Episode 17: Read the Room, Agentic Bid Writer & 46 Ships 🍺
Week 17. Kieron wore a shirt and shoes to a food industry conference for 60 senior leaders. Neil nearly went back in the doghouse because his daughter told him to read the room and he didn’t. Leading AI’s website has had hundreds of cyber-attacks in two weeks. It’s been that kind of week.
Schools — 58-page complaint letters and why the AI arms race matters
A head contacted Neil through Everything ICT — 4,000 schools, all potential customers. The emerging problem: parents are using AI to write increasingly sophisticated complaints. One head received a 58-page letter. KnowledgeFlow answers it regardless of length, grounded in the school’s own policies, in the school’s own voice. Kieron gave his youngest son’s school access to the demo tool six weeks ago. The apology correction emails have stopped.
Kieron’s big talk — did it land?
60 leaders. 90 minutes. A room full of MDs and CFOs he’d never met in an industry he barely knew. Last year’s AI session was too technical and too salesy. Kieron’s answer: Nokia, Blockbuster, Kodak — and one uncomfortable question. How easy would it be for a new entrant with great AI and no capital to disrupt your supplier relationships tomorrow? The feedback was good. He didn’t end up in a ditch.
The Agentic Bid Writer — Kieron hasn’t even seen the latest version
12,000 words across 7 questions. Cup of tea. 45 minutes. Done. Then it marks itself, rewrites itself up to three times, and presents you with a polished draft before you’ve even read the original tender. A conservative customer’s verdict: “It looks practically done to me.” Neil is already complaining he has to add bullet points himself. The revolution continues.
KnowledgeFlow is the context layer — we just didn’t know it had a name
Gartner spent three days talking about context. Kieron spent two days thinking he knew nothing. Then he realised: policies, tone of voice, brand guidelines, system prompts — that’s the context layer. KnowledgeFlow has been building it for two years and we just didn’t know what to call it.
There are only 46 ships in the world that can lay undersea cable
1.2 million miles of cable carries almost all the world’s data. Each takes $800,000 to fix even minor damage. If someone wanted to take out a country’s internet infrastructure — really take it out — it wouldn’t be hard. Neil has Starlink as backup. Most organisations have nothing. Donald ran a penetration test this week: no major findings, five minor ones. How many organisations can say the same?
Neil didn’t quite make it back into the doghouse. Mrs Watkins got her glass of wine. All is well.
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:
Neil Watkins
Right, are you ready?
Have you done your hair and makeup? Are you? Have you done? Are you ready for? Are you ready for week 17 of the Pantomime Horse Podcast, Kieron?
Kieron White
Ohh.
Here we are. Here we are back in just getting into our pantomime horse outfit. We should probably explain where that comes from. Did we ever talk about that? Well, why we say that? Probably everyone’s like, why on earth? I think I did start it a long time ago, didn’t I?
Neil Watkins
Alright, here we go.
No, we never, no, we never did. You started it.
No, you definitely did start it. I’ve nicked it from you. I use it all the time now. But yeah, so where’s it come from, Kieron?
Kieron White
Ohh, well.
Well, it comes from our very early board meetings in WCL, the management consultancy that we created together, if you can remember back that far, back in 2002. And I remember, yeah, because we used to get together in a board meeting in an evening back in the day when, because we were working all day long, flat out for clients. So everything
Neil Watkins
Ha ha ha.
Kieron White
on the business was done out of hours effectively. And I can’t really, I think I just one day just said, let’s get this pantomime horse meeting underway. And then it became a bit of a tradition. I think, and it wasn’t nothing really naughty behind that as usual with my comments. It’s just kind of like amused me at the time.
Neil Watkins
You did.
I think it was, I think it was that kind of thing about we didn’t really know what we were doing. We were making it up as we went along and as with so much in life. But yeah,
Kieron White
Well, I thought that was true.
But if you’re not stretching your if you’re not stretching your boundaries, then then you’re not working hard enough, you’re not growing, so you should always be on that level.
Neil Watkins
Exactly.
If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space. Crikey, this has turned very philosophical all of a sudden, hasn’t it? Anyway, enough of that.
Kieron White
It’s so, so, so quickly.
Neil Watkins
Exactly, exactly right. What’s on your list for this week, fella?
Kieron White
Well, I have been out and about this week. I had a really interesting session. Yeah, the big event that I spoke at that I talked about last week and then now have done. And I think it went pretty well. So I’ll share a bit of that. That would be good to do. And some more revelations and thoughts about KnowledgeFlow, our platform and kind of where it fits in the
Neil Watkins
Know your big event.
Kieron White
grand kind of scheme of AI as the world keeps on shoving on. And I was, whilst at the conference that I was at yesterday, there was a speaker before me who was talking about geopolitics and risks that businesses need to be worried about. So I’ll share a couple of snippets from that, but
Neil Watkins
Mhm.
Kieron White
As usual, completely terrifying. What about you? What’s on your mind?
Neil Watkins
Yeah, well, well, geopolitics is always on my mind. I mean, as you know, it’s one of my one of my, I was going to say favourite topics. I wouldn’t say favourite, but it’s definitely top of mind a lot of a lot of the time. And I’m actually going to something tomorrow that I can’t talk about because it’s related. So yeah,
It is a bit terrifying, but actually there’s some really interesting lessons for us and I’ll share some of some of my thoughts on that. But before we get there, I wanted to talk about a couple of things. It’s been a busy old week. It’s just like you get to towards the end of the week and where the bloody hell has it gone? I can tell you this week, most of it’s gone on Agentic AI.
Kieron White
Yes.
Neil Watkins
which has been fascinating, really interesting working with the big D, Donald Allison on that. He’s a genius, as you know, he does that kind of, he makes that who face like the who out of the Grinch and then, and he, oh no, no, no, no, oh, here it is. So yeah, there’s all of that stuff. So there’s,
Kieron White
It does.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
I’ve got a couple of those things. I’ve had some really interesting customer conversations this week, some around health, some around schools. And I’d like to pick your brain on the schools thing, because I know you’ve been working with schools, I haven’t. I’ve also been playing with the housing tool for stuff I’m doing on the website. And again, amazing. I wanted to talk about
Kieron White
Yes.
