Digital transformation is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. AI agents can double staff capacity, vibe coding turns ideas into applications in a matter of days, and competitive threats can come from unexpected sources, such as a young developer working behind his laptop. Organizations are faced with a choice: move fast or fall behind.

The speed is incomparable to the situation we are familiar with. After two decades at Microsoft, where he led the public sector, partner channels, and consulting services in Australia and New Zealand, George Stavrakakis states, “I have never seen technological changes happen so quickly.” Stavrakakis made this statement just four weeks after taking on his role as global CEO of Rapid Circle, during an interview. “Moore’s Law states that computing power doubles every two years, but this is now happening every few months.”

With more than 30 years of international experience, he has led during multiple technological tipping points, from early digital transformation and cloud to the current AI wave.

Rapid Circle, founded 17 years ago by Harold Punter, has 450 employees in the Netherlands, Australia, and India. The company built its reputation in cloud transformation and won multiple Partner of the Year awards as a Microsoft partner.

To help organizations navigate the fast-moving AI landscape with confidence, Rapid Circle offers Chief AI Officer as a Service. This fractional leadership model gives customers access to expertise in AI strategy, governance, and adoption without the need for a full-time internal appointment.

Rapid Circle’s approach combines technical implementation with structured change management and adoption programs. The company doesn’t just deliver the technology and then leave. It integrates teams at customer sites to build skills, ensure adoption, and establish governance frameworks. “We don’t just do the tech,” Stavrakakis emphasizes. “We also do change management and adoption. We do the human elements that are really important.”

This innovation phase is all about adoption. The development of AI is currently limited mainly by the pace of GPU and NPU innovation. What will happen when quantum computing is deployed at scale is pure speculation. But the first signs are impressive: calculations that seemed to take forever have been reduced to minutes.

The way Rapid Circle uses AI internally is an example of this. The CFO demonstrates AI-enabled forecasting to client CFOs. Legal uses it for policy tracking. People and Culture applies it to engagement analyses. “We are like a customer,” says Stavrakakis. “Our data, our governance, our security, our privacy are incredibly important to us.”

Organizations are beginning to manage AI agents in the same way as human resources. Centuria, an Australian asset manager with US$20 billion in assets, is building agents that personalize office space according to customer needs without requiring site visits. A mortgage brokerage service is doubling its workforce with 100 multilingual agents who handle Asian market expansion using voice and natural language, with access to mortgage policies from multiple banks.

Vibe coding — the use of natural language to create applications—can compress development cycles from months to weeks or days. “Executives see it in real time.

We conceive and create in the same time frame.” The global CFO holds 45-minute client meetings in which applications are built during the conversation.

The RE Group, a 100-year-old publishing company in Australia, uses Copilot agents to digitize PDF content and extract intellectual property for new product development. Quooker, the manufacturer of the boiling water tap, is building a data platform with full visibility of production facilities and plans to add an agentic layer that can position the tap as a central point for home personalization.

The most immediate risk that many organizations face is unintentional. “In the Netherlands, there are currently millions of people using ChatGPT,” Stavrakakis points out. “Many of our customers’ employees may be releasing sensitive and private data into the world.”

“Who uses ChatGPT?” Stavrakakis asks during presentations to boards. When hands go up, his immediate response is, “Then you have an immediate risk.” The solution is not to block innovation but to create secure environments. Microsoft Copilot offers the same capabilities within the boundaries of enterprise security with sovereignty protection.

During his second week as CEO, Stavrakakis met with the company’s bid manager, expecting to discuss how AI automates responses to tenders. The young man—a former recruiter with no technical background—showed him a website he had built in a week using vibe coding and YouTube tutorials. The site monitors real estate prices for vacant properties in Amsterdam.

“That’s exactly what’s happening in the market,” says Stavrakakis. “Nowadays, your competitor could be a young person experimenting behind their laptop.” Traditional barriers have been broken down, and it’s up to organizations to move quickly enough to keep up.

Would you like to learn more about George Stavrakakis’ vision on AI, cloud, and the acceleration of digital transformation? Read the full interview with CEO George Stavrakakis on the website of Het Financiële Dagblad.