What Happens When Your Customer Has an AI... and You Don’t?

Friends,

Your weekly AI briefing is here—designed to help you respond to AI, not react to the hype. No curveballs. No chaos. Just clarity.

Please help me! 👉 Share the newsletter with someone you know who needs it.

Here’s what’s important to you this week:

🔥 URGENT PRIORITIES
This is the 4th week where there is nothing urgent:

✅ No fires to fight
✅ Your AI roadmap remains stable

Use the calm to double down on robustness and experimentation.

🎯 STRATEGIC CONSIDERATIONS
While there are no major shifts, the pace keeps accelerating.

If you’re already...

✅ Training your organisation to use AI tools
✅ Developing your AI tech stack
✅ Working from a clear AI strategy

...you’re outpacing 95% of your peers.

🧠 The Money is Getting Smart—Agentic Payments Are Here

This is the week payments shifted from reactive to proactive.

• Mastercard launched Agent Pay, enabling agents to transact on behalf of users.

• Visa unveiled “intelligent commerce” rails for AI-powered shopping assistants.

• Stripe dropped a new foundation model for payments, backed by NVIDIA.

Why this matters:
Agentic payments will change how you think about checkout, trust, fraud, and value capture.
Your next planning session needs to ask:

👉 Read Mastercard’s vision
👉 Visa’s rails for AI commerce
👉 Stripe's new model and NVIDIA partnership

🤓 GEEK OUT

📉 The AI Backlash Begins
BBC reports growing momentum among consumers who are ditching AI—or demanding less of it.

👉 Read the BBC piece

Why it matters:
You’ll soon serve two kinds of customers:

1. Those who expect AI in everything.

2. Those who want you—the human, the handmade, the pre-2022 version of life.

Smart businesses will split-test both. Don’t assume everyone wants automation.

⚖️ Meet the First AI-Native Law Firm
Garfield is a law firm designed from the ground up as an AI first business. It offers SME businesses very low cost ways to pursue payments through the small claims courts.

👉 Explore Garfield 

Why it matters:
This isn’t just tech adoption. It’s AI-first business design. Expect more verticals to follow—accountancy, therapy, coaching, architecture…

🔐 Double Word: Build Your AI, Your Way
This startup lets you self-host AI agents, aligning with digital self-sovereignty principles.

👉 See what DoubleWord offers

Why it matters:
Your AI needs to be aligned to your business, which means you need to own it.
Expect more tools like this to give SMEs control, not just convenience.

🎨 WEEKEND PLAYGROUND

🧠 Map Your Mind with Penumbra
What if you could model how you think, decide, and act—and turn that into your own reasoning engine?

That’s what Penumbra helps you do. Think: your internal worldview, structured as a knowledge graph that informs your AI.

Hugo spoke this week with Shep Bryan, Penumbra’s founder, about why knowledge graphs are becoming a core layer in the AI tech stack—not just for data teams, but for leaders building agentic systems that think like them.

👉 Try Penumbra
🧠 Start building a model of your own mind.

📢 Share Your Thoughts

If you’re finding the What Now newsletter helpful, share it with someone else who’s feeling overwhelmed by AI and needs clarity.

If it’s not quite hitting the mark, let us know—what’s one thing we could do better? Just hit reply and tell us.

Have a great week,
Hugo & Ben