AI Can Grow Both Your Company And Your Headcount

While most companies are eager to bring enterprise AI to a host of different functions, a new study from AI search and product discovery company Lucidworks indicates that some of them might be better off tapping the brakes. In a new study, featuring data from the company's agentic AI "Guydbot," which explored and evaluated digital experiences at more than 1,100 companies, Lucidworks found 65% of companies do not currently have a solid foundation on which to build more AI into their platforms.

"If you think of agentic AI—AI that performs tasks—as a car, then you can imagine generative AI as the engine, and data as the fuel," Lucidworks CEO Mike Sinoway said in a statement. "Our report finds that too many e-commerce companies are trying to build Formula 1 racers around go-kart engines—and they might not even have enough gas to fill their tanks."

Lucidworks' bot examined which companies are actually utilizing AI-powered solutions on their websites. More than seven in 10 have some form of AI capabilities—including AI summarization, guided selling, interactive Q&A and dynamic personalization. But just 6% have fully deployed an agentic AI solution.

And while company leaders may be able to speak confidently about their progress in AI, a survey done by Lucidworks to add to its report shows that many of them know just how behind they are. About 83% said they felt major or extreme concern about their progress in AI—an eight-fold increase from the amount who felt that way two years ago.

Lucidworks' recommendation to the companies that aren't quite there with AI adoption is pretty basic: Stop worrying about the huge picture of what AI can eventually do for your company, and concentrate on succeeding in one area at a time. There are relatively easy and fundamental places to improve. For example, only 37.5% of companies are using AI to support multiple language translation on their site, which is a basic AI function.

AI-powered recommendations can give customers what they are looking for—intentionally or not. More AI can improve your company's efficiency, finances and services, but it doesn't have to lower your headcount. Hristo Borisov, CEO of fintech software platform Payhawk, has been hiring more employees in his engineering department as he uses AI to help scale.

I talked to him about how more AI has meant more people at his company. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter. We're taking a summer break and will not be publishing Forbes CIO next week. We'll be back on Thursday, July 17. This is the published version of Forbes' CIO newsletter, which offers the latest news for chief innovation officers and other technology-focused leaders. Click here to get it delivered to your inbox every Thursday.

The U.S. Capitol building last week. While President Donald Trump's signature policy bill appears to be on track for passage before the July 4 holiday, the Senate removed one of its controversial tech-related proposals during their markup earlier this week.

There is no longer a 10-year moratorium on state-level laws regulating AI, writes Forbes senior contributor Tor Constantino. Senators voted 99-1 to remove the language, with only Senator Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) voting against it. The main objector was Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who noted that the Senate has shown its inability to legislate about emerging technology, including a bill she proposed for children's online safety, the Hill reported.

"You know who has passed it?" she asked. "It is our states." Constantino writes that consumer groups, which had been pushing against the provision, hailed its removal from the massive policy bill. "The proposed ban that has now been removed would have stopped states from protecting their residents while offering nothing in return at the federal level," James P. Steyer, founder and CEO of consumer group Common Sense Media, said in an email to Constantino.

However, the fact that the provision was removed is only a partial win for those who wish to regulate AI. After all, there still are no federal regulations governing the technology and its use. Qantas Airlines planes sit at the Sydney airport domestic terminal on a rainy day. Massive cyberattacks by the Scattered Spider threat group were reported in the last three weeks by three major airlines: Qantas, WestJet and Hawaiian Airlines.

writes Forbes' Suzanne Rowan Kelleher. The attack on Qantas exposed records for as many as 6 million customers, though the airline said no credit card details, personal financial information, passport information or frequent flyer accounts were in the system that was breached. Hawaiian reported the incident impacted IT systems, while WestJet said the attack affected both internal systems and customer access to the app and its website.

The FBI issued a warning about the Scattered Spider attack last week, writes Forbes senior contributor Davey Winder. Ransomware analysts found Scattered Spider was targeting U.S. food, manufacturing and transportation sectors—particularly airlines.

Scattered Spider's main hacking tactic is impersonating tech vendors to bypass safeguards around two-factor authentication, Winder writes. Adam Marrè, CISO at cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf, told Winder that this attack should be a reminder for businesses to assess their cyber defenses both internally and across supply chains.

Cloudflare is blocking web crawlers that scrape information for AI firms to use as training data from websites it hosts, writes Forbes senior contributor Emma Woollacott. Cloudflare users are able to customize how AI crawlers can access their content—like for search purposes, but nothing else.

The blocking systems could force AI companies to get explicit permission from site owners before scraping. Cloudflare is also beta testing the ability to charge companies for access to a site for AI crawling purposes.

Hristo Borisov, CEO of fintech software platform Payhawk, has been using AI to accelerate hiring as his company scales up. I talked to him about how AI can be used to boost the size of development teams and make the team as a whole more productive.

This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. Tell me about Payhawk's recent hiring.

Borisov: We see really good opportunity with AI in general. When it comes to employees, there is a huge amount of productivity that we see right now. It’s almost impossible as an engineer to write code without AI.

"For us internally, we see first the opportunity to accelerate our engineering. Our current engineers are a lot more productive because a lot of the things that they have to do—like unit testing that is not cost critical—could be much easily handed to AI."

Sometimes building things with AI is a little bit harder. When you have a big code base, you can still do some things, but you need still a lot of human supervision when you are doing brand new things.

Productivity is really important. We are growing with fast pace. Just in the last month, we had 51 new employees. The ability to actually see a lot of productivity with AI is great. If you think of venture capital business, growth is the No. 1 most important thing.

AI is giving an opportunity to grow even better, faster. You can still continue to hire and you can utilize your existing people, but it allows you to scale faster. Instead of hiring 10 people on support, we can now hire five.

In engineering, more time coding is what really matters. Higher capacity there, better performance on many of those [vital business functions].

We see really good opportunities where we can combine AI with additional headcount, and that helps us accelerate as a business.

Is there any reason for people who would be aiming for midlevel positions to be concerned that AI will take away jobs? AI is an opportunity to be more effective at every type of job you’re doing.

"I don’t think engineers are going to vanish. They are going to be just more specialized."

We really don’t care how we have built our HR system as long as it works. But I do care how we have built our financial services infrastructure, which is what drives our growth.

"We need to make sure that AI is augmenting our employees’ abilities, not replacing them," Borisov said.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. It highlights the importance of using AI in a way that complements human capabilities, rather than replacing them.