Episode #19 and it’s getting hot in the pantomime horse outfit.
Neil’s back from the Isle of Arran — sunburned, hydrated, and mildly alarmed by the FT and The Economist’s sudden AI pessimism. Meanwhile, Kieron had a rollercoaster of a week with client highs and lows. Week 19 rolls on.
The big insight this week: most organisations are handing staff a Copilot licence and expecting transformation. That’s not a strategy. That’s hoping people figure it out on their own — and most of them won’t. The truth is, most of people don’t want to.
Also: the BidWriter lesson we learned the hard way trying to do a favour for a friend (you can’t skip the setup week), why big prompts are so 2025 and don’t work the way people think they do, and a new step-by-step product feature that produced 9,147 words of Ofsted response for a college.
Plus: Midjourney is building a full-body scanner that takes 60 seconds, data centres in the US use less water than golf courses, and why the AI backlash in the financial press may be slightly overblown.
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? Are you sure? Are you sure you’re ready? Are you ready for the pantomime horse that is, is it week 19, week 19?
Kieron White
OK, yes.
What?
Up.
Well, that is 1 tired pantomime horse then.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, this pantomime is getting a bit sweaty in this pantomime course after this last week here. It’s been a bit off.
Kieron White
We’ll have to get, we’ll have to get another outfit. Maybe who else? Dame, who could? Dame Washot? No, what’s the? Another pantomime character.
Neil Watkins
I don’t know, do you remember those? Do you remember those party outfits you used to get which had ostrich legs and a bit of an ostrich thing in the? Yeah, one of them. It’s pantomime ostrich.
Kieron White
There you go. Yeah, I’ll get you one of those. It’s your big birthday coming up this summer. Maybe you can get one of those.
Neil Watkins
If I can get into one, I’ll be delighted. Anyway, enough of that old nonsense. How was your week? How was your week while I was away studying myself doing not a lot?
Kieron White
Well, you were sunning yourself in Scotland, which is, I mean, those two words have never been said together, have they?
Neil Watkins
That’s true, yeah. As I joked earlier, it’s like it was a world first. I don’t know how hot it was in. So we were in the Isle of Arran on the West Coast and I had no idea how hot it was, but I had to go swimming twice in the sea on Thursday to try and cool down. So
Kieron White
Wow.
You be, I bet you were chopping off your waterproof trousers and your and your your Hunter wellies.
Neil Watkins
It was.
I took my I took my waterproof trousers and my waterproof jacket and neither got neither got it neither got used the busted in the bag all week. It was absolutely tremendous.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Right. I bet trying to find your swimming togs is where we are. No, we didn’t. We didn’t think of this eventuality.
Neil Watkins
Ha ha ha!
I didn’t think about sun cream. I had loads of midge repellent, but nobody’s sun cream. So yeah, no, it was hilarious. It was absolutely fantastic, really good. And a lot of downtime, a lot of thinking, a lot of reading, a lot of chilling. You’ll be glad to hear I drank quite a lot of beer in order to just, I mean, hydration, I just take a lot of hydration breaks like the football Kieron, like the football.
Kieron White
Very wise.
Neil Watkins
Every 20 minutes I needed a hydration break.
Kieron White
Well, very wise, whilst you whilst you enjoyed yourself on holiday, why not?
Neil Watkins
Yeah, indeed, indeed. So yeah, no, it was really good. It was a lot of fun. And then, yeah, now back to it with a vengeance. So anyway, what’s been going on in my absence?
Kieron White
Good stuff.
Well, in your absence, we have been busy growing and doing amazing things. There’s been highs and lows, as is true of most weeks. So I’ll share with you some of those. So the biggest high, I think, is our largest customer who use huge amounts of knowledge flow. It seems to add
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Excellent.
Kieron White
loads of value to what they do, which is great to see. And they’ve just confirmed their renewal for year two with an increase in the number of things that they want to do and therefore the amount that they will be paying. So that’s really good news, still incredibly affordable and way less than any other AI.
Neil Watkins
Excellent.
You don’t have to sell it. You don’t have to sell it to me or our audience.
Kieron White
Exactly. Well, just in case our audience is one of our clients ever, then just to reiterate, we are still.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
No, I saw that. I saw that. I thought it was really I was it was really pleasing to see, and it made me think that I should go on holiday more often and actually do nothing. Well, while you’re while you’re while you’re trickling the usage of the of knowledge flow for our biggest customers, that’s brilliant.
