This Week in Leading AI

Leading AI

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. 2d ago

    Su Belagodu and The Human in the Loop

    Six legs on the pantomime horse again — and this time we had to explain what a pantomime horse actually is. Su Belagodu joins us from Winchester, Massachusetts (yes, we compared notes on the other Winchester), introduced by our previous guest Nicole Alos. Her first question after the explanation: "Are you the head or the back?" Kieron's answer: Neil's very firmly in the front. He's at the back, but driving. Su started in computer science until a manager told her she asked too many questions and wasn't a very good coder, so she should go into product. For Su that was a blessing in disguise. She's led healthcare startups, co-founded an AI-native company in 2024 when she didn't yet know what "agentic" meant, and now advises companies on the thing everyone gets wrong. The warm body problem. Everyone knows you need a human in the loop. So organisations drop a programme manager at the end of a workflow, tell them to approve things, and call it governance. Su's research, built on 40-plus interviews into a Human in the Loop Maturity Model, found what actually happens. After the first 20 or 30 approvals, confidence in the AI rises, fatigue sets in, and people start rubber-stamping. One human at the end of a workflow isn't oversight. It's poor design. Trust, quantified. Accountability × transparency × accuracy. Accountability means someone answerable who can actually change things. And the answer can never be "it was the AI." Perhaps her most incisive line in the chat was that enterprises aren't buying AI, they're buying confidence that AI won't add risk. That's why they don't adopt. Not cost. Not scepticism. Risk appetite. One-way doors and two-way doors. Taco Bell's AI took an order for "lots of water" and added 99 bottles. Annoying, reversible. Get a gas boiler enquiry wrong and it could have life-changing consequences. Design the checkpoints around which door you're walking through. Su also talked about pathology study where humans scored 97%, AI scored 98%, and the two together hit 99.8%. That's co-intelligence in one number.  Safeguarding is a big topic for us and today Su explains why she tells her sixth-grader's AI class don't humanise it. Alexa and Siri trained us into blind trust, and no chatbot should replace a teacher or a counsellor.  Management agents that supervise swarms of other agents (a callback to Kieron's son and his arguing bots). And Su turns the tables at the end to ask what AI adoption actually looks like in the UK, which gets us into the sovereign LLM problem, the Azure Foundry queue where Sweden gets everything first, and Kieron's line that deploying Copilot as your AI strategy is like handing everyone Excel and calling it data analytics. We've promised her a return at Christmas. In an actual pantomime horse outfit. She says she'll hold us to it. Two mates and a third stool with a new friend on. A bar. And all they want to talk about is AI. Pull up a stool — we'll get the beers in. 🍺

    Su Belagodu and The Human in the Loop

  2. Aug 11

    Cameron Mirza and the Learning Scientists

    Some university leaders believe AI is free. Not cheap. Free. That's one of the findings from research by our special guest this week — Cameron Mirza, who leads major education projects in Jordan for IREX, the NGO working in over 100 countries, and who has just surveyed university AI readiness across 25 countries. Three-quarters of the respondents came from the Middle East and Africa, a perspective you rarely hear in the UK AI conversation. The headline numbers deserve a moment: Only 34% of institutions have a clear AI strategy. Only 39% have approved AI policies. Universities have grand AI ambitions — Cameron hears them in every president's office, complete with impressive PowerPoints — but ask a simple question like "can you give me an example of how you've used it?" and the fundamentals fall away. No strategy. No budget. No staff literacy. And in some cases, a genuine belief that the whole thing costs nothing. His diagnosis will sound familiar to anyone who's listened to this podcast: ambition driven by fear of missing out, budgets that don't match the rhetoric, and a rush to buy tools before anyone has worked out what problem they're solving. But the conversation goes much further than the survey. We get into why the Fable ban has made AI sovereignty the topic in every university leadership meeting from Nairobi to Abu Dhabi. Why offline LLMs and low-bandwidth design might matter more for global education equity than any frontier model. The Stanford research showing students achieve far more with a teacher plus AI than with AI alone. And Cameron's framing of the future of the profession, which Neil announced on air he was stealing: teachers as learning scientists — part educator, part data analyst, part behavioural scientist. Oh — and the story of how Cameron once collected four months of unpaid salary in cash, in carrier bags he had to fetch from the car, then hid it in suit pockets and under his mattress because the bank wouldn't take it all at once. You'll have to listen for the full glory of that one. We've known Cam for over 25 years, since the three of us fought the millennium bug together in Ford and then went on to the Department for Education. This one was a genuine pleasure. Two mates and an old friend. A bar. And all they want to talk about is AI. Pull up a stool — we'll get the beers in. 🍺 #AI #HigherEducation #AIinEducation #AISovereignty #EdTech #InternationalDevelopment #Podcast #AIStrategy #FutureOfWork

