Business Insights Birmingham — talent, AI, and the New Entrepreneurial Ambition

Our first Coutts Business Insights Programme regional conversation took us to Birmingham, bringing together a cross-section of the region's most dynamic business leaders. We focused on the critical themes that define how businesses are hiring today — AI adoption, acquiring talent, and the need for a more connected regional ecosystem.

Key findings for entrepreneurs

Re-price your value

AI challenges traditional business models like the billable hour. Businesses must shift from selling time to selling outcomes.

Hire for critical thinking

As AI handles routine tasks, the most valuable human skills are creativity and critical thinking. Successful deployment is about combining these attributes with AI tools.

Culture is a commercial strategy

In a fragmented talent market, a strong, defined company culture is a key driver for attracting and retaining the best people, moving beyond profit to a shared sense of purpose.

AI adoption is still in its early stages, with ONS data from late 2024 showing only 15% of UK businesses are using it. To accelerate this, leaders need greater investment in training tools, as well as a clearer understanding of use case and how to empower their people to use AI effectively and securely.

Leaders in sectors like law are asking ‘if AI completes a task in seconds, how do you price your expertise?’ The consensus is that a shift is required, moving from selling time to selling outcomes. This immediate value is clearer in health and social care, where AI admin tools free up skilled professionals for high-value human interaction

The new essential skill is not coding, but critical thinking. As AI becomes more powerful, a team member's value lies in their ability to question, validate, and guide its output. A recent survey from Adobe, supports this view — finding 44% of hiring managers cited creativity as a must-have skill, versus 38% for AI capabilities. Successful deployment is about combining that uniquely human creativity with the power of AI tools.

Finding people with these skills is a primary challenge for entrepreneurs, compounded by rising labour costs. More than half of small businesses see this as a barrier to growth, and regulatory changes, such as the new Employment Rights Bill, are forcing two-thirds to alter their hiring plans, according to the Federation of Small Businesses.

The ongoing question of remote working also creates a hiring challenge. Entrepreneurs we spoke to were candid about their desire to have teams physically present to build culture and drive collaboration. Yet, they understand that to access the in demand talent they need, remote and hybrid options are necessary — particularly to keep up with global competition. This creates a perceived compromise between culture and talent.

However, the evidence of highly successful West Midlands companies, such as Gymshark, suggests that a clearly defined culture is a key driver of talent acquisition and retention. Global data from SHRM’s report, The State of Global Workplace Culture, supports this. Only 15% of employees who rate their company culture as "good" are actively job-seeking, versus 57% of those who rate it as "poor".

Despite hiring challenges, world class talent is demonstrably present in the West Midlands. The region has one of the highest graduate retention rates nationally, at 55%, (West Midlands Growth Company) and the largest number of emerging tech companies outside of London (Tech WM 2024 Annual Report). The question is, how do we effectively connect this talent with these high potential businesses?

The problem, as the room defined it, is ‘fragmentation’. There is a perception that cities such as Bristol and Manchester have a distinct ‘vibe’ or ‘swagger’ that is missing in Birmingham, with the region's entrepreneurial ecosystem lacking a cohesive identity and connective tissue.

A solution discussed was an ‘Ambition Fellowship’. This wasn't a call for more funding or government policy, but for a cultural shift, led by entrepreneurs themselves and requiring:

A culture of mentorship

A call for successful founders to actively mentor early-stage businesses, and to create platforms that bring different sectors together to share insights and build community.

Conscious capitalism

To win the war for talent, entrepreneurs must create cultures and missions that people want to be a part of — organisations that share risk, reward, and a sense of purpose that goes beyond profit.

The infrastructure for such a fellowship already exists, in major public-private partnerships such as the Digital Skills Consortium, which was created specifically to bridge the gap between employers and the regional talent pool.

The challenges of AI adoption and talent acquisition are two sides of the same coin. The path forward is not just about integrating new tools. It is about building a new, more connected entrepreneurial culture.

This is why we created the Coutts Business Insights Programme: to provide the forum for these essential conversations, connect leaders across sectors, and support entrepreneurs with the insights and networks they need to build, scale, and lead.

If you want to attend events like this and hear more, you can register for the Coutts Business Insights Programme.