Buzzsprout Description
Buzzsprout Description
Episode 12: Sir David Attenborough, Magic Wands, and prep for the Glasto of AI 🍺
Week 12. The pantomime horse of a podcast is back. Kieron is heading to David Attenborough’s 100th birthday picnic after this. Sort of. It’s at his son’s school, 100 metres from Sir David’s house. There is a non-zero chance of Sir David making an appearance. Neil wants photographic evidence if he does.
Next week: both of them are off to the Glastonbury of AI — the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit in London. The Leading AI team back is bracing itself for what whacky ideas they come back with.
Neil’s uncle — 100 years, a minesweeper and a ZX Spectrum 🎖️ Neil lost his uncle two weeks ago — one month short of his 100th birthday. A man who served on a minesweeper in the Pacific in the Second World War and saw huge technological change in his lifetime. . Neil reflects on the pace of that change: TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in two months. AI isn‘t slowing down.
Shadow AI — the problem that won’t go away 👤 If your organisation is forcing people to use the “default AI” (yes, you Copilot) and it keeps stopping halfway through a task, don’t be surprised when they quietly spend $20 a month on Claude and get the job done properly. The shadow AI problem is real, and it’s growing because the default can’t do the job. Microsoft has been quietly removing Copilot from places where nobody’s using it. A deleted social media post says it all.
Safeguarding — its important!🔒 Neil flags two major developments this week. Meta has just lost a case in New Mexico over making their tools addictive for young people. And Google and Character.AI settled out of court in January with families suing them over the role AI played in the deaths of young people. Neil recommends a piece by Nate B. Jones (now on his fourth mention — no, still not on commission) on why parents need to talk to their children about AI relationships. It’s not a chatbot. It doesn’t understand you. And if you don’t explain that clearly, the consequences can be devastating.
Product of the week — the Agentic Bid Writer goes live 🎉 Donald created a working prototype this week which Kieron and Neil have both been demoing… but ‘forgot’ to tell Donald. I guess they didn’t want to bother him… 😂 Kieron said: “What if the first time you even saw a new opportunity, you already had an 80% complete bid ready to go?” Which led to…
The billion-pound consortium bid 💷 A consortium of seven organisations has approached Neil about using KnowledgeFlow BidWriter to write a £1 billion bid together. Seven separate KnowldgeFlow assistants, each loaded with their own technical docs, marketing material, insurance certificates, and case studies. Press the button. First draft in ten minutes. For anyone who’s ever spent three weeks chasing consortium partners for content they should have sent on day one, this is the dream.
ROI — if you switched off your AI today, would anyone notice? 📊 Neil poses a question someone put to him this week: if you cancelled all your AI subscriptions tomorrow, would your business notice? The answer for most people is: immediately and painfully. That’s your ROI right there. And it links back to the social workers turning down jobs at councils without AI tools. The gap is real. It’s widening. And the organisations still asking “but what’s the return on investment?” are the ones who’ll find out the hard way.
Kieron may or may not meet David Attenborough at a school picnic this afternoon. Neil wants a photo. We all want a photo.
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. 🍺
