those same projects feel like ancient history—and the companies still stuck in that phase are already obsolete.

We’ve seen technological disruptions before. The internet. Mobile. Cloud computing. Each one took roughly a decade to fully permeate business operations. AI is moving faster because it doesn’t require new infrastructure. It plugs into existing workflows immediately. A lawyer can use it today. A marketing director can use it this afternoon. A developer can ship twice as much by next week.

The current state is pitiful.

Look at healthcare. It’s a graveyard of fragmented, outdated, leaky platforms stitched together with duct tape and prayer. Hundreds of systems that don’t talk to each other, built by armies of engineers whose main output seems to be more meetings. Support staff clogging their calendars with standups, Jira grooming sessions, strategy updates, and quarterly roadmap reviews—while the actual software barely functions. This isn’t unique to healthcare. It’s everywhere. Finance. Education. Government. Decades of accumulated technical debt, maintained by organisations that mistake activity for progress.

AI doesn’t just threaten these bloated structures. It exposes them. When a single developer with the right tools can outpace a team of twenty, the question stops being “how do we optimise our process?” and becomes “why does this process exist at all?”

No industry is immune.

Healthcare is using AI for diagnostics and administrative tasks. Legal firms are automating contract review. Accountants are leveraging it for analysis and compliance checks. Creative agencies are prototyping campaigns in minutes instead of days. If your sector feels untouched, you’re simply not looking closely enough—or your competitors are keeping quiet about their advantage.

Adaptation is non-negotiable.

The businesses that will struggle aren’t the ones lacking resources. They’re the ones waiting for certainty. Waiting for the “right” tool. Waiting for someone else to figure it out first. That caution, once prudent, is now a liability. The learning curve is real, but it’s getting shorter every month. The cost of delay is compounding.

Start small. Start now.

You don’t need a transformation strategy. You need to pick one workflow, one pain point, one repetitive task—and experiment. The goal isn’t perfection. It’s momentum. The companies winning right now aren’t smarter. They’re simply moving faster.

The wave is here. The only question is whether you’re riding it or being pulled under.