Kieron White
Ha ha ha!
Well, you should do that. Although, as I said, every silver lining has a cloud, or indeed I think the other way around. So we had a really challenging conversation with one of our clients who had bid writer and singly bid writer. So there’s some lessons to be learned from that, which is a real
Neil Watkins
Yes, indeed.
Kieron White
pain. So we jumped really quickly because they said, we’ve got these two bids both due in in two weeks time. Can you move? And we were like, yeah, all right, no worries. I know that I know some of I know all of the folk from various parts of my work in the past. And so we built BidWriter. They then took a week
to find, to send us their proposals and documents and things. So we finally got those in. They eventually, I think, got it in their hands, like with two days to go before the bid deadline, very limited training. And funnily enough, as we would fully expect on the first go of these things, it wasn’t writing quite in their tone. It wasn’t finding enough variance in the answers that it was.
in the case studies it was citing. All of those are things we would fix normally over the first two weeks. And guess what? We didn’t have that opportunity. So they kind of left feeling like, oh, they’re a bit deflated. They were saying it’s kind of doing half the job, not we want it to do the whole job, of course, which everyone does want it to do, and it can do a fair bit of the whole job.
Neil Watkins
Mhm.
Kieron White
80%, as we always say. Anyway, so that’s been kind of a challenge because they obviously don’t see it from their side of the house. It’s like, well, we were thinking this thing was going to just smash it out of the park immediately.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, but see, one of my one of my holiday reflections was about adoption, how we get people to use the tool more. And I keep coming back to the, it’s a magic bullet. I know it’s not a magic bullet. There are no silver bullets, only lead ones, and you’ve got to fire lots of them. And you’ve got to put
got to put the effort in. And I did, I saw on the wires a couple of things about this. And really frustrating just to observe from an outside perspective of, you know, we jumped over lots of hoops in order to try and get them up and running. And then for them not to respond for a week to get the bloody documents, their documents in, or even get them together, just
Kieron White
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Neil Watkins
Absolutely super frustrating and actually really odd. And I wondered about, you don’t have to answer this question because I don’t think it’s appropriate, but I did wonder about the kind of hierarchy of engagement in that particular organisation and others that we’ve worked with.
you know, you get to the guy at the top comes to us and says, oh, can you help us out? Yeah, no problem. And then by the time it gets to the person who’s writing the thing, they can’t be bothered to get the documents together or they’re too busy writing the bid to get the documents together, potentially to be fair to them. You know, and there’s, you know, whatever steps down, we had another
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
call, we had a sales call earlier today, where we were chatting to a bunch of people where the guy at the top, super smart, super bright, sees the whole kind of sector opportunity. And he said, right, I’ve got to leave early now. And then he left and then the people who were left go, oh yeah, it’s all a bit rubbish, isn’t it? It was really weird, just a really weird conversation. I just wondered whether
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
It was a bit like that with the with the Bidwriter guys, where the you know the guys at the top had high expectations and the guys at the bottom, I don’t know if they know how.
Kieron White
Well, I think, and I, well, I think the thing is making it clear, because I think they was like, can you do it at the time? Yes, we can. Then I don’t think we could have been clearer about the project steps that are needed afterwards. I mean, I said to them, we need your documents. And then, but I obviously didn’t make that clear enough about how important it is to get those like now.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
because we know there will be problems. Most people’s proposals and case studies will have problems when AI tries to run embeddings across them and finding those and then fixing those, which we can do once we know where they are, but there’ll be quirks, there’ll be tables in tables, there’ll be images, there’ll be, I know all kinds of bits and bobs that trips AI up.
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Yeah.
Kieron White
in that embeddings process that we can then get on and solve, but won’t be solved until we do. And then of course, is that tone and trying to get it to write in their way and all that. I mean, that only comes from talking to them about what is your tone. Show me, yes, we can look in your document and get some of it and we can write, you know, we can get it to emulate that.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
in some way, but it’s better when you have a measured conversation about it and talk about which one of those is a really good tone, because not all of them will be. And by the way, if we try and do it from the documents, there’ll be things in our terms and conditions and tables and stuff that it will pull out as tone and you don’t want that. So anyway, so yes, I’m hoping that we can turn them around. We’ve got, we’ve agreed some actions with them to improve things, so I hope so, but
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Kieron White
Yes, I think the clarity that it isn’t my magic wand, it doesn’t know everything about you and every piece of work you’ve done if you haven’t told it about it. So let’s teach it.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
And also the kind of where it’s pulling information back, the kind of whole one shot doesn’t solve it in the one shot prompting. Here’s my 3000 word prompt. And of course, it’s not going to work the first time. Actually, one of the things I did want to say was congratulations to Donald and to you and the rest of the team for the
Kieron White
Indeed.
