Episode 11: McKinsey Got Hacked, McDonald’s Writes Python & We’re Big in Uzbekistan 🍺
Week 11. Eleven weeks of consistent podcasting — a personal consistency record for both of them. 🥳
The podcast now has listeners in Venezuela, Malaysia, Kenya, Ukraine, Vietnam and Uzbekistan. Almost certainly the same person with a very well-travelled VPN. Hello to all our world listeners.
Kieron stopped off at Neil’s northern castle on the way back from a Housing gig in Glasgow. He took the sunshine with him when he left.
McKinsey got hacked — and it’s a warning for everyone running RAG AI 🔐 Donald WhatsApped Kieron the news at 7am. McKinsey’s internal RAG system, Lilly, was breached in March — 100,000 documents, 57,000 user account details, and the prompts, all exposed through 22 open endpoints. Probably an AI tool that spotted their JSON file formats and quietly helped itself. The lesson: if you’re running RAG AI without regular penetration testing, you’re hoping for the best. Leading AI runs pen tests constantly. Donald spotted and locked down a minor exposed endpoint the same morning. That’s what vigilance actually looks like.
Prompt injection — and the McDonald’s Python developer 🍟 Prompt injection is the art of slipping instructions into an AI to make it do things it shouldn’t. The McKinsey version is terrifying. The McDonald’s version is brilliant: a customer asked their support AI to help him finish a Python script before ordering chicken nuggets. It obliged. He announced he was cancelling his Claude subscription. £20 a month versus unlimited nuggets. With large fries and a milkshake.
Pricing — transparency, tokens and not getting ripped off 💷 The strategy session in Penrith produced a really important conversation. Token pricing is confusing, opaque, and vaguely terrifying (see the £150k overnight bill from Episode 10). Neil’s take: be radically transparent. Fixed costs, consumption costs, kill switches, and using mini models that are 10 times cheaper. It’s the right thing to do so customers understand what they’re buying. Even if his mates it the pub call him a “soft lefty”.
New wins 🎉 A new council social care customer. And a trade body confirmed on Wednesday that KnowledgeFlow’s Policy Buddy is being deployed across 10 member organisations. Shared knowledge, shared learning, shared insights across a geographically dispersed group. The kind of national change infrastructure Kieron and Neil have spent careers building, now with AI baked in.
Kieron at the Share Annual Conference 🏴 Kieron spoke at the Share Annual Conference and Awards in Glasgow. A packed room and an honest conversation about what Copilot can and can’t do. Most people in the room were using AI to summarise documents. Which is fine, but it’s also the worst way to let AI bias creep in unchecked, because Copilot doesn’t know who you are, what you care about, or what a good summary looks like for your organisation. KnowledgeFlow does.
AI observability — the Glastonbury of the AI world 🔬 Kieron and Neil are heading to the Gartner Data Analytics Summit in a couple of weeks. They describe it as the Glastonbury of the AI world. Kieron is on a mission to track down Wilco Van Ginkel, Senior VP at Gartner, who he mat last year. Wilco’s latest research is on live AI observability and evaluation, which is exactly what Leading AI is currently building. The key insight: you can’t test AI output like a calculator. You mark it like an essay. And you need to keep testing live because model drift happens. Wilco, brace yourself.
The Cumbria Clock Company, repairers of Big Ben, get a heartfelt farewell shoutout. Keith the pirate clockmaker may yet appear as a guest.
Two mates. A bar. Thirty years of business between them. And all they want to talk about is AI.
Pull up a stool, we’ll get the beers in. 🍺
Transcript
This week in Leading AI… Episode #11
Neil Watkins
Right, shall we get this pantomime horse of a podcast underway for week 11, Kieron, for week 11.
Kieron White
Week 11, we are now we are now podcast influencers, surely if we for veterans.
Neil Watkins
I don’t know about any of that stuff, but let me tell you some things, some interesting things that I found out this week. We have got people on our podcast from a far away as Venezuela,
Kieron White
Well, go Venezuela.
Neil Watkins
Malaysia, Kenya, Ukraine, Vietnam, and Uzbekistan. Isn’t that brilliant? I know. That’s right. Well, I’m not sure we’re big. I think we’ve got one listener there. So
Kieron White
Yes, yes.
Oh, come on, Uzbekistan. We’ve always wanted to be big in Uzbekistan.
Haha.
Brilliant!
Ohh.
Neil Watkins
Hello to our listener in Uzbekistan, but yeah, yeah, we’re on, we’re on our world mission, Kieron. We’re getting there, we’re getting there.
Kieron White
Haha.
Yes, Salaam.
Good. World dominating podcast with our one listener in several countries. Well, let’s hope that we only keep on improving that.
Neil Watkins
Okay.
What?
I do wonder if it’s the one we’ve got one globetrotter who’s just going from country to country.
Kieron White
Probably. VPNs. It’s probably people downloading it from different VPNs just to make us look good.
Ha.
