Episode 20: Is AI Conscious? Plus a Troll, a Marking Robot & a Mystery Guest 🍺
Somebody told Neil his content is lazy and rehashed. He’s decided being trolled is an accolade. Kieron got ambushed on stage when a customer asked a live audience whether KnowledgeFlow had helped or hindered them. (Spoiler: he survived. Every hand said helped.)
The big question this week: is AI conscious? Kieron — who has an actual psychology degree — points out that you can’t dismiss the idea until you can define consciousness, and nobody’s managed that yet. Meanwhile AI companies are pillaging university philosophy departments and Anthropic is reportedly monitoring Claude’s mood. Third-beer conversation territory, and it’s brilliant.
Also this week: the hackathon that built an AI marking assistant in 30 minutes (and why AI marking is dangerously generous by default), the college trip risk assessment process so bureaucratic that teachers have stopped taking students on trips, Raven Housing’s masterclass in doing AI adoption slowly and properly, and why Microsoft is throwing 6,000 people and billions of dollars at the adoption problem everyone pretends doesn’t exist.
And a first for the podcast: a special guest pulls up a stool tomorrow. Tankard at the ready.
Two mates. A bar. Thirty years of business between them. And all they want to talk about is AI.
Pull up a stool — we’ll get the beers in. 🍺
TRANSCRIPT
This week in Leading AI… #20 – 07 Jul 2026
Neil Watkins
Cool, right. Speaking of good, should we get this pantomime horse of a podcast underway, or should we mess around a bit more?
Kieron White
Let’s get underway, why not? We’ve got lots to talk about, so let’s get started.
Neil Watkins
Alright, let’s get under it.
All right, Matt, well, you’ve had a busy old week. So what’s on your list for this week?
Kieron White
Well, I have, I want to talk about a college hackathon, which I was at on Tuesday. That was really good. And then I went to a university teaching and learning conference. They were a KnowledgeFlow customer. So I’ll share with some of what happened there. That was good fun. I also want to share some client feedback, which is really
Neil Watkins
Mhm.
Mm.
Kieron White
good and lovely. And I’ve got a question to explore, which is, is AI conscious? So that thing that’s come back again. So that’s on me. What about you? What have you got?
Neil Watkins
Trikey.
That’s really interesting. So just to pick up on that immediately. So one of the things I read this week was that the number of philosophers being hired by AI companies has massively gone through the roof. But they’ve gone straight to university departments. And there was a guy from, I don’t know which university it was in the US, complaining that
philosophy departments have been pillaged by the AI companies because they want to hire these people to think about the way that their models answer questions and how they react and how they behave. I was like, I was gobsmacked. Who’d have thought that? Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, philosophy wasn’t on my list, but what was on my list was some marketing feedback.
Kieron White
My word, wow, who would have thought of that?
But.
Neil Watkins
Things about data, again, we’ve talked about it in the past, but I’m sure we’ll keep coming back to it as we will today. Fable 5, of course, is back on the agenda for a limited time only. So let’s talk a little bit, unless you got the last one on it. So let’s talk a little bit about a little bit about that.
Kieron White
Dance.
Sorry, unless you got lots of money.
Neil Watkins
And I also wanted to pick up on your hackathon thing. And maybe we should start there because you did another hackathon. You’ve done several of these things now. And I’ve never been to one. I mean, I’ve heard you talk a little bit about them, but I just wondered whether for our audience, whether it would be useful.
Kieron White
Ohh.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
for, just to explain what’s actually involved, how does it work, how do you get the most out of them, what can people do to prepare and actually how can they really help them with what they want to do with their AI and their AI strategy?
Kieron White
Yeah, interesting. Yeah, happy to do that. So I think firstly, our, what we describe as a hackathon quite often is more AI strategy than the hackathon, which is interesting in its own right, because I think that’s more a measure of where people are in thinking about AI. They’re still kind of like, you know, can I help with that thing? And then you kind of end up more widely talking about
at some point, nearly always about kind of, you know, what is the future of AI in that job area and those things, which is fun. But typically our hackathons are we try and get, try and get, sometimes we do a day or two days I’ve done where we have different teams coming for periods of those days, which is quite a good model. Start with the senior team and then bring in individual teams
to work on their thing. The key is, of course, like all good facilitated events, is to have the people in the room who do the work, who are going to be the people that need to learn a little bit about how AI is helping them and how to use AI to its best effect, and people that really understand the process and data
of course, which is the real key to all of it. So I kind of found myself at this hackathon in the main, listening to sort of workflow planning exercises. And my angle always is like, okay, so what data are you drawing on to answer that question to
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
to move that piece of work down the process, and therefore can we use that data within KnowledgeFlow? The thing that makes it really exciting and does make it hackathon-y is because the customers nearly always have KnowledgeFlow already, and we know KnowledgeFlow enables us, the team, the devs, or indeed
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Kieron White
you know, any of the kind of prompting team to create instantly new assistants, pretty much, you know, live, if you like, then we can actually do some stuff in them. And that’s been my favourite one, I think, was it was marking. In fact, it was in a college that wasn’t this week, but that was in a college where they, one of the participants that I have to go because I’ve got to go and mark 30.