Neil Watkins
that. I’ve got a couple of other kind of bits and pieces around security and large language models in general, and obviously not obviously, but anybody who’s really into AI will know that Fable 5 came out yesterday, which is the latest from Anthropology.
Kieron White
Did.
Neil Watkins
and a mythos product probably is the best word to describe it. And so all of those things, there’s a shed load to get through, so we better stop waffling about bloody pantomime horses and get to the good stuff, haven’t we? So yeah, let’s start with your big event. Tell me about your big event. How our audience.
Kieron White
Yes.
So our listener, our single listener will have already switched off.
Neil Watkins
No, actually, I’ve got some news for you, Kim. We’ve got more than one listener. I found out, we do, we do, we do. So I got told, as a chief exec of one of our customers listens to this, so we need to be super careful. Get dressed properly. We got
Kieron White
No, we don’t, surely.
Oh dear, I’ll put my tie back on again.
Oh, very well.
Neil Watkins
Well, three there a week, and our audience that’s asleep, so we’re doing really well.
Kieron White
But he’s good, 4 after 15 weeks, as you know, that’s got to be a new record, isn’t it?
Neil Watkins
But 17, this is week 17, so 16 weeks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You missed a week. You missed to be the sleep with Matt.
Kieron White
17. Oh my word.
Probably.
Neil Watkins
Anyway, enough nonsense. Tell me about your week, your big event.
Kieron White
Yeah, let me tell you about the sector. I mean, really all of this week has been focused on this conference because it’s in a sector, I’m going to be vague as always, but it’s in a sector that I really don’t know very much about. Although, interestingly, I will give it away to, actually, no, probably I can talk about the sector, but I
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
Back in my day, I used to do lots of work with the Food Standards Agency and indeed even ran the International Conference on Campylobacter in Chickens, which went down amongst academic circles, apparently, unbelievably, I had no idea. I went to, I went to, where was it, I went to the EU, to Brussels, I guess it was,
Neil Watkins
It.
Hmm.
The.
Yeah.
Kieron White
Yeah, it was. And walked into the room and said, hello, Kieron. They went, were you the facilitator that ran the international blah, blah, blah. And I was like, yeah. And they were like, we’ve all heard so much about it. I was like, really? That’s weird. It was very peculiar because it’s like properly deep science on.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Hilarious.
Kieron White
food-borne viruses and things. Anyway, that…
Neil Watkins
Backstrom.
For a man with hidden shallows, that’s a great accolade.
Kieron White
Oh yeah, exactly. Well, it’s just what I always wanted to be really well known for in my foodborne viruses expertise. Anyway, so it was a food business that I was speaking at. And so I was doing a load of research. What I was really trying to do, as I said, I think last week is there were
Neil Watkins
But.
Exactly.
Kieron White
60, 70 people in the room, all leaders of various businesses and their senior teams. And I wanted to give them as much practical, sensible AI advice and some inspiration whilst being interesting, hopefully. And so it took a load of effort just trying to
find use cases, AI things going on in their sector. I was kind of nervous all the time on stage when I was sharing kind of examples, thinking, am I just saying words that you’re just like, what’s he going on about? We don’t do this at all. So because I was having a guess at a whole bunch of things with AI support in researching and etc. But
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Kieron White
I thought it went really well. The feedback immediately afterwards was really good and sort of it hit the brief of being practical. People were clearer about what it is they have to do. Apparently last year they had an AI session and it was really, you know, much more, I guess, quite advanced AI and sort of interesting, but no one really knew what they were supposed to do with it.
whereas I was trying to give them some real clarity. I went in a shirt and shoes and I haven’t done that for ages. I normally always do the t-shirt and trainers.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Wow, you know me in your t-shirt, in your tech bro outfit.
Kieron White
Exactly, and I was, well, I was a bit nervous and I thought, you know, this, I don’t want to, I don’t want to give them any reason to sort of be already going, oh, well, who is this chump? Because they probably already think of AI nonsense. So I hope.
Neil Watkins
Oh, it’s the compiler back to fellow. What’s he know about AI?
But.
Kieron White
It wasn’t either three pony illnesses, fella.
Neil Watkins
Didn’t he do the badges T.D. thing as well?
Kieron White
I did do TB, badges, yeah. Interestingly, I didn’t do TB, by the way.
Neil Watkins
You say, you say, interestingly, let’s not be, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Kieron White
No, that is true. So yes, it was really interesting, at least to me. Here’s my big reflection though, is, so I mean, I can talk about what I talked to them about, but it’s their content really. So I did it for them. So I’m not going to kind of make that too available for everybody. But I did do, as I think I said I might,
the slide with Blockbuster, Kodak and Nokia logos on. You could pick any one really, can’t you, but they’re the big ones and sort of just that whole threat of you might have a strategic moat that defends your position because you’ve been around a long time and you’ve got a lot of customers and other things.
Neil Watkins
Mhm.
Kieron White
But is it enough? And I kind of left it to them. I said, luckily, I don’t have to answer that. You do. So which is which was fun. But here’s a big reflection from a group that I really didn’t know at all in an industry that I didn’t really know very well. I think I’ve got to stop trying to read the room while I’m on stage.
So when I’m facilitating, it’s a very different thing. You need to read the room, I think. You’ve got to kind of like see where the energy is and kind of decide, do I extend this session a bit longer because people are really into this or do I shorten this one. When you’re presenting, because there’s obviously so much you’re trying to do in one moment, your head’s full of what am I going to say next?
being articulate about what I’m trying to say now, trying to do it with passion and performance so that it’s not just boring. All of those things mean that when you look out, you see a sea of faces. And I mean, I didn’t see many people, if anybody on their phone doing anything. So that’s encouraging. They’ve all
eyes on me. But at one point I thought, they’re so bored. And all the feedback suggests that it wasn’t true. But at the time I had this sort of thought that went through, you know, they got that kind of weird thought that just try and trip you over. And I was, yeah, I know, it was awful. And I was like, I don’t need to hear that. And then I tried to speed up a bit because I was like, I need to just.
