Google paid $10 million for a bankrupt airline’s emails. It wants to learn how work gets done.
Spirit Airlines went to the wall. Google bought 600 million of its emails, documents and Teams messages at auction, so its agents can study how people actually work: the meetings, the back-and-forth, the stuff that never makes it into a process map. Neil Watkins and Kieron White have one question. If you want to teach an AI how to run a business, why start with one that failed? And haven’t you got your own data to play with?
That leads into the week’s other lesson in dependency. The White House ordered the frontier labs to shut the UK out of pre-release model testing, then reversed it 17 days later. OpenAI’s revenue went from $70 billion to $50 billion in the space of a week, and its IPO slipped to 2027. If your business now runs on someone else’s model, what’s your plan for the day it changes price, changes terms, or goes away?
Kieron looks at the new personal agents, Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s equivalent, and explains why he’s not connecting one to his bank account any time soon. Then Walmart’s agent-to-agent contract negotiation, and what it means for a business like Leading AI’s own procurement work.
Also this week: a government AI risk management toolkit that’s been out for a month and nobody has mentioned. Why Turnitin and the AI detectors may have had their day now Google’s SynthID is free. The senior manager who has a junior cutting and pasting emails into Word before they go into the AI. The customer who’s been with Leading AI three years and had no idea there was a bid-writing tool. And what rubbing a genie lamp has in common with writing a prompt.
We’re getting up super early tomorrow because Dr Jo Orlando joins us from Australia for a special guest episode on children, AI and staying safe.
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
Podcasting – #34 – 13 Oct 2026
Neil Watkins
So, right, let’s get this pantomime horse of a podcast underway, Kieron.
Kieron White
Good afternoon or morning or wherever you are and good evening if you’re in another part of the world.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, indeed, wherever you are happy, whatever day it is when you’re listening to this. So we have.
Kieron White
It’s Columbus Day and that is Columbus Day apparently today. I, as we’re recording this, I’m guessing that’s it just appeared in my diary in my Outlook calendar. I’m guessing it’s something to do with Christophe Colombi.
Neil Watkins
Is it?
Oh, nice.
I did.
Well, he just messaged you to say, are you free? Are you free for the podcast on Tuesday, Kieron?
Kieron White
Yeah, he’s right. He’s reminded me. So.
Yeah, I think it, yeah.
Neil Watkins
I need to find America. Could you think AI can help me? Very good. Well, America, actually, interestingly enough, America is on one of my list of topics that I wanted to talk about this week. So a couple of other things I wanted to talk about were AI in business and how
Kieron White
Yeah.
Very good.
Neil Watkins
The frontier models are doing something which is really, on the surface, looks a bit random, but also a bit scary. I want to talk a bit about politics and public sector AI. And I want to talk a little bit about security and customer feedback. So I got lots of things to talk about this week. What about you?
Kieron White
Yeah, well I have a hodgepodge of things to talk about that have been catching my eye that I think are really interesting. There’s one about the newish personal agents, so that’s Muse and ChatGPT’s equivalent. I want to talk a little bit about that and what that might mean for the future.
Neil Watkins
Please.
Kieron White
Similarly, on the future, Bill Gates has a report out this week, which is quite interesting as well. Actually, I’ll share a little bit about what I want to explore. I’ve got a couple of amusing anecdotes, as always. What does summoning a genie have in common with prompting an AI tool? So stick around to, I think, cover that.
Neil Watkins
Mm-hmm.
As always.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
And I’ve got a question on is it is Turnitin and AI detectors in general, have they had their day? So I want to talk a bit about that. And then finally on my list is agents for organisations negotiating contracts, very interesting potential new world, which
Neil Watkins
Hmm.
Kieron White
Yeah, it might change things a little bit. Those are mine. Where do you want to start?
Neil Watkins
Cool. Well, let’s start with America then, because one of the things I noticed this week was that Google had just bought in an auction, they beat somebody else off to buy all of the emails and Slack messages for an airline called Sprint that apparently has gone to the wall in the US.