Neil Watkins
Anyway, it used to be greatly. So anyway, thank you to everybody who has listened in so far. And if you’re back for a repeat, then crikey, you are a glutton for punishment. So thanks very much.
Kieron White
Indeed. Yes. So I was at your, I was staying at your castle last night. It was a splendid, a splendid visit to your northern castle and what wonderful sunny weather and flowers and blooms.
Neil Watkins
DO.
Well…
Well, it was since you since you’ve gone, it’s all gone completely cloudy, so you’ve taken the sun down south with you.
Kieron White
No problem.
Yeah, well, it’s definitely sunny here, so yeah, it’s followed followed me down, which is, you know, how it should be.
Neil Watkins
Well, I won’t be sitting in the beer garden of the pub this afternoon because it’ll be too chilly. I’ll have to sit inside.
Kieron White
That was very lovely. The horse from Farrier was a very fine pub and wonderful dinner yesterday. So a shout out if you find yourself in Penrith to our listener, then you can get a look, but not when Neil wants to go in because we don’t want to be taking his favourite seat.
Neil Watkins
Ohh.
That’s fine, I’m sure. Okay, I’m happy to share it. No, it was lovely to see you and great fun. We had Donald, our chief techie guru with us, and we did some beer storming, although he was drinking non-alcoholic beer because he was driving. But he did that thing where he goes, no, no, no.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
pulls a funny face, looks up into the sky, and then about 30 seconds later goes, yeah, I can do that. So he’s got lots of new projects to go at. So I’m delighted.
Kieron White
Yeah.
It’s very interesting. And we were talking about this will be a future product of the week, I hope, but is our bid writer. So bid writer is our probably our most ubiquitously popular tool in that you can, whichever organisation you’re in, you’re either grant funding, applying for grant funds, or you are
private sector applying for tenders and responding to those and bid writer is amazing, responding to those privately on your data using your case studies and finding case studies in your vast amounts of data. But the problem with all of the AI bid writers is there’s quite a lot of copying and pasting.
And some of that’s good because it forces the human in the loop to have to read things and decide what is. So that’s good because it reduces that opportunity to go, there you go. But it’s also frustrating and the part that I think people, well, I do people do say that’s kind of a bit annoying. And so what we are looking at creating, I say we, Donald, is looking at creating,
is the tooling that allows the AI to create, to open like the spreadsheet with the questions in and write the answers and save a new version of that spreadsheet completed. And obviously Word documents and whatever else. So it’s really interesting to the world of bidding and procurement really, because you could effectively within 5 minutes of having a new opportunity flagged to you.
You could have the first draught ready to go, ready for review, so really interesting.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Well, I’ve spent two days bid writing this week using bid writer, different bids, three different bids. And the thing it does is it allows you to do more faster. So that’s great. But one of the things I said, I mentioned it on last week’s chat. So we’ve got a, I’m doing a bid for a bid writer.
And I told you there’s a question there saying, “Did you use AI in this in this in this?” But what I said to Donald was, wouldn’t it be great if I could just load up the five documents that they’ve sent me through while we were on a demo to them? If we get to the stage where we’re doing a demo, we load up the five documents, press the button,
Kieron White
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
wait however long it takes for it to fill in the 240 questions in two Excel spreadsheets and then go, right, there you go. What else do you need to know? So I think that that’ll be super impressive. If he pulls that off, I’ll be absolutely delighted. So yeah, we now know what he’s going to be doing over the bank holiday weekend.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, Mrs. Allison is going to be very cross for us all, and if you come out of the dark room now, it’s a lovely afternoon.
Neil Watkins
I think so.
I’m fed up with shoving pizza under your door to feed you. Get out of here.
Kieron White
Yeah.
I mean, it’s a really tremendous, and as you know, the conversation where we were in one of the many conversations we were having in our strategy session yesterday is about doing more, getting AI into the workflow rather than sort of always the human copying and pasting back and forwards. So finding those kind of lower risk areas where you can just have it silently get on.
with things. The bit that interests me in there massively bid writing would be really interesting. But yeah, it’s this sort of tenant inquiry management for housing. It’s the student inquiries in colleges where, you know, they get a whole bunch of stuff. It’s kind of have a pet in my in my property. And it’s very clear the answer’s in the policy and you don’t need a human to keep writing that back.
you can instantly tell them. So having taken away some of that stuff so that you can leave your team to deal with the things that do benefit from a bit more thought and a bit more human touch is just really exciting. And the other things in that world for colleges, which we have been working on and are pretty good now, I think, ready to go,
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
ready to go for sort of beta testing with colleges is smart target writing and parent progress report writer. And that is where you can, at the moment, we’re doing it through export and re-import data from systems, but we can do it through API calls if the APIs exist. So we can automate all of that.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
and it can write a parent report. And I know that I’ve said it on the podcast before, but my excitement there is you could be putting out a weekly parent report if you wanted to. I suspect weekly might be too much, but you could, and it would take about 3 minutes to do the entirety of your college, school or university, less over universities, I guess. But
But yeah, being able to really be able to give more granular updates with zero admin effort, I think is very interesting and something we should definitely be encouraging people to look at.
