Martha Lane Fox on why AI's future must be built by all of us

Baroness Martha Lane Fox is still clearly haunted by an incident that happened to her last year. While attending a large tech conference event in the US, she turned to a man and said, “I'm so depressed that it's 2025 and I'm one of only two women sitting in the room.” He replied, says Lane Fox, without any sense of humour: “Haven't you heard? We're done with women.”

I'm speaking to her in the green room of Tech Show London, where she's just come off stage after delivering a keynote. The audience, at least, is a healthy mix of men and women – as is the speaker line-up.

Today, Lane Fox is one of the UK's best-known female business leaders, and a figurehead in a country where fewer than 10 per cent of FTSE 100 companies are led by women, and a tiny fraction of venture-capital money makes its way to women-led businesses.

In this article, we cover:

• The near-death car crash that reshaped her career after lastminute.com
• Why she built her own AI seating-plan app and the "divide" it exposed
• How AI regulation is really being talked about in the House of Lords
• Why AI agents are becoming the new workforce and the new customer

Ignoring half of the world's population is a business failure as well as a moral one, Lane Fox points out. There are many examples of money being wasted due to product launches that didn't take female feedback into account. A recent example is Apple Health, which has been called out for failing to consider the menopause, she says. Lane Fox also points to the lack of senior female leaders working for male tech bosses such as Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman.

Lane Fox shot to fame in the late-1990s dot-com era, with her co-founder Brent Hoberman, as they scaled lastminute.com. It was an early e-commerce platform that sold travel and theatre experiences online, using pioneering techniques including dynamic pricing. It went public in 2000 at a valuation of more than £500m.

She stepped down as managing director of lastminute.com in 2003 after the company turned its first profit, roughly 18 months before it was sold. But what should have been the start of a new adventure was curtailed when Lane Fox suffered a life-changing, near-death experience.

What a serious accident taught Martha Lane Fox

A serious car accident on holiday in Morocco left Lane Fox with broken bones, and she suffered a stroke. She recovered after nearly two years in hospital but with mobility issues, and she still walks to this day with the aid of a cane. Undeterred, she has gone on to build an enviable portfolio career, indicative of her clear resolve to champion British business.

Lane Fox has also gone on to play a prominent role in public life. She is currently chancellor of The Open University, and her previous roles have included being the country's digital champion under former prime ministers Gordon Brown and David Cameron, and the president of the British Chambers of Commerce.

Earlier this year, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, appointed the tech founder as chair of the new London AI and Jobs Taskforce, helping to promote AI as part of a growth plan for the city. She'll be working with the likes of professor John Amaechi OBE, organisational psychologist and founder of APS Intelligence, and Angie Ma, co-founder of AI unicorn Faculty, as well as senior trade-union figures. And, of course, she became a baroness upon joining the House of Lords in 2013 as an independent, cross-bench peer, in recognition of her achievements across business and tech.

You can hardly think of a place more different to a tech start-up in your mind's eye than the House of Lords. No bright rooms, bean bags, open-plan desk spaces or infinite snack bars. Instead, it's a place steeped in tradition, with centuries-old ceremony and ritualised dress codes.

But it's a place no less crucial to the development of AI in society, as it will have a say on the regulation and guardrails that will accompany it. “There's an incredibly committed group of people in the Lords who think about AI regulation very deeply,” says Lane Fox. "I think the Lords is where you get more thinking sometimes than the Commons, just because the pace there is slightly different.”

Automated dinner parties

From her work with the British Chambers of Commerce, she knows that AI transformation is what British SMEs are hungry to learn about. She's getting stuck in herself, too, using AI to code her own app. “I've always been completely frustrated by seating plans,” she explains. “I have a lot of parties and I go to a lot of business events. I'm obsessed with making sure people sit down where they're having a good time. But it's very hard to do that without using technology. So, I built my own seating-plan app, hilariously.”