And what they want to do is they want to take all of the billions of messages, and there’s something like half a trillion emails and Slack messages that they’ve bought. And we want to go through that. They want to let agents loose on them to understand how work is actually done. And this kind of links to a comment that we made a couple of weeks ago, I think, about
Kieron White
Brown.
Neil Watkins
the Frontier Labs wanting to own work and replace staff with AI that can do the job. But they don’t, agents are very, as you know, they can be very black and white. And if they’re not instructed properly, then things go wrong and all of that. So how does work get done? Because
A lot of work is in the meeting, a lot of the work is in the interaction, a lot of the work is in communications. So they’ve bought all of these millions of emails and information. And as one commentator put it, it’s really interesting, they’ve told them to buy up all of the messages from a failed business. So aren’t they going to learn all the wrong things then, which I thought was a really interesting piece.
Kieron White
I.
We’re good again.
Neil Watkins
but it just shows the direction of travel. Here’s how not to do it.
Kieron White
Be careful. Yeah, be careful about using those agents on your own business then.
Neil Watkins
That’s right. We won’t be using them. So yeah, I thought that was, I thought it was a really interesting move. And if they’re going to start just absorbing all of that data in order to try and work out how work is done and people could be replaced, then that’s just going to accelerate, isn’t it? So yeah, but with.
Kieron White
So.
Yeah.
It’s interesting. I would have thought they’d already have lots of access to things like that, but obviously not. People are spending millions of dollars buying it. I would have thought they’d already snuck into systems enough. You only got to open Microsoft’s, for example, or Google’s own.
Neil Watkins
Well, you…
Hold on.
I was going to say that they’ve got they’ve got billions of their own. Why would you start with a failed business? Why would you start with an external failed business when you’ve got all of your? I mean, they have they must have the biggest data sets in the world, Google.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Maybe it’s training an airline model, a specific airline version in the going down the sort of cohere large language model routes of a specialist small language model that only knows about airlines. Perhaps that’s their interest. But again, you’ve still got a bit of a problem. How to crash your airline financially, I mean.
Neil Watkins
Maybe.
Yeah, indeed, indeed. So that amused me and terrified me in equal measure. So let’s start with that. And then the next thing was the letter to America was Trump.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
or the White House deciding that the UK should be shut out of frontier model testing. And I know he’s changed it within, I don’t know, however many hours or days it is, but it just goes to show how kind of, how unstable and uncertain it is. And actually, yeah, how dependent we are. And we’ve talked before about actually,
Kieron White
Yeah.
Yeah, dependent, we are.
Neil Watkins
independence of models when it comes to even down to kind of do we do we just run models on our our own servers, because because that guarantees that we can actually access things and do things when when others when others switches off. So, I thought that was a really again just another salutary lesson.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
the whether people pay any attention to those kind of messages or not is a different thing of course.
Kieron White
Yeah.
I think that is, I mean, the thing that for us more right back to our business really is knowledge flow as an AI harness, which I think is its definition. The language changes so often, it’s hard to keep up, but I think I think knowledge flow would be defined as an AI harness because it sits between
Neil Watkins
The.
Kieron White
a large language model and your organisational context and your organisational data and all of that stuff and it holds all of that. So it’s a good position. I worry about if you are using like ChatGPT Enterprise or Claude Enterprise, whatever they call that, you’re in a world where if they do vanish.
or decided pricing’s gone up or whatever, all your data is there already. You’re going to have a real difficult time probably moving. So yeah, interesting.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
The other bit that was kind of linked to that is, I don’t know if you saw this, but apparently OpenAI’s financial reporting earlier this week, I think it was for the first half, was $70 billion worth of revenue, which is massive. And then like a week later the Financial Times went, oh, no, no, it’s not. It was only 50 billion.
Kieron White
27.
