The Collective XCHANGE2025: Key Takeaways

xCHANGE 2025 brought together founders, investors, technology experts, GCs and brand leaders to reflect on a core question: how should businesses make decisions amid persistent disruption? Four themes stood out, offering timely insights: context matters; that trust, talent and inclusion are competitive assets; that innovation is the operating system and must be commercially-oriented, governed and protected; and that and consumers are re coding value from transactions to relationships. Here are the key highlights and why they matter for organisations now.

Pattern over prediction: use history as a discipline for decision making

Dominic Sandbrook (of The Rest is History fame) kicked the event off with a reminder that history can provide useful reference points to reframe and rethink uncertainty. Today's turbulence, he explained, is not unique, as it rhymes with past cycles and events, with examples from 1970s Britain and late 1960s America being the most resonant with today's scenario. But Dominic's message was above all practical: his lesson was not that the past predicts the next move, but that it should teach organisations the importance of assuming volatility and building scepticism and adaptability into their planning.

Dominic also underlined that this is particularly relevant in relation to ongoing technological developments. If AI yields a civilisation-scale shift, today's linear roadmaps, he explained, simply won't hold. Yet leaders should keep in mind that moments of transition reward those who merge talent with timing. While today's ecosystem is tougher than it was a generation ago, businesses today have an opportunity to 'grow' leaders who can embody a message and harness anxieties around change into coherent action.

The UK's relevance: optimism and execution

Opportunity was a central theme in Jo Farmer's conversation with entrepreneur investor Debbie Wosskow, too. While the UK's soft power might have faded a little, the range of opportunities it offers for founders remains strong, if we lean into our advantages and fix what is fixable.

• Capital formation and listings – The Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) and Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) continue to de-risk early-stage capital. The London Stock Exchange remains very much 'open for business,' and pension fund reforms (e.g. the Mansion House Compact) are beginning to direct domestic institutional capital into growth equity.

• Cost of entry and currency – The UK is 'good value' in USD terms, drawing US acquirers and talent. That's a chance to do more cross-border deals, but also a signal to build defences that keep IP, teams and tax base in the UK.

• Sectors and talent – AI and university spin outs remain a core strength. Creative industries and London's magnetism help build greater capacity and competitiveness. However, scale-up execution is increasingly delivered by distributed Gen-Z teams offshore, often located in low-tax hubs, which puts pressure on onshore capability.

• Inclusion and returns – The Invest in Women Taskforce has assembled an institutional wall of capital with a mandate to back women-led and mixed teams. The returns case is clear, but under-allocation persists. Debbie called for more female investors, balanced investment committees, as well as male founders and funds actively bringing women into the cap table and GP ranks.

Innovation as an operating system: product, trust, regulation and IP

Carolyn Jameson (Airalo), Gabe Pereyra (Harvey AI) and Tobias Hooton (Stelia) joined Lewis Silkin's Rupam Davé and Scott Foster to reflect on the intersection of innovation and value creation. What creates real value in an era saturated with tools: For the panellists, value begins with products that work and stick: solutions that deliver human impact rather than technological theatre. In legal, this means translating law into commercial context and focusing on profitability and client outcomes rather than chasing point solutions for their own sake.

The shift from product to platform: Several companies described how tools built for internal needs are evolving into licensable products. This 'inside-out' pathway improves product–market fit, derisks early deployment, and accelerates adoption.

Regulate while you build: By definition, disruptors operate ahead of law. Choose test-friendly jurisdictions for early development and engage regulators proactively to shape workable norms. Regulation will lag, but panellists encouraged founders to embrace the responsibility to educate. For in-house legal teams, the challenge is to convert blank-sheet models into contractable, risk-weighted frameworks by analogy - borrowing for instance on long-standing data-licensing in financial services.

