300 minutes to 15: going AI native at EO Ignite South Pacific

Last week I spoke at EO Ignite South Pacific in Port Stephens.

My argument was in line with Philip Lowe's - Australia's productivity growth has flatlined at around 0.2% a year. The current Government policy settings won't fix that. Business owners can, and AI is the lever.

The uncomfortable part: if your business is more than a couple of years old, it isn't AI native. Your competitors who are AI native are getting better every week while you stand still. Propel was hit first. AI landed hardest on software, and our average project size has fallen by 80%, so just to hold revenue, we need to sell five times as much. So I had to become AI native before anyone else in the business.

A proposal that used to take me 300 minutes now takes 15, reviewed and sent, that is a 20x improvement.

Two speakers sharpened my thinking. Dan Monheit gave a masterclass in behavioural economics. He explained how more choice kills conversion: in the famous jam study, 24 options pulled more people to the table, but 6 options converted ten times better. From now on I will offer fewer, better choices, set a clear default, and show the highest price first.

His peak-end lesson stuck too. People remember the peaks and the ending, not the average. I'm already rebuilding my proposals around both ideas.

Stephanie Bown made the case that matters most and gets funded least: the human change. The technology moves weekly and people move more slowly. That gap is where AI programs stall. It's also why most of our deployment work at Propel is now training and change management rather than tooling.

Huge thanks to Socrates Capouleas and Heidi Merchant for lining up a cracking program.

At Propel we help leadership teams make this shift, from AI strategy through to AI-native software delivery.