BTEC unit for blah, blah, blah assignments. And I said to her, can you just wait 10 minutes because I think we might be able to help. And it was about half an hour in the end where we grabbed all the marking materials and scheme of works and marking schemes and etc from the awarding bodies, public websites.
So we indexed on those. We then did a little bit of prompting to create a strictness that you needed and the structure that you needed and then asked her if she would load because it’s secure student work and then ran that and it was probably two or three tweaks and she was absolutely blown away. It was very impressive. But doing it really quick means you do miss some bits and marking is new.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, Ian.
Kieron White
notorious for being overly generous in marking. So whilst we’re in this rabbit hole, if you’re ever building AI for marking, you’ve really got to work hard on structure and strictness. The structure being if, and this was a live example, one of the things that you had to do in this BTEC thing was evidence of a diary.
and that had to cover particular things. And on first pass, KnowledgeFlow decided that there was a diary because there were a number of date entries with things throughout a 30 page student assignment. There was no diary. You could not, if you were looking at it as a human, that does not constitute a diary, but because
Neil Watkins
Yeah, yeah.
Kieron White
smattered amongst it was enough things it had basically congratulated them on their diary and said it could have been better if blah, blah, blah. The way around that is to structure it so that it has to answer that question on its own from the section entitled the diary. And if there is one, the great, if there isn’t one, then you don’t get the marks. So hackathons,
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
do that for them or at least support them with that. So it’s that kind of team in the room, get them talking about what they’re doing, talk about the pain, talk about where the data is that they’re using in each case or the templates or the rules or the policies or whatever the kind of, you know, the data really is. And then typically we can create for most things, the interest, most for most
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
workflow, we can create AI that will do a whole lot of it normally. One of the challenges with them that you have to watch out for is that you get little pet hobby horse areas. So you’ll get something that helps one person save an hour a month maybe. And you’re like, okay, that’s really, and you don’t know that as an external.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
someone starts sharing with you, this is a big challenge. And the word game changer I’ve heard from more clients, this will be a game changer for our sector. And so we get excited and build something and put a load of effort in and no one else is interested.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that’s right. We’ve done that quite a few times, been responsive to people and done stuff. I can give two examples that I’ve initiated where I’ve said, oh yeah, these people are really keen and then they go, yeah, thanks very much. And then they do nothing with it. It’s like, why is that? And I wondered whether it’s kind of, it comes back to does it actually sit in the workflow or is this just a nice dish of the stick on the outside? Oh, look what.
Kieron White
So yeah, there you go.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
look what AI can do, it’s really cool, but then actually go back to the day job because they’ve got a pressing deadline or someone complaining or something kicking off elsewhere in the forest.
Kieron White
Perfect.
And data analytics and predictive nearly always seems to fall into that trap. And it’s one of the hardest things to do well in KnowledgeFlow because you have to add data dictionaries and rules and often some help with the joining because their common identifiers aren’t necessarily as identical as they should be.
Neil Watkins
Hmm.
Kieron White
So there’s lots you do in there. And then you get to the kind of point of it, a really amazing functioning natural language query tool. And then they go, oh, I don’t really know what to do with it. They say those words, of course. But you say, what do you want to ask it? And they’re like, oh, I don’t know. I’ll ask it how many open cases we’ve got. And you go, great, you’ve got
Neil Watkins
Yeah, that’s right.
What’s the weather?
Ha ha.
Kieron White
You got 200. OK. What is that it? So yeah, it’s I think I think starting at the end is key for all of these things is what’s the, you know, what are we actually trying to achieve and is it worth it, frankly? Is it worth the effort? So that’s good. So hang on. So on that though, tell me about your gift of feedback you had this week then.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, thanks.
Ha ha ha!
Yeah.
Kieron White
Your.
Neil Watkins
Gift of feedback. Yeah, yeah. Feedback is a gift. He said that some more famous probably, but yeah. So I had some feedback that some of the content that I’ve been putting out is rubbish. And it’s like, and specifically it’s just, it was the feedback was it’s rehashed.
Kieron White
Haha.
Of.
