This is an interview with Virginia Holden, CMO, AnniQ.
Tell us about your current role
My current role as CMO at AnniQ is to make something extremely complex feel simple, intuitive, and human. The platform is made up of over 250 agentic AIs: marketing strategists, writers, video creators, essentially a full-service agency powered by AI. My job is to ensure people can understand it, trust it and actually use it, rather than feel overwhelmed by it. Alongside that, I’m building AnniQ’s brand as one that feels immediately recognisable as being on your side, a system that supports you, rather than one you have to fight to make work.
How does AI inspire you and how does it worry you?
AI inspires me because of its potential to democratise expertise. Platforms like AnniQ give businesses access to capabilities that were once only available if you could afford a large agency or specialist team. Used well, AI can also give companies real competitive advantage by moving data, information and knowledge through an organisation as fast as possible, to where it has the most impact.
Where I worry is when AI is treated like any other tool and viewed purely through the lens of cost reduction and short-term profitability. That framing limits its effectiveness and reduces its positive impact on the world. AI is also inherently biased. It’s built on human language and human language reflects our biases.
If you’re not aware of that, you risk creating “knowledge ghettos” as I like to call them, where systems repeatedly surface the same perspectives, pushing people further to extremes and limiting exposure to diverse ideas. AI is powerful, but it demands conscious, responsible use.
You’ve done extensive work around behaviour and decision-making. What separates good leadership from bad leadership?
Whether people like it or not, original human decision-making systems were distributed. We survived by making decisions collectively. Leadership was never static, it was about knowing who was best placed to lead at a particular moment so the group could survive and thrive.
What frustrates me is that modern business still relies on leadership models that are only around 2,500 years old – patriarchal, hierarchical systems where the person at the top is assumed to be right. That model represents a tiny fraction of human history, yet we treat it as inevitable. For most of our evolution, leadership was adaptive, contextual and shared. We’ve lost sight of that and it shows.
How have you seen the corporate world evolve over the last 10–15 years?
Business has increasingly become about shareholder profit rather than the business itself. Shareholders care about how much money is made, not how it’s made, and they rarely have a long-term interest in the organisation’s purpose or sustainability. That pressure has intensified, shortening time horizons and distorting incentives.
As a result, everything becomes a cost: people become a cost, ethics become a cost, long-term thinking becomes a cost. That was never what business was meant to be. If you’re in pharmaceuticals, for example, you should be building for the next 30 or 40 years, not the next quarter. When profit becomes the only measure of success, something fundamental breaks.
How can scale-up companies leverage AI to improve business processes?
There are three powerful ways businesses can use AI today. First, automating processes that don’t require human empathy – things like scheduling, accounting and moving data. Tools such as Micrsoft Copilot can realistically save an individual a full day a week, if not more on tasks like this.
Second, AI can help businesses move competitive advantage to where it matters most. Competitive advantage comes from getting the right data, skills, tools, or resources to the point of maximum impact as quickly as possible. AI is uniquely suited to this because it’s apolitical, it doesn’t care about hierarchy, opinion, or internal politics. It simply optimises for competitive fitness.
Third, AI gives access to expertise businesses have never been able to afford before. Systems like AnniQ effectively democratise specialist knowledge, allowing scale-ups to compete in ways that were previously out of reach.
Some leaders say AI can provide facts but not nuanced opinions. How far away are we from that changing?
I think that’s the wrong question. AI isn’t about opinion, it’s about fact. The issue is that people are asking AI the kinds of questions they would ask another human. AI will never respond the way a person does because it has no theory of mind. Theory of mind isn’t about language; it’s about feeling. It’s the evolutionary mechanism that allows humans to understand that “I know, you know, we know” which is the foundation of trust, cooperation and collective action.
AI doesn’t possess that, and it never will in the way humans do. The real risk is that AI is already disrupting human decision-making, with people deferring to systems in the same way they blindly follow sat navs even when they can see it might drive them off a cliff.
Can you tell us about creating the Bag for Life? What inspired it?
The Bag for Life came from a very human place. I didn’t want to see 251middle-aged men working in a factory in the Lancashire town of Nelson made redundant because supermarkets wanted cheaper carrier bags produced outside the UK. I’d already seen too many towns hollowed out and I felt that if I could do something, I should. The solution wasn’t about asking people to change their behaviour consciously, it was about working with how the brain already works.
The bag was thick. There’s a simple shortcut in the brain that says ‘thick means strong’. People don’t analyse it, they just trust it and naturally put more shopping into it. At the till, customers were asked how many bags they wanted, forcing a conscious choice. We used the dead time at the checkout to introduce the messaging “Bag for life 10p if it breaks free” written in iambic pentameter, which the brain remembers instinctively. People remembered “10p free,” filled the bag more, and reused it. It was all built on unconscious decision-making, not lecturing people about sustainability.
With so much global tension, are you a hopeful traveller?
Yes. I always have been, even now. There’s a lot I can’t control, and sometimes it feels like I’m on a plane where everyone else is flying it. But I’ve always believed in the power of human beings working together. We are far more powerful collectively than we are individually and I think that’s exactly what scares elites, and why there’s such effort put into dividing us.
What’s next for you?
I’d like to build AI competitive advantage systems that genuinely help organisations thrive, not just cut costs. And I want to work in environments where profitability isn’t the only measure of success. There’s an old Indigenous American saying “you can’t eat gold”. I think we’d do well to remember that.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
We forget that we are resource-constrained people living on a resource-constrained planet. Everyone has value and no one should be destroyed because someone else is scared they’ll lose something. We’re taught competitiveness from the moment we enter school, yet young children instinctively solve problems together. Then we give them the wrong measures for success: tests, rankings, scarcity. We teach people that knowledge must be hoarded to survive. That mindset is deeply damaging, and it’s something we urgently need to unlearn.