Najoh Tita-Reid was tasked with supercharging growth across a $30 billion division of the Mars global conglomerate. Unbeknown to her, AI was running 25 per cent of the race – and outperforming the status quo. Tita-Reid quit to learn the new rules of the road.
For Najoh Tita-Reid, the last year of rapid AI adoption has delivered an awakening that stopped her in her tracks.
“There’s a bullet train that we know called AI that is racing – and either you’re on it, you’re watching it go by, or you could be at risk of missing it,” Tita-Reid told the audience at the Cairns Crocodile festival this week.
The US-based executive’s concern was that even at a multi-national organisation that was embracing AI, there was learning and opportunity for growth that was being left on the table.
“Someone sat me down and took me through the tech stack that my team and agencies were running on my behalf,” says Tita-Reid. “They showed me the tools that were powerful, that I’d never seen, the decisions being made by people and systems that I didn’t know existed, producing output I was accountable for.”
Estimating that she was completely in the dark on 25 per cent of the work that was being done, Tita-Reid took matters into her own hands. For the next six months, she spent time with AI trainers between 4am and 7am each morning, before the workday began.
“I did that because at work I wasn’t able to use the tools that I had access to at work. I wanted to understand the entire ecosystem. And once I started I couldn’t stop looking, I couldn’t unsee what I had seen.”
What she saw changed her perspective forever. Tita-Reid realised the part of the growth ‘machine’ that wasn’t visible was actually the part that was winning.
The “missing 25 per cent” was an ‘autonomous shadow layer.’ By empowering her teams and agencies to seek “efficiency” and “optimisation,” she had inadvertently sanctioned a system where AI agents were now making tactical moves – buying media, synthesising content, and shifting budgets – at speeds that bypassed the executive approval loop. And crucially, this autonomous layer was excelling, outperforming the status quo and the manual strategies she was actively overseeing.
That epiphany led to a career and life-changing decision.
“I left one of the best jobs that I’ve ever had,” Tita-Reid says. “Not to stop driving, but just at this moment, to ensure that the car getting built actually gets us where we want to go.”
She doubled-down on investigating how AI can be used to supercharge growth.
“I watched two people in a coffee shop spend 48 hours on workflows that used to take my entire team,” she says. “My mouth was open the entire time… because I was watching it real time and live.”
In the former Mars C-suiter’s estimation, to be a master of growth in the future, one cannot just be a “driver” but must become a “race engineer” – someone who understands the sensors, the data points, and the engine well enough to know when to trust the machine and when to override it.
“Productivity is a race to the bottom. Growth is the only race worth running,” she told the Cairns audience.
“The ones who will get cut are not going to be the ones who work fast enough,” she predicted. “They’re going to be the ones who can’t tell the difference between real growth and the appearance of productivity.”
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