In From Hype to Habit, the Six & Flow CEO and co-authors Adam Aigbokhae and Aimane Ben M Hand challenge how businesses measure AI success and introduce the FLAIR model.
Manchester, United Kingdom (PRUnderground) November 10th, 2026
Grand Publishers today publishes From Hype to Habit: An operating model for AI that lasts, by Richard Wood, Adam Aigbokhae and Aimane Ben M Hand of growth consultancy Six & Flow. Launched at GROWTH:SUMMIT:26 at The Albert Hall in Manchester, the book argues that an AI assistant can function as designed yet fail to change how a business operates. It introduces FLAIR, a five-phase operating model for leaders seeking measurable business value from AI.
The book is written for what its authors call "the person who has stopped being excited about AI and started being responsible for it". Its starting point is a problem many leadership teams will recognise. Assistants are built and launched, the output arrives, and nobody acts on it. The authors describe this as quiet failure: programmes that do not collapse, but drift out of use while they continue to consume budget.
From Hype to Habit sets that problem against the research. It cites the MIT NANDA report on what it called the GenAI divide, published in August 2025, which found that around 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots fail to deliver measurable financial impact. The authors are careful about what that figure means: not that the pilots failed outright, but that they produced no measurable return. They also draw on McKinsey's State of AI research, in which only about 6% of organisations fall into the high-performer group attributing 5% or more of EBIT to AI.
The authors argue that the difference is rarely the technology and usually the structure around it. "AI does not improve broken processes. It replicates them faster and at scale, which usually makes them worse, not better," they write.
FLAIR answers that with five phases in a fixed order: Foundation, Leverage, Activation, Iteration and Realisation. Foundation checks whether data, processes, ownership, governance and capability are ready. Leverage chooses fewer priorities and pushes them deeper. Activation scopes and tests assistants, including a period in shadow mode, before they go into real workflows. Iteration keeps them useful after launch, and Realisation is where they become part of how the business runs. The phases form a repeating cycle, and each one exists because of a failure mode the authors kept seeing in client work.
Alongside the framework, the book provides ten working artefacts, from the FLAIR Scorecard and Use Case Prioritisation Matrix to the ROI Calculator, Assistant Brief, Iteration Review and Measurement Scorecard, with a One-Page AI Plan that sits above them. A composite professional services firm, Marlow Partners, is followed over eighteen months to show the artefacts in use. Readers can try the FLAIR Scorecard for free at flairframework.ai.
FLAIR emerged from Six & Flow's client work between 2022 and 2026. The agency was founded in Manchester in 2015 and has worked on revenue operations, CRM implementation and digital transformation, primarily in the upper mid-market. The book is open about the framework's testing base, which runs from professional services firms of around 100 people to technology businesses in the low thousands. "Done well, Foundation is the cheapest insurance an AI programme can buy," the authors write.
From Hype to Habit: An operating model for AI that lasts is published by Grand Publishers and can be pre-ordered at flairframework.ai/buy-the-book. More about FLAIR and its tools is available at flairframework.ai.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Richard Wood is the founder and CEO of Six & Flow, a growth consultancy operating across three continents that uses technology and process to simplify the problems that hold businesses back. With an academic background in digital innovation, he has spent more than 20 years advising clients on growth and operations. He created the FLAIR framework because he believes AI only pays off once it becomes part of how people work every day.
Adam Aigbokhae is Director of Strategy at Six & Flow, specialising in systems architecture, CRM infrastructure and operational transformation. With more than a decade of experience, he designs the connected data, processes and automation that help organisations operate efficiently and scale.
Aimane Ben M Hand leads AI and Innovation at Six & Flow, helping boards and executive teams move beyond pilots to AI that changes how the business runs. His implementations across sectors, from logistics to professional services, helped shape the FLAIR framework at the heart of the book.
