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The Newtonian age of marketing - the age of the funnel, the persona, and the "is" - may be over. We are living in a world of Potentia, where consumers exist in superposition, where influence operates through resonance and entanglement, and where friction destroys value faster than advertising can create it.

A marketing consultant in Glasgow, Edinburgh and across Scotland is someone who helps businesses figure out how to grow.That’s the simple version. The more detailed version is that they help companies spot opportunities, solve marketing challenges, and build strategies that drive measurable results. They’re problem solvers who combine strategy, creativity, and execution to make things happen.

Howard Marks is not a passing commentator. He co founded Oaktree Capital Management and built his name by navigating credit cycles with a cool head. His memos are written for serious investors who want judgement rather than slogans. Warren Buffett has previously said they are the first thing he reads when they land in his inbox, which gives a sense of how widely they are respected.

Over the years building and working with Scottish SMEs, I've seen this pattern repeat itself. According to Scottish Enterprise, a large share of growing businesses cite cash flow as their primary constraint, yet most can't pinpoint where the money's actually going. A good business growth advisor doesn't just repeat what you already know. They find the bleed you can't see and help you face the uncomfortable truths before failure.

Heading into 2026, any business still caught in this extended experimentation phase should treat itself as officially behind. The window to establish structural competitive advantages is closing. Future success depends less on chasing the latest model and much more on adopting a systemic, enterprise-wide approach.

Poor inventory alone steals up to 11 percent of annual revenue (Firework, 2025). You are not growing if you are leaking. Live dashboards deliver 30 % faster cash-flow pivots (The Management Journal, 2025). This guide shows you where to press the stop-tap, without hiring a data-science team.

The boardroom conversation around artificial intelligence has, until now, fixated on model capabilities and upfront licence fees. This narrow lens is proving dangerously inadequate. Across FTSE 350 companies and mid-market PLCs, a silent cost escalation is underway, one driven not by the AI models themselves but, by the context they consume. Every document ingested, every customer interaction logged, every agentic workflow executed: each carries a chain of token consumption,

Recent research by NBER economists suggests these AI agents in particular, could drive a "Coasean singularity," a point where transaction costs fall towards zero, radically reshaping how markets function. In essence, tasks like finding information, negotiating deals, and enforcing contracts which are traditionally costly frictions in commerce, may become nearly instantaneous and costless.

This article focuses on data and technology. It reflects what we are seeing inside real organisations. It adds balanced advice so you can act without buying into hype.

Most leadership teams cannot articulate which they are pursuing. Or worse, they pursue all three simultaneously without acknowledging the different cultural infrastructures each requires. Productivity demands training and enablement. Automation requires trust and transparent communication about displacement. Opportunity needs permission to experiment and tolerance for failure. When you try to do all three at once without cultural foundations, you get confusion, resistance, an

The next generation of consultants must be builders as well as thinkers. They need to understand how these systems perceive, decide, and evolve. They must know how to govern them, not just advise around them. That shift demands a new literacy, the ability to translate technical behaviour into business language. A good consultant should be able to explain why an agent made a choice, how feedback altered its reasoning, and what governance keeps it accountable.

Are we in an AI bubble? Evidence in 2025 points to a large investment boom with visible froth, but not yet a confirmed bubble. The pattern mirrors past infrastructure overbuilds such as the railways and fibre optics, where capacity arrived before demand, valuations overshot reality, and corrections followed. Those corrections were painful but productive, leaving behind assets that enabled long-term growth.