Neil Watkins
I think so. A couple of things spring to mind. One is that lots of the questions, something like 100 questions were in one of the bids was around security. And so I did create a can’t deny. I used a
our what we call knowledge flow sentient with all the technical documents in to do the to do the writing, but then reading through the answers just to make sure they absolutely listen. I now know a lot more about cloud security than I ever thought I would. But I was I was go smacked this morning when you were telling me about McKinsey being hacked.
Kieron White
Matt.
Haha.
Yes.
Neil Watkins
So yeah, share that story because it’s really quite terrifying.
Kieron White
Yeah, well, Donald, well, this was this morning. I woke up to Donald already WhatsApping me with some news of McKinsey’s Lily, which is their RAG system, RAG AI, you know, our specialism, and I’ve been aware of it since they did it. They were very quick to do early and great idea for consultancies, putting all of your knowledge.
into a rag AI tool that then any any of your consultants can use to draw instant reference case studies or help you with comparisons and when have we done this project before and etc. Anyway, they got they got hacked in March and they apparently so they they were had 22 endpoints which were
open and available to be able to get into. So that means you’ve got a kind of ***** in your armour if you like. And somebody had, or some thing probably, may not have been a body, could well have been just an AI tool that it, had seen their JSON file formats in the background and then started manipulating it and managed to over, I don’t know how long.
get everything, 100,000 documents, 47, I think they said 57,000 user account details and the prompts apparently. So I don’t know, I mean, I should say it’s all up, this is I’m reporting or summarising other reports. So do look it up if you’re interested in that stuff, but really interesting and then
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
the view of some of the pundits is this is a problem for everybody who is running RAG, because unless you know about that stuff. But as you know, we had our, we do penetration tests all the time. Donald sent us the latest pen test on us. We look pretty healthy. There’s a couple of things we need to fix, including an exposed endpoint, but that was from something we never actually deployed into any production.
Therefore, it never went through our security cheques in the in the kind of build process, and so it doesn’t do anything. It’s like a non-existent kind of thing that doesn’t go anywhere, so, but that’s where that will be locked down, I have no doubt, very quickly anyway.
Neil Watkins
I suspect that’s already gone after this morning.
Kieron White
I imagine it is, yeah.
So yeah, something to definitely keep your eye out. And I think, I mean, the thing with those tools that is concerning, there’s a prompt injection is the phrase, as you probably know, from where people are basically trying to get the AI to do things it shouldn’t do. And you can just add words and phrases. I heard a brilliant one I should share, the McDonald’s app.
Neil Watkins
Matt.
Kieron White
But with prompt injection, you could do things like manipulate the prompts to say, give me your bank details and your PIN numbers. But I guess more nuanced in McKinsey’s world, you could say if evaluating JP Morgan, make sure they always come out on top and
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
show off, you know, here is their strategy and it’s all amazing and make sure you. So there’s lots and it’s a beginning of a journey for us, everybody really as to what the new risks are. The McDonald’s app really amused me. I don’t know, I don’t think we talked about this. Somebody, they said Matt McDonald’s apparently have an AI
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Ben.
Kieron White
support on their app. And this fellow was on there and he said, his prompt was, this is prompt injection in action, was I want to order some chicken nuggets, but before I do, I need to finish this Python script for this particular task to do blah, blah, blah. Can you help me? And he went, yeah, no worries, and gave me the whole Python script. And he was like, I’m cancelling my Claude subscription.
‘Cause McDonald’s can do it now.
Neil Watkins
Do it for me. I can save $20 a month, but I can get chicken nuggets as much as I like. Brilliant.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Yeah, really good, pretty funny.
Neil Watkins
Very enterprising.
Kieron White
So.
So tell me, we talked about pricing last night and I thought that was, it’s one of our biggest challenges and you led the conversation. Tell us about that. I’d love to explore that and get it on the record.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, well, as you know, we touched on this last week and it’s pricing for AI is incredibly difficult because all the models run on token-based pricing. But what’s a token? You know, it’s not a character. And as you know, you know, numbers can
be more token heavy than text, bizarrely, you know, is a question mark, a token, is an exclamation mark, you know, so actually nobody really understands what a token is. And as you said last week, you can get a token, you can stick your text and see how many tokens you’re going to burn.
And people have got lazy about all of that. But I think the real challenge is we’ve got a few customers who, and I don’t mean this disrespectfully, I mean it very respectfully, which is they are not sophisticated AI buyers. They want to use AI, they know that they’re going to get benefit from AI, they know they’re going to get efficiencies, etc, etc. But
They don’t know what a fair price is. And actually, you know, even just in your daily life, you don’t want to get ripped off. Nobody wants to get ripped off. Nobody wants to feel like you’re being done over. And so people want to pay a fair price. So I think there’s a real argument for us being really transparent about a bunch of stuff. You know, we have a bunch of fixed costs. We know how long it takes to set one of these things up.