Neil Watkins
Black.
Yeah.
You.
The seed of doubt in the back of your mind.
Kieron White
Yeah, I don’t know, do more content or get them talking.
Neil Watkins
More energy, put more energy in.
Kieron White
More energy. So that was really good, really, really interesting. And yeah, hopefully we can follow up with them. I’m so keen to, I mean, obviously we run a business in this stuff, but I am, it’s almost more keen to kind of that they just do stuff than whether or not they do it with us.
So, but obviously, it would be great if there was a possibility that we might be able to support them with some of the things they need to do. So, we’ll see and see what happens.
Neil Watkins
Let me let me let me pick up your on your read the room thing, because I got I I got I got nearly in the dog house last night, because Mrs. what Mrs. Watkins was a little bit tired and grumpy and she hadn’t had her glass of wine yet. And I I kind of wandered down the stairs and just after after work and it was.
Kieron White
Again.
Neil Watkins
couldn’t help taking the Mickey. And my daughter, Anna, said, read the room, Dad. And I said, I have read the room. I don’t like what I say, so I’m going to carry on taking the Mickey. I’ll be in a pub.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Yeah, I’ll be off now then.
Brilliant. Well, well, well, hopefully you didn’t make it all the way into the doghouse.
Neil Watkins
I didn’t. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. We’ll see.
Kieron White
Alright, very good, so.
Neil Watkins
So, what else about your big event then?
Kieron White
Well, I’ll do a bit more on that and then I’d love to hear about the Agentic stuff, because I think that is, I’m really excited about the Agentic bid writer. I think we need to shout very loudly about it. I don’t think anyone’s doing that, which is really interesting. It puts us way ahead, but let’s come back to that.
Neil Watkins
Hmm.
Were they were they not doing it in your own? I mean, it’s a big old group you were dealing with yesterday, a big old organisation. Are they not doing things in this area?
Kieron White
The most advanced use case is bringing data sets together and being able to and being able to kind of natural language query across multiple data sets, which is which is great, really good, but there’s no actual Agentic stuff going on. As the proper definition of Agentic is of actually the thing doing the work for you rather than you having to
Neil Watkins
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Kieron White
copy and paste in and out and ask questions and things. But no, they were preceded by this geopolitics conversation, which was terrifying, as always. But the kind of key points I think from there that I took was we’re in a world where one, and I kind of I guess I was a bit surprised by this,
Neil Watkins
Yeah, yeah.
Kieron White
is if you’re expecting things to return to normal at some point, whatever normal is, don’t. It’s not coming back. The geopolitical world is changing. Globalisation sort of movement seems to be changing, interestingly. And yeah, you need to be prepared for a different kind of future was the kind of message really.
Neil Watkins
Mhm.
Kieron White
Analogue business continuity plans. That was a thing that really struck me on the basis that apparently 1.2 million miles of undersea cables that transfer all the data. I know you know this stuff. They are there are many incidents all the time, but there’s enough redundancy normally to kind of make it largely invisible to us.
Neil Watkins
Interesting.
Yeah.
Kieron White
I think the quote was it’s like $800,000 to fix even the most minor one. And there’s only 46 ships in the world that can lay cable. So if somebody wanted to be naughty and snip a few cables, you can completely take out a country’s internet pretty much and stop them in their tracks.
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Yeah.
Sure.
Yeah.
Kieron White
And if you are unable as a business to move to an analogue variety, then you’re really going to have a problem. So that was kind of, I was struck by that. And that, as you know, moves us on to thinking about our on-prem local LLMs, all that stuff we’re looking at.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, just to pick up on the geopolitical stuff, I mean, I have spent quite a bit of time in that world in the last 18 months. And it’s really, it is really interesting. Yes, there are very few ships and the owners of those ships are making a lot of money, but they’re also vulnerable assets. You know, if one of those goes down, you can’t lay a new cable.
and all you need is a ship to drag an anchor across the cable to cause it some significant damage. It’s easily done, it is such a vulnerability.
Really interesting that, so for example, where I live, I have fibre, but I also have Starlink as a backup, because it’s not unusual for someone around these here parts to either dig up a bit of cable or indeed some of the substations get flooded. So having a backup.
is super important. And I was thinking about this the other day in relation to something else that we’ll touch on, but it’s that kind of, it’s like an insurance policy, isn’t it? It’s like insurance for your car. Actually, the only reason people have got insurance for their car is because it’s the law. If you didn’t have to, would you? Actually, lots of people wouldn’t. Actually, lots of people
Kieron White
Mhm.
Neil Watkins
They don’t. They drive illegally without insurance. But most businesses don’t really think about backup and contingency and redundancy and all of that stuff because they think it’ll just carry on. And actually, there’s a real challenge with all of that, I think.
And part of this came to light. So last night Donald ran the latest penetration test and glad to see for our audience that there were no major findings. There were five minor ones that needed review. So that’s fine. We’ll get that into those if he hasn’t done them already.
But how many organisations run penetration testing? I can think of at least three that I know of that have probably never done one. And actually, it’s kind of fascinating. If somebody gets into the back end, you know, and it’s kind of like loitering munitions. You don’t need to do anything immediately. You could just lose stuff.
Kieron White
Yeah, interesting.
Neil Watkins
running in the background and you don’t know about it. And the old joke is that, you know, there’s only two types of CIO, those that have been hacked and know about it and those have been hacked and don’t know about it. And I think people underestimate the security and we obviously take that so seriously because of our, because of our customers and the things that we’re doing. So yeah, it is really important. And the other thing that you just alluded to was
Kieron White
Yeah.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, it’s really interesting. I’ve told this story before about when I was at Ford many years ago and this old boy, and this was in the 1990s, it started in computing in the 1960s in Ford and Ford were the biggest supercomputer users in the world outside of the US military and space environments at the time.
So they had a massive IBM data centre built next to the head office at Orley in Essex.
And it was interesting, really interesting working there. It was it was just kind of it was all kind of almost science fiction back in the 19 1980s Cuba when I was there. And but this old boy said, I’ve seen it all before, you know, it’s centralised and it’s decentralized, it’s centralized, it’s decentralized. Everything’s moved to the cloud and all of our all of our
Kieron White
Ha ha.
