ANS names Ali Mustoe-Playfair as Agentic Operations Chief

ANS has appointed Ali Mustoe-Playfair as Director of Agentic Operations, the first role of its kind at the company.

The Manchester-based digital transformation provider created the position to focus on its internal use of artificial intelligence and to help customers adopt AI agents for specific business outcomes. It has set a target for every employee to have support from an AI agent by the end of 2026.

Mustoe-Playfair has worked at ANS for more than five years and most recently served as Head of Business Operations. She joined as an Internal Sales Account Manager and has held four roles, giving her experience across different parts of the organisation.

Her appointment reflects ANS's decision to treat AI adoption as an operational issue as well as a technical one. Her remit will focus on identifying pain points across departments and introducing AI tools into day-to-day processes where they can solve defined problems.

This builds on ANS's Customer Zero model, under which it uses its own business as a test case for AI deployment before advising clients. The approach gives it direct experience of the organisational, process and cultural changes involved in rolling out AI systems.

ANS has also recently received recognition from Microsoft for its work in the market. It said it was among the first UK organisations to achieve Microsoft Frontier Partner status and was also named Microsoft UK Partner of the Year, which it linked to its AI-related customer projects.

Internal focus

The creation of the Director of Agentic Operations role suggests ANS wants to formalise and expand its internal programme. Rather than placing the initiative solely within a technical or product team, it has put an operations executive in charge of linking business needs with AI deployment.

In practice, Mustoe-Playfair will work across functions to help teams test AI in everyday workflows and share lessons from those trials. The aim is to build a culture in which staff can experiment with the technology in practical settings rather than see it as a separate specialist project.

ANS also linked the appointment to its Frontier Firm strategy, a term it uses for organisations that embed AI into routine work to support employees and automate repetitive tasks. The emphasis of the new role is on how work is organised and how staff use the tools, not simply on acquiring new software.

Mustoe-Playfair said the starting point should be business problems rather than the technology itself.

"Agentic AI shouldn't start with technology, it should start with the challenges businesses are trying to solve. My focus is on understanding those challenges and translating them into practical AI solutions that genuinely improve how ANS and other organisations operate."

"By embracing the Customer Zero approach in our AI journey, we're able to experiment, learn and gain invaluable hands-on experience. This empowers us to guide our customers in adopting agentic AI confidently, while demonstrating the transformative potential of embedding AI across everyday workflows," she said.

Customer demand

The appointment comes as technology service providers seek to move beyond broad claims about AI readiness and towards work tied to measurable business use cases. For firms such as ANS, that means showing not only that systems can be deployed, but also that staff can use them in established workflows and that organisations can adapt their processes around them.

ANS said Mustoe-Playfair's experience in business operations made her well suited to that stage of adoption. Her previous role involved translating organisational challenges into strategic improvements, experience that will now be applied to AI-led changes across the business.

Chief Executive Officer Richard Thompson said many businesses had moved to a different stage in their use of AI.

"As organisations move from AI experimentation to AI Realisation, the challenge becomes less about the technology itself and more about how businesses evolve their processes and culture".

"Ali brings a deep understanding of how organisations, including our own, actually operate, and her ability to translate this into practical solutions will be key as we continue our journey as a Frontier Firm and help our customers navigate the opportunities of agentic AI," he said.