Episode 9: AI Deniers, AI Slop & KnowledgeFlow Cracks Salesforce 🍺
Neil’s on a non-alcoholic beer again — this time because he’s in the doghouse with Mrs Watkins and needs to drive her to a romantic weekend away to patch things up. It’s that kind of Friday. Welcome to Episode 9.
Mrs Watkins is an AI denier — and she’s not alone Neil tried to convince his wife of the wonders of AI. She said “it’s great but it’s not for me.” Sound familiar? Neil points out this is almost word for word from Richard Susskind’s How to Think About AI — a whole category of people who can see the value but won’t change their process to fit around it. Then again, Staples’ share price allegedly collapsed when Mrs Watkins switched from post-it notes to spreadsheets, so perhaps there’s hope.
The future of management — courtesy of Nate B. Jones Neil recommends a brilliant piece by Nate B. Jones (his second plug this series, and no, he’s not on commission) on what management is actually for. Three roles: routing information to the right place, sense-making in the noise, and accountability. How much of each is AI-able? More than most managers would like to admit.
Trust in a world of AI slop Can you trust a video anymore? A photo? A LinkedIn post? Kieron raises the uncomfortable reality that AI-generated content is everywhere — including on Instagram (those animal rescue videos? Mostly fake). The organisations that will win are those with genuinely trusted brands and curated data sets — like the King’s Fund or Stripe. Being a trusted source is now a competitive advantage.
Anthropic’s Claude 4 Opus (Mythos) — the model you’re not allowed to have Kieron digs into the buzz around Anthropic’s most powerful model, apparently so capable it performed zero-day attacks on every major operating system in its first outing. Is it genuinely that dangerous? Or brilliant pre-IPO marketing? Either way, the CEO of Barclays was talking about it on the radio at lunchtime. Mission accomplished.
Five security questionnaires, 20 hours, and a lot of AI slop Neil spent most of the week answering overlapping, partially nonsensical security questionnaires from a prospective customer — three of them about data privacy, many questions clearly generated by ChatGPT (the M-dashes are a giveaway). The cobbler’s children moment: Leading AI built a KnowledgeFlow security RAG for themselves mid-episode and were answering questions live before the call ended. Twenty hours of pain, sorted in minutes.
Outcomes-based pricing — the next frontier Goldman Sachs says AI companies are moving away from per-seat licensing toward outcomes-based pricing. Kieron has already had the first conversation about it: a college currently pays £20 per student application document check to an outsourced company. KnowledgeFlow can do the same thing for about 30p of AI processing. The maths are not subtle.
Product of the week 🎵 (build to a crescendo) KnowledgeFlow now connects directly to Salesforce via live API calls. No more exporting data, no more waiting for reports, no more paying tens of thousands for bespoke dashboards. Any staff member can now ask questions of their Salesforce data in plain English and get instant answers — across multiple data tables, in real time. Well done Donald and Ibby.
A personal moment — Kieron’s dad’s care plan Kieron’s father moved into a care home in January. The family received a 16-page care plan full of jargon and boxes nobody understood. Kieron put it into KnowledgeFlow, asked “what can I do to help?”, and got five clear bullet points back. He sent it to the family WhatsApp. Everyone said thank you. That’s what this is actually for.
Plus: house manuals loaded into Notebook LM, a frame TV that displays art when switched off, and the ongoing mystery of whether Neil will successfully escape the doghouse by Monday.
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. Even non-alcoholic ones for those who want them.🍺
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