Neil Watkins
It’s lazy and it’s rehashed up off. First of all, I didn’t think it was rehashed. And then, and I’ll share this with you because I am, I don’t think you’ve ever read an author called Terry Pratchett. Terry Pratchett for our audience, very funny man. This world, yeah. And he,
Kieron White
This world.
Neil Watkins
He literally wrote a book called, I think it was called Soul Music.
which was all built around the final line, which was, there’s a guy down the chip shop swears that he’s Elvish. And it was entirely for this one funny line, which anybody, you have to be, I think you had to be alive in the 80s to know that, I think it’s Cyndi Lauper’s song.
Kieron White
Okay.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
to be relevant. I’d created this, and it was a reflection on my holiday in Scotland. I was thinking about that and some of the stuff that I read and I talked to you about last week. But there was one line in there about, there’s a lot of noise about,
water being used for data centers. And actually, it’s nowhere near the amount of water being used on American golf courses. And my line was, let that soak in for a minute. And I thought that was hilariously funny. And I, yeah, yeah, and actually, when I got this bit of feedback saying that my content was lazy, and I was thinking,
Kieron White
Mm.
Hey, there you go, alright, it’s good.
Neil Watkins
They’re really interesting. Okay, so that’s your opinion, everyone’s entitled to opinion, and actually I shouldn’t change my entire approach, my very humorous approach, of course, to context. It made me wonder about what people actually want and actually what the people find useful.
Kieron White
Alright.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
And actually, we can’t, you know, I can’t tailor everything I do to appeal to everybody all the time. I mean, you can’t please all the people at times a very well used saying for a reason. And actually, it’s a, and it reminded me of this podcast where we’ve had some feedback from our audience that it was really helpful with his insomnia.
and put him up and sorted him right out, I think was the exact phrase. And we kind of, we don’t necessarily do it for him, we do it for us. And actually it’s helping us think things through and talk things through. So that was really, it was really interesting to me, what should I be creating in order to help people with their journey, which is partly where the hackathon question came from really.
Because I think that’s a really interesting, simple idea. It’s just good old-fashioned facilitation. It’s good old-fashioned workflow, actually, how do you use the tools to fix the workflow? It’s not necessarily about, you know, the magic technology. It is about actually how do we help practically help people with the dull, difficult tasks that actually stop them getting on with their day job. So
Yeah, a really interesting bit of bit of when I first read it, it was a bit annoying, having some negative feedback.
Kieron White
Well, no one likes to see negative feedback, but equally it’s supposed to be very good on the socials, isn’t it? It drives much more engagement, particularly if you have an argument about it, but I’ve never done that.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Oh, I know.
Yeah, my life’s a bit short for arguments on social. I’m not a convert to social media. I came to it very late and I only do it because I work as the honest truth. I find it really, I find it really challenging. I don’t really want to know what people have had for their breakfast or, you know, whether it’s just, I find it really, and especially with LinkedIn, you get more and more of that. Now, here’s where I am on holiday and here’s the things that it’s not work related actually.
Kieron White
No, I did.
Neil Watkins
I’ve been, I’ve been much more diligent recently about, yeah, hide this advert or unfollow this person and why is this person coming up in my feed? This has got, I’m really not very interested, but it’s definitely listening to me, Kieron, because it’s been a few times recently where I’ve like, hang on a minute, I just talked about that and now I’m getting a bloody advert or whatever.
Kieron White
Oh yeah, that old question of are they listening and feeding that in? Who knows? The hackathon thing I should share with you just for amusement really, although it’s kind of depressing amusement, is a college and one of the two hackathons that we ran there that day was on trips and visits and risk assessments when you take students out of the college on various trips.
Neil Watkins
That he’s listening to now, Chestnut.
Ohh.
Kieron White
And the process is so awful. And it is, so first, I mean, I’m not obviously going to go through all of it, but you first have to kind of like find out how you’re going to, how’s the transport going to work? And then where are we going and what is the risk there? Apparently they were saying there was something, what happened?
They were walking along this beachfront on the on the kind of promenade, but if you wanted to walk on the beach, you needed it was now going to be high risk, even though it was like effectively walking next to where you were. And that would involve a whole different set of paperwork and more scrutiny and sign off. But it goes and some of it, I mean, you know, it’s good in lots of ways because it’s protecting people and stopping people getting hurt. But
or whatever happens, but they’ve got things like, you have to do this, what’s the transport risks, and then what’s the kind of risks of being there and then getting back again. But then you have to look at that via each of the students and the neurodiverse challenges or additional needs that they have. So you have then individual versions of things within all of it.