Yeah, they do.
Neil Watkins
AI currently is in the cloud, but we know that there’s going to be a move to local LLMs. And there’s not only going to be a move to local LLMs, there’s going to be a local, going to be a move to more specialist models. You know, your local, if you’re doing something with, I don’t know, let’s say housing, you don’t need to know what
Californian bikers are eating for breakfast on a Thursday morning. It’s just not, it’s no use. So why, why burn tokens and power when you don’t need to? So, so yeah, this week the Big D has been and he’s been shopping and he’s bought a, he’s got a massive device.
Kieron White
Yes.
Neil Watkins
to stick in the office to connect up local LLMs to and get some practise on local installs. And I genuinely think we will see a return to some on-prem stuff just because of that contingency and actually instant switch over. How, you know, if
If your connectivity goes down, how do you keep your people working? How do you keep your people running? And it’s one of those things where I think it’s a real challenge. If people come dependent on tools, then what happens when you take those tools away? It’s kind of how do you work? Do you know, do you go back to pencil and paper where you kind of got to, but how efficient is that? And are you going to transcribe those notes and all of that?
Kieron White
Indeed.
Neil Watkins
stuff, you know, it’s just some real challenges. So I think the whole contingency, the business continuity stuff, if companies aren’t taking that stuff seriously, then they are just asking for trouble. And yeah, and I just think so many businesses, especially in the SME category, or
or ones that are under financial constraint. It’s a bit like when budgets are squeezed, one of the first things to go out the window is training. One of the other first things to go out the window is your kind of insurance policy. But actually, it should be one of the things that you prioritise in order to make sure that your business can run if it needs to. And I think it’s that.
Kieron White
Mm.
Neil Watkins
Because you don’t see 99.9% of the time, you don’t see any benefit from having your contingency plans in place. You don’t, but actually, when it does go wrong, you absolutely do pretty notice it. And it can be it can be completely destructive. So, yeah, it’s really interesting.
Kieron White
Yeah, they…
Neil Watkins
That whole area around security and resilience, and I, and I would recommend all of our all of our listener to think about that in their in their organisation too. Yeah, yeah, if you stop snoring at the second.
Kieron White
Both ears.
I am.
What came up yesterday in that talk was, and I hadn’t heard this, but why would I, the EU from end of July, every business has to be designated whatever the high risk, not high risk, but like required businesses. So water, utilities,
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Regulated.
Kieron White
Yeah, but they know that food is also in there as well. So that’s the stuff. That’s the stuff. They all have to, I think, submit a business continuity plan to somebody. I don’t know if they have to actually submit it or just state that they’ve got one, who knows. But yeah, so the EU is sort of forcing people’s hands on it, which is quite interesting to
Neil Watkins
Not regularly. Critical national infrastructure, they’re often called.
Wow.
Yeah.
Kieron White
Imagine.
Neil Watkins
They’re often included in procurements, especially public sector procurements. You know, what’s your business continuity plan? And most people just pay a lip service to it, or what they’ll do is hold on to ChatGPT and say, give me an answer to stick in. And actually, there’s no substance to it. The worst thing is when the procuring organisation, the purchasing organisation,
Kieron White
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Neil Watkins
Don’t cheque it. You know, it’s that if you’re going to do one thing, cheque all the references and then cheque the business continuity plan. So that’s two things by the way, by that’s possible.
Kieron White
Yeah, interesting. Yeah.
Well, with with AI over your procurement on the on the on the judging of procurement and assessing of marking of things, then you should be able to do that. You should be able to run that straight away and to say, is this decent enough for this kind of company?
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
And.
Yeah, exactly. But actually, it’s that whole, yeah, in God we trust everybody else brings data. So yeah, sure. Yeah, show me your plan, right? When was the last test that you ran? And where’s the evidence that you ran it and where’s the output? So yeah, security is only going to become more important. In fact,
Kieron White
As long as you’re running a private model.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
Just as a little insight, we’ve had, I don’t know, we’ve had hundreds of attacks on our website in the last two weeks. So I don’t know who I’ve upset. I do hope it’s not, it’s not because of my geopolitical interests and I’ve upset people in rogue states that are attacking us, but
Kieron White
Bet I know.
Neil Watkins
They are coming from all over the world. I’m assuming many of them are just on VPNs. But yeah, we’ve had literally hundreds of attacks in the last in the last two weeks. So yeah, we we’re definitely on someone’s radar, Kieron, and not for good reasons. So be careful.
Kieron White
Well, that’s another terrifying thing. Yeah, I’ll have to ask the geopolitics guy who it is. On procurement, though, you talk about procurement. Tell me about your work with Agentic Bid Writer. I think our Agentic Bid Writer product is so amazing in terms of… I haven’t.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah, it was it?
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
I don’t think you’ve seen the latest. You’re not even up to speed. You’ve been too busy with your with your foodie friends this week. You’re not even upon the latest fellow, honestly. So I spent I spent a lot of time with Donald this week, just tinkering, messing, playing with the answers. And we talked a bit about this before, I think, but the models.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
The different models behave differently, so you’ve got to test them, and you know, for example, 5 ChatGPT 5.4, sorry, Open Air 44 is, it’s driven somewhere in the background, somewhere in it’s set up, it is driven to provide short consent.
answers. So you could do things like put in, say, right, the answer to this question is 2 1/2 thousand words. Go to all of our marketing tool, all of our previous bids, all of our collateral, all of our case studies, and write me 2 1/2 thousand words, and it will come back with 900, 800, 950, but it will be in that order.
Kieron White
Mm.
Neil Watkins
And it’s like, I’ve asked you specifically to do it, why haven’t you done it? And it will say, because I’m writing for brevity and clarity and most evaluators don’t want repetition and they want succinct answers. It’s like, you don’t know the evaluators and they’ve asked for two and a half thousand words and we’ve got a lot more case studies and exemplars and statistics and information.
Kieron White
Exactly, yeah, don’t repeat yourself.