Neil Watkins
So they’ve changed the numbers by 20 billion and they’ve delayed their IPO to next year. So you said a couple of weeks ago, I don’t know when it was exactly, but along the lines of, you know, token prices are falling. And so who’s paying for this stuff? Actually, because if these businesses are in trouble in inverted commas, you know, what happens if they all just get
Kieron White
It’s crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
shut down. Now, it’s very unlikely that that would occur, but there’s got to be some turmoil in that, you know, in a marketplace where people aren’t making money and losing trillion billions of dollars and other invest in order to invest in the future, then, you know, what’s what does it mean for the for us, the consumer?
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
back to the whole kind of how do we defend against our model of choice going down the pan and being able to switch instantly and therefore who holds the data and therefore, you know, being independent and…
as a contingency against anything that could go wrong. Really interesting set of business challenges.
Kieron White
Yeah.
We’re getting you sovereign models. That’s the thing that I still wonder. Why would we, it cannot be sensible not to have your own sovereign large language model. Even if you’re building one for your government alone, it’s a private version, but if you needed to or wanted to, but relying on others, other models,
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
all the time, just is like, really? But I don’t know, I mean, I’m sure there are wiser brains than mine dealing with thinking about that as well, but this, yeah, it strikes me as a kind of bit of a no-brainer, you’d want one.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Well, you’d need something, you would argue you’d need something and there’s kind of all this open source stuff and you can use some of the Chinese models, but again, just terrifying what could happen, because if that gets switched off at any particular time, you’re doomed. So actually, how are you going to, how are you going to run your business if you don’t have access to the tools is, I think, a real
a real risk management problem that most people just aren’t taking seriously. I was chatting over the weekend to a friend who runs a business who’s getting very dependent on Claude for coding and they’ve just gone through a round of redundancies, letting a bunch of developers go and
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
and they’re relying much more on the tools, which kind of, I get it, I understand it, but equally, if that gets shut down or you don’t have access to the latest models and how much of A disadvantage if most of your competitors are US based and they do have access, but we don’t because we’re in the UK, then what are the implications for that? So
Kieron White
And…
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, trick, tricky old stuff, and and and one which…
Kieron White
Yeah, indeed. And if you’re running your business on that, because the thing with coding that you’ve got to watch out for is, unless you know enough about it already, is introducing malware, I guess, I mean, or just security vulnerabilities really, rather than necessarily malware. But you don’t know.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
If you’re looking at this thing, you don’t have a clue what it’s built really. And most AI is as good as the instruction. Claude, I think, seems to be a bit better at thinking more widely around the problem that you’re sharing with it and sort of saying, oh, you should also think about doing this rather than, but otherwise you have safety risks all over the place. And the more, you know, endpoint hacks and whatever else is.
easy to leave those unprotected without, and you wouldn’t know what you’re looking at if you haven’t got a good team around it. That reminds me of the story I was going to share, which has amused me this week. It’s a little amusing one was about good training, good prompting. And we’ve heard the example I’ve shared it on here, I think, about how you could give a simple instruction to an AI to make paper clips.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
And it would, it could, in theory, as a thought experiment, make every piece of material in the universe into paper clips, including you. So, but I heard another version of that, which was, you imagine a genie. This is the link between a genie. So imagine a genie, you rub your lamp, your lamp and your genie pops up and you say, make me the richest person in the world. So it’s like, all right, no worries, done, kills everybody.
Neil Watkins
Yep.
Kieron White
You are now the richest. This is, yes, careful what you wish for, but I guess if you’re if you’re training your organisation agent on Sprint on Sprint’s airline data, that’s going to be a very real concern, I’d suggest. Watch out.
Neil Watkins
Bye.
Be very careful.
I guess that’s right.
Yeah, great.
Kieron White
Do everything that I should do with the opposite of everything that stops it.
Neil Watkins
That’s right, yeah. Whatever this one recommends do is exactly the opposite.
Kieron White
Yeah, go talk about the, talk about the future.
Neil Watkins
Cool.
Okay.