Get this, this was amazing. Their data process, although they weren’t sure whether this was just an invented thing or was actually in their policy, because everyone was like going to say, who’s got, who wrote that? You have to collate all your contact details for the students. So, you know, emergency contacts and things. You’re not allowed to take that piece of data with you in case you lose it.
It’s considered too high risk because it’s got personal data. So they have to call. So if something goes wrong, then they have to phone back to the college to get someone to access that file and tell them whatever is information that they need to know. And they go, but it’s absolutely bananas that they’re not allowed to have, yeah, they’re not allowed to carry it with them.
Neil Watkins
No.
Yeah.
Kieron White
She’s so crazy. And then the checklist for the morning is a three page A4, 3 pages of like checklists, like a table. So it must be like 100 items you’ve got to tick on there to say that you’ve done all this and all that’s done. And no wonder, I guess what? People don’t really want to take the students out on trips and visits because you spend about 3 weeks doing the paperwork.
Neil Watkins
He.
You spend five times as long doing the paperwork as you do on the bloody trip. I mean, I get it, you know, we need to serve the students and all of that good stuff, but you know, common sense has to apply, doesn’t it? And there’s got to be a better way, got to be a better way.
Kieron White
We concluded that.
Exactly.
Well, and what we’re trying to gun towards with AI added to that is, I mean, it’s obviously really important not to take the human out of that too much, because I guess the act, although I suspect most of them are copied and pasted now, but if you were starting from a fresh start, then it is a useful thing for the teacher on the trip.
to have a think about what the risks might be. That’s probably going to be the most useful part of any risk assessment, I would argue, a bit like project planning, actually, you know, the art of creating the plan is the thing that makes you think. After that, it’s kind of has some use, but much less. So I think designing some AI that’s going to help them with, well, here are similar things, and maybe a step-by-step approach that asks them
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
but then kind of enhances their answers with like, well, there’s two other things you probably haven’t thought about that you might want to build into your thinking, that kind of approach maybe, rather than just doing it. Because we could, it occurred to me sitting in the room, we could build an Agentic version that literally just writes the thing, you dump the files of
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Kieron White
you know, what you know about the trip and who’s going and let an Agentic model create all the paperwork for you. But I suspect, I think the risk there is a workflow, is it just no one’s going to look at it.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely. Now they’re just going to press the button and so I did my bit and that’s the wrong thing to do. The step-by-step approach.
Kieron White
which is probably what they’re really doing.
Neil Watkins
Well, yeah, indeed. Yeah, they’re forcing it through paper rather than through technology, I guess.
Kieron White
Exactly, exactly. On the checklist, at least you have to tick, rather than the rest of it, presumably copied and pasted stuff. But anyway, while I see I’ll update you once we build some, I’m now just waiting for some content data from them on their previous assessments, and then we’re going to build something that will help.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Well, a college hackathon wasn’t the only educational experience you’ve had this week, was it?
Kieron White
Oh no, indeed. Well, I had a trip to Lincoln for our university clients teaching and learning conference, staff teaching and learning conference where we were talking about knowledge flow and they have had knowledge flow now since September, I think. And so, yeah, coming around for that. So it was a kind of how are you finding it, what you
Neil Watkins
In a year, wow.
Kieron White
how talking a bit about how it works again and reminding people of that and inviting further thoughts on areas we ought to tackle with it. But interestingly, so they did a piece where they, the person after me, who’s one of their, she’s sort of the, I guess, key lead champion does training and training the champions and organises the AI champions.
She asked people in the room, she said, right, who here has used logged into KnowledgeFlow? And probably about two-thirds of the audience put their hand up, which is good. I was like, OK, well, that’s all right. And then she said, and who here has found KnowledgeFlow helped them or did it hinder them? And I’m standing up. No.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Did she let you know that question was coming in advance?
Kieron White
I’m on stage going, holy moly. And I’m delighted to say that it was exclusively that it helped them. And they weren’t, these, the interesting thing with the university client are they are some of the most sceptical about AI. I think there’s an academic challenge that academics don’t like, musicians, I sense.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Ha ha ha.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kieron White
Artists have a similar kind of immediate, this stuff is awful. I see a bit of that, you know, in music media. Academics, I think, are a lot like that as well. It’s all about cheating and it’s all about not being rigorous and diligent. So you’ve got, it is a tough audience. So to have nobody say it was
Neil Watkins
Haha.
Kieron White
hindered them was really good. I’m sure if you poke between the lines, there’ll be a couple of little fine things, I’m sure.
Neil Watkins
That’s right, yeah. If they knew you were on stage and they didn’t want to embarrass you, but hilarious that she didn’t ask you, she just dropped you right in it. Brilliant.