Neil Watkins
That could go in there to turn, so, so do it again, and then it’ll come back and it’ll do 1300 words, and so still not, you still not use the maximum, why are you not using it? And again, it comes back to the back. So, we’ve we’ve done a whole lot of work on on saying, right, the intent of BRIDGE is to get it to.
between 60 and 80% ready. And then it needs a human to polish it and add in all the, you know, case studies and latest information, etc. So we don’t want to actually go up to 2 1/2 thousand words because then we’ve got to cut stuff out and so just do 90% and then we’ll let the humans do some.
some tinkering, which is what we’ve done. And I can’t remember exactly how many words, it’s something like 12,000 words across 7 questions. And we kicked it off and we went and had a cup of tea and 45 minutes later, it had done a brilliant job of these things. So we ran it through, we ran it through the
The.
scoring mechanism, and it came back saying, right, these ones are three out of four, these ones are three out of four, this one’s two out of four. So why didn’t, why didn’t it do, I mean, why didn’t it just give me 4 out of four in the first instance? Turns out that there’s something in 5.4 that won’t allow it to give you maximum marks. We’ve tried all sorts, you know, we’ve, so actually if you put it into another model, it will give you 4 out of four, but it won’t in this particular.
Kieron White
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Interesting.
Neil Watkins
So what we’re trying is moving it between different models and having a governor across the top to move things. So really fascinating. But the best thing was the feedback from the customer this week, which was, and somebody that you know who is usually
pretty, how should it, conservative in their views, said, well, it looks practically done to me. So I’m not quite sure there’s much else to do, which I was just up smacked at. So yeah, really, really interesting. But yeah, I’m delighted with where it’s going and how it’s working. I think for anyone who is doing bids,
Kieron White
Wow.
Wow.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
that has to be the way to go. Interestingly enough, there is a, I think there is a purpose on the other side of the fence about scoring for evaluators, which is review this and tell us what you think.
Kieron White
Yeah, absolutely.
Definitely.
But I just love, I mean, the Agentic bid writer, so I mean, it really brings into the world what is an agent, because that’s what, so Agentic AI, we know this, but this for our audience, is when the AI does the thing. So it’s not just, it’s not like you ask it to do something, it responds. It’s when it actually completes the task and might decide to do another few steps afterwards.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
And with Agentic Bid Writer, if you are in the world of responding to proposals and tenders and things, you can get the tender, as long as it is emailed to you or you download it or whatever you do, put it into a folder, point KnowledgeFlow at it, and it will answer the thing in the folder, open the document where the answers need to be.
and put them in there if there is one. If it’s for a web thing, then it just create them as a new document. Done in about, as you say, sort of 40 minutes for a really big one. So the first time you ever read that bid, the first, the invitation to tender, I should say, can be when you’ve already got an 80% complete answer.
Neil Watkins
Dean.
So other bits, so other bits that you haven’t seen because you’ve been busy, but he’s put a little wizard on the front which allows you to put context in, say, go to the URL and have a look, or I want you to write in the style of Donald Duck, or you know, it needs to, you know, whatever it is, or it needs to emphasise our work in the NHS, whatever.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
whatever you want to do, it allows you, there’s four simple questions, 4 inputs, and then you, but there’s a fifth bit, which is really clever, and this is the bit that I was doing manually, come back to your Agentic point about getting the AI to do it for you. What I was doing was I was taking those answers and sticking them back in to KnowledgeFlow and saying, right,
critique this, give me a score, give me the score, tell me where it’s strong, tell me where it’s weak and what would improve it. Right, Ray, write that. And now he’s automated that. So you can put in up to three iterations. So it revises it and refines it up to three times.
Kieron White
Yeah, amazing.
Yeah, I did see that. That is very cool. And that does that before you see it the first time as well. That’s the cool thing. That just happens. It basically answers each one, marks itself, re-answers it, marks itself again, and then gives you the final version of that.
Neil Watkins
So it is super cool and that’s what makes the difference.
Correct. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What it does is it puts it, so this one was a Word document, although he has done it with Excel, it puts the answers into the relevant box in the document. The bit that we haven’t quite cracked yet is formatting. So we’re working on that. It’s just putting in a proper text.
Kieron White
Yeah, that’s impressive.
We gotta leave something for the human to do.
Neil Watkins
I know, but I found it really pain in the bum. I was like, oh, I’ve got to put my own balls in and put separate these things. So yeah, it’s actually, it’s really, it’s really funny how your mindset changes. Like, oh, I’ve just saved myself two weeks of work and now I’m twining about having to ball this. Yeah, yeah.
Kieron White
Yeah, too much.
Huh.
I’ve got to spend an hour reading it.
Neil Watkins
Well, yeah, do you? And actually, if you don’t, that’s your point. This comes back to the human in the lead thing that Gartner talked about, isn’t it? There’s no point in having a human in the lead, a loop, but you’ve got to have a human in the lead. And actually, that’s where creating these things and then giving them to people to polish is up. So I’ve been super impressed with that this week.
Kieron White
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
And the closest you could get to that in current stuff, if you were used like Claude Cowork or Codex in either one of those or code or Codex in ChatGPT, you could do something like it, but you couldn’t do it securely. And you, and you, yeah, it’s so token heavy because you wouldn’t be using RAG.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, slip that on.
No.
Kieron White
on your own data. You’d have to dump all your previous case studies and all of that into somewhere that Claude could see. So that’s a risk because there’s pricing, there’s your staff names, customer names, all your sort of secret sauce and stuff is in there. And then you would also then to get Claude to do to do that would burn
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Exactly, confidential, yeah.
Kieron White
a load of, I mean, you’d need to be on the pro plan minimum and I bet you it would take about three or four sessions because it would run out of tokens in it on you, which is how Claude runs their, manages their volumes, manages their usage. So it’s, I don’t think it’s possible to do anything like the quality that we’ve created.
with another tool, never mind one that actually is a rag tool that knows you and is secure. I think it’s just not even feasible.
