You don't need to hire an AI person: here's what you actually need

Short answer: you don't need to hire a software engineer or a dedicated AI specialist. You need one technical, curious person already on your team, the autonomy to experiment, and a small monthly budget. Nick Harding, CEO of Fifty One Degrees, suggests around £250 a month as a starting figure, but treat that as an example to adjust to your own business. Set a regular point to check back in, whether that's 90 days or a shorter monthly catch-up, and ask them to report on what's worth doing next.

The hiring myth that stops small businesses starting

A lot of small business owners assume AI adoption requires bringing in specialist headcount: a data scientist, an AI consultant, someone with "AI" in their job title. That assumption alone stops a lot of businesses from starting at all, because hiring for a role like that is expensive and the outcome is uncertain.

Nick Harding is direct about this: "You don't need someone who is a software engineer to come and be your AI and data person necessarily. Obviously you'd benefit from that. Everyone would benefit from that. But do you need it? Absolutely not."

What you actually need: one person, not a specialist

Instead of a specialist hire, Nick describes a much more achievable profile, someone who almost certainly already works for you.

"What you need to do is you need to find a small backbone across the organisation of people who are technical. They don't need to be a software engineer, but they really do need to know their way around a computer. It's the sort of person who can always help everybody else in the office out if something goes wrong on their computer."

You know who this is in your business already. It's whoever colleagues go to when their laptop won't connect to the printer, or when a spreadsheet formula breaks. That instinct for figuring things out, not a computer science degree, is the actual qualification.

There's a second trait Nick says matters just as much: attitude. "It's really important that these people are also positive, progressive. These people must use their initiative and have the authority and the autonomy to use their initiative."

A technically capable person who's cautious or sceptical about new tools won't drive adoption. You need someone both capable and willing to try things.

Give them a small budget and get out of the way

This is the part most businesses get wrong even when they've identified the right person: they make that person ask permission for every small expense.

Nick's advice is to remove that friction entirely. "You don't need that person coming back to you saying, I'm going to try something, it's going to cost £10 a month, and they keep on coming back to you and that slows them down again and again. Say to them: you've got 250 quid a month as a budget. Go and try as many things as you can and come back to me in 90 days' time and tell us what we need to do, and give them the autonomy to go and deliver against it."

£250 a month is just Nick's example, not a rule. The point isn't the exact number, it's picking a small, affordable figure for your business that's enough to remove the friction of asking permission for every small AI tool subscription. The same goes for the 90-day timeframe: some businesses will prefer a shorter, regular monthly catch-up to hear about new AI findings instead of waiting three months. What matters is that there's a clear point to report back, rather than an open-ended, directionless mandate.

If you're time-poor, start with two things

A common objection from busy owners and managers is simply not having time to learn AI themselves, even if they've assigned someone else to lead it. Nick's answer here is practical rather than dismissive.

"AI for Growth is clearly a really powerful resource that gives independent, high-value support to members," he says. "It's really difficult because there are very few organisations out there that really have a balanced view that is credible, has authority, but also is trying to give progressive opinions. Most organisations are trying to sell something. AI for Growth is a nonprofit organisation, literally just trying to support these businesses to grow."

The second recommendation is to use AI itself as the learning tool, including to check its own advice: "You can get to the bottom of a chat and then say, okay, pick holes in this, tell me how this thesis could go wrong. Tell me the advice you've just given me, tell me what might not work out about that advice, and use it to stress-test its own advice."

That's a genuinely useful technique beyond just AI adoption: ask the tool to argue against its own recommendation before you act on it.

Being honest about the limits of this approach

This works well for a business with 10 or 20 people, where one enthusiastic, capable person can realistically own AI adoption for the whole team. It's a weaker fit if you're a five-person business without anyone who fits that technical-and-progressive profile at all, in that case, the more useful first step is Nick's other advice: use AI tools directly to sense-check what to do, rather than assuming you need to designate an internal owner you don't currently have. If you're not sure which camp you're in, our AI readiness guide walks through a simple three-stage model to work out where your business actually stands.

It's also not a substitute for leadership involvement. Delegating AI adoption to one enthusiastic team member doesn't work if the rest of the leadership team stays disengaged, see the point on leadership modelling in why AI training doesn't stick.

What to try this month

Identify the person on your team who already gets asked for tech help informally. Give them a small, no-questions-asked monthly budget (£250 is just an example, use whatever figure suits your business, even £50 or £100 if that feels more comfortable) and set a point to report back on what's worth adopting properly, whether that's a 90-day review or a shorter monthly catch-up with the team on new AI findings.

If you want a neutral, non-sales-pitch place to learn alongside other small business owners doing the same thing, the AI for Growth community is free to join and built specifically for businesses without a training budget or a specialist to hire.