Manchester digital transformation company ANS has appointed Ali Mustoe-Playfair as Director of Agentic Operations, a newly created role focused on accelerating its internal AI transformation and helping customers deploy AI agents in practical business settings.
The appointment sits within ANS’s stated goal of having an AI agent assisting every employee by the end of 2026. It also expands the company’s work around enterprise AI adoption, following its recognition as one of the first UK organisations to achieve Microsoft Frontier Partner status.
ANS was also named Microsoft UK Partner of the Year, with the business pointing to its delivery of AI-powered customer solutions. Mustoe-Playfair’s role is designed to turn that experience inward, embedding agentic AI across ANS’s own operations while building repeatable models for customers.
Mustoe-Playfair has been with ANS for more than five years and most recently served as Head of Business Operations. She joined the company as an Internal Sales Account Manager and has since moved through four roles, giving her a close view of how teams work across the business and where operational friction sits.
In the new position, she will focus on identifying pain points across functions and applying agentic AI to address them. ANS said the work will centre on outcomes, including process improvement, productivity gains, and practical use cases that teams can test and refine inside the business.
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.”
That Customer Zero model is becoming a central part of ANS’s approach. By applying AI inside its own workflows first, the company is building operational experience before taking those lessons into customer environments. ANS describes this as part of its wider ambition to develop as a “Frontier Firm”, embedding AI into everyday workflows to augment employees and automate routine work.
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.”
The appointment comes as more technology providers move beyond AI pilots and towards process redesign, governance, and workforce adoption. ANS is placing that work inside a dedicated operational leadership role.
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