Neil Watkins
piece of work, which I saw this morning when I got back first, my very first meeting. I was delighted to hear about the whole, I don’t know how to describe it, the step by step, which kind of really underplays what it actually does and how it works. So tell our organ about that, because it’s great.
Kieron White
I am.
Is it?
Yeah, it’s very cool. And that actually does solve this problem of having a massive prompt and hoping it will somehow be able to read all of that prompt and apply it to all of the documents.
Neil Watkins
Can you can you just explain why the big prompt doesn’t work? I don’t think people understand that, because I think I think as net would prompting is so 2025 and actually people just have ended up just adding more and more to their prompt, their system prompts. And actually, they just they think if they write a massive prompt, it’s going to
Kieron White
Mmh.
Neil Watkins
Fix the problem; actually, it makes it worse, not better.
Kieron White
Well, and I think partly it’s if you use some of these reasoning or skill enabled models, so if you have a paid for like expensive Claude license, then you can get away with more because it will operate differently to how any of the kind of internal tools will.
And that’s what step by step what Donald has built is now aiming to emulate in our secure way. So there’s two main reasons why big prompts won’t work. One is the amount of text in there that’s not that relevant and it basically confuses the system.
alongside the context window for what you’re working with might be limited and therefore, like all people, it reads the beginning and end. Interestingly, in 5.4, which is our platform, 5.4 mini for a lot of our work, is it favours the end will always trump something buried in the middle, the last thing you say.
And so you have to think carefully about prompting and how you finish up your thing to with the stuff that you actually need it to definitely do. So there’s a whole bunch of kind of just, I don’t know what you’d call it, the art, the artistry of kind of designing the prompt in a way that is going to follow it. But it will, a long prompt, they always drift a bit in the middle. So that’s part of it. The other part is when you’re using it with RAG,
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
So with retrieval augmented generation, if you run a single prompt, it will do a single search and retrieval step of the data of all of your case studies and things in this case. The problem with that, of course, is that if you’re answering 30 questions in an RFP, probably 20, if
top case set at 20, which is fairly standard for our products, you’re going to get 20 case studies that somehow speak to all of those 30 questions, which might be all over the place and nuanced and whatever. So you need it to go in multi-shot and then it will do a retrieval every time and it can find 20 relevant case studies for just that specific thing that you
want to know about for this particular question. So step by step, which is now, as you say, it’s not the best name that we should probably use AI to find a better name, but it will now take a massive prompt and break it in the background into individual steps, each one sort of self-contained so that it can go and
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
That’s right.
Kieron White
find data if it needs to, it can run analytics if it needs to, or it can summarise other things if it needs to. And I am looking on the other screen at its output for the new Ofsted tools that we’ve created, and it is very, very tremendous. And in fact, let me tell you how many words it’s output because this is quite interesting in its own way. I’m just going to open this quickly while our audience gets themselves another cup of tea.
Kieron White
Oh, there we go. It is 9,147 words. So that is like your whole RFP response done in effectively one shot, but actually running over multiple.
Neil Watkins
Nice.
Kieron White
prompt. But in each case, if you wanted to do that for your organization, there’s some work to do with us on how do you want those things structured then. Because once you bake that in, that’s how it’s going to follow. It will answer each question. But if you always like to do this or that, or always write like this, then that’s the part we need to bake into it to give it that context.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, yeah.
Kieron White
So, there you go, that was… Go on.
Neil Watkins
They can’t do.
I was just going to say the context thing, come back to the context thing, because it’s so important. You know, we context was king was the message from the Gartner conference. And actually that whole piece about the context layer being the bit that actually differentiates. Again, we had another conversation with somebody about co-pilot. It’s like, yeah, and they admitted they’d had trouble getting stuff out of co-pilot.
