ANS has appointed Ali Mustoe-Playfair as Director of Agentic Operations. This newly created role is designed to accelerate the company’s internal AI transformation, support its goal of having an AI agent assisting every employee by the end of 2026, and helping customers deploy AI agents in practical, outcome-driven ways.
The appointment builds on ANS’s growing leadership in AI adoption. The company was recently recognised as one of the first UK organisations to achieve Microsoft Frontier Partner status, reflecting its ability to help businesses move from AI readiness to real-world impact. ANS was also named Microsoft UK Partner of the Year in large part due to its innovation and delivery of AI-powered customer solutions.
Ali brings more than five years of experience at ANS, most recently serving as Head of Business Operations, where she focused on translating organisational challenges into strategic improvements. Since joining as an Internal Sales Account Manager, she has progressed through four roles, building strong relationships across the business and developing a deep understanding of how it operates.
In her new role, Ali will focus on embedding agentic AI into ANS’s internal processes to help its teams understand how AI agents can solve real business challenges. Rather than approaching agentic AI purely as a technical initiative, Ali will identify pain points affecting different functions, and work to deliver solutions that drive measurable outcomes.
As part of this, ANS is expanding on its Customer Zero approach, embedding AI across its own workflows to gain first-hand experience of enterprise AI adoption and develop practical insights to guide other UK businesses on their AI journeys. This also supports ANS’s broader strategy to evolve as a “Frontier Firm” – organisations that embed AI across everyday workflows to augment employees, automate routine work and unlock new levels of productivity.
Ali will also support ANS’s culture of continuous improvement, helping teams across the business to learn, experiment with AI in practical ways, and share what works.
Ali Mustoe-Playfair, Director of Agentic Operations at ANS, said: “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.”
Richard Thompson, CEO at ANS, said: “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.”