Most people overestimate what can be achieved in a year and underestimate what can be achieved in twenty. That is not a motivational poster line. It is a practical description of how real, durable change is built: quiet, repetitive actions that compound, long before anyone can see the result.
There is a story that captures this better than most.
In 1962, a British newspaper editor called Brendon Grimshaw bought a small island in the Seychelles called Moyenne Island. He did not buy it to develop it. He bought it because he could see something that was not there yet: an island that would become a living sanctuary.
And then he did the unfashionable thing. He worked.
Over decades, Grimshaw (with long-term help from René Antoine Lafortune) planted thousands of trees, cut paths, and steadily turned Moyenne into a flourishing refuge for wildlife, later secured as a protected park and national park. The transformation was not a viral moment. It was slow, physical, and mostly invisible to the outside world while it was happening.
The real lesson is compounding (and the invisible years)
The part people do not see is what happens in the invisible years.
Grimshaw did not “transform an island” in a single act. He worked at it for decades, gradually turning Moyenne into a nature reserve and ultimately securing it as a national park, a milestone that only arrived after years of persistence. That is what compounding looks like in the real world: slow inputs, accumulating quietly, until the outcome finally becomes obvious.
It is the same logic that sits behind the Thomas Edison story. The line most people know about “10,000 ways that won’t work” is repeated in many forms, but the useful lesson is not the number. It is the method. Breakthroughs that matter are usually the end product of systematic experimentation, learning from what fails, and improving relentlessly until the outcome becomes practical.
This is the common thread: long-horizon effort, disciplined iteration, and the willingness to keep going when progress is real but not yet visible.
Why this matters for VAi
That is why I use thes stories when I talk about VAi.
I started building VAi in 2009. That is 17 years ago. It did not look like a “product” for a long time. It looked like small steps. It looked like frequent dead ends. It looked like trialling software that did not cut the rub. It looked like investing in learning properly, including a university course in AI, because I wanted foundations, not just enthusiasm. And the vision was not always crisp. At times it was more like a direction of travel than a fully formed destination. But it was a vision nonetheless, and I held onto it even when the end result felt far away, out of sight.
If you only judge progress by what is immediately visible, you miss how almost all meaningful innovation actually happens. It happens below the surface, through iteration, revision, error correction, and the steady conversion of experience into a working system.
That is what I set out to build: not “AI content”, but an insolvency co-pilot that supports professional decision-making and professional documentation. A tool that helps you move faster without losing grip on risk, judgement, and accountability.
Why the smaller builder can sometimes beat the bigger players
Here is an uncomfortable truth. Individuals can do things like this precisely because they are not trapped by the same short-term financial target pressures that larger organisations live under.
Early-stage innovation rarely “brings home the bacon”. In the early years, progress is real but not always visible. The benefits are often intangible until the compounding reaches a threshold.
In a bigger firm, with quarterly targets, layers of management, and a CEO who must justify spend against immediate return, a project like this is easily labelled “non-core”, “uncertain”, or “too long-dated”, and it gets squashed while the results are still invisible. That is not a moral failing. It is a structural constraint. The system rewards what can be measured quickly and punishes what takes patience.
And that is exactly why someone with vision and persistence can sometimes do what the bigger boys cannot. Not because they are cleverer, but because they are free to keep their head down, keep plodding, and keep building through the invisible years, until the compounding finally becomes impossible to ignore.
How AI goes wrong in professional services
In insolvency and professional services generally, there is a pattern I see repeatedly:
- People treat AI like Google.
- They ask short, vague questions.
- They get a generic answer.
- They conclude “it’s not that useful”.
That is not a tool problem. It is a usage model problem.
Professionals do not need “information”. They need decision support: structured thinking, options, risks, sequencing, and documentation that stands up to scrutiny. They need help producing first drafts that are genuinely fit for purpose, and then they need to apply human judgement to refine, challenge, and sign off.
Used properly, AI compresses time. It reduces friction. It removes blank-page paralysis. It makes it easier to be consistent, especially under pressure.
But it does not remove responsibility.
Safeguards matter, because the stakes are real
The win is not automation for its own sake. The win is better outcomes delivered more efficiently, with a stronger audit trail of how you arrived at decisions.
That is why any serious use of AI in insolvency needs safeguards:
- Human in the loop: you remain accountable for advice, decisions, and communications.
- Evidence discipline: outputs must be checked against the actual facts and the governing framework.
- Confidentiality and data hygiene: use appropriate controls and avoid careless disclosure.
- Professional scepticism: treat AI as a high-powered assistant, not an authority.
The point is not to hand thinking over to a machine. The point is to reclaim time, reduce friction, and improve consistency, while keeping professional judgement where it belongs: with you.
The visibility threshold is coming
Most people only notice a forest once it exists.
And in exactly the same way, most firms will only notice the competitive shift from AI once the gap becomes uncomfortable:
- one firm producing better client communications faster
- one IP consistently documenting decisions more cleanly
- one team standardising quality across cases without doubling headcount
- one practice freeing time for higher-value work rather than drowning in repeatable admin
By the time that shift is widely “seen”, it will already be harder to catch up quickly, because the advantage will have compounded.
A practical challenge (the plant one tree”test)
For the next 10 working days, use VAi (or an equivalent AI co-pilot) for one defined task per day, such as:
- drafting a non-standard letter where tone and structure matter
- producing a file note that documents judgement and rationale
- mapping a case strategy into options, risks, and next actions
- generating a first-pass stakeholder communication and then improving it with your expertise
Do not outsource your judgement. Use the tool to accelerate your thinking, tighten your structure, and reduce wasted time. Track how long it takes, and whether the quality improves after your review.
That is how capability is built: small, repeated actions that compound.
The “end game” is not a finish line. It is stewardship.
Did Grimshaw ever reach a final “end game”? Not really. Yes, he achieved a landmark outcome when Moyenne was secured as a national park. But nature is not a project you complete. It is a living system you continue to look after.
And that is exactly the right frame for VAi too.
I am proud of what I have built because it exists where it did not exist before, and because it was built through persistence, learning, and professional seriousness rather than noise. But I am not “finished”, because tools like this are never finished. They improve by increments: new edge cases, better workflows, stronger safeguards, clearer outputs, tighter alignment to what practitioners actually need under pressure.
Like the island, the point is not a dramatic finish line. The point is continued progress, with care, discipline, and a long horizon.
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