And contextually, that’s really important, pulling back the wrong stuff or stuff that was inappropriate or immaterial to the question at hand. So yeah, back to the context stuff and it being able to pull the information that’s relevant and important. Because I had, before I went to it, I had a bit of feedback from one of the bigger IT users saying, no, it’s not.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
It’s kind of repeating itself. It’s not it’s not doing a great job. But so we fixed that problem in a different way because it was just looking at the it was just looking at the wrong stuff. But actually, unless you know what it’s doing and how you fix that stuff in the background, then you’re going to end up with
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
mediocre answers. And that links to one of the things that I came away from my holiday with. And my holiday reading was quite extensive, but I was trying to do a lot of it on my phone while I was sat in the sunshine. And I read a couple, lots of my sources were from the FT or from the Economist.
And I don’t mind admitting those of my sources. But there’s a real kind of negative vibe last week about AI in previous weeks. So it’s been AI is brilliant. AI is going to transform the world. AI is there. But last week, AI has kind of lost its shine. And there were articles like the AI backlash is coming. And I’m like, what? So it really kind of.
Kieron White
Mm-hmm.
Neil Watkins
negative, but some of it was along the lines of the things we’ve been talking about around contextually, that the AI isn’t delivering for people. AI isn’t being embedded in people’s workflows, so they’re not really doing it. Loads of people have spent massive amounts of money on licences that no one’s actually using.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
Lots of news in the last wee while that some of the stuff we picked up on about companies limiting the token burn from people because they’re spending millions of dollars on tokens and actually got they’ve got lazy then it again that be jobs.
Kieron White
Mhm.
Neil Watkins
picked this. He said, you know, people will start to want to be more economical and they won’t just throw everything in. Right now, they throw everything in because it’s lazy. They’re not thinking about actually how much it’s costing. And this fact amused me. It was all part of the data centre backlash and somebody, one town,
claiming that if you live near a data centre, it was 9 degrees hotter than actually if you lived further out. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And Jeff Bezos was in the news because he’d made some comment about water for data centres rather than for humans to drink. But there was a fact, and I think it was the economist that said,
Kieron White
Really.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, but no one’s no one’s actually spotted the fact that all of the all of the data centres in the US use much less water than all of the golf courses. No one’s picked that up. And I wonder why. I wonder why that is. Anyway, I know your views on playing golf.
Kieron White
Yeah, no, indeed, yeah, indeed.
Indeed, you’re right. Interesting though, what you’re saying about like the context and people not wanting to do it or not realising they have to. And I think here’s it, there’s two thoughts that spring to mind. There’s a phrase I, well, I think I wrote this while I was on a webinar as my sort of notes on it is, go work it out yourself is not an AI strategy.
Neil Watkins
Thanks.
Kieron White
And that is so many people are deploying co-pilot. And how many times have I had the conversation saying, well, we’ve got co-pilot everywhere, so we don’t need KnowledgeFlow? I’m like, no, you’re completely missing the point. Putting co-pilot everywhere, even with training, is still then reliant on people to work out how to use it to help their job. Now, that’s fine for really basic use. Summarise these documents, help me rewrite this thing.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
all those kind of uses, which is pretty much most AI use in work, that’s fine, but it’s not where any of the big transformation is. That is the stuff of like the steam engine analogy of last week that we talked about of just changing your big steam engine for a big electric engine and expecting everything to change.
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Kieron White
And I think that whole thing of like, you’re just relying on people just to go away and work out how to make co-pilot be useful to them. And as I’ve talked about before in the podcast is my consulting years of consulting shows me that most people do not want to think about their job other than they don’t want to work on their job. They want to just
do their job. Most people. I find it very interesting because for me that sounds like the worst nightmare of a job I could ever imagine, where you just come in and turn this handle and don’t ask why, just keep doing it. But most people seem really happy. Tell me how to do my job, I want to do my job and hopefully I feel some fulfilment from or achieve something useful.
Neil Watkins
No.
Kieron White
But it is few that people that want to stop and go, how do I make this job better? How do I bring entrepreneurial mindset to my job so that I can improve it? And those are the people that will be getting lots out of AI if they’re so minded. But just saying to your whole organization, there’s co-pilot.
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Kieron White
You get, yeah, I mean, it’s probably worth doing if you use a free one, because it’s like you’re going to get probably 5% efficiencies, which frankly is not a small amount across a big organisation, but it’s never going to transform you, unless you will have another set of stuff going on where you’ve got people that are super users that are then sharing it and then embedding it. So, yeah, and the other part I think is
Neil Watkins
The.