Kieron White
Oh, there’s a couple of bits of like futuring, you know, where does the world go? What happens? What are the big changes that are going to happen? And I…
Neil Watkins
Oh, we got, we’re going, we’re going from, we’re going from Greek mythology to future forecasting. Brilliant. Love it. Philosophy, philosophical questions.
Kieron White
Yeah.
There we go. Well, I think, I mean, there’s, I think, I’m not sure if I said it last week, but the businesses that are going to win, I reckon right now, if you had to pick one, and I haven’t got a good idea for one, but is the business that AI agents need to buy the services that they need.
I think that is a very interesting world. And it could be as simple as something like fiverr.com, where you can get a human to do a task for you for Fiverr. You know, go and read, and we’re going to talk about those personal apps, but like Muse and the ChatGPT equivalent, doing your admin for you, which I just think is wonderful because there’s nothing makes me more cross than dealing with
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
just life admin. It’s so tedious. But you could have like, you know, a fiverr.com, your AI agent pays someone to read your metre and then sends the data you don’t have to get involved. Never know, never never asked you for a metre reading. I believe everything these days called smart metres, but those examples of where the AI kind of gets to its boundary.
Neil Watkins
Thank you.
Aah.
Kieron White
and being able, so there may be places in there that are rife for a future business. But those, if I go on those agents, which is the bit that’s what I wanted to talk about, the personal agents, I think, so firstly, there’s a line of thought that if you’ve got a muse agent and you decide you want a pair of
new pair of trainers or whatever you saw, a pair of trainers that you’ve decided you want, it just would get them. And you would, it wouldn’t go looking around websites and looking at adverts and it would do its research and go get them and have them delivered to you as however conveniently you wanted them. And that suggests that the future of the internet is a very different looking place.
when we’re all looking effectively through our AI tool of choice for everything. And you know, we do that now, don’t we? Research. I can’t remember the last time I used Google to do any research. It’s got to be more than two years ago. So I think that’s going to be very interesting to imagine what the future of that will be.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
But I also, whilst I love to hear your thoughts, but was I love the idea of one of these personal agent apps, but I am not connecting it to anything. So I’m not even, you know, my Mac mini is the only thing that runs Claude Cowork and nothing else touches it because nothing else is on there.
Neil Watkins
Okay.
Kieron White
that can touch work, but imagine giving me your bank account details. Yeah, you go for it, son. I mean, the horror stories that could happen from that, it’s just terrifying. So I think I’m a little way off having one of those agents.
Neil Watkins
Now you can I can that.
I think most people are. I’ve seen, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the cartoons or anything about, yeah, first Metis glasses were ridiculed for being stalker glasses. And so they’ve come up with something even scary, which is a really an omnipotent
Kieron White
I mean, yeah.
Neil Watkins
the Tamagotchi in your pocket that can hear and do everything. But yeah, I just can’t, I can’t imagine anytime soon me wanting to connect anything like that up to my personal stuff, just because you can’t, there’s trust. And come back to something that we’ve talked about a lot is, you know, it’s not AI, it’s trust. That’s the biggest, that’s the biggest commodity.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
in this world and that we’re working in. And it’s really difficult because when people don’t trust it, then, you know, they can’t use it to the full extent. But also you kind of, I just would, you know, I haven’t even hooked up my emails or anything like that because I just don’t, you just, yeah, what’s going to happen? Yeah, decides to do something. No, thanks very much. So the controls.
Kieron White
Ben.
Neil Watkins
Really interesting, sorry, slight aside. One of the things that I was reflecting on yesterday was our conversation with the team about a reduction of personal information and whatever before it goes to the language model for processing, even though it’s already inside the customer Azure tenant. Now, we’ve gone
Kieron White
Yeah.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
complete belt and braces on, there’s old fashioned, isn’t it, braces, belt and braces on security and kind of nobody really knows about it, but we’ve just taken the view that actually to be completely secure if people are going to start asking these kinds of questions for
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
you know, whether it’s personal learning plans or to do with social care or whatever it is, it just needs to be absolutely as secure as it possibly can be. So yeah, I have looked on with bemusement at Muse and because I can’t imagine a world where I would
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
do that. And you hear all these stories about, you know, tech bros in Silicon Valley doing all of these things and, you know, saving loads of money and, you know, using them to organise everything from the, you know, picking up the kids from school, football games through to, you know, organising their next holidays. It’s like, it’s just.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
I’m glad somebody else is at the bleeding edge because I don’t want to be at the bleeding edge of that stuff.
