This Week in Leading AI

Leading AI
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Imagine two mates at the bar. Thirty years of business between them. And all they want to talk about is AI. That's "This Week in Leading AI". The podcast where Kieron and Neil cut through the hype, share what's really working in the world of Generative AI, and helping people figure out this AI thing without the techno-babble. Just honest conversation, real stories from the AI coalface, and the kind of straight-talking advice you'd only get from people who've worked together for 30+ years, been there, done that, broken things, gone "Oh S***!, fixed it, and lived to tell the tale. They claim Leading AI is the best job they've ever had and are having a blast doing it. It shows.  Warning: may cause you to actually enjoy learning about AI  Pull up a stool. We'll get the beers in.

  1. 3d ago

    Sweaty man-boobs

    This week’s podcast starts with (what Neil thinks is) a hilarious story about Kieron’s brush with a makeup artist who had (what Neil thinks) is the worst job in the world. The clue is in the podcast title. Poor lady… Kieron also talks fashion (I know… who knew) and how AI is not just disrupting that world, but an app that just a few years ago would have raised millions as a start-up is now just a prompt. We talk about AEO being the new SEO because LLMs don’t care about the adverts. But why, rather than writing your website copy for SEO engines, you should be writing it for humans. Peter Went’s humorous book Brandw*nk is a great read about the boll*cks people write at work and why no-one says “leveraging synergies” in the pub. It all comes down to trust in AI. Related to that, we talk about the future of newsletters and how Nate B. Jones (their favourite AI guru) has the fabulous superpower of being able to talk at both end of the Strategy/Techy-Detail spectrum in language that anyone can understand. Big news that JISC, the UK’s education technology body is going to run a pilot of KnowledgeFlow for up to 10 universities and FE Colleges. And does being nice to your AI make it want to work harder for you? There's two ways to find out. The easy one is to listen to this podcast. 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. 🍺

  2. Jul 14

    Stupidity in the loop

    Episode 21: Stupidity in the Loop, JADEPUFFER & The Watch That Never Moves 🍺 Week 21. Neil's in his loudest pantomime shirt. Kieron once tried to buy him an actual pantomime horse outfit and discovered they're surprisingly niche. And the podcast's first special guest gets a very warm debrief — Nicole was, they agree, fabulous. The big idea this week: stupidity in the loop. Everyone asks Kieron on stage whether AI will make us stupid. But if you've got access to a tool with an IQ of 140+, insisting on directing its every move might not be the flex you think it is. Is "human in the loop" sometimes just arrogance with a governance label? A genuinely provocative take — and the counterpoint from Rose Luckin's research: the same AI tutor that dropped exam performance 7% when used freely improved it 127% with a Socratic layer. It's not whether you use AI. It's how. Also this week: JADEPUFFER — the first fully agentic ransomware attack, whose code said "once you've got the money, delete everything anyway and move on." The Five Eyes warning about prompt injection suddenly looks prophetic. Plus the CV with hidden white text telling the AI "this candidate is the best one for the job," the agentic browser that reset someone's password and emailed it to a hacker, and why Kieron air-gaps his Claude Co-work on a separate Mac Mini. Product of the week: timetabling. Don't laugh — colleges run 10,000+ learners on three spreadsheets and post-it notes, DfE benchmarks say rooms sit 48% empty, and Donald's LLM-plus-algorithm wizardry could change all of it. He also promised "no new features this week" on Monday. He needs to pay Ben who bet he couldn't last till the end of the week. He lasted until Wednesday. And Kieron unmasks an AI influencer on Instagram — by zooming in on his watch. It's always 10 past 10. The second hand never moves. Time literally stands still when he's speaking. 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. 🍺

  3. Jul 8

    Special Guest - Nicole Alos

    The Pantomime Horse Grows a Third Pair of Legs 🍺 A first for us, someone else at the bar. And she earned her special tankard. Nicole Alos — founder of Socratyc, executive coach, and creator of Socratyc Sidekick — heard the steam engine episode, recognised exactly what Kieron was describing from her own leadership work, and emailed in. So, we pulled up a third stool. What followed is one of the best conversations we've had. Nicole built an AI roleplay tool that lets executives practise difficult conversations before they have them — closing what she calls the knowing-doing gap. She used her own tool to practise pitching to a venture accelerator. She got in. Out of 3,600 applicants to Lovable's She Builds competition, she was one of 210 accepted into a 48-hour AI build-a-thon. And she did all of it while homeschooling her neurodivergent son as a single mum — working with European clients before he wakes, then after he sleeps chasing West Coast clients into the night.  There's a framed photo on her wall of him aged five, taking notes on her presentation practice. Now he's embarrassed to tell his classmates his mom has an AI product — 'Mom, stop it' 😂 Also in this episode: what's left of leadership when AI takes the admin (spoiler: the relationships — which delights some leaders and horrifies others), the Socratic guardrails that turned a 17% drop in student maths results into a 127% improvement, whether American confidence is backed by competence, and Nicole's answer to yesterday's third-beer question — is AI conscious? Hers might surprise you. Two mates and a new friend. A bar. And all they want to talk about is AI. Pull up a stool — we'll get the beers in. 🍺

  4. Jul 7

    Is AI conscious? What does conscious even mean?