Mm.
Yeah.
Kieron White
the expectation thing is our future, I think the future of jobs. In fact, I was saying this, I was invited quite last minute to join FE News’ live event on Thursday morning. So I was out doing this half hour live news panel. I was a panel member and I was sharing the kind of, in my view, the future of work. And it’s really what Gartner’s saying. So it’s not.
really my view is just I think I agree with it very strongly, is it will be human, a human managing one or more agents, and the agents will do the work. That might be whether that’s answering emails, processing documents, working out when your gas safety fixes are needed to be done and all those kind of whatever.
The agent can do all of that, but it needs governing. And that governance isn’t just like looking at the output saying yes and no. That’s a tiny bit of it. It’s working out what data it needs. It’s working out what instructions it needs that improves it. It’s working out that the regulations changed recently. I need to add that in. All of those things are what is the future for now of work. Who knows how long that future is.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
Interestingly, the other thing I shared on there was, I think, learning prompting. I mean, even that’s gone away because agents don’t really need prompting in anything like the way you did before. If you’ve got, like, you know, use any of the proper Agentic stuff, they need access to the documents with the rules and various things. And you’ve got to decide.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, yeah.
Kieron White
and curate cleverly and closely what you give them access to. And then there is sort of some prompting, but not a day-to-day prompting thing. There’s a kind of Uber master prompt that drives a thing to do the behaviour. And that’s, so who knows where the prompting is even a thing that’s going to continue, but let’s see.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah, indeed, that is interesting. And I think the whole, one of the positive things that I did read was about actually how do you use AI to transform public services and how do you help citizens and all the things that we’ve been kind of thinking about, talking about.
Kieron White
Nice.
Neil Watkins
and actually working on with groups, you know, that there was a really positive piece about that making a real, making a real difference to citizens and people not being scared of AI, but actually also wanting to engage it in a in a much more positive way. So yeah, it wasn’t all dim and gloom on the on the wires, but it was a bit of it was a bit of that, I have to say.
Kieron White
Well, there’s lots of, there’s a lot to be said, isn’t there? But then you get the backlash of like Palantir in NHS, which is, you know, problematic, isn’t it? People don’t want their data shared and you get into sort of all kinds of kind of difficult challenges. I want amazing health care and I want it all efficient and I want it all to work, but oh, no, I don’t want a computer to do anything.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kieron White
I am, this will amuse you. So there was a webinar that I wanted to go to this week from Look Up, which is Matthew Hook and his partner Caroline. And it’s storytelling for businesses and transformation and in this case on AI. And how do you tell the story in a way that actually interests and compels people, which is
as we know, kind of fundamental to everything really. If you can’t communicate what it can do, how it can help, then frankly, you’re onto a bit of a loser. Anyway, this is the amusing part, so I thought I’ll join that. I was on another call at the time and they were starting, so I went and joined it and it was a Zoom one. And so that was joined and I had it muted, but
And then I heard them, but I didn’t turn off the sound. And I heard them go, oh, good, there is someone here.
If Kieron is here. So I was like, oh no, because two things happened. One, I had to get out of this other meeting much more quickly, but two, I was going to run it, you know, when you listen to webinars, you know, they’re running in the background while you’re working and you kind of just kind of work out whether it’s something you actually care enough about to really pay attention to. So they said, well, it would be great to get a good question from you at the end.
Neil Watkins
I.
Yeah.
Kieron White
So I was like, now I’ve got to listen. I even made notes. I mean, it was a good webinar. It was a good webinar. And I enjoyed listening to the to Matthew and his guest, Hamish Nicklin. But yeah, it was it was I suddenly like moved from just a passive.
Neil Watkins
No.
But.
Yeah.
Ha ha ha.
Kieron White
passive, I’ll get on with other stuff while I listen to this too, now I’m in it. So yeah, that was fun.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, yeah, that’ll learn you, that’ll learn you to switch your bloody mic off.
Kieron White
Indeed, I should, well, it was even though just because my name popped up because of the Zoom version, they just ran it as a Zoom meeting, I think. So it was like, oh, here I am now, front and centre. Anyway, it was nice to meet Hamish because I’ve heard lots about him through the years and many people have said I should meet him and I hadn’t. So now I have. So it was good and some useful bits.