    Cameron Mirza and the Learning Scientists

  3. Aug 4

    Donald Allison - The Big D, the brains behind KnowledgeFlow

    Six legs on the pantomime horse this week. This time the third stool goes to the man who started it all, the on, the only Donald Allison, CTO and architect of KnowledgeFlow.  The origin story is better than any of us remembered. In June 2022 Neil was getting ready to retire. Donald said don't do it because I've built this exciting thing with AI. In August, Kieron and Neil went to the biggest AI conference in the world in Vegas, got hideously sunburned, avoided the gaming tables, and had a minor incident in the Bellagio bar that remains permanently classified. They came back, went to see Donald, and a month later Leading AI existed. Donald had built a private ChatGPT before RAG had a name. Everyone he showed it to said the same thing: that's magic. Nobody believed it could do what it did. Three years on, this is the conversation about what's actually under the bonnet. It's the most technical episode we've done, but hopefully everyone will learn something from it. Why KnowledgeFlow lives in your Azure tenancy. Donald's answer is the cleanest argument for it we've heard: your security is already there. Role-based access, the lot. So why would you break that barrier and drag your board minutes, CVs and medical notes somewhere else — just to make the software easier to write? Better to write software that complements your security posture than one that dismantles it. The safeguarding filter that catches the question, not the answer. Edge devices filter what comes back. But if a student asks how to build a bomb, the LLM refuses — so the edge device sees nothing, and nobody ever knows the question was asked. Donald built it the other way round. Catch it before the LLM ever sees it. The browser extension nobody talks about. Use Azure or OpenAI APIs directly and internet retrieval goes out through their connection — quietly bypassing every firewall and filter you've got at the edge of your network. KnowledgeFlow routes it through the user's own browser, own gateway, own firewall. Kieron's summary: "So we're even more secure than Azure." The hardest thing he's ever built. The hardest thing to do in AI isn't unstructured date (like 700-page legal packs, or 1,00 PDFs). It's structured date like spreadsheets. A SQL database with 50,000 rows is harder than a library, because the differences between line 1 and line 427 are minuscule — and LLMs are built for unstructured data. As Kieron puts it: it knows the difference between a kettle and a car, but 10 and 11 look basically identical. The BidWriter argument. A customer handed it back this week. Kieron asks the uncomfortable question: should we retire some of the early tools? Neil defends it hard — 60% of a bid in two hours versus two weeks — and reminds everyone of the 190-question spreadsheet he cut and pasted for two days before Donald said "I can fix that" and built the button. Donald's verdict, and the line of the episode: give me a trowel and a pile of bricks and ask me to build a house — imagine what that's going to look like. Plenty of people can prompt. Most can't. That's who the tool is for. And the thing Kieron caught him building. Automated downtime alerts started pinging from something called "KnowledgeFlow for Procurement." Donald's response on air: "I don't know what you're talking about." Then, after a pause: "So, I've started to put the building blocks together." What's he most proud of after three years? Not the tech. The daily 09:30 team call. The team is scattered across the country, still here, still moving, working on things that help people who need it. As he puts it: we make a difference. Two mates and the man who built it. A bar. And all they want to talk about is AI. Pull up a stool — we'll get the beers in. 🍺

    Donald Allison - The Big D, the brains behind KnowledgeFlow

  4. Jul 28

    Show me your evidence

    "Show me your evidence". Imagine a regulator, an auditor, or an ombudsman asks you that about an important decision your organisation made. Now imagine the honest human answer: "Well, I read the documentation and had a cup of tea. I thought about it for a bit, then I wrote something down." That doesn't sound very convincing, even if it is the truth. Here's what the AI version looks like (and it's the thing we're most excited about building right now). Every answer KnowledgeFlow produces sits on top of a complete evidence trail: the question asked, how the AI interpreted it, the documents it cited, the documents it consulted but chose not to cite, the model used, every reasoning step. Press one button and it assembles into an immutable evidence pack. The next time the regulator asks to see your decision making evidence — ta-da, here it is. In housing, complaints escalate to an ombudsman whose first question is always a variation on "show me the backstory." In colleges, Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs)consultation decisions about special educational needs get challenged all the time. EHCPs are important, often large  documents full of medical language. In social care, in finance, in any regulated sector, the organisations that can prove how a decision was made will be in a different league (and less trouble) from the ones that can't. The irony is that AI is becoming more explainable than the humans it works alongside. Nobody's ever asked you to produce an evidence pack for your cup-of-tea thought process. They're about to start asking how you used your AI to come to the answers you did. Can you show your workings out? Also in Episode 23: the education policy paradox (76% of students say they're clear on AI use in assessment; 7% of lecturers agree; 49% of schools have no AI policy at all — there's a free one on our website). The OpenAI models that escaped their sandbox and hacked Hugging Face to cheat on a benchmark. Procter & Gamble's 791-person study showing one person with AI matching the productivity of two-person teams and breaking down silos. Room-temperature quantum chips built on diamonds. And Kieron's brief, unpaid, unappreciated career in flower delivery. 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. Jul 21

    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. 🍺

  6. 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. 🍺

  7. 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. 🍺

  8. 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. 🍺

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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Leading AI
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    27
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 This Week in Leading AI
  • Show Website
    This Week in Leading AI