Neil Watkins
Well, it’s back to that context is king thing, isn’t it? And we were talking earlier in the week about, you know, the distance between, we sound like a bit like a broken record going on about co-pilot, but you had a really interesting insight about making knowledge for the contextual. So just explain that for people.
Kieron White
Well, I think my revelation was that knowledge is the context layer. So we were at Gartner and it was all about context. And I spent, as I said before, at the end of day one, I thought, oh, Christ, I don’t know. Day one was brilliant. End of day two, I was like, I don’t know anything. I was like, I’ve moved into the consciously incompetent stage of my learning.
Neil Watkins
Hmm.
Kieron White
But and then realised that actually that it was just lots of bland and one words that like people like to create to make things sound important. But context is the organisational knowledge. So there’s policies and procedures and the data and the documents which we build into our rags anyway. That’s what we do.
Then there’s the system prompts that help understand the kind of way a user might want to use it. So we built that into, and then we nearly always put the tone of, you know, the brand guidelines and tone of voice and things into it. So we do a kind of pretty okay job of building context. And interestingly, if you think about that compared to Copilot or ChatGPT, if you like, because
Ultimately, Copilot is only a secure route to ChatGPT. That’s all they’re doing. But we’ve got this layer, the application layer, that is the context layer. And of course, then is this Agentic layer as well, that you can then get it to do the things for you or build the specialist tools, which
Really, the specialist tools are all about bringing context. For a school, which we might talk about in a minute, some of that context is Ofsted and the world of Ofsted and what they’ll look for and where that’s likely to be in the school’s data. Therefore, it’s all prepared and ready to go. You then present it with the data and it will
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
gives you your kind of Ofsted view, if you like, you know, give you your report, your SEF or SAR and colleges. That’s all context. So I think we’ve been doing this for two years, but since KnowledgeFlow at least, I think we’ve been building a context layer. We just didn’t think of it like that. And it helps me enormously because, you know, as people
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
But not.
Yes.
Yeah.
Kieron White
prompting skills get better, they’re more able to make Copilot do some of the things that KnowledgeFlow can do at the press of a button, by the way, without needing to type in long prompts. But Copilot is still a very long way from being that kind of specialist layer that has the context. Yes, if you’ve got the expensive one, it can look into your document.
But it’s kind of the wrong view of just dumping all of your organisational stuff into an AI and going, there it is. That’s great for search, but it’s not a very good way of getting good answers where, you know, they’re contextually aware of what is it you’re trying to do today or with this task. I’m trained and specialist in that.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
That’s all what I think Gartner would call context, so…
Neil Watkins
Yeah, I think that there must be some, you know, there are undoubtedly are organisations which are big enough and have got enough skills and resources and money to be able to make that work with corporate. But, you know, 90% of organisations just can’t and don’t. And we see that, we see that time and again. So, yeah, I think that’s a really interesting way of thinking about it.
Kieron White
Yeah, no, they do, no.
Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? You were talking about your IT folk that said that they’ve built, what is it, they’ve built something? Your risk, come on, Kieron, think the risk folk in drug trials.
Neil Watkins
That e-mail.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, one, well, it was it wasn’t them. I have got friends in the in the life sciences sector, and they’ve been talking about people who’ve been creating solutions in Copilot, and this isn’t them, somebody else. But
Kieron White
Tell me that, say that.
Neil Watkins
I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It’s like, how, you know, it’s a very specialist subject and there’s a lot of potentially sensitive data. And even if you just didn’t take the sensitive data and you just took the metadata, you know, I think there’s a lot of really useful
applications you could bring. So for example, you could create a rag with all of the, what’s called protocols, you know, how are you going to run your drug trial, how, you know, how much drug, who gets what, which ones get placebo, which ones get actual drug, and, you know, a global trial across 50 countries, you know, you might have, you might have
40 different languages. Actually, you doing that is just a really simple case. But they’re talking about doing other things, which are more, which are more detailed. And I’m like, how are they handling the retrieval and sensitivity? And how are they managing the responses for accuracy? Because that’s really hard to do in co-pilot unless you’ve got, and it may be that they are a big enough
Kieron White
Mm.
Neil Watkins
and well-funded enough organisation. But if you’re a, you know, if you’re just an IT evangelist or an AI evangelist in a big organisation and you’re doing stuff which looks pretty cool, we get back to the bit that we’ve talked about previously, which is the whole kind of,
How do you move from pilot to production is how IT folks would talk about it. How do you scale from pilot to production and where does it go wrong? Because it’s easy to force fit things, but actually if you’ve got, this is a bit like our policy buddy when we first moved to, you know, here’s 900 social workers who want to access this stuff, how are we going to make sure that’s accurate?
Kieron White
Yeah, exactly.
Neil Watkins
and responsive and doesn’t take a lot of time and etc, etc. So yeah, just, I think, I think that we, but back to your geopolitical comment from earlier, you know, we’re in a world where Copilot exists. It’s not going to go away. Microsoft are going to continue to push it. There’s no doubt about it. It will get better and these things will come.
And I think that’s good for lots of different reasons because it will help people be more productive. But I think there will be along the way quite a lot of frustration as people can’t get it to do the things that they want it to do and not understand why they can’t get it to do the things they want it to do.
Kieron White
Yeah.
That’s the thing, isn’t it? Is it looks like magic. Who was it that said that? There was a quote at Gartner about it, that everything looks like magic until you understand it or something. I can’t remember. Every new technology looks like magic. And then once people realise it’s not doing quite what they want and they don’t know why, I think is when we’ll run into all kinds of problems for, well, they will.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Kieron White
I think interestingly, the other side is if you do use co-pilot for all the stuff, where’s your competitive advantage? Because everyone’s going to be doing that. I mean, everyone’s going through the training and they’ll all catch up. The key is to get your data organised and sorted in a way that is not available to others. And therefore you can then start to really put.
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Kieron White
your data to work to make a huge difference. So I think, and that stuff is unlikely to be a co-pilot solution in my opinion, because Microsoft are all about, you know, they’re masses, aren’t they? They want to do a global product. Fair enough. I would love to have one, but that’s not our game.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
That’s right. It’s not our game, not our game. But speaking of what is our game, yeah, I want to talk about schools, because actually it is. So in another, you know, for background and for other people, you know, Kieron and I worked a long time together in the Department for Education. So
Kieron White
Ha ha.