Kieron White
No, that’s right. I was like, oh, good. But that was really good. And then I was also asked by the Vice Chancellor, who was meeting with the CEO of Guild HE. So Guild HE is one of the, I guess, a professional association, professional organisation. I don’t know how you’d quite describe it. For HE, they have 70.
universities in their group. And Dr Brooke Storer Church was the person that was there. So I was, but I got a phone call from the Vice Chancellor. He said, Kieron, are you on campus? And I was like, yeah, I am just meeting with someone of your team right now. And he said, could you come over to wherever we are?
because I’ve got the CEO of Guild HE and we were talking about AI and we figured, why don’t we actually get someone who knows what they’re talking about? And so I was like walking towards this thing, getting, at first I was like, yeah, I’m on my way. And then as I got closer, I was thinking, this could be really challenging. Where is it going to go? I know nothing. And so that was really good. I had like 1/2 an hour kind of
a bit of briefing on KnowledgeFlow, what we’re doing and the importance of some of the things that we believe in security and human in the loop and really focusing on what are you trying to achieve rather than how do we make AI work here. So yeah, it was good. I liked it.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, yeah.
Excellent, excellent. And speaking of feedback, I hear that we had some other feedback from your other pet area. I say pet area. See why I did that.
Kieron White
Yes.
Wow.
Hey, the pet, yeah, pet policies. Yeah, well, I’m not sure how many pet policies work particularly here, but housing. Housing.
Neil Watkins
Housing.
Housing. Yeah, yeah, okay. And I meant the pet joke, by the way, I’m not going to have to explain this because it’s lost in translation. We have a customer called Raven Housing. And I don’t know if I can mention them, but I have now, so I’ll cut it out if we’re not allowed to mention them. Part of the reason why I think it’s…
Kieron White
Yes.
Neil Watkins
it’s great is because I have jackdaws living in my house and they’re malevolent little *******. They will nick all the food. They will be, they’re really interested. They’re clever birds. I can walk out with a broom and they’ll just like ignore me. If I walk out with a gun, they’re like, wow, we’re off. They’re not stupid at all. So
Kieron White
Ha ha ha, how funny!
Neil Watkins
Yeah, very clever, very clever birds. Anyway, very clever housing association because they’ve got KnowledgeFlow.
Kieron White
They do. Hey, look at that good segue. That’s right. And so we had a first sort of proper check-in, I think, really after they, well, they’ve probably been about three months so far, maybe, maybe a bit less. And I think that what the way they’re doing it, Gemma there, I won’t do surnames in case.
Neil Watkins
Nice.
Kieron White
She doesn’t want to be shouted about, but is a really measured and thoughtful approach to bringing AI to the organization. They’ve really thought hard about knowledge flow. We had lots of conversations with them prior to getting it in there. And she has purposely taken a view that we should not launch with everything that we could. Because some of, as you know, a lot of the time we’ll launch with all assistants live and let people kind of
find their way and some people find the things that they find useful and we see usage. What we’re doing with them is a very measured starting with policy and then moving to repairs next. Anyway, the feedback, so the usage of theirs in total numbers isn’t amazing. Like, you know, in our lists, we look at them and they’d probably be in certainly
not more than, they might be second bottom quartile, but they’re going to be low on our list of overall usage overall. But what’s really interesting, she was absolutely raving about how amazing it was. She was like, this is so helpful. It’s saving so much time and getting much better answers. And that’s the kind of key to this, I always think, is
Yes, it should make time a bit easier for the really dull tasks that you don’t really want to spend your time on, but really the focus is on consistent, high quality answers that everybody can now give because it’s not just the person that knows all your policies that can answer well, everybody can do that. So that was really, really useful.
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Kieron White
But it led me to the thought that we, and we talked about it on here before, but measuring usage versus measuring impact. And it’s that whole kind of, if you, so I remember one of our customers where they use co-pilot, fine, good, so they should if they want to.
Neil Watkins
Hmm.
Kieron White
good personal productivity, and these knowledge flow for the Agentic style and indeed just the specialist tools that you don’t have to try and gather loads of documents together in order to get co-pilots to give you an answer. And the co-pilot usage is higher than knowledge flow. Not massively, actually, which is quite interesting, but
Neil Watkins
Okay.
Kieron White
higher. And I was a bit annoyed when I heard it sort of presented alongside each other because it feels like we’re losing in that competition. But of course, the reality is what those prompts are are things like summarise this document, help me with his e-mail, all that kind of stuff, as opposed to KnowledgeFlow, which is like
trawl through all our policies and find all the times that we mention Awaab’s law in this housing place and make sure that we’ve got it all properly worded in each case. And the kind of difference in what you can achieve in one prompt is phenomenal. So I think just reminding ourselves that we should not be about token maxing and focusing on getting people using it,
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
We need to keep focused all the time on what’s the impact and what actually matters to the world of tenants and students and children who are in care. There you go.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, interesting. So they, I think, I don’t know anything about it. So I’m surmising that if they had lots of conversations before choosing to go ahead and then making sure that whatever they did do worked, they must have invested quite some effort in making sure that their data
underlying it was structured and sensible and fit for purpose then.