We have to buy licenses, we have to set up storages, we have to, you know, do testing, manipulation, all of that. So we’ve got a bunch of fixed costs and then that goes on on a monthly basis because obviously these things are subscription based. So we can be really transparent about that. And then there’s the whole kind of consumption bit. And this is where
Back in the day when we were doing cloud solutions in education for the first time, nobody wanted to move their stuff to the cloud because they didn’t want an open-ended bill. Well, that’s all kind of gone away now and people aren’t so worried about that because the prices have come down. But everyone’s really worried about AI pricing because, you know,
A bit like the chap you mentioned last week, you know, stuck on agent on, went to bed and he got 150 grand bill the next morning. So it is it is terrifying. And just to be clear on tech time yesterday, I did hear them talking about getting the bricks on.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Ha ha.
Yeah, the kill switch.
Neil Watkins
so that you kill switch so that no one can can burn too much. And I think just simple things like that, if we if we can if we can articulate that in a much more simple way, here’s some fixed costs that we’ve got to set you up, here’s some fixed costs we’ve got to to maintain to run it, because
things like security, GDPR, compliance, etc. You know, every Monday morning, we know that Mark goes through the logs for the previous week to see if there’s been any challenges, problems, etc. And actually, all that stuff needs to be paid for, but people don’t realise that. And I think if we’re much more transparent,
about what we’re charging for and why, then we will get a much better reception, especially from people who really don’t understand it. And one of our big challenges right now is everyone says, oh, I’ve got Copilot. And it’s like, yeah, we’ve talked about Copilot on here before. You’ve got Copilot. That’s great. It’s great for some things. Yep.
because it’s embedded in your Excel, in your Word, whatever, but…
As you keep saying, you know, saying I’ve got co-pilot as my AI strategy is like saying, here’s Excel for your data.
business data strategy, it’s just like it’s nonsense. And that whole kind of you can’t manage the back end, you can’t you can’t tweak and tune the back end of Copilot because it’s an enterprise-wide solution. But if you need it for do something specific like bid writing or like policy or like repairs or like
tenants or whatever, then, you know, it’s got to be not only a trend, it’s got to be accurate and it’s got to be consistently accurate. You can’t have it hallucinating. And I think that’s the real challenge that lots of people still don’t understand. And I think it’s going to be a long time for
So before people kind of get past that. So yeah, some really interesting things about how we demonstrate to people that, you know, we think we’re really cheap. We know that there’s competitors out there charging literally 10 times as much as we do. But how do they,
Kieron White
Yeah, certainly.
Neil Watkins
How do they justify that? Well, I think our challenge is we just need to play our game and say, here’s what our fixed costs are, here’s what our margins are, and we’ll be open and transparent about it, and we’ll provide a fair service to everyone. So yeah, call me, call me, as many people in the
In the pub, do you know a soft old lefty, the power wants you to do the right thing all the time? I don’t really care.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Soft old lefty, I like it. Yeah, it’s interesting, the 10 times thing. I remember one of the early things we ran into in college land was a company that had, I won’t name any names here, but a college had built for them our exact setup and they paid 80 grand for the build to do it and then there was a load more, I’m told, but took it over 100 grand in the end.
And that was our version ones. They had a few different version ones. So if you remember back then, we were charging 500 pounds a month for those.
Neil Watkins
Queue.
Kieron White
80 grand or 100 grand all in, they were paying 500 pounds a month for us. It’s just, it’s just robbery. I mean, so they, and who knows, maybe that maybe that company made heavy weather of it and actually spent the time that needed to cost that. But that model of build your own in house and have someone pay a lot of money. And of course, with
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
It is, yeah.
Kieron White
That thing now will be almost useless compared to some of the tools that can outperform it. So not like they did that 100 grand spend probably years ago, the 18 months. So it’s not like they’ve got a great thing that they never have to spend any money on again, because there’s still going to be token and consumption prices of that, which is included, was included in our, is included in our fees and was included in our 500 pound a month fee. So there’s just no.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
Justification, and it is, yeah, silly bad decision, and a company that’s obviously very happy to take their cash, so…
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
And it is glowing when you hear those kinds of stories, isn’t it? I’ll tell you another little story because it amused me yesterday. Donald said, we’re now doing so much AI business that we’ve been invited to be a Microsoft tier 5 AI supplier. And I was like, what does that mean? And he said,
Kieron White
Yeah, Dutta.
Neil Watkins
I don’t know. He said, he said, but it’s by invitation or application only and we haven’t applied and they haven’t invited us, they’ve just put us on it. And I was like, brilliant. So what? And he’s like, I don’t know, I’ll have to find out. So yeah, we’re obviously.
Kieron White
But.
Yeah.
We don’t know quite what it means. We think it means, though. The thing that we looked, I was looking at last night with Donald was, well, I think, well, we didn’t look at that, but it was just one, I was asking him, we’re playing with 5.4 mini driving knowledge flow in one of our sandboxes. And I didn’t think we could get 5.4 mini in the UK South.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
IT.
