Agility Will Help Founders Navigate Industry Changes

Your strategy must be flexible enough to change direction quickly, and your company has to move fast enough to seize the next wave before it passes.

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Founders often talk about long-term strategy as if steady planning can outpace market change. But every industry today is being rewritten in real time.

• Payments infrastructures are shifting into AI agents.
• Video distribution is fragmenting across platforms.
• Advertising is moving from “interruptive” to “embedded.”

In this kind of environment, long-range planning matters, just not in the rigid way that many imagine.

Your strategy must be flexible enough to change direction quickly, and your company has to move fast enough to seize the next wave before it passes. Here are five lessons for founders.

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1. Find your industry’s window

Highly regulated categories like finance, healthcare, and transportation often look impenetrable from the outside. But every sector experiences moments when innovation outruns regulation. These windows are brief, but they create room for entirely new business models to emerge.

I’ve lived this firsthand. I’ve capitalized on market windows twice - first with Borderfree in ecommerce and later with Payoneer in fintech.

Payoneer emerged during a narrow moment when cross-border prepaid infrastructure hadn’t yet been fully defined. By the time regulation matured, we already had customers, traction, and credibility. We weren’t smarter - we were simply early, attentive, and willing to move fast.

The founder lesson is straightforward: enter early, execute quickly while the window is open, and be ready to adapt once the rules catch up.

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2. AI Agents will rewrite the payments and ecommerce industry

We’re approaching a reality where purchases won’t happen through websites or checkout flows, but through AI assistants acting on the customer’s behalf. Soon, instructions like, “Plan my ski trip - optimize for price, find discounts, and book everything,” will set off a chain of machine-driven decisions. When that becomes mainstream, the payments stack changes entirely. Authentication, settlement, user experience, risk scoring, and interchange will shift from user-driven clicks to automated orchestration.

Founders in fintech should plan for this now. Companies not deeply embedded in the AI-native layer of commerce may find themselves pushed to the margins.

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3. AI will also transform content and advertising

A parallel revolution is happening in video. The cost of producing and distributing content has collapsed. Creators, armed with a camera, AI video production tools, and a point of view, are reaching audiences that rival national broadcasters.

The biggest shift isn’t distribution - it’s monetization. AI has opened the door to entirely new advertising models. We saw this early at Linguana by studying creators’ workflows, revenue stresses, and global audiences. Eventually, a pattern emerged. Brands wanted localized reach; creators wanted more revenue without more work; viewers trusted messages that came through the creator rather than around them. That insight led us toward a new format of advertising: AI-driven, hyper-localized brand integrations placed directly inside videos, in the creator’s own voice, and perfectly suited to their audience’s interests and their preferred language.

This advertising is not an interruption, not a banner; it’s a natural embedded moment, swapped seamlessly per market. This only became possible once AI reached the point where emotional fidelity and authenticity could be preserved. And authenticity matters: If the message doesn’t feel like it genuinely comes from the creator, it fails.

The broader lesson for founders is simple: When an industry changes this quickly, you cannot rely on the plans you made a year ago.

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4. Being a chameleon is an essential skill

Great founders aren’t rigid visionaries - they’re chameleons. They stay highly attuned to market signals and are willing to rethink the company’s core direction when the environment shifts beneath their feet. Many of the strongest startups only found their true value proposition after a year or two of exploration. The founders driving them forward were paying attention to what was actually happening, not what they hoped would happen.

This kind of adaptability starts with honest reflection. Ask yourself whether your company would survive if the market changed dramatically overnight. Consider which parts of your product will need reinvention long before they break. Imagine what you would build if you were starting from zero today. If these questions feel uncomfortable, it’s often a sign that your strategy has become static. Agility requires that founders revisit their assumptions frequently enough that reinvention feels natural, not disruptive.

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5. Agility must be a cultural habit

True agility is rooted in culture long before it shows up in strategy. It begins with building teams that are comfortable operating amid uncertainty and leaders who treat course correction as a strength rather than an admission of failure. Companies committed to agility make a habit of examining sunk costs honestly, moving on quickly from ideas that no longer serve the mission, and hiring people who thrive in dynamic environments rather than static structures.

When adaptability becomes part of the organization’s identity, strategy gains flexibility. Teams iterate faster, leaders make decisions with clearer judgment, and the company becomes far more resilient to external shocks. Cultural agility is the foundation that makes strategic agility possible.

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The Bottom Line

We’re living through rolling revolutions. AI is redefining how we buy, how we create, and how we advertise. Strategy still matters, but adaptability matters more. Build a company that can change shape as fast as the world around it.

The founders who win in this environment aren’t the ones who predict the future; they’re the ones who can move with it.

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This article was first published on Inc.com