Neil Watkins
And…
Yeah.
Nice.
Kieron White
in there on AI strategy, I guess, really, and sort of lots of this sort of usual story, but really about you need to understand enough about its kind of potential and know how to use it properly if you really want to transform anything. So, yeah, that’s what Hamish is trying to do in the world, which is great. Good on him.
Neil Watkins
Very good. Good looking with that. There was one other thing, I did not link to anything that we talked about, but it popped into my head as you were just talking about how do you pitch the stories of AI. And there was an interesting article I read last week about the different biases or the different values that AI
can bring. And one of the questions it was asked was, I’ve got a problem with my in-laws, how should I handle it? And depending on the different model that you used, it gave very, very different answers from the, well, you need you need to confront them and actually have it all out to the, oh, it’s best not to get involved as to be here. There’s a graphic where it’s got, it’s got each of those.
Kieron White
Ha ha ha!
Yeah.
And it blow over.
Neil Watkins
sort of the big, big frontier models. It’s like how, how passive or aggressive along this line. It was, it was really quite funny. I was thinking, yeah, I’m not sure I’d be putting anything about my in-laws on the on the interweb, but I don’t need any, I don’t need that kind of stuff coming back to me now.
Kieron White
That’s not.
No, it.
Neil Watkins
In KnowledgeFlow, where is private, dead easy.
Kieron White
Yeah, there you go. Yeah, you can go go mad. I just don’t let them on your version of it. OK, so look in the history.
Neil Watkins
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, they don’t need to look at my prompt history. Yeah, very funny.
Kieron White
So I wanted to quickly talk about our blog this week, which was about predictive analytics really, but featured around the World Cup, the Football World Cup that’s going on. Yeah, it’s quite good, isn’t it? And interestingly, the sort of nub of it was that if you use AI to predict anything in the World Cup, or indeed use anything to predict,
Neil Watkins
I saw that, I read it, very amusing.
Kieron White
the World Cup, it will look back in patterns of history and try and make future predictions based on that. And interestingly pointed out this time was, well, this time is the biggest World Cup there’s ever been with many more teams and therefore many more mismatches, as in very poor teams playing very, very good teams. And therefore,
much bigger goal differences than have been experienced. Now put that into your predictive models. Oh, you can’t because you’re relying on everything up to today. So really interesting. They’ve got to watch out of if you’re going to try and do predictive analytics, which everybody wants to do, then you’ve got to be really clear about the biases. It is bias really in your data.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
OK.
Kieron White
or the inaccuracies, I guess. So, and in education where I often talk about predictive analytics, I think this is so true. It’s so difficult because in education, you’re right into the kind of social science of it really. Why is that pupil, learner, student not engaging?
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
And there is probably as many reasons as there are pupils, learners and students not engaging. And you can look in the history and you can look at attendance patterns and handing patterns and even back to kind of primary school experience and transition. And there’s all kinds of data you could bring to bear.
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Kieron White
But what I always say to educators in this space is, if you’re in a school, 1000 student secondary school, you already know the 10 students it’s going to point out, don’t you? And the reality is, deprivation is already there as your predictor. It is nearly always deprivation.
Neil Watkins
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
on any kind of recognisable pattern causes the problem. So the question is, what do you do about it? And unless you’ve got some levers you can pull, and frankly, having more data on the subject, at the moment, it won’t be that useful.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
No, I did.
Kieron White
But there is, but as we’ve talked about, there is the unstructured data, which is new, and that is worth looking at, which is the words on pages, reports, things that you have captured about the interactions you have with pupils and students. Because if you start to build that with structured data,
you now have unlocking new potential, new insights that were never previously available because you just couldn’t analyse at that scale. So I think that’s really interesting. But in that regard, most of the educators we talk to don’t capture that kind of content in any managed way. So you don’t get the kind of, actually, he was a bit low today. I had a chat with him after class and
Neil Watkins
No.
Kieron White
Actually, it turns out he’d had a bit of a bad weekend, whatever. That isn’t captured in most schools, not with any student identifier on it anyway. Therefore, we can’t use it. So there you are.
Neil Watkins
Hmm.
Mhm.