Kieron White
And he said, yeah, we can now because we’re a tier 5 thing. So I think we might get for more opportunity, they call it, what do they call provision, I think, provisioning, or there’s a word that Microsoft use for, they don’t want everybody to grab it immediately because it ruins the UK South data centre. It gets too hot, I guess.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
So that maybe that’s a benefit. Who knows? We’ll find out, I guess, as we go. It’s probably just a way of them charging us more money. Now you’re tier 5.
Neil Watkins
Possibly, but that’s, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, you’ve got to cough harder. Now, I don’t think so, because certainly using the mini models, you know, in theory, they should be cheaper, faster, and better, and much more suited to the kind of things that we want to do. So, again, being transparent about the models that we’re on,
Kieron White
Yeah, yeah, 10 times cheaper, so…
Neil Watkins
and the prices that we’re being charged for that, I think, you know, I think that has to be the way to go. I think we will.
Kieron White
Yeah. And what’s really interesting in that, if you have a private conversation with Donald, he says, I haven’t told this to everybody, he said, so I’m about to share it. Well, we’ve been, as you know, pushing people to a 5.2. Now we’re happy that it works and we’re sort of rolling out upgrades to get everybody running on GPC 5.2. Our previous model has been 4.1 pretty much for a year and a bit now, a year and a half probably, which was a hell of a long time.
I’m in AI land and it does perfectly good rag and all the things we want of it. Both Donald and I think 5.2 for our use case is worse, but we’re still asked to be on it and customers want to kind of feel like they’re moving ahead and we obviously need to show that we are and every week knowledge flow improves anyway without them even knowing one of our problems.
You don’t tell them enough. But yeah, it’s really interesting that the 5.2 is actually, if you had your way, you’d say, just stick with 4.1, it’s doing a great job for you in 5.2 is quirks. So it is intriguing.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
There you go, that’s all very good.
Neil Watkins
Well, 5.5 came out this week, didn’t it?
Kieron White
Well, yeah, indeed. Well, as soon as we can get hold of one of those, we’ll have a little play and see. But the minis are the way forward for our work, because as our token burn goes up, it obviously that becomes a bigger challenge for us to keep an eye on. And I think really for the last three or four months, it’s when we’ve really had to start looking a bit more at all of that world and understanding how to keep the costs down more. And that will increasingly be a problem for everybody. So it’s good to be on that.
On that journey, I think, earlier, for the mini is 10 times cheaper. I think that’s going to be fantastic for our customers, because we can then up prompt limits and do all kinds of things, because it may be easier to run. So, that is very good.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Easier to rule out across the organization, yeah.
Kieron White
Yes, alright.
Neil Watkins
which links to that whole piece about injecting it into the workflow rather than just having it as a standalone piece that we’ve talked about several times. But, you know, that has to be the future, making sure it’s part of the workflow, not just stuck on top and people not using it because they don’t, it’s not integral to their work or they don’t want to use it.
Kieron White
Exactly.
Neil Watkins
All like some AI deniers who were who we love dearly.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Okay.
Haha.
Indeed. No, indeed. And I think if it is in the workflow happening agentically in the background, then having some of the mini models running will just be even more compelling, frankly, because you’re going to be one pence on a response then. At the moment, we’re probably three or four pence on a fairly average response, one kind of in and out.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
into one of our systems. So, you know, like a penny a go, frankly, brilliant. Let’s just respond to everything and get it done. So, very good.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
I was, as I’ve in housing this week, of course, I was at the Share annual conference in Glasgow. Hence, I was up your end. And so popped by on my way back home.
Neil Watkins
Even even further NOT than me.
Kieron White
Yeah, it was a lovely Glasgow, beautiful and sunshine looked great. I really liked it.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, you were there for the one day a year where the sun shines in Glasgow, the rarest meteorological event of the year, and you just happened to be there. Oh, Glasgow’s lovely. Right. I’m going to take, I’m going to take you in February.
Kieron White
Yeah, I liked it, Mike.
I might go there for my summer holiday, it was so lovely. If it’s always like that.
Neil Watkins
Take your raincoat.
Kieron White
But it was, so I was talking there at the Share event on AI, of course, and it’s kind of mainly the usual kind of giving people some insights into what AI can actually do and indeed where it still struggles. So sort of trying to get people seeing it’s a bit more than just co-pilot. And interestingly, we were talking there, there was someone was
I sometimes ask, there were a few people as they came in early and I’ll be like saying, what are you doing with AI currently? Just trying to get a measure of your audience. And they were talking about summarising with Copilot and all those. And I shared in the talk about the challenge of what a lot of the basic use cases, and this is where just saying Copilot is an answer.
is dangerous. So if you load a few documents or one or whatever to go by and say summarise this, that’s great, it will do it. But that is the very worst way of getting every part of AI bias into your summary, because it doesn’t know what’s important to you. So you’re asking it to work out what is important in a summary and it doesn’t know who you are.