IP strategy is both defensive and commercial: Protect where protection creates advantage, but open-source where diffusion helps them permeate markets. In hyper-fast product cycles, 'being first' rarely sustains a moat. Make decisions at the outset, not retrofit them at exit. And brand and trademark hygiene still matter as consumer businesses remain vulnerable to bad-faith filings if they do not secure rights globally and early

Risk posture matters: While over-regulation can suffocate innovation, under-guardrailing creates far greater exposure. The strongest model blends enterprise-grade tools, clear and enforced policies, gated access, mandatory AI training, and an internal oversight forum chaired by Legal but incorporating R&D and product at the table. Culture and capability matter as much as the rules: without organisational fluency and discipline, governance remains performative rather than protective.

Competing in a fragmented world: brand coherence, compliance and capability

Jacqueline de Gernier (GWI), James Greenfield (Koto), Chris Macfarlane (Peloton) and Faye Cottingham (Bacardi-Martini) joined Lewis Silkin's Duran Ross and Francesa Ainsworth, widening the lens to talk about geopolitics, supply chains and consumer behaviour.

• Brands are witnessing a clear shift toward a more inward-looking, value-driven consumer. Economic pressure is pushing 'fewer, better' choices, renewed interest in resale, and a greater willingness to trade convenience for quality and trust. Attitudes to AI are also splitting along lines of trust and perceived expertise, and in some markets Gen Z is drifting rightward. To keep pace, brands need real-time consumer intelligence (many are refreshing leadership KPIs weekly) and must move from messaging to mechanics by embedding these preferences directly into product design, routes to market and service models.

• Brand localisation with global discipline is becoming essential. Tactical wins, such as cheap clicks or clever TikToks, can't compensate for a fragmented customer journey. Hold a clear global core; localise execution with cultural fluency. In a world where local misstep can globalise instantly, the strategic question becomes not 'be everywhere,' but 'know why you're somewhere.'

• Rising pressure on compliance, AI governance and trade. Tariffs, sanctions and political shifts are pushing trade compliance and horizon-scanning up the agenda. AI has become a first-order governance issue, with organisations formalising approved tools, data-handling and privilege protocols, often tying access to mandatory training. Many companies are doubling down on supply-chain resilience, working-capital discipline and market diversification.

The new codes of value: from transaction to relationship

Alice Crossley's (The Future Laboratory) final keynote session outlined how consumers are actively renegotiating value, driven by the 'enshittification' of digital services, rising time scarcity and a generational reset shaped by climate, conflict and inequality. Three dynamics matter most:

1. The concept of 'resistance' captures a turn away from hyper-consumption. Consumers are gravitating toward private communities and rewarding durability, refurbishment and brand restraint, as seen in refurbished products outperforming new even on peak retail days.

2. System D, the alt-economy in which resourcefulness becomes rational. Informal work expands, side-hustles proliferate, and behaviours like illegal streaming or 'swiping' reflect both necessity and resistance. While brands can't endorse illegality, they can design for scarcity through modularity, repairability, product-mining and fair pricing - treating constraint as a design principle rather than a barrier.

3. Modern Anchors, a renewed desire for ritual, presence and intentional friction where these add meaning. Think fewer, better experiences, purposeful scarcity and designed pauses, counter-programming to the relentless optimisation of the past decade.

Looking ahead, four speculative 'foresights' feel particularly investable: empathy engines (products and platforms whose metrics reward connection over rage-bait), care communities (brands that remove screen time, foster kinship and take decisions with all 'agents' in mind, including nature and future generations), neo‑abundance (industrialised resource pooling and micro‑mining in closed loops), and retro-finance (community banking models and mutuals reinvented with AI to inject fairness and agency).

What to do next

Across xCHANGE 2025, a common thread emerged: disruption is no longer an episodic challenge – it's the new baseline in business environments. The organisations that will thrive amid uncertainty are those that treat volatility as a strategic input, invest in leadership, trust and inclusion as competitive infrastructure, and build innovation, governance and cultural fluency into the core of how they work. The task now is to turn these insights into practical action.

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