Just coming back to the blog piece, I was most humoured that Julia, the person I would have thought was the least interested in football in the world, was writing A blog about the World Cup. But it was the line about, I’m 3 pints in. Just 3 pints of Negroni was that.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
Julia is.
Kieron White
That explains how the blog went off soon.
Neil Watkins
It did, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I could just imagine her. I just wondered who was shouting at the TV most, her or Kevin. So it would be hilarious to be a bit of a goggle box experience, watching them watch football. I would have thought. I hope she’s won a, she’s only doing it, she’s only going to win a tenner or something stupid, but she’s putting a lot of bloody effort in.
Kieron White
Isn’t it?
Yeah.
Yeah, what’s that? What’s happening now?
Neil Watkins
For 10 quid, didn’t she?
Kieron White
Yeah, indeed.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
I am, you know, sort of not to do with that story, but I was really, this is amazing. Midjourney, so they’re an image producing AI tool in the main, but they have just announced, what are they calling it, Midjourney Medical Scanner or Midjourney Spa.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Okay.
Kieron White
So, they they have they they have got that, so according to the reports I’ve read, have produced a whole new way of doing whole body scanning, so the MRI scan kind of thing that takes an hour or so, doesn’t it, to have a kind of proper body one. They do it through water and ultrasound and then using AI to predict to to look at the
image and it sends millions of sound waves through the water and then obviously measuring the bounce back or whatever. They reckon 60 seconds to get an entire body scan and they’re going to be have their first one in San Francisco in 2027 apparently. So they’re already kind of, they’re that far down that they’re announcing where and when. So
Neil Watkins
1.
Wharam.
Kieron White
If that’s true, I mean, that’s incredible because MRIs, I mean, they’re so expensive, they’re so noisy, they’re so slow that you probably, I mean, best day in a hospital, you probably get 12 people through one. And now you could be doing 12 in 20 minutes.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Trying to.
Kieron White
Amazing.
Neil Watkins
That is incredible. Yeah, no, the whole health thing is incredible. We’ve talked to plenty of people from health and some of them are, how should we say, less enthusiastic about moving things forward than others, but it sounds like that is just a brilliant use of technology in order to help improve people’s lives and identify.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
Intentify problems, but in.
Kieron White
Yeah, isn’t it, Jess? There you go.
Neil Watkins
Crikey, is that is that the high night that we should finish on? And seeing as I’ve been seeing as I’ve been really miserable with all my kind of AI’s AI’s rubbish according to The Economist and the FT. I’m going to stop reading them, Kieron, until they until they put a bit more joy back into the AI business. I’m going to I’m going to stop reading them.
Kieron White
I think so.
Yeah.
Well…
Well, do you know, I went on a little trip in May up the river on my little river boat, and I had a six days and I basically didn’t pay attention to any news. And it was lovely. Because you don’t have all that just misery in your life, though. You just don’t need to know about most of it. And particularly all that, I mean, the UK political scenario for almost as long as I can remember now is just about the inviting of the various parties.
Neil Watkins
Mmh.
Ha ha ha.
That.
Yeah.
Kieron White
And you just don’t need to pay attention because you know it’s going to be the same stuff in a year’s time. And so or a week’s time, a month’s time, whenever you choose to look again, it will be exactly the same. So there you go. And I’m actually very interested in politics, but I’m just so fed up of that kind of news cycle of just nonsense. Anyway, there you go. So
Neil Watkins
Yeah, yeah.
Kieron White
Turn off the news for a bit.
Neil Watkins
All right, well, on your little boat trip, after you got back from your boat trip and you asked your little boy what the best bit was, what did he say?
Kieron White
The fact that he got to play on his iPad every day. He’s only allowed on weekends and then we were on holiday. So he played Minecraft and watched children’s YouTube. I saw brilliant, brilliant. All these wholesome stories and live events I was hoping he would be telling everyone about. Nope, it was about YouTube and Minecraft.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
No.
Right, well, there you go. That’s the new generations coming through for us, Kieron. That’s the new generation. You don’t have to worry about it. Right, I’m going to go and switch my, I’m going to go and switch my news feeds off and I’m going to go and crack open a beer. So you have a great evening and I will catch you very soon.
Kieron White
There you go.
Good.
Nice one. Take care. Nice to talk to you. See ya. Alright, cheers everyone. Bye bye. Bye.
Neil Watkins
Alright, see you soon. Bye.
Neil Watkins stopped transcription