Kieron White
Well, you’d have thought so. No, I’m sure they are. No, I…
It is important, isn’t it? As I know you are about to talk to us about with your challenge this week or not on customer, customers expecting a lot.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Yeah, well, yeah, it is a bit that, so that whole kind of what structured and unstructured data, how is that used? It comes back to something that we talked previously about is the context and actually the context being king piece of, actually, unless you understand the context, it’s just
It’s just words, it’s just data, and it doesn’t make any difference. So really pleased to hear that someone is really thinking that stuff through, because we’ve got another customer in my part of the forest where they’re like, yeah, and could it do this huge, massive thing over here? And could we lob all of these documents and pictures and images and recordings in? It’s like, wow,
According to Donald, yes, you can. But unless you’ve got some kind of, you know, what’s the purpose? If it’s just to kind of create like a really big pool that you’re just going to dip into now and again, it’s really not going to help you. So yeah, I’ve got some challenges on getting them back on track and actually
What’s the thing that’s going to make the difference? Come back to something we said probably 20 minutes ago. You know, just creating solutions is relatively easy. Actually, whether those solutions are really bloody good or make a difference, I’m sure they’re good, but whether it makes a difference to them on a day-to-day basis, you know, it’s really…
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
You’ve got to think about stuff before you actually do it and invest a lot of time. And I know that we’ve done that with quite a few people I don’t want to do with this particular customer. I want them to get it right because it’s important stuff.
Kieron White
Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it, all of that kind of how much effort is the data worth? And it’s back to that, what we talked about hackathons just now, I think, is what’s the ROI to put it into that terminology of if AI can do this in a 10th of the time, half the time, whatever, then
Neil Watkins
Ohh.
Kieron White
Is that, is it a time saving or is this a problem with quality and consistency that you need to fix? Is it, what is it? And I think getting people clearer on that earlier is helpful because then it is like, is it worth data wrangling or not? And AI is very good in unstructured data as we know, but there are still 1000 little
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
bits that will trip you up if you’re not aware of them and actually putting time and energy in will get you over a whole bunch of those things. I was just building out a, this coming soon to colleges, Agentic quality assistant. And what it’s going to do is in colleges after they do their self-assessment, which will be about now and running into September, they will then write a quality improvement plan
Neil Watkins
Ben.
Kieron White
which each department will have one and then they’ll write a kind of Uber one. I want to be able to take those departmental quips as a shortcut and then load them into knowledge flows index and then have director of quality, let’s say, load the current college data, attendance, performance.
handling rates, whatever. And then instantly identify all the things that are going well against the quips, all the things that are not going well, and whatever else you need to know. And then write a notification and ultimately, potentially in time, just send the notification directly to each of the quip owners.
to say, you know, this is where it’s going for you this time, well done, or it’s not working and you should think again. But to do that, well, what we really need is to take each quip and pull out everything that is a sort of target. They write smart targets within them. So we need to pull all those out and put them in one spreadsheet.
Neil Watkins
Mm.
Kieron White
and then index on the spreadsheet and the quips, because that will give the narrative background. And my question is, are they going to go, oh, I’m not doing that outside of admin. And that’s all about what’s the prize? Because if the prize is quality improvement, that’s always on, because you don’t even have to load the data. If this is really good, we can have the data API’d into it, or assuming you can run APIs.
Neil Watkins
Mmh.
Yeah, yeah, sort of hassle, yeah.
Kieron White
Not all the MRS providers allow that, but assuming you can get the data in, this thing could just happen on its own. It could just nudge you every time something’s changed for good or bad. But it will depend on is the prize worth it? I think it is, because anything that drives quality improvement is a wonderful thing for student outcomes, but it will require probably a not massive step.
Neil Watkins
Dean.
Kieron White
very small step probably just to copy and paste those smart tags. We could do it for them using KnowledgeFlow, but they need to own it to make sure it’s up to date, I think. There you go.
Neil Watkins
People making the effort is the tough stuff, isn’t it? Is it worth the price? Yeah, good question, good question.
Kieron White
Thank you.
