A year on from embracing AI. What I actually think now.

It has been just over a year since AI tools became part of my day, here is where I have actually landed. My musings for June...

When I first started using these tools seriously, I had two reactions inside the same week. Excitement, and a quiet panic about whether the business I had built was about to be eaten. Twelve months later that panic has not disappeared, but it has changed shape.

For Midships, less changes than you might think. We have always run lean, expert led delivery teams, so the model the rest of the industry is now moving towards is the one we already operate. What does change is the centre of gravity. It moves further from delivery hours and further towards expertise, products and IP. We are investing accordingly. Icebreaker, which is patent pending, is the clearest example, but it is not the only one.

What I did not anticipate is how much I would enjoy this. The work my team gets to do is more interesting. The boring, repeatable parts of delivery are exactly the parts AI handles well, and as those tasks become BAU we automate them. What is left is the hard problem solving, the bit people came into this profession for in the first place. That is a better business to run and a better business to work in.

That part is exciting. It is also uncomfortable. A services business that admits it needs fewer people on a project is an honest business, and honesty has commercial consequences. The flip side is that we can take on more work than before. Our team's experience and attitude is transferable across domains, so smaller teams free us to get involved in more.

Attitude has become the variable that matters most. I have watched two very different patterns emerge this year.

• The first is the person who reaches for AI without the underlying understanding. The outputs are weak, and in meetings it is obvious. They cannot defend the work, they cannot pressure test it, and they cannot tell you why the model said what it said. These people will not last. If they are not adding judgement, why do I need them.

  
  

• The second is the person who uses AI to accelerate through challenge, review and idea generation, but holds the critical thinking themselves. They are not outsourcing thought, they are compounding it. These individuals are extraordinary to work with and the gap between them and everyone else is widening fast.

On the larger SIs, my view has softened considerably from where it started. I reacted strongly twelve months ago. I assumed Accenture and the firms in that bracket were facing an existential reset. I am still a proud Accenture shareholder, and I have spent enough of my career inside that world to know what it does well. I now think the impact is meaningful but narrower than I had assumed.

The reason is unglamorous. Large enterprises struggle with change. They need help and they need expertise, and that does not disappear because a model got better. Adopting AI is hard. Adopting it competently across a large organisation is exceptionally hard, and most organisations are quietly failing at it right now. That is precisely the work the large SIs are built to do.

What I do think changes is the mix. The industrialised end of the SI book, the work that has been priced on volume and bench rather than judgement, is where the pressure lands. Those workloads will get absorbed by AI, but slowly. Industrialising an entire process to produce consistent outputs is not easy. It requires changes to the SDLC itself, and for many enterprise clients that adoption will take years. I know from building the Midships AI Led SDLC that what we have moved to is fundamentally different from what the industry has traditionally used, and even getting our own team there has been a deliberate piece of work.

The high value consulting layer, the bit that actually shapes a client's decision, looks resilient.

There is a second constraint that I think is underappreciated. Firms want to be different. You can save money by adopting the same solution as everyone else, which is the SaaS argument, but most enterprises want to introduce their own edge on top because that edge is what differentiates them in their market. That instinct makes pure best practice delivery harder, and it limits how much of the work AI can actually do. AI is strong at well defined problems, and I genuinely love using it for idea generation. It is not strong at building something that has never been built before. The novel bits, which are the bits clients pay the most for, are still ours.

The more interesting constraint sits on the client side. Change programmes can be accelerated because there is more delivery capacity available per pound of investment. What stops them being accelerated is the organisation's ability to absorb change. That ceiling has not moved. It is the same ceiling it was three years ago, and it is what will ultimately throttle how much of the AI dividend the large SIs actually capture.

Smaller and sharper at our end. Slower and more painful than the market expects at the large SI end. The binding constraint in the middle is still the client.

I will end on the part I find harder to write. For all the optimism about what AI does for firms like mine, I think about my own children and what they will need to do to build a career in the next ten years. People will still be needed. The roles will change, in some cases beyond recognition. The intervening period, while the world works out what the new shape looks like, is going to be interesting and genuinely difficult for the people caught inside the confusion. I do not think we talk about that honestly enough.

Writer’s Overview

Ajit Gupta – Co-Founder & CEO, Midships  

Ajit leads Midships Group’s transition from a specialist identity consultancy to a portfolio of autonomous, AI-native business units. He focuses on long-term business relevance through platform thinking, customer outcomes, and scalable operating models.

Short bio: Ajit is a strategic founder with deep expertise in IAM, platform delivery, and AI services, driving Midships’ expansion across Asia, the Middle East, and beyond.

📧 ajit@midships.io  

🔗 LinkedIn: Ajit Gupta