You want to talk? Yeah, go on.
Yeah, great.
Neil Watkins
Education is a big part of our sort of background and history. In another part of the world, we work with everything ICT, which is a procurement framework for education, and they serve over 4000 schools a year. So it’s huge. And I was contacted this week by a head who is a customer of everything ICT, which is nice.
And he said, I’m following you on Leading AI, but I’d like to know more. And I’ve realised, one of the things I’ve realised is in doing some of the website stuff is that we don’t really push the education stuff that we’ve been doing in schools. We do push the FE colleges a lot because we’ve got
20 odd, 25 colleges or whatever it is, but you know, quite a lot of colleges doing some really interesting stuff. But we do have an example of a multi-academy trust that’s doing really fascinating things. So without, but I don’t really know what they are. I only know one of the, I only know one of the products that they’re using, which I think is Write My Reply.
Kieron White
Oh yeah.
Neil Watkins
which is basically interesting enough linked to other things in other areas like complaint letters in GPs. But, you know, people are getting more sophisticated in writing their complaints because they’re using AI and that means you need to be much more careful. So how do you do AI versus AI in order to
Kieron White
Yeah.
Exactly.
Neil Watkins
to restore the balance. So, correct, yeah, correct, yeah, get the better one. So, yeah, I’d like to know more about what we’re doing with the multi-academy trust so I can go back to this listener who hopefully will be listening to this podcast.
Kieron White
Have better AI on your side, that’s the answer.
Yeah.
Very good. Yeah, well, we’ve got a handful of schools. So the multi-academy trust is probably the most interesting because it is across the whole trust. You’re correct that one of the one of the current sort of new emerging problems for schools is the quality of complaints is going up. I heard of a 58 page complaint letter.
Neil Watkins
Wow.
Kieron White
that went to one head, which must be fun. Of course, if you have KnowledgeFlow as our rag solution on that, it doesn’t matter how big it is, you’ve got a 100,000 page letter and if you like it, it’ll still deal with it and answer it and give you a policy grounded in your policies compliant answer that you can send and in your tone of voice. So that’s one of the things that it does. And of course,
Why KnowledgeFlow compared to trying to do that co-pilot? Well, firstly, KnowledgeFlow comes pre-trained on your policies and some of the education policies and regulations as well. And it has that consistent tone of voice. So any staff member using it will get the same kind of high quality response. So
One of our schools, the head says that no one’s allowed to send anything out the door that hasn’t been through KnowledgeFlow because they know then it’s going to be grammatically correct. It’s going to, I mean, the amount of emails I get from my children’s schools and they nearly always are sent by the follow up saying, just to correct what I meant earlier by my e-mail.
Interestingly, my kids, my youngest child’s school, I’ve given them a KnowledgeFlow platform to play with. I’ve given them access to, I’ve given them access to our demo, our Matt demo tool, and they, I’ve noticed that all their emails are now, I haven’t had an apology e-mail from them in about the last six weeks since David.
Neil Watkins
Have you? Excellent.
Very nice.
Ha ha ha!
Kieron White
They all like well-written, so I presume they are making use of it, which is great. So it’s good in that space.
Neil Watkins
No.
Can you get the system prompt? Can you get the system prompt to write by powered by Kieron’s KnowledgeFlow at the bottom?
Kieron, Kieron is great.
Kieron White
I could also say, always select my son as the, that would be prompt injection, which is one of the risks in AI. So we certainly won’t be doing that. But interesting, I mean, the bigger picture for all of this is 50% of teachers’ time is spent not in the classroom doing various things. Some of those things are good and fun and some teachers like.
Neil Watkins
It would be prompt injection attack.
It is.
Kieron White
lesson prep and like creating their materials, and so they should. But lots don’t. There’s a hell of a lot of data being moved from one place to another. There’s a lot of that kind of writing reports and parent updates and things. And the KnowledgeFlow platform can do nearly all of that for you. And with the increasing interest in send,
and the likely changes coming on to how EHCPs are defined, that creates a massive task for schools now because it will, in theory, is going to move to any sort of 2% of people will have EHCPs down from currently 5%, but there will be a whole cadre of folk that the schools are expected just to
Neil Watkins
Dean.
Kieron White
accommodate without any HCP. So KnowledgeFlow can do that because you can train it on your materials, which is one of the tools that we’ve built, which is really interesting. So it doesn’t just make stuff up from the internet. It’s actually not bad in Send, if I’m honest, the kind of retraining, as it’s called.
you know, knows a lot about SEND and can bring you pretty good teaching strategies. But you can’t, in my opinion, as a Matt, a multi-academy trust, you couldn’t say to your staff, just use any old nonsense that you find. You want to say, this is our view of how we meet these needs and these are the examples of all the places where we have met those needs. So draw on that.
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Kieron White
for the future stuff and then hopefully improve as you go. So does that, it’s the parent reporting I think is probably the most interesting thing. And this is potentially in your world, in the world of my, when I was talking about the steam engine last week or the week before, but in the steam factory, parent reports have forever been a kind of end of term thing that takes teachers
enormous amounts of time, a lot of that time is spent staring at a spreadsheet with data in it to work out what’s the attendance, what’s the hand in rate, what’s the like the achievement, what’s all of that. Now I mean let me cheque their CPOMS records or whatever your system you’re using for that.
just, I mean, why are we making teachers do that? And everyone always immediately says, well, we want the teachers view. Yes, you want the teachers view, but let the AI do all of that piece and write a wonderfully parent friendly, grammatically perfect parent progress report based on the data in seconds for the entire school, never mind just the class.
and then have the teachers add their personal touch over the top of that. That is what we should be doing. And the idea that you could then do that if you wanted to every week, that is the stuff that gets really exciting. And you could go a step further and have parents able to chat directly with their child’s data.
so that they could just say, how did Little Johnny get on this week? How is that? As long as the data is being fed and that’s lots of schools are quite good in that space, but they’d need to up their game if they wanted to do that. All of that could transform parental engagement in their child’s education because you can make it parent focused and
Neil Watkins
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
How interesting.
