If You’re Behind on AI, Put Your 10-20 Best Engineers in a Different Building. Today.

Not every B2B company needs to panic right now. Some of you shipped AI agents early. Some of you have been rebuilding your product around AI for 18+ months. Some of you already have agents in production, doing real work for real customers.

This post isn’t for you.

This post is for the CEOs who know they’re behind. The ones where the AI strategy is still a roadmap slide, not a shipped product. Where “AI” means a chatbot bolted onto the help center. Where the board keeps asking about the AI plan and the honest answer is: we don’t really have one yet.

If that’s you, here’s what I’d do.

Take Your 10-20 Best Engineers. Physically Separate Them.

Put them in a different building. Not a different Slack channel. Not a different sprint. A different building.

Don’t let anyone talk to them. Don’t let the VP of Product “align” with them. Don’t let the head of CS send them feature requests. Don’t let the CEO pop in to “check on progress.” No one.

Their job — their only job — is to build the #1 AI Agent in your category.  With no distractions.

Not an AI feature. Not a copilot. Not a chatbot in the corner of the screen. An agent — one that actually does the work your customers are paying humans to do today.

Why Isolation Is the Only Way to Catch Up

If you’re already behind, the normal product org will never get you there. I’ve watched this pattern play out dozens of times now across the portfolio and beyond:

• Your existing product org will kill it. Not on purpose. But every standup, every sprint review, every “quick sync” pulls your best people back toward incremental improvements to the current product. The gravity of the existing codebase is immense. You can’t escape it without physical separation.
• Your best engineers need room to throw things away. Building a great AI agent means building 5 terrible ones first. That requires rapid experimentation that is fundamentally incompatible with how most B2B product teams operate. Your existing team ships quarterly. This team needs to ship daily.
• The people closest to your current product are the worst at imagining the replacement. The engineer who spent 3 years building your workflow engine is not going to wake up and say “actually, an agent should just do this entire workflow automatically.” They need distance from what exists to see what’s possible.

When you’re behind, you can’t afford the 30% effort version. You need a team that wakes up every day thinking about nothing except the agent.

What You’re Actually Racing Against

If you’re behind, here’s what should keep you up at night:

The startup that’s already ahead of you. Somewhere, a 4-person team has been building an AI agent for your category for 12 months. They don’t need $100M in revenue — they need 500 customers at $20K/year. That’s $10M ARR, a Series B, and now they’re coming for your mid-market.

The competitor who isn’t behind. One of your direct competitors may have already done this. They separated their best engineers, shipped an agent, and suddenly their demos look like magic while yours look like 2019.

The horizontal AI platforms. The next wave of AI companies is building agent layers that work across entire categories. If you don’t own the agent experience in your space, someone else will build it on top of you — or around you.

All three scenarios end the same way for the company that waited too long.

“But We’re Already Working on AI”

Maybe. But be honest with yourself. Is your AI effort a real, standalone initiative with your best people dedicated to it full time? Or is it a feature track inside the existing product roadmap, competing for resources with 40 other priorities?

If it’s the latter, you’re not working on AI. You’re adding AI sprinkles to a product that was built for a world where humans did the work. That’s not a strategy. It’s a delay tactic.

The companies that try to do AI with the same team, in the same building, on the same sprint cadence, end up with an agent that’s 30% as good as it could be and a core product that’s 30% slower to ship. You get the worst of both worlds.

Your Own Team May Be Your Biggest Obstacle

Here’s something no one talks about enough: a lot of your team won’t want to do this.

Your VP of Product will argue you’re cannibalizing existing customers. Your head of engineering will say you can’t afford to pull 10-20 people off the core product. Your sales leaders will panic about the message it sends to the market. Your CS team will worry about what it means for the workflows customers depend on today.

And they’re not wrong about the risks. They’re wrong about the math.

Yes, an AI agent that automates what your customers currently do manually inside your product is cannibalization. But here’s the thing — if you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will. And they won’t care about your existing customers when they do it.

The deeper issue is that most of your team has spent years building, selling, and supporting the current product. Their careers, their comp plans, their identities are tied to it. Asking them to get excited about a project that might make their work obsolete is asking a lot. It’s human nature to resist that.

This is exactly why the “different building” matters. You’re not just separating the team from distractions. You’re separating them from the antibodies. The well-meaning, perfectly rational people inside your company who will slow-walk this initiative to death through a thousand small objections.

You need a team that isn’t debating whether to build the leading AI agent in your space. That’s settled. The only question is how.

How to Actually Execute This

If you’re going to do it, do it right:

Pick the right leader. Not your most senior architect. Your most creative engineer — the one who prototypes on weekends, who’s already been playing with agent frameworks, who sees what’s possible before it’s obvious.

Give them real resources. 10-20 engineers isn’t a side project. GPU budget, data access, the authority to make architectural decisions without committee approval.

Set a 6-month milestone. Not a deadline — a milestone. “Can this agent complete [specific task] end-to-end, autonomously, better than a human?” If yes, double down. If no, iterate or pivot.

Protect them from the org. Your VP of Sales will want to show it to prospects. Your CPO will want to “integrate the roadmap.” Your board will want a demo. Say no to all of it for at least the first 6 months.

It May Not Work. But Nothing Else Will.

I want to be honest. This is a massive bet. Taking your best engineers off the core product might not pay off. The agent might not be good enough. The market might not be ready. You might burn 12-18 months and have to fold the team back in.

But if you’re behind — really behind — the incremental approach definitely won’t work. You’re not going to close the gap with a better chatbot and a few AI-powered features sprinkled across the product.

The companies that win the next 5 years of B2B will be the ones that made this bet in 2025 and 2026. Not the ones that waited until they lost a few big deals to an AI-native competitor and then decided to act.

Especially if what you’re doing right now isn’t working. If growth has stalled. If win rates are dropping. If the product feels stuck.

The answer isn’t another planning cycle. It’s a different building.