because you’ve probably not told it that you’re a housing officer in this case and that it’s a report for your CEOs and it’s about, we probably can read what it’s about, but what kind of things you’re interested in seeing and drawing from it, which is just, it’s all about inferred world. If I asked a team member to summarise a document for me, they know I’m interested in AI developments and
the things within that that I’m interested in, and that would, of course, automatically drive them. Copilot doesn’t know that. That’s interesting. So I was sort of sharing some of that stuff with them and the importance of just giving it more context, which of course, with a, we shouldn’t miss the opportunity for the sales plug, but knowledge flow, the point of it is, is installed into your organisation with
your context. So it knows who you are, it knows what your values are, it knows what you do, it knows what you never do and never say in your tone of voice. So that’s all there. So now all of your staff using that platform, the consistency starts to align and the amount of time that comms teams spend trying to get people to be consistent in
writing and you know, just getting people to use the same font in an e-mail, you know, those kind of things is hard enough, let alone trying to get them to answer in the in the consistent way. So there you go, yeah, knowledge flow wins again when I compare it to Copilot on that level.
Neil Watkins
Good. Well, we’ve had a couple of other wins this week, so we’ve got another, exciting, we’ve got another council, a social care customer coming on board, which is fabulous. And interesting enough, we just got last night,
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
confirmation. Actually, no, it was Wednesday night, wasn’t it? That we got confirmation that a trade body is going to procure knowledge flow to serve policy buddy effectively to 10 of their organisations, possibly up to 15.
which is absolutely fantastic, because that means that there’s going to be a whole host of organisations sharing the same knowledge, being able to collaborate across different organisations, being able to share to improve services. So I’m really chuffed with that one. Hopefully, once it’s up and running, we can announce it properly. But in the meantime, to get
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
to get a group like that across such a broad geographical area is just fantastic.
Kieron White
And I think that play, that exactly what you said about people using the same data, learning together, innovating together, the tool itself will have the audit trails of everything happening so that we’ll be able to help with the insights from across 10 different teams using it. I think that’s a really interesting angle.
pitched it to a college last week for they would they do a thing with three ports in the UK and there are 18 colleges in the Freeport Group. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff about that and you know why that is important. But to be able to put one platform into all of them for their project work and
Neil Watkins
Okay.
Kieron White
for their, you know, the kind of summarising and the policy part of it and whatever it is that they’re up to, the curriculum and training, it will be part of the angle of what they’re doing there. So to have one that you can drive with the kind of best version of the truth really and have everybody working from that, and of course at any point, update it.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
so that you’re now moving in with the latest version of the truth, having learnt something new. I was listening to a podcast on the way back on the way down on the train today about robots in factories and what happens in a row if you’re using AI with robots in factories. When one learns to do something new, they instantly all know how to do that thing.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
And you think about the power of how fast you can innovate with a model where you don’t now have to train everybody to, and it’s not quite that, is it, in the land of colleges. But the idea that we’ve got a better way of doing this thing, so let’s get it into the AI tool. So everybody you asking the AI about it is going to get that already sort of baked in.
That strikes me as a very interesting world and one where public sector, you know, our background of driving national change programmes, helping design and manage national change programmes. Imagine giving everybody, if you could, 150 local authorities, each their kind of platform for this project with everything you need to know in there, the guidance in there.
Neil Watkins
The.
Mm.
Kieron White
best practises already ready out-of-the-box to not just read, which is the usual way, go to our website and repository, but no, ask it to create your summary for your local stakeholder meeting to talk about this thing and it will do the very best of its knowledge and feedback from everyone else’s experience doing the same thing. Interesting.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Brilliant. Can you imagine using something like that on the Every Child Matters programme back in the day? It would have been tremendous.
Kieron White
Ohh, yeah, exactly.
Yeah. And then the richness of insights. I mean, again, if you think about Every Child Matters and the outcomes framework and that tremendous piece of work that you led is if you could start tracking how people were using a tool, you could create, or at least have a, you can create, but you’d have a really good sort of starting point for something like an outcomes framework.
Neil Watkins
Queue.
Kieron White
just because the amount of things you see when someone’s trying to measure themselves against these criteria under the CQC regulations and how that aligns with maybe what Ofsted are asking over here and all that stuff, which is, you know, the outcomes, the outcomes framework really tried to grapple with. Very interesting.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just for the record, I was a humble servant in the Every Child Matt. I wasn’t the leader of it. I couldn’t possibly take any plaudits or credits. It was a it was very much a very big team effort. So I just happened to be part of it. So I’m very proud. It’s the thing I’m most proud of in my career. So
Kieron White
Yeah, I bet.
Neil Watkins
Matt and Leading AI, of course, which is the best job ever had.
Kieron White
Oh wow, here we go. Oh, it’s very cool. Right, what else is on your list? I’ve got to do, you know what I’ve got to do over this weekend is change the bank password for one of our, one of our, I won’t name the bank because I don’t want to be hacked. But so every three months they force a password change.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Ha ha ha.