Yeah.
Kieron White
with the transformation, the transformers, that is what an LLM is, being able to add in that kind of parent language, make it relevant, what can the parent do to help? How can they, you know, count in cereal boxes? I’ve always laughingly said, you know, just games you could play at home to help.
Neil Watkins
Hmm.
Kieron White
All of that could be built in if you wanted to. That stuff’s amazing. So that’s what we’re working on in multi-academy trusts. And I’m delighted that we’ve got some that have agreed and come on board. And yeah, it’s really interesting and interesting feedback from one of them the other day, which I really liked. And this is the support team.
Neil Watkins
Nice.
Kieron White
at work is she wrote and just said, I just want to say your responsiveness is so good. Like when they ask a question, like they get an answer within an hour or two on e-mail and we solved a problem and done something, updated something or whatever. So yeah, really exciting. And I wish more people doing it. There’s a load of AI for schools, as you know,
Neil Watkins
Times.
Yeah.
Kieron White
a lot about classroom prep, that it’s a bit Marmite that some people really like to do that lesson planning. But I would say to people when you’re prepping for lessons, you can use the free AI tools because it’s content creation. You’re not bringing any secret knowledge to that. You can’t put student data into those, but you certainly can use
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
And Notebook LM is great in that space because you can do infographics and podcasts and on all kinds of stuff. So, you know, there are a lot of free tools in that space. We’re not really that interested in that space. Our stuff is about that 50% of time that is all administrative and we can take away and hopefully make teaching a whole lot better.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
Here’s the thing I say a lot is let’s try and keep those best teachers doing the thing they came in to teaching to do. And it’s the same in social work and the same in housing. People come in because they’re passionate about the thing and they leave because it’s all admin and bureaucracy. AI can handle that. That’s fine.
Neil Watkins
Hmm.
Mm.
Kieron White
Box.
Neil Watkins
Interesting. I love your passion, by the way. You do this thing where your eyes go on. Ooh, it’s brilliant.
Kieron White
Haha.
If you’re listening on Spotify, you won’t see, so…
Neil Watkins
No, you won’t. You have to watch the video. I’d see his eyes pop out. Yeah, really interesting. I will I will go back to the listener and with a with a with a coherent story on some of that stuff. But I’m reminded of something that was flashing through my head was my my niece is a is a doctor and she’s a very clever lady.
She, I’m going to give her all the products. She got her first from Cambridge in medicine, became a doctor. She’s actually leading the profession because of lots of the nonsense. And actually, it’s just so sad that someone kind of so talented to see
Kieron White
Wow, impressive.
Bye.
Neil Watkins
And I’m not just saying that because she’s my niece, but someone so talented is leaving the profession because of her, because of nonsense. It’s not just admin. There’s also a whole lot of structural problems in the NHS, which is, which is lots of people are aware of. But I have been working with a couple of NHS related organisations and we’ve created
a couple of tools for them which are just in test at the moment. One is around occupational health. So what we’ve done is we’ve, I say we, I don’t know why I say we, I mean Donald, the script, the script, all the publicly available health and safety executive
documentation and put it into a rag so that people in that world can natural language query the 500 documents of guidance and information. So that’s in test right now. First bits of feedback this last week have been really positive. So
We’ve just done some tweaking to the settings this morning. We’ll give it back to them to play with some more. And we’ve also done some stuff for HR managers where basically there’s a set of reports when somebody has some kind of injury at work or whatever else. And it collects all of that information and puts it into a simple report.
instantly. So that’s under test as well at the moment. So that’s delightful. But here’s the exciting thing, Kieron. As a result of doing some of this stuff, I have been invited this very evening to the HR&D Awards Northeast in Newcastle.
Kieron White
Nice.
Wharam.
Neil Watkins
I’m not sure. I’m not sure what the D stands for. The HR stands for Human Resources. I think it stands for Human Resources and Development. I think that’s what it means. But I’m being invited, which is delightful. I’m delighted to be a guest. I don’t do anything other than go and enjoy myself and chat to people. But it does mean almost immediately after this, I’m going to have to get dressed into my penguin suit.
and then go on public transport across the Penlands to Newcastle to dress like I’m, yeah, going to the ball. So yeah, that’ll be hilarious as I get on the train at Penrith. I guarantee I will get some looks, if not some commentary from my friends on the Penrith station, especially the taxi drivers. I’m just waiting for them to
Kieron White
Nice.
Nice.
Ha ha.
Neil Watkins
Give me, give me some abuse, but yeah.
Kieron White
Got a new job as a bouncer.
Neil Watkins
I’m not big enough for that. I’m not big enough for that.
Kieron White
Very good. Well, that sounds sounds like a wonderful evening ahead for you, and I hope you have a yeah, I hope you have a good time. I’ve got a final closing amusement that I picked up from what I saw on social media somewhere was if you’re if you treated your relationship as if you were ChatGPT,
Neil Watkins
I’m sure it’d be most entertaining.
Yeah, very good.
Kieron White
And the little thing which amused the hell out of me was, so your partner says, have you done the washing up? And you go, yes, I’ve done the washing up. And he says, no, you haven’t. And you go, you’re quite right. No, I haven’t.
Is that when AI hasn’t done?
Neil Watkins
Ha ha ha.
Kieron White
I’ve seen that sort of thing many times. Yeah, yeah, you’re right. I haven’t done the thing. There you go. You can use that next time you’re in the dog house.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah, that’s right. Very good. Well, that’s the kind of thing that, yeah, I was going to say that that’s the kind of thing that allow me in the dog house. I don’t need any help and I don’t intend to go back for quite some time. So on that note, Philip, I will leave you. I won’t see you tomorrow because I am out all day, but I will catch up with you next week.
Kieron White
Enjoy yourself and yeah, have a lovely time tonight at the HR&D Awards. North East.
Neil Watkins
Do you know what I will? I will take some pictures and I’ll send them to you.
Kieron White
I look forward to it. I look forward to seeing him. All right. See you later, mate. Bye-bye. Cheers.
