Brett StClair operates at the intersection of product, platforms, and enterprise change, with a career built inside organizations that define how modern business scales.

A former Google and Barclays executive, he has held senior roles spanning Google, Barclays digital product leadership, and AdMob, giving him a practical vantage point on how new technology moves from prototype to real-world adoption at pace.

Today, Brett is the Co-Founder of Teraflow.ai and leads work that helps organizations modernize their technology stack and translate emerging capabilities into measurable operational outcomes.

He is also the voice behind the Rebel Technologist platform, where he interviews technologists and operators on what actually works when businesses attempt changes under real constraints such as legacy systems, risk, and internal resistance.

In this conversation with the AI Speakers Agency, Brett breaks down what separates momentum from stagnation when organizations try to evolve, and why speed, clarity of intent, and disciplined execution have become competitive differentiators.

Question 1. Many organizations struggle to balance the cost, risk, and disruption that come with major operational change. From what you've seen, how should businesses approach transformation without damaging performance in the short term?

Brett StClair: Well, especially in the era of AI, we've all heard of the term. It is not AI that will disrupt humans and society, but it will be the humans that use AI to disrupt others who are not. That's becoming a very plausible term that we're seeing more and more.

Where do we start? How do we start this disruption? 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.

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. This disruption that we're seeing, this fear of being disrupted, is truly being empowered by one technology, and that technology is artificial intelligence.

Question 2. With traditional five- and ten-year planning cycles increasingly out of date, how should business owners rethink what it means to futureproof their organization as AI adoption accelerates?

Brett StClair: In order to be able to futureproof your organization, you need to know what's going to happen in the future. 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?

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.

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. If you're really going to look forward, the only real light that we're starting to see that is going to be for certain are two things, and the combination of those two.

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. It might start with a proliferation of AI doing different things, different models, different tools within the organization, but over time it will amalgamate into one AI source, one large language model for that business.

If we know that each individual will have their own AI, how does that impact the world of marketing? 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?

It becomes an incredibly exciting time. 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. 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?

It's no longer about building fabulous experiences for humans but building fabulous experiences for humans and their AI.

Question 3. While AI is often discussed in terms of opportunity, what practical challenges should businesses realistically expect when deploying AI and other emerging technologies at speed?

Brett StClair: 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.

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. Eighteen months for processing power to double, that's way too slow.

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. We're already seeing it with the number of large language models in the market.

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.

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?

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? I'm so passionate about the speed of change that I've developed a one-day course to get you started in one day.

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. 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.

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.

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

Benzinga Disclaimer: This article is from an unpaid external contributor. It does not represent Benzinga’s reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.