Episode 7: Punch Cards, Agentic AI & KnowledgeFlow Outperforms Salesforce 🍺
It’s Easter week and this week’s recording is in the morning, so too early for beer. Even for us. And that’s in spite of Neil’s granddaughter telling him to toughen up. Welcome to Episode 7.
This one’s packed — from a proper history lesson about the early days of computers, to KnowledgeFlow quietly doing something Salesforce couldn’t. Pull up a stool.
“There’s no future in computers” — a history lesson 🕰️ Neil’s nearly 60 and reflecting like an old pensioner. His school had one computer in the corner and he learned to program with punch cards. His brother wanted to study computing at university, but the teacher told him: “There’s no future in computers son, study Geography instead”. How wrong was she?
Claude Co-work: brilliant, baffling and burning tokens 🔥 Kieron bought a Mac Mini specifically to experiment with Claude Co-work — the agentic AI that can control your computer. He’s already burned through half his weekly allowance in half an hour on file reorganisation. One person accidentally spent £27,000 worth of tokens, so be careful out there. The use cases beyond file reorgs? Still figuring it out. The agentic wave is coming — but we’re still at the “dial-up modem” stage, and that’s fine.
The sales cycle problem — and what to do about it Three meetings with the same prospect. Same demo, slightly improved product each time. Now they’re asking for a list of all 300+ AI assistants. Neil’s verdict: don’t give it to them. Find out what their actual problem is and fix that. Kieron reflects on measuring value versus usage — prompts are easy to count, but impact is what actually matters. Some good news: several renewals this week, which is always a better signal than any number of demos.
KnowledgeFlow outperforms Salesforce 🤯 A customer needed to find out which of their programme participants hadn’t logged in since September — across three Salesforce data tables. Salesforce couldn’t do it. They extracted the data, dropped it into KnowledgeFlow, and ran the query. 170,000 rows of data across three tables. 45 minutes later: done. Donald (CTO) was delighted. The pricing model, however, took a bit of a hit — roughly £50 of tokens for what counted as two prompts. A fix is incoming.
Product of the week 🎵 (hum your jingle) Smart Targets and Parent Reports — and this one is a genuine game-changer for education. Colleges have to write personalised SMART targets for every student — attendance, achievement, deadlines, the lot. KnowledgeFlow tested with 418 rows of anonymised student data and produced four personalised SMART targets per student in about three minutes. Teachers confirmed them and uploaded them straight back to Pro Monitor. The same approach works for parent reports too — and because it’s so fast, you could send them weekly instead of termly.
Oscar’s all-nighter 🎓 Kieron’s 19-year-old son Oscar messaged at 3:30am — he’d finally got his agentic AI project working. Messaged again at 7am to say he was going to bed. The next generation isn’t waiting for anyone.
Going global, going to a wedding The podcast now has listeners in the UK, Canada, Australia, the Middle East and Sri Lanka (but only till our one listener there gets back from holiday). Kieron is off to his sister’s wedding this weekend, where he has been given the role of “crowd control.” Given his history, this is deeply alarming. Tune in next week to find out what went wrong 🤣.
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. 🍺