Yeah, I think that’s where we need to keep people focused, isn’t it? As we go more hackathons, more strategy, I think that given Microsoft just announced their AI implementation company, I can’t remember what they call it, Microsoft Frontier or something, there’s something to do with Frontier in there. And that is all about helping, helping. It was last week’s announcement, I think. So, but they’re all about
Neil Watkins
Oh, really? I hadn’t seen that.
Kieron White
a few billion dollars in, I think I’ve had 6,000 staff to be recruited to it or probably moved over from another part of Microsoft, I guess. But it’s all about helping organisations adopt and embed AI and building it with them alongside them, etc. So it’s all the same challenge everyone’s having is like this shiny new tech.
Neil Watkins
Wow.
Kieron White
can make a massive difference, can definitely completely transform the way we work and therefore student outcomes, tenant outcomes, etc. But it takes a bit of effort and no one wants to hear it. They want to do it the old way, get the old papers out, put it all together, put it in my own spreadsheet,
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Kieron White
with all my gaps and my odd column headings and my misworded things, but I don’t care because that’s my spreadsheet. Okay.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, yeah, that’s my job. In fact, I was reflecting with somebody, the comment you made, I think it was last week or the week before about, you know, most people just want to go to work and do a good job and then be told they’ve done a good job and then go home. They don’t want to really think about actually how do I improve this? They don’t bring an entrepreneurial mindset, I think was the words that you used, to the approach.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Heather.
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Neil Watkins
But the fact that Microsoft are in this, I knew that Open AI had invested a lot of money in there. Yeah. So yeah, the fact that Microsoft are going down that route as well is really interesting, but it just demonstrates the scale of the adoption challenge, doesn’t it? The fact that they know they’re going to throw billions of dollars at it in order to try and keep some of the billions of dollars.
Kieron White
Yeah, and then throw pick up on.
Neil Watkins
invested in getting the whole AI infrastructure and ecosystem up and running, because if we can’t get people to use it, then you know, there’s going to be a there’s going to be some real challenges, as we’ve touched on before, with people not using the tools. That’s an interesting, I hadn’t heard that, but it’s an interesting segue into my final point that I wanted to raise this week.
Kieron White
Yes.
Neil Watkins
which was Fable Fide is back on the menu, even if for a very, very short time. And I’ve only had a chance to play with it today. And it’s really interesting in the way that it challenges and pushes back, but actually is really quite smart. And it did a couple of things, which
Kieron White
Bye.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, I gave it some, some what I thought was quite a tricky challenge. And it did this little thing where it said, yeah, but if you could just give me a little bit more detail or could you add in, you know, kind of this, can you give me a spreadsheet of that? And I’m thinking, this is, this is partly how the shadow AI problem kicks in and you went to an event.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
A couple of weeks ago, I think it was at the E-Ling Learning Partnership. Thank you. Sorry, yeah, that’s a big problem. And the audience, you know, 67% of the audience were worried about Shadow AI. And actually, it’s that whole kind of, it tempts you in. It just that kind of, could you just be, could you just tell me this?
Kieron White
Partnership, yeah, alliance, alliance.
Yeah, yeah. Give me a bit more data.
Neil Watkins
give me a bit more information, give me a bit more detail. It’s a bit like, if it felt like I was being scanned, it was like that kind of thing. Can you just give me your pin number? Yeah, can you give me your inside leg measurement and your mum’s date of birth and everything else? It’s just like, am I being scanned? So it was interesting to me going through this process with Fable. I mean, it is super
Kieron White
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, just put your PIN number in here.
Neil Watkins
powerful. But it also made me think about, I thought originally about it being a three-tier world, but actually it’s probably a four-tier world. So you’ve got, you know, Fable is great, but it’s going to be put into this highly expensive tier.
Kieron White
Yeah, yeah, I think it max, yeah, and that that topics max model, yeah.
Neil Watkins
Yeah, so you’re going to have those companies that can afford the full max version, then you’re going to have people who are doing effectively kind of where we’re at with the sort of private stuff. Then you’ve got people using the free stuff and then you’ve got people who aren’t using it at all. And one of the conversations I had this last week was with
a CEO who was, I’m like, you know, if you don’t do this stuff, where’s it going to leave you? Where’s your competitive edge going to be? You know, if your competitors are doing this and you’re not, or if you’re choosing to tinker around the edges, where does it leave your competitive edge? And I think it’s tough for lots of people because they’re not seeing the instant
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
productivity benefits. But again, coming back to some of the things that we’ve talked about in this conversation, it’s not necessarily about the tele magic bullet thing. It’s actually, let’s go through the process, let’s go through the workflow, let’s go through the data, let’s go through what’s actually really going to make a difference.