Kieron White
Oh, indeed, and it’s been the music has been like the fastest, faster uptake apparently than ChatGPT itself. Yeah, apparently it’s been through the roof, the numbers. So that’s the, I guess, Meta can promote it on all their channels. So it’s probably…
Neil Watkins
No way.
Wow.
That’s true, yeah, yeah, they’ve got the biggest audience.
Kieron White
It’s correct.
No, I will be, I’ll be watching and reading the horror stories before I decide to do any of those, I think. There is another angle on the future of, and I’ve touched on this, is agents for negotiation. So, the current challenge for organisations, particularly big companies now,
Neil Watkins
Exactly, exactly.
Hmm.
Kieron White
is you can’t negotiate with every customer individually and create a unique contract for them, can you? You’ve got your terms and even, never mind every customer, but Walmart, which we’re going to cite, I have now cited, it turns out, is doing this approach because they have like thousands of suppliers.
Neil Watkins
Right.
Kieron White
and you have to accept Walmart’s terms and conditions for and you know you deliver the thing to their spec and all that stuff. What if you could and did have the capacity to negotiate on every point of a contract and to be able to have two agents, one for the supplier, one for Walmart that can talk to each other as in the space of a few minutes and hash out the best deal for both sides. So genuinely win-win, you hope. I think that’s a fascinating world to imagine. So Walmart are doing it right now. I guess the suppliers problem will be they won’t have the agents necessarily to respond. So it’s probably human on that end. but Walmart are doing this apparently right now and being able to negotiate millions of contracts with each one of them unique and you can keep tabs on them, keep make sure that they’re managed and governed and potentially changes how we buy stuff because you no longer have to have to just fit into
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
Let’s cook together.
Neil Watkins
And you’ve talked, you’ve talked before about procurement agents, so AI to AI procurement in the past. And it’s one thing that I want to talk. We are together on Wednesday and I was, I was wanting to talk about that. And when we talk about the future of procurement and where that goes and how that works, because
Kieron White
Yes.
Yes.
Neil Watkins
I think we have, we’ve got the opportunity to get ahead of the game on that stuff. And if we can prepare for it now, then we will learn so many lessons over the next year or so that we’ll be ahead of the curve on that stuff. So I’m genuinely excited about that. I think there’s a lot that can be done.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
But it kind of links, and you know, our other part of the world we deal with, as everybody knows, is public sector procurement. But one thing I noticed this week, I don’t know if you saw this, there’s a public sector AI risk management tool that’s been out for a month and no one, no one’s been talking about it. Yeah, it’s absolutely nuts. I had no idea until I saw it yesterday.
Kieron White
No.
Is right.
Neil Watkins
And it’s all about how it’s a risk management toolkit. It identifies, it helps you identify the risk, helps you identify, if you’re a public sector organisation, it helps you identify your risk appetite, how you could treat the different options, how you go about looking at different potential impacts and outcomes and how you treat those risks.
It’s actually quite a comprehensive tool. And it’s looking at how you incorporate those commercial solutions into your public sector offering and all of that, whether you build stuff in-house or you outsource it, you know, what’s the implications? But no one’s even talked about it. It’s just,
Kieron White
Interesting.
Neil Watkins
I’ve seen absolutely nothing at all, and it’s, but it’s…
Kieron White
How did you find out about it?
