Often when I demonstrate KnowledgeFlow (Leading AI‘s secure AI platform) to potential customers I am met with ‘can’t CoPilot do that’. There are so many reasons why CoPilot can’t, but mostly I am reminded of the early days of the Internet.
Back when the web was new, I was with the Department for Education. Every policy team wanted its own website, so every team got one. They commissioned different web development agencies, adopted different branding, different tone, different everything. It felt like innovation and progress…
Then someone counted. Government was running the best part of 2,500 separate websites. GDS then spent years pulling 1,882 of them back into one. GOV.UK. They saved over £70m a year in hosting alone, never mind the wasted effort getting there.
I saw the exact same thing with Excel. Every team had its own spreadsheet, each one quietly becoming the database nobody signed off. Data held locally, different versions of the truth. Then in 2020 Public Health England lost nearly 16,000 Covid cases because a file hit a row limit baked into a format from 1987. That was never a spreadsheet problem. It was a governance problem in a spreadsheet costume.
Now it’s CoPilot. “Copilot can do that.” Course it can. So could a web agency in 2001 and so could Excel. The tool was never the bit that bites you…
The bit that bites is fifty teams building fifty assistants, each with its own prompts, its own rapidly out-of-date compliance data and its own private idea of what “compliant” means, with nobody holding the whole thing together. It feels fast. The bill turns up later, and it always turns up.
The pattern is 30 years old. A new tool democratises creation, everyone builds, fragmentation sets in and eventually someone pays to unpick the lot.
Which one are you building?
Kieron