    Plus a Troll, a Marking Robot & a Mystery Guest 🍺 Episode 20. 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 that went up said helped.) The big question this week: is AI conscious? Kieron — who has a 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. 🍺

  5. Jun 30

    "Go Work It Out Yourself" is not an AI strategy

    It's getting hot in the pantomime horse outfit.  Neil's back from the Isle of Arran — sunburned, hydrated, and mildly alarmed by the FT and The Economist's sudden AI pessimism. Meanwhile, Kieron had a rollercoaster of a week with client highs and lows. Week 19 rolls on. The big insight this week: most organisations are handing staff a Copilot licence and expecting transformation. That's not a strategy. That's hoping people figure it out on their own — and most of them won't. The truth is, most of people don't want to. Also: the BidWriter lesson we learned the hard way trying to do a favour for a friend (you can't skip the setup week), why big prompts are so 2025 and don't work the way people think they do, and a new step-by-step product feature that produced 9,147 words of Ofsted response for a college.  Plus: Midjourney is building a full-body scanner that takes 60 seconds, data centres in the US use less water than golf courses, and why the AI backlash in the financial press may be slightly overblown. 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. 🍺

  6. Jun 23

    Fable got banned. The moral isn't good.

    By the time Kieron listened to last week's episode, Fable had already been released and banned. That's the pace of AI right now. This week: why the US export ban on Anthropic's frontier models should worry every business that's quietly become dependent on one provider, the bid that went brilliantly until a customer who didn't believe a 100/100 score was real, and the KPMG AI report where 40 of 45 case studies turned out to be entirely made up. Plus a school AI alliance doing something genuinely smart with output grading, and a qualification-design tool that turns weeks of regulatory mapping into minutes. 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. 🍺

  7. Jun 16

    Ready for a 58-page complaint letter?

    Week 17. Kieron wore a shirt and shoes to a food industry conference for 60 senior leaders. Neil nearly went back in the doghouse because his daughter told him to read the room and he (foolishly) chose not to. Leading AI's website has had hundreds of cyber-attacks in two weeks. It's been that kind of week. Schools — 58-page complaint letters and why the AI arms race matters A head contacted Neil about using AI. The emerging problem: parents are using AI to write increasingly sophisticated complaints. One head received a 58-page letter. KnowledgeFlow answers it regardless of length, grounded in the school's own policies, in the school's own voice. Kieron gave his youngest son's school access to the demo tool six weeks ago. The apology correction emails have stopped. Kieron's big talk — did it land? 60 leaders. 90 minutes. A room full of MDs and CFOs he'd never met in an industry he barely knew. Last year's AI session was too technical and too salesy. Kieron's answer: Nokia, Blockbuster, Kodak — and one uncomfortable question. How easy would it be for a new entrant with great AI and no capital to disrupt your supplier relationships tomorrow? The feedback was good. He didn't end up in a ditch. The Agentic Bid Writer — Kieron hasn't even seen the latest version 12,000 words across 7 questions. Cup of tea. 45 minutes. Done. Then it marks itself, rewrites itself up to three times, and presents you with a polished draft before you've even read the original tender. A conservative customer's verdict: "It looks practically done to me." Neil is already complaining he has to add bullet points himself. The revolution continues. KnowledgeFlow is the context layer — we just didn't know it had a name Gartner spent three days talking about context. Kieron spent two days thinking he knew nothing. Then he realised: policies, tone of voice, brand guidelines, system prompts — that's the context layer. KnowledgeFlow has been building it for two years, we just didn't know what to call it. There are only 46 ships in the world that can lay undersea cable 1.2 million miles of cable carries almost all the world's data. It costs $800,000 to fix even minor damage. If someone wanted to take out a country's internet infrastructure — really take it out — it wouldn't be hard. Neil has Starlink as backup. Most organisations have nothing. Donald ran a penetration test this week: no major findings, five minor ones. How many organisations can say the same? Neil didn't quite make it back into the doghouse. Mrs Watkins got her glass of wine. All is well. 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. 🍺