Her old co-founder Hoberman has been teasing her about the app, but is very keen to use it, apparently. For Lane Fox, it was a chance to put to the test all the different AI models she has been practising with. She's been using the likes of Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT, but focusing on the latest paid releases to really test the frontier.

“I think unless you are using the tools very currently, you're not really understanding what's possible," she says. "And it felt to me there's a difference between people who can see what's possible because they're using it and people who don't. That's going to be the divide increasingly over time.”

As she tells her 10-year-old twins, we'll all have access to the same tools in the world they enter as adults. “The price of initiative has collapsed; that's the fundamental truth,” she says. The cost of trying is falling, she believes, ushering in a new age of entrepreneurship.

This is all a far cry from the Martha Lane Fox of the 1990s. While building lastminute.com, she couldn't write a line of code. She used to keep a book about the Java software language on her desk, but simply to impress developers. “I've always been one removed from the actual building in terms of the technology,” she reflects, but adds that this has changed since ChatGPT arrived on the scene. “It's got us all one level closer to understanding the technicalities.”

AI leaders share one trait: humility

Lane Fox is not convinced that the UK will become an AI superpower, but she is certain of our talent for building companies. It's another reason why she's been getting more hands-on by experimenting with vibe coding.

“I think that we're going to see the world redesigned through the lens of AI,” says Lane Fox. “Though I really hate the sort of ‘Who will build the first billion-dollar start-up with one person?’ question. I just don't like that as a theme for society.”

On businesses, Lane Fox believes the ones that swiftly integrate AI to create “hybrid workforces” will come out on top. “Software used to be a tool that you plugged into your workforce,” she says. “But now it is the workforce – it's working alongside your employees.”

The most forward-thinking companies are already giving autonomous AI agents access to Slack channels and trusting them to work with other tools. And the same logic applies on the customer-facing side, for e-commerce retailers especially, she believes.

While lastminute.com found success by persuading humans to make purchasing decisions online with various tricks and techniques, the challenge now is persuading AI agents, who have essentially become the new customers. “It's not the future, it's the now,” she says. “The platform shift is substantial. AI isn't something that's out there in some weird sci-fi unreality.”

Lane Fox sits on the board of large companies as diverse as British Airways, Chanel and Euan Blair's HR business Multiverse. If there is one thing they have in common, she says, it is an appreciation that AI is “redesigning” the world before their eyes. One of the key struggles we all need to undertake as an AI-first society is not technical, she argues, but emotional. We need to embrace new tech with humility.

“Sometimes I've said to an AI, ‘Write something as though you're Martha Lane Fox – write me a Substack paragraph about the future of the workforce.’ And it's pretty freaking good! I'm not arrogant enough to think that I can't be replicated, to a degree," she says.

However, as Lane Fox herself has written in a recent Substack post, “LLMs [large language models] are extraordinary, but they remain pattern machines, not judgement engines. They miss humour, irony, face-saving formulations and veiled threats – the tiny signals on which diplomacy often turns.”

Martha Lane Fox's four lessons for leaders

Audit decisions for who's missing from the room. Lane Fox points to Apple Health overlooking the menopause as a product built without female input in the room. Before you ship, ask who wasn't consulted – not just who was.

Use the frontier tools yourself, don't just report on them. Lane Fox built her own seating-plan app and tests the latest paid releases from Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT personally. She's blunt that the gap between leaders who use AI and those who don't is “going to be the divide increasingly over time”.

Redesign the workforce around AI agents, rather than bolting them on. “Software used to be a tool that you plugged into your workforce,” she says. “But now it is the workforce.” The businesses that treat AI as a colleague with Slack access, not an add-on, will move fastest.

Stay humble about what makes you replaceable. Lane Fox has watched AI write convincingly in her own voice and doesn't pretend otherwise. Her advice is to hold onto judgement, ambiguity and reading intent – the things “pattern machines” can't do – rather than assume seniority alone is protection.