Neil Watkins
Just doing some research, just kind of my usual kind of reading in part in part for this conversation, but it is, you know, we both do a lot of kind of reading of random sources, because I think part of the challenge for lots of people is they get stuck into a rut, don’t they? They just like,
listen to one or two sources, it’s easy just to kind of, it’s a bit like if you do only get your news from one channel, then you’re only going to ever get one version of the news. So, but I just, it was, yeah, it was just one of those things where I just thought, why is nobody in the public sector? Because I don’t, I don’t know anybody in education.
who’s heard about this. I don’t know if you’ve heard, you clearly haven’t heard about it in housing from what you’ve just heard.
Kieron White
No.
Published on the 8th of September 2026, so it’s quite new to give government a little bit of credit. But yeah, I will look into that then. That’d be great to see because the DfE have guidance and indeed lots of the departments have bringing out their own view, which isn’t particularly helpful, I think. I think DfE’s position isn’t too bad, my own view, I think they are at least
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
trying to help schools, colleges, universities sort of at least think about the things they need to be concerned about. But yeah, it doesn’t really help to then have a different one for the MHCLG and a different one for Department for Defra or whatever they’re called these days.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
So yeah, this I’ll have a look at it.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, yeah, take a look and, you know, on the surface, the surface of it, I mean, it looks quite high level, but…
But I think that’s useful because if we, if I think about some of the senior managers that we’re dealing with in public sector organisations, they are very reliant on their staff to come back and tell them what’s right and what’s wrong. I’m far reminded of
our friend Chris Tweedale, who back in 1992, he asked his IT manager to look into the internet and after he hadn’t heard for two weeks, he asked the guy again and he said, oh yeah, there’s nothing in the internet, but never catch on. And we’ve got a bit of that with the whole, oh yeah, AI is difficult, or indeed we’ve got a slightly different version.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Yeah, no, it’ll come of that, yeah.
Neil Watkins
problem now from two years ago, which is, oh yeah, Copilot can do that. And we’ve got a lot of that.
Kieron White
Yeah, exactly. People look at the magic, look at the magic, it appears magic, and then get all excited. And then when it’s wrong, I wonder, because, you know, we get like our ticket support tickets through, we encourage our customers to kind of tell us anything. You know, if it’s if it seems off, if the answer’s not right, all of those things. And we get a handful of those.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Mhm.
Kieron White
And I think, what do they do in an organisation where that’s your co-pilot, if you’re using co-pilot studio or to create a kind of rag tool and it’s wrong? Who do you tell and what do they do about it? Because I imagine you just go, oh, okay, don’t ask it that then. Or more likely, well, you should cheque.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, yeah. Move on to the next.
Oh.
Kieron White
which is all very well, right up to the point when you’re supposed to know whether it’s 15 days or 10 days on a particular thing, which you’re never going to have the detail.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
No, I like that thing Donald put out on LinkedIn yesterday, which is I threw all of my information into ChatGPT in order to answer the e-mail because I needed more time between meetings. And it’s just, you can absolutely see that. And we’ve had customers where when we’ve been through the process, the staff aren’t following the process because
they get a workaround, you know, and actually the future of adoption of AI, I think, comes down to that. What’s the customer experience? You know, because if they don’t, if it’s too hard, it’s too clunky, it’s too, you know, you’ve got to switch between apps. But the cutting and pasting thing, just
That whole kind of, you know, you, you two years ago, you said AI just turned us all into cutters and pasters.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Exactly, yeah, I guess.
Neil Watkins
So, but it still it still goes on, doesn’t it? So…
Kieron White
I’ve just created a macro on my, I have a Logi Tech mouse, which has clever little buttons you can do things with. And on stand up this morning, I asked Donald to add a keyboard shortcut in Knowledge Flow to be able to copy the last response. Ibby has added that to his sandbox. It was as easy as I thought it was.
Neil Watkins
Ha ha.
Kieron White
And I’ve now got a macro, which you basically press the top button on my mouse and it will grab the last thing, copy it, open the testing tool that we use, paste it in, tell it to review that answer. I don’t have it hit return so that I actually do have to cheque before I hit enter if I actually want to send it.