Kieron White
And if I don’t do it, then I’ll get locked out completely and that creates aggro for the Finance team after then go in. So I’ve got to change it. But guess what? You have to have one of those long, strong passwords with, you know, whatever, different characters, but it will not allow copy and paste in the field. It’s the only one I’ve ever known that doesn’t.
Neil Watkins
Quite right, too.
Kieron White
So, you can’t, so you got to type out this thing, then type it again to confirm it all, you know, at a time. And then when you hit enter, invariably it says, no, you didn’t put enough special characters in or there is, or actually it is, it’s got to, it’s got a special character, you’re not allowed that or whatever. And you just like, oh for God sake, and then you go, it normally takes me 3 goes.
And I normally swear a hell of a lot and hate that bank, so…
Neil Watkins
Maybe you should just put swear words in and then some special characters at the end. You’d remember it then. I’m sorry, there’s too much profanity in your in your password, Mr White.
Kieron White
Yeah, that’d be good, yeah. Yeah, I was a night Matt.
Yeah, profanity filter, see what goes off, there’d be a red alert happening somewhere. We’ve had that, did I mention we’ve had that happening in one of our housing for our housing clients is the content filtering is stopping the response halfway through. So they’re using it for an e-mail response and it might be quite a challenging thing.
Neil Watkins
I will, yeah.
No.
Kieron White
and then the content philtres stop it. And so we’ve had a couple of thumbs down responses going, what’s going on here? It just stops. And then you kind of have a quick look at what they’ve sent and it finishes with like something, I won’t share any detail, but it finishes with something you’re like, oh, I can see exactly what’s happening. It got to that word.
Neil Watkins
Oh.
Matt.
Kieron White
And they went, I’m not carrying on. So we have to have the conversation next. I’m meeting them next week and I need to talk to them about whether they want us to remove the guardrails, obviously their decision. The downside of that is then for all of the tools and any use within the organisation, it won’t have that kind of, you know, sort of really big glass safety net really. So
Neil Watkins
That’s right.
That’s true.
Uh-huh.
Kieron White
It’s NOT.
Neil Watkins
Is that, so is that a member of staff putting rude words in or is it because a tenant has put a rude word into the e-mail?
Kieron White
in an e-mail. So it’s an e-mail. It’s actually the subject of the e-mail. It’s not a rude word. It’s just like what it is talking about is in the world that is going that I’m not having that, not talking back to you about that. So I think we’re going to have to lift them on it and we could put some guardrails into knowledge flow itself to protect against other things.
Neil Watkins
All right.
Okay.
Okay, interesting.
Kieron White
I think, but it is ultimately their decision. They need to decide. Obviously, it’s a governance decision, not a Leading AI decision.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
No, it’s interesting that whole kind of governance thing, isn’t it? And people…
It’s like when people say, oh, this policy’s buddy’s great. How is it going to keep policies up to date? And you say, well, how do you keep it up to date now? And they were like, oh, well, we don’t really. Well, hang on a sec, isn’t that a problem? So you do need to keep them up to date and creating SharePoint Hoovers to hoover up.
Kieron White
Yeah, yeah.
Neil Watkins
the latest versions of documents, which is a great tool. I love the fact that I just imagine some kind of big pipe where we’re just sucking out all of the files into the back end and knowledge flow. Yeah.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Whatever you put in that folder, it gets gets hooped in, yeah.
Neil Watkins
But yeah, what was going through in my head was the redaction piece in the safeguarding tool. And I wonder whether there’s something along those lines where if there is a subject matter or a profanity or whatever else in the incoming, because of course the organisation got no control over the in.
Kieron White
Queue.
Neil Watkins
inbound communication, but I do wonder whether we’re in Donald spare 30 seconds that he’s got between 2am and
Kieron White
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I know I did. Well, our safeguarding philtres already would pick it up, which is the thing I’ve said in my note ready to send to this housing association, so they can think about it ahead of me talking to them. But they, but our safeguarding philtres will flag it and make it or show it up as critical, I’m sure, if it’s
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Mm.
Kieron White
being blocked at the moment. So we would still know. It’s just the safeguarding philtres don’t stop you doing it. They just alert someone to the fact it is happening. So you’ve got some level of governance over it. But yeah, it’s one of those interesting areas, really. And particularly, I remember with one of our health sector clients who were doing research into suicide, and they were
Neil Watkins
Meet.
Yeah.
Kieron White
not going anywhere. And that was, again, it was content filtering was blocking their responses. So we did remove them for that, but that’s an internal research use case, kind of much easier, whereas one that’s a more general tool across the whole organization, if you think about it.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, good that the sentiment analysis tool is picking up the thumbs downs and flagging those so we can pick up on them.
Kieron White
Queue.
Yes, yeah, yeah, we get all that, and then that leads into which I know we’re over time, so we should stop it. But do you remember, do you remember Wilco Van Ginkel?
Neil Watkins
The.
Of course I do.
