AI is changing how a company can be organised and operated.
When I started building e-commerce businesses in the late 1990s, competitive advantage came from understanding the internet earlier than others. I believe the next major shift will be significantly more profound.
AI is not only changing how we produce content, analyse data or serve customers. It is changing how a company can be organised and operated. That is why we are progressively rebuilding Vuxen Group from the ground up.
Over the past year, I have devoted the majority of my own time to this transformation — working together with the organisation to develop and implement AI across our workflows and to build the technology infrastructure that will support the Group going forward.
Commerce, purchasing, pricing, CRM, customer service, analytics, logistics and administration are being connected step by step through our proprietary systems. AI is not intended to sit as a separate layer on top of the business. It is being embedded directly into the infrastructure and into the systems used to make decisions and run day-to-day operations.
Several of these systems are already in operation. But we are still in the midst of the transformation. In many areas, we are running new and existing ways of working in parallel, allowing us to test, measure, improve and refine the systems before they assume greater operational responsibility. Automation must not merely be possible — it must be better, faster and more reliable than the process it replaces.
Our ambition is clear: as the Group grows, its complexity and corporate headcount should not need to grow at the same rate. I do not see this as the outcome of a completed efficiency programme, but as the beginning of a new operating model.