But that’s now one press of a button, which was otherwise just annoying. And I do it so much when things are wrong. I’m like, what’s wrong with this prompt? What’s wrong with this output? So yeah, there you go. So I’m automating my cutting and pasting.
Neil Watkins
Quite right too, because we heard the story of a customer this week where the senior manager has got a junior member of staff cutting and pasting emails into a Word document or responses for him to review before it then gets pasted into AI. It’s just absolutely nuts.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
Absolutely nuts.
Kieron White
Isn’t it? Yes, it’s all a bit crazy. I want to ask, changing the subject.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Ohh, yeah, ohh, go ahead.
Kieron White
Turnitin and the other AI detectors, are they going to turn it off, do you think? Well, so we’ve got Claude or Anthropic, we should say, who are watermarking their responses in a way that apparently is very difficult to discover, but had to do with the way the tokens are put together, so it’s not obvious.
Neil Watkins
Mhm.
Kieron White
but apparently you just paste it into one of the other tools and then get it out again and there you go, done. That saves. But Google has now opened a thing they’ve got called Synth ID, which is an AI detector and it’s now publicly available. It used to be paid for only and to subscribers and that will detect open AI.
Google and some other large language models. So you’ve got them all covered now pretty much. And I kind of think, well, so what’s the place of the AI detectors which turn it in? I saw their share prices having a bit of a hammering apparently because they are lots of universities are moving away from them because this is partly they’ve changed their terms and conditions just now to say that we will train on the data that you load.
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Kieron White
student essays, which I suspect is part of the whole problem. But the other half is the age-old problem of an AI detector flagging students’ work as potentially AI. And you then taking that into a conversation when ultimately disciplinary, possibly. And how do you know? You’ve got this.
Neil Watkins
Oops. Oops.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
fictitious figure that is easily proved incorrect. So you potentially upset your relationship with your student. And I think the false positives, and I shouldn’t just focus on turning it in, there are a few of them out there, but the false positive rate might only be 10%, 5%.
3%, but on a university with 30,000 students, that’s too many. You can’t. I’m not doing public maths. Never. Never do public maths. It only ends in tears. So you look like a complete idiot instantly, unless you’ve got a maths degree, which gives you probably a bit better, even you’d be very bad at it.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, how many is it?
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
Anyway, so I, I know, but that’s why even you, so I said even you would be, hello, we must be in the pub towards the closing time now, we’re having an argument. Yeah.
Neil Watkins
I have got a math degree, you cheeky sausage.
That’s right. Brilliant. End of the period. I’ve run out. I need another one.
Kieron White
So I think, yeah, it’s going to be interesting whilst that, because that’s now free, being another business being disrupted by AI. I was going to say about the procurement conversation we were just having, because procurement services are very much the layer cake business, as we have talked about before, which is a very good place to play in the main as a long term stable business.
But AI is coming after the layers. So I think you’re right to be at the forefront of that rather than them, rather than waiting until you’re whatever you are, discombobulated, disrupted. So yeah, I suspect they’ve got a big problem on their hands right now because…
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, this something.
Well, that’s always been the case, though, hasn’t it? So I remember 10, 12 years ago when we first were doing some of the education business. So the companies doing things like desktop management and network management, and there were a whole lot of specialist tools. And of course, Microsoft just came along and
incorporate them into their operating that they either bought them up or they just duplicated the features. And we’ve, you know, we’ve kind of, we’re kind of going through a very similar problem with our, you know, with our co-pilot challenges, aren’t we? We’re in that same business of, you know, two years ago, whatever we showed people was magic and they loved it. And now it’s like, oh, co-pilot can do that.
Kieron White
Yeah, that’s true.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
continue to innovate, because if you don’t, you just get you just get run over. And actually, the thing about the networking space was it took you, you know, it took you had a long you had a long run, you don’t have a long run in anymore with any of this stuff. It’s super quick, you know, the world is changing super fast. And unless you keep on top of it, and unless you keep innovating, then
Kieron White
Yeah, absolutely.
Neil Watkins
Then you’re gonna get you’re gonna get run over, there’s no doubt about it.