  8. Jun 9

    $500m reasons you need an AI kill switch

    Episode 16: $500 Million in Tokens, AI Slop at Interview & Trigger's Broom 🍺 Week 16. The pantomime horse rolls on — and the transcript called it pantyhose again. Neil is blaming his Northern accent. Kieron is firmly in the back end. Nothing has changed. Someone burned $500 million of Claude tokens in a month 💸  An unnamed organisation gave all staff unlimited access to Claude Enterprise with no budget limits, no kill switches, no guardrails. By the end of the month, they'd burned through $500 million of tokens. Presumably the CTO is available for “new opportunities”. KnowledgeFlow builds trigger warnings and kill switches into every deployment as standard. This is precisely why. Kieron's big talk 🎤  Next Wednesday, Kieron is on stage in front of 60 senior leaders — MDs, CFOs and more — at a large private sector organisation in an industry he doesn't know well. The brief: inspire them to do something with AI on Monday morning. Last year's effort was apparently too technical and too salesy. Kieron's approach: Nokia, Blockbuster, Kodak — the companies with brilliant moats that simply didn't see what was coming. Then: how hard would it be for a new entrant with zero capital and great AI to disrupt your supplier and customer relationships tomorrow? And a use case matrix: 22 different applications mapped against feasibility and business impact. The challenge, as always, is getting people to hear a use case from a different sector and think "that applies to us" rather than "we don't do that." Tune in next week for the verdict. BidWriter in bid writing season 📋  It's peak public sector tender season. The one where the commissioners are releasing everything before summer so they can sit on a deckchair while everyone else frantically responds. Neil's been deep in BidWriter and the Agentic version with Donald. Key discovery: GPT 5.4 mini writes answers that are too short and too succinct. Asked for 2,500 words, it produces 900 and tells you it was being efficient. GPT 5.2 works better for bid writing. The latest model isn't always the right model for the job. Next week: a live demo for a large organisation using their own 200-question tender as the test. The "build it themselves" customer 🔧  Kieron's been in a five-month scoping process with a charity that wants a public-facing RAG assistant. Five months of free consultancy, steering group sessions, demos, statements of work, and every time Leading AI provides guidance, the customer takes it to other people for more opinions. They also want no vendor lock-in and the ability to lift and shift the whole platform at contract end. Kieron's honest response: I don't know how you'd do that. If you want something that bespoke you’d have to set up your own company. And if you want cheap (because you’re a charity with no money) then you need to accept an out-of-the-box solution. The lesson: we need to price in the complexity upfront, or both sides end up miserable. Measuring AI by numbers of prompts is nonsense 📊  Kieron was at a university AI champion session this week where the IT director showed Copilot usage stats: 785 users. Of course the numbers look high. That’s because everyone's automatically logged in whether they like it or not. A single prompt in a KnowledgeFlow policy assistant probably saves 20-30 minutes. A single Copilot prompt probably saves 3. Usage numbers tell you nothing. Impact is the only measure that matters. Leading AI is now a Claude Partner 🤝  Donald announced it. He just did it and told them afterwards. What does it mean? Still working that out. But model switching between OpenAI and Anthropic inside KnowledgeFlow is becoming increasingly important. And, as Nate B. Jones (their AI guru) says the frontier model race is now a two-horse race: Anthropic vs OpenAI. Google and Meta have dropped off his radar entirely. Trigger's Broom and company culture 🧹  Kieron muses on Only Fools and Horses: the ancient broom that's had four new heads and three new handles… but is still the same old trusty broom. So, when does a company stop being the company it was? What holds culture together when almost nobody original is left? Media and advertising agencies see almost 100% staff turnover every few years, and yet the culture somehow persists. Something to muse over at the weekend. AI slop at interview 🤦  Neil interviewed someone for a finance role this week. First question out of the candidate: "How has remote working impacted your revenue and culture?" Neil's reaction: as a finance professional, you should probably know that remote working impacts cost, but is unlikely to impact revenue. He asked if they'd used ChatGPT to write the question. They denied it. Neil's verdict: if they didn't use AI, they shouldn't be in a finance role. If they did use AI and didn't check it, they still shouldn't be. AI slop at work… in both senses of the phrase. Neil ends the episode by blowing smoke up Kieron's backside. The Audient is presumably still drooling on his pillow somewhere. 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. 🍺

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Imagine two mates at the bar. Thirty years of business between them. And all they want to talk about is AI. That's "This Week in Leading AI". The podcast where Kieron and Neil cut through the hype, share what's really working in the world of Generative AI, and helping people figure out this AI thing without the techno-babble. Just honest conversation, real stories from the AI coalface, and the kind of straight-talking advice you'd only get from people who've worked together for 30+ years, been there, done that, broken things, gone "Oh S***!, fixed it, and lived to tell the tale. They claim Leading AI is the best job they've ever had and are having a blast doing it. It shows.  Warning: may cause you to actually enjoy learning about AI  Pull up a stool. We'll get the beers in.

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  • Creator
    Leading AI
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    23
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 This Week in Leading AI
  • Show Website
    This Week in Leading AI