Kieron White
It’s a name you wouldn’t forget very often, is it? Wilco Van Ginkel is a Gartner, one of the senior vice president. They’ve got a lot of job titles. Anyway, he’s very, very knowledgeable in our world. And I saw him speaking last year at Gartner Data Analytics, and he’s back this year. So
Neil Watkins
Yeah, very engaging.
Yes.
Kieron White
I want to try and get some time with him. He’s running a session with an Ask the Expert session on them. And the thing he’s just been researching is the thing that we are looking at right now is observability and testing, which is that or evaluation, as he was very clear in his paper, is that you can’t test AI’s output like you could test a calculator’s output.
Neil Watkins
OK.
Ben.
Kieron White
because that’s deterministic and you can tell that it’s wrong. Whereas testing an AI’s output is much more akin to marking an essay where you’ve got to bring some judgement to it and work out whether it’s right or wrong that way. So we’re, as you know, grappling with that right now with how do we build that so it’s live all the time kind of
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Kieron White
I think because his other point in the paper, which is what we’ve been talking about, so it’s nice to think we’re up to date with what Wilco van Ginkel’s working on.
Neil Watkins
We’re up to him now, crikey.
Kieron White
Exactly, and it’s not enough to test and release because it’s not deterministic and model drift happens. And so you need to be doing it live all the time. And that’s what I’ve, as you know, got the team thinking about is that how do we pick out one in 10 prompts, one in 100 prompts, whatever it is, and run it through some observability.
Neil Watkins
Matt.
Kieron White
And the thing with observability in RAG is it’s not as simple as here’s the answer, is it right? You need to be able to look at the retrieval step and then you need to be able to look, and indeed potentially chunking and embeddings prior to that, but certainly the retrieval and then the LLM’s kind of reconstructing of the response. So
Interesting. So, anyway, Wilco Van Ginkel, if you’re listening, I’m coming for you again. Yeah, brace yourself.
I will.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
OK, just one more thing. But he was really good. I mean, he helped get us on to things like chunking strategies, didn’t he, last year? He was, yeah, super good. So yeah, I’m looking forward to that.
Kieron White
Definitely.
And and any of.
Yeah, putting NER into CV search so that it picks up. One of the things with that is embeddings on names and weird things. It’s very difficult that AI doesn’t really know what to do with it because it’s not, you know, 13 Acacia Avenue, actually, that probably would go because that name is, but if it was a totally unusual name, when it goes to the embeddings process, it’s just like, I don’t know where to put this in the vector database. So
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
random. So NER is the solution to that and it has worked very well for for that and that was that was Wilco Van Ginkel. So there you go. And not a name I say very often, but I think a fun name to say.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Right, big chat.
You’re gonna be saying it up for the next few weeks, ’cause we’re going to see him in two weeks’ time.
Kieron White
Very excited. It’s almost like going to see the killers live, go on the data analysis, what has become of my life. But it’s like it’s not quite out there with Glastonbury, but it’s close.
Neil Watkins
I.
Right.
It’s the Glastonbury of the AI world. Hilarious. Crikey, we’re getting old, Kieron.
Kieron White
It is, it is.
As well.
Neil Watkins
Right, on that note, have you got anything else or are you done for the day?
Kieron White
No, well, I do lots of things, but let’s, we should wrap up. We’ve been rabbiting on, rambling on as we like to do. I have been anyway. You’ve been making lots of good. I do want to say a shout out to your local clock manufacturer though. I’m sure you’d rather think of himself something else. Oh, there you go. Will.
Neil Watkins
We have been rambling, yes.
Oh yeah, Will. Yeah, Will, yes, Will Scobie Young. He’s a lovely, a lovely young man, and they’re actually leaving the Cumbria Clock Company used to live next door to us, and they actually repaired Big Ben, which is part of their claim to fame.
Kieron White
I thought it was a secret.
Neil Watkins
Well, it’s all fixed now and it’s back in, so it doesn’t matter. So it’s all kind of, it’s all sorted. And they do all sorts of those big, big clock stuff, the premier horologists in that in that sector. So yeah, I’ll be really sorry to see them go. They are really good fun.
Kieron White
Okay.
Neil Watkins
The best guy, though, is Keith, who started the company with his wife, Lynn. They are a lovely couple, but Keith is the master clockmaker, but he looks like a pirate because he’s got this little goaty white beard and he’s got the curly moustache, but he has to wear an eye patch because he’s got, he gets pain in his eye. So he looks like a
Kieron White
All right, Keith.
Neil Watkins
proper pirate. But then when he gets his master clock maker, he just looks absolutely awesome. And he’s just a lovely chap to go for a beer with. And he’s full of all sorts of random stories. But yeah, I’ll be sorry to see the Clock Company go.
Kieron White
Ha ha.
Maybe we could get him on as a guest before they…
Neil Watkins
But…
Maybe we should get it because they’re big into AI.
Kieron White
I can imagine, yeah. I can imagine.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, hilarious. Right, on that note, fella, you enjoy your weekend and I will catch you next week.
Kieron White
I have.