Kieron White
If you remember back, I was thinking about this just this morning, was thinking we should celebrate more, but we were probably the first organisation talking about RAG.
In certainly in any of the sectors we play in, we were there when people when people were going, look, I can take this e-mail and shorten it, look at that. We were going, no, no, look, you can take these 3000 documents and put them in as a library and ask any question and write an e-mail response to an inquiry on the back of it instantly. We were doing that like
Neil Watkins
Hmm.
Yeah.
Kieron White
three years ago. And people had, and it’s only even now people are going, look what I can do with Copilot. I can make this agent, as they would call it, which is a rag tool. That’s what people is that leading edge now. When I ask people what they’re doing, that would be one of the considered leading edge use cases thing we did three years ago and we think now is
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
It’s a great basis for building from, but it is not the cell. So yeah, that is interesting.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, yeah. Back to the redaction thing, you know, who else is doing redaction internally on an LLM model that you can’t?
Kieron White
Thank you.
Co-pilot aren’t, according to the research I have done, so let’s just be really clear in case Microsoft lawyers want to come after me, but it is the co-pilot does not have a pseudo anonymization feature and you can set rules, but you’ve got to remember to set them in your organisation.
Neil Watkins
Hmm.
Kieron White
So you, it is a risk. We are in theory and in practise less risky than co-pilot. And particularly when we’re dealing with the stuff that we do, that education healthcare plans, which is probably the most sensitive data we run, I would have thought. And all of that is brilliant because it’s all redacted at source inside knowledge flow.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
stays in your tenant, no one does that. We build in your tenant, so the data is inside your tenant, redacted before it leaves to the LLM, which is still within the Microsoft Azure security layer, and then comes back in unredacted to fill your response. Amazing.
Neil Watkins
You.
Yeah.
Well, it kind of, it’s a very tenuous segue into…
One of the other things I wanted to mention was some customer feedback we had this week. So we’ve had customers now, you know, we’re over three years old. We’ve got customers that are into that three-year renewal cycle. And it’s easy to worry that people just get bored and they’re just not going to bother.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
or the thing they can do, or they’ve been told they can do it in co-pilot. And we had a customer this week who’s been with us for a long time. And they were like, oh, no, we didn’t know Knowledge Flow could do all of these things. And somebody went, hang on a minute, you’ve got a bid writer tool that helps you write bids and wins new business. Why?
Why haven’t I seen that? And I’m like, crikey, we’re back to that whole adoption thing. How do we get how do we get adoption across the organisation? How do we how do we get people internally to share the information and the good news and the and the and the case studies and all of that stuff? So, yeah, back back to the people challenge. Lots of it comes back to the people challenge, doesn’t it?
Kieron White
And.
We need Walt Disney back again with his AI adoption strategies, building castles and magic lands. That’s the way, surely. Yeah.
Neil Watkins
We do, yeah.
That’s right.
That’s right. Fireworks, fireworks at the end and everything. Cool. Well, speaking of the ending, our ending, we just have the little notification which says we need to stop blathering on. Have you got anything else that we need to finish with today, Kieron?
Kieron White
Very good.
OK.
Nothing. I could share the music. No, I won’t. I will save it for next time. My music anecdote.
Neil Watkins
Save it. Okay. Well, no, not next time, because tomorrow morning, you and I have to get up very early because we’ve got a special guest all the way from Australia, Joe Orlando, who is a very interesting person, has done some great stuff. And I’m really looking forward to talking to her again. So yeah, we’re getting up early in the morning. So set your alarm. Don’t have too many beers tonight.
Kieron White
Yes.
Indeed.
Ohh.
Neil Watkins
And I’ll see you bright and breezy in the morning.
Kieron White
Very good. I shall look forward to it. I will try and drink some coffee before I get there. Wake up. Snoozing. All right. Take care. See ya. Bye bye.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, just, yeah, nothing else. Just got, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. I’ll see you. See you bright and breezy in the morning. Cheers, fella.
Bye bye.
