Un-retiring (2/2)

I finally got around to writing the sequel post

I have alluded to this in more than a few places by now but I guess it’s time to be direct (or at least write the sequel to the original post). We have set up a holding company (more on this later) called 10xHumans, investing in AI training, consulting and implementation services (‘AI Enablement’) and related media. You can think of it as a platform for the AI Enablement sector.

There is a back story to this. Actually two.

The first is about pulling on a thread. For the second half of last year, Max, Daria and I made ourselves quite unpopular in certain circles by asking a lot of questions (both to companies and the AI teams selling to them) about just how easy or hard it was for businesses to meaningfully adopt AI tools. A lot of what we heard was stories about organisational and (mostly) human friction.

This in turn led us to almost a hundred conversations with founders of (mostly) bootstrapped AI training, consulting and implementation companies who are being hired (often behind the scenes) to help companies navigate this landscape. Your company has almost certainly hired one (or likely more) of them by now to help navigate its AI adoption. We’re actively tracking over 650, there are more started every day. Ben Evans has a delightfully timely quote in his latest newsletter:

OpenAI and Anthropic have…realised that grass-roots enterprise software adoption almost never works and giving people a tool and saying ‘it can do anything!’ isn’t useful.

Additionally, one of the sentiments we’ve heard quite frequently in our conversations is that the incumbent management consulting firms (Accenture, Bain, etc.) are simply not sufficiently AI-native to handle this challenge. Accenture’s ~$1b recent acquisition of Faculty (17x revenues!) suggests that’s a real issue. But it isn’t just the Fortune 500 level of companies who will need this support, every company is going to need some equivalent of a fractional Chief AI Officer or some kind of AI consultancy of record.

AI maximalists tend to dismiss the role of human-powered enablement and argue that agents will simply make these professional services (literally) redundant. But the evidence on the ground is pretty consistent: business adoption of AI (at every level from SMB to blue chip) requires leadership buy-in and understanding, planning, change management, learning and implementation. This led us to a high conviction thesis around AI Enablement professional services, and specifically around the newer, AI-native firms. In fact I am convinced that AI Enablement is now a far more important investment category than frontier models, data centres and power grids. Especially for Europe.

That covers the ‘what’. But the ‘how’ is also important.

Historically we have built companies which were, by design, singular bets on trends we saw emerging. 10xHumans is a holding company: a structure which allows us to place multiple bets on a long term trend which we have high conviction in. Many opportunities in this space do not fit neatly into VC (business model) or PE (size) paradigms. This is not unique to the AI Enablement space. I have talked about this evolution elsewhere: AI is decreasing the atomic unit of business and making an increasing percentage of new opportunities harder to reach for conventional fund structures. In some cases 10xHumans is building, in some cases we are investing and in other cases we will be acquiring.

Regular readers might have seen me talk about AI Enablement Insider, the industry newsletter that we’ve launched. But our platform strategy goes beyond that, we’ve invested in aibl (AI for Business Leaders), a new events and insights business for practical AI transformation in the UK. We met Richard, John, Terry and the team there quite early on and realised that as a group we were highly aligned on the challenges (and importance) around AI adoption for business. As well as an upcoming London event in October, aibl are also running a series of summits for senior leaders across people, marketing, technology and finance/ops teams. I get a lot of people asking me where they can get some function-specific AI support and this would be a good place to start.