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
rather than the kind of, you know, the magic wand stuff. So yeah, really interesting, the whole fable thing and where it’s going to be leading us and the four tiers, the four tier hierarchy. I don’t know whether that’s the right terminology or not, but it just feels like for those people who just haven’t engaged,
Kieron White
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
I just don’t want to engage. I get it. I was a bit like that with social media back in the day, but now look at me. I’m writing content that’s getting, I’m getting, yeah, I’m getting, getting trolls telling me it’s rubbish, which apparently is an accolade. So, yeah, great. Yeah, yeah. Terribly well, terribly well.
Kieron White
Now you’re reluctantly there.
But.
Haha.
There you go. It’s all going very well for you, I feel.
I don’t think I’ve had any hate mail on mine just yet, but no doubt I probably have.
Neil Watkins
I wouldn’t go hate mail, but yeah, it was just it was an interesting little wake up call. Right, speaking a little interesting wake up, I’ve got one final thing to finish on, but I’ll let you go. Is there anything else you wanted to touch on this week before we head off?
Kieron White
Well, AI consciousness, but I must touch on that. It is a wake up call, but I thought you were segueing again with your tremendous segues.
Neil Watkins
Oh yeah.
Oh no. Do you know, it’s just because we’re so witty, Kieron, we haven’t even realised how good we are at this podcast stuff. I’ll share this with you. I bought a book on saying why 75% of podcasts fail. It’s in the poster. I’ll read it and I’ll tell you why, but I think we already know. We can have written it.
Kieron White
Oh yeah, that’s it.
Hey, Gabe.
Well.
Yeah.
Well, you can’t fail if you don’t set out to achieve anything, which is partly our plan. AI consciousness that was back in the news again last week with now, I think, Anthropic are actively monitoring the mood of Claude. It changes, apparently.
Neil Watkins
The.
Really?
Yeah, you’re hanging out with AI too much these days.
Kieron White
There is now funded research, I think, from the Frontier companies, Frontier Labs. I need to look it up, brilliant. I should have, I saw it and then didn’t bother writing down the references as usual. I was more, this is our in the pub style podcast, so that you don’t bring all your references to the pub. It’d be a bit dull if you did.
Neil Watkins
No, that’s right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You bring your crisps and your lager.
Kieron White
There you go. Interestingly, so, and the question is back to that kind of actually, you know, there’s quite a lot of, if you, the Turing test has been smashed and there are new versions of that now to try and accommodate LLMs, but could it be conscious? And there are a lot of people, including myself, who kind of almost dismissed that out of hand of like, it’s a computer, don’t be ridiculous. However,
I did a psychology degree and you’d have to be able to define consciousness first if you’re going to dismiss that nothing else has it. And it has been impossible so far for psychologists to define what is the mind and what is consciousness, or indeed for anyone to define it really.
scientifically at least. So who is it to know? Because on a physical level, all we are, or our brains are, which is where we assume our consciousness is, is electrical signals passing through neural networks.
And guess what’s going on in computers?
Neil Watkins
Ohh.
Kieron White
So I think it remains an area which I find kind of fascinating in that kind of, you know, really third beer in a pub kind of conversation as opposed to on stage. But it’s worthy of keeping in mind and worthy of a small put your brain to think about it occasionally, I think.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Well, a couple of things. One is I always joke with my family about when things go wrong and things get emotional. No wonder things go wrong. We’re basically bags of meat powered by chemicals and electricity. So no wonder things go. When you think about it, it’s not very very gratifying or anything, is it? However, the thing I did want to finish on and
Kieron White
Lovely.
Yeah.
Neil Watkins
is a little bit of a trailer. So tomorrow, we’ve got a special guest pulling up a bar stool and coming to talk to us. And one of her big topics is neurodiversity. So again, if we’d have planned this bloody podcast, we could have we could have mapped out that segue, but it was beautiful in the way that we did it.
Kieron White
Yes.
Neil Watkins
because we hadn’t planned it, but that’s where we’re going to finish on. So a little plug for a special guest on our podcast coming tomorrow. So as soon as that’s out, we’ll let people know.
Kieron White
How exciting! We’re getting a joined in the in our pub podcast, I guess. I hope they’re bringing a tankard.
Neil Watkins
I know.
Well, I think we said we’d get the beers. It says that you come up the still, we’ll get the beers, so we need to get.
Kieron White
Ohh yeah, that’s true. Well, I’ll have to we’ll have to get a tanker down for them then.
Neil Watkins
Yeah.
Excellent. Well, in that case, I’ll see you tankard in hand tomorrow.
Kieron White
But.
Nice one. Good to talk to you. Have a nice one. See you later. Bye bye. Bye.
Neil Watkins
Alright, have a good one. Bye.
Neil Watkins stopped transcription
