Every MSP and SI is racing to badge itself “AI first”. After nearly thirty years running Brennan, Dave Stevens argues that order is back-to-front.

I get to see a lot of pitches and these days, most have identikit headlines: “AI first”, “Operationalise AI”, or some variant of the two. It’s the loudest drumbeat in our industry and it’s been thumping for a year straight.

I’ve run Brennan for nearly three decades. In that time, I’ve watched our industry try on a lot of new outfits, spanning everything from Software-Defined-Networking and Big Data to cloud and zero trust …the list goes on. Some were, and remain, essential while others were fashion.

AI is different, earning its moment and some. While the others reshaped the plumbing (where compute ran, who ran it, how it scaled, how you defended it), AI puts intelligence inside it, accelerating true innovation.

But the way many are bolting it on tells you a lot about who’s been paying attention, and who’s dancing to the drumbeat.

The sequence is important. To my mind, most have it backwards.

The quarter that changed the question

Over the Christmas break of 2025, a lot shifted. AI took a capability step that made the previous 18 months blush by comparison. Suddenly, everyone felt as if they’d been gifted superpowers. By the time businesses came back in late January, the ground had moved.

Customers went quiet, tech investment plans that had been green in December were red by March, and the first three months of 2026 (I call it the ‘Claude Quarter’) were among the toughest our business has faced in a long time. I think most in our industry would echo that sentiment.

The temptation in moments like that is to chase everything and hustle harder. And we didn’t want for trying. But what that quarter really needed was for us to take proper stock of what had changed.

For much of our existence, Brennan has innovated as much on instinct as we have by listening to our customers and the market. And fronted by good people with sound judgement, it’s mostly worked, steering us to build a 1,000+ strong business with a national footprint.

“We’ll never stop listening. But instinct has a shelf life. As soon as a business gets bigger, ‘business-as-usual' tends to dominate while innovation falls away. And when the ground shifts the way it had, instinct can’t keep pace.”

Dave Stevens, Managing Director, Brennan

The obvious application of AI was personal productivity. Everyone was doing just that. But to me, the real question was how we’d apply AI to give our customers a genuine edge.

The lesson from my saddle

I ride a bike. Not as fast as I’d like, but fast enough. And as every rider eventually learns, no bike in the world can beat the rider who’s put the hours in.

“Equipment sharpens a habit. It doesn’t replace it. AI is the sleekest bike anyone’s ever built. But what it can do for a business depends on whether the habit underneath is worth sharpening.”

Dave Stevens, Managing Director, Brennan

To my mind, the real problem to solve was innovation. AI had just handed our engineers and developers a serious toolkit. Blazing fast, it opened work that wouldn’t have been attempted a year earlier. Most businesses (Brennan included) had been running an innovation model built for the older toolkit.

That was the thing to rebuild. Everything else, including how we applied AI, would fall out of getting that right.

Innovation first, AI second. In that order, and no other.

That’s when our Innovation Foundry started to form: a purpose-built engine, run by a dedicated team whose mission is to deliver business innovation and IT services fit for the AI era, with AI powering the process.

Brennan’s Innovation Foundry: our innovation crucible

The seeds were sown in late December. I stood up the Innovation Foundry to test the theory in April, staffed by twenty experts from across the business.

I’d sketched out stage gates for how the group would work: Concept. Design. Build. Deploy. The full innovation sequence, exactly the way textbooks teach.

Our new head of the Brennan Innovation Foundry, Dean Robertshaw, stepped up to the challenge and looked at how we could use AI’s capabilities, starting with the proposed stage gates.

The gates I’d drawn up were the expected processes a business uses to make sure innovation is done properly. Dean’s version handed those steps to AI: concept to working code, with no one slogging away on the documents in between. That’s the new order, put to work.

Every step of every project runs on one call: human or AI? Get honest with the answer and the pace lifts. That’s ‘Innovation first’ in a nutshell. Fudge the answer and the broken bits just ship faster.

What our new habit has made

Three months in, and the Foundry has generated more innovation than Brennan had accumulated in the three years prior.

Take our Skills Marketplace. Thirty-plus capabilities live already, each one ingested, evaluated and co-built by the Brennan Innovation Foundry, each one ready for users to run with.

“What used to take a scoping conversation, a statement of work, a project kick-off and a delivery phase now just needs an activation.”

Dave Stevens, Managing Director, Brennan

Picture a large enterprise customer running an annual all-staff hackathon – a worthy exercise, no question. They leave the room with 500+ ideas and no way to work out which ones were worth building.

That’s the shape of problem our Innovation Tool solves for. It’s what we use to run the Innovation Foundry process end-to-end, from Submit through to Ship. AI reads each submission inside 30 seconds, scores effort against impact and recommends the next best action.

An approver reads the AI’s verdict alongside the raw idea and gates it forward, or back. AI drafts the spec and an engineer signs it off before code is written. The build agent works to the spec and posts progress to the sprint board. At the end, the original submitter gets credit on the rollout note. Our teams approve at every stage, delegating to AI to amplify the quality, volume and velocity of the output.

The AI never ships without us, and five hundred blue sky concepts become fifteen worth funding, in an afternoon.

Now none of this was for our own fun. Although it absolutely has been.

“We rebuilt the way we innovate because customers deserve partners who’ve done the work on themselves before pitching a vision to them. And if we can’t apply this to ourselves, we’ve no business advising you on yours.”

Dave Stevens, Managing Director, Brennan

And that, to me, is what AI-first pitches miss.

Two tells worth watching for

To any partner or internal team claiming AI leadership, there are two questions I’d ask.

One. Ask them to show you the innovation they shipped last quarter and point at the thing customers are using today. If it’s only a demo or a roadmap, they’re running a facade.

Two. Ask them to explain the process that produced it. If they can only walk you through who worked on it, or if the process lives in one person’s head, what you’re looking at is a lucky one-off. AI can’t make a one-off repeatable, only a process can. AI then pushes its pace.

Get the order right

Brennan turns 30 next year.

My time running and growing this business has taught me that the market rewards those who work out what the big moments really call for, invest in getting the order right, and build the habit that meets it.

“Right now, that means putting innovation first. AI is powerful. Powerful tools need a habit worth sharpening. Building that habit is our work.”

Dave Stevens, Managing Director, Brennan

So, if you’re anywhere near the front of an AI conversation right now (leading it, buying into it, funding it, or trying to work out where to put your next dollar), ask these in this order.

What’s the innovation habit? Then, where does AI fit?

Get those right and I reckon we’ll all be in decent shape for whatever comes next. Brennan included.