The Action Gap
I have not had the chance to put pen to paper for a while. Running a startup consumes the hours I used to spend writing, and a bank holiday is as good an excuse as any to turn the notes in my phone into something useful.
After twenty-five years in sustainability and ESG, I have shifted my focus to business transformation and AI. It is less of a pivot than it sounds. I have always been building businesses. The subject just got broader.
Over the last two years I have been augmenting myself through courses and, more importantly, by working with people considerably smarter than me, including my CTO. Combined with the research and interviews I did to build Edify, it has pushed me from observation to strategy, and to start sharing what I am seeing with others who are living it.
One pattern keeps repeating.
Across companies of all sizes, the gap between what a brand intends and what actually happens on the frontline has never fully closed. The further you get from the CEO, the more diluted the passion and the action become. The further you get from headquarters, the worse it gets. Most strategies fail at the execution.
I work with companies as what I call a nano advisor. They bring me in for an hour or two when they have a specific, very practical problem to solve, short, focused interventions.
Consulting showed that frontline teams are rarely set up to thrive. My first job on the shop floor just meant I recognised it immediately. A new hire can take seven months to reach full productivity and costs far more than their salary on the way. Over a typical three‑year stint, a disengaged worker quietly burns through hundreds of hours in errors, downtime, and disconnection, before you pay a hefty slice of their salary to replace them. Recruit, onboard, repeat.
Multiply that across a whole workforce and it stops being a rounding error.
If you want to turn strategy into what people actually do, you have to change the way they work.
When I go into a business, I am less interested in the strategy document and more interested in what the frontline would say if I asked three questions:
What are we trying to achieve this year?
How would you know, on your shift today, that you are helping?
What gets in your way when you try?
The gap between the answers you expect and the answers you get is where your strategy is leaking, and AI can’t fix this!
Closing that gap is practical:
Put your strategy into one plain sentence
Translate each big goal into a handful of observable behaviours on a rota.
Fix one broken process your frontline constantly complain about, with them in the room.
Give managers a five-minute ritual at the start of each shift to connect today’s work to the strategy and remove one blocker a week.
And there is a second reason this matters more than ever.
People are not retreating from connection; they are retreating from synthetic connection. After years of algorithmically optimised content and AI-generated everything, many can no longer tell whether they are dealing with a person or a machine , and that ambiguity is exhausting. For the first time in decades, the scarcest, most valuable thing a brand can offer is a real person who knows what they are doing and genuinely wants to help
The frontline worker is not the weakest link in the customer experience. In a world saturated with synthetic everything, a knowledgeable, present human being is the competitive advantage. Your competitors are automating the customer experience. That is your competitive advantage.
AI finally gives that people the tools to be extraordinary, by putting the knowledge, standards, and judgement of your best people into everyone’s hands, in the moment they need it, without a manual in sight.
The only question is whether you will decide your frontline is a priority before your competitor does.
