AI Native Speakers

Alasdair Bell
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Most leaders feel behind on AI. AI Native Speakers talks to the ones who got ahead. Each episode, we interview an executive whose company has become AI native. We get into the weeds: how they structured their data, how they managed culture and skills, and the tools they used to make it happen. The episodes form a playbook to transform your own organisation. Hosted by Alasdair Bell, fractional head of AI for startups and partner at AI consultancy Turing Works.

Episodes

  1. Why an AI company still needed to do an AI transformation - Matt Geleta, Harrison AI

    Jun 23

    Why an AI company still needed to do an AI transformation - Matt Geleta, Harrison AI

    Harrison AI is already an AI company. It built a whole team to become AI native. Matt Geleta is Director of AI Operations and Enablement at Harrison AI, one of Australia's leading AI companies — its radiology model passed the UK's toughest exam and beat every frontier lab, it's in 40 NHS trusts, and it recently raised a US $112 million Series C. You'd assume a company like that gets a free pass to becoming AI native. It doesn't. The pace of change means even Harrison is racing to keep up, so Matt built a dedicated team whose entire job is making the company AI native. He walks me through the whole model, the agent they had to build because nothing off the shelf was good enough, and why he thinks AI should make us better humans, not just more productive ones. What you'll take away: An AI company isn't automatically AI native. The technology moves faster than any organisation, so Harrison built a dedicated team to close the gap.The model: one full-stack, generalist team across four pillars — infrastructure, knowledge, tooling, enablement — plus AI champions embedded in every function.The biggest unlock was context. Pensive, their in-Slack agent, reads emails, Confluence and Slack through a knowledge graph and vector database that compounds over time. It writes tenders and automates business cases.Optimise for speed, not cost. "There's only so much cost that you could ever take out, but there's really no limit to how fast the company could move."AI can make you a better human, not just a more productive one. Matt's personal agent reviews everything he writes and says, then flags his EQ and knowledge gaps every week.Juniors: hiring has slowed for grads across the market, but younger people often upskill on the tools faster than anyone. Chapters 00:00 Cold open 03:56 Meet Matt Geleta 05:47 The title he won't put on LinkedIn 07:36 Why commit fully to AI now 10:29 The real cost of waiting 11:33 Harrison's principles for AI 15:16 Bringing every person along 17:31 Even an AI company had to change 18:36 Superhuman, not cost-saving 22:55 Building the AI ops team 26:49 A full-stack generalist squad 31:07 OKRs and owning the work 34:27 Do we still need juniors? 39:46 Pensive, the in-Slack agent 45:07 Matt's personal second brain 50:53 The weekly coaching loop 54:04 AI making us better humans 55:23 What hasn't worked 57:21 Fighting work slop 1:01:00 Why today looks anarchic 1:05:08 A bright, unknowable future Links Matt Geleta: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewgeleta/Harrison AI: https://harrison.ai/Matt's website: https://www.matthewgeleta.com/Turing Works: https://www.turingworks.ai/ Hosted by Alasdair Bell, fractional head of AI for startups and partner at AI consultancy Turing Works.

    1h 7m

  2. Jun 8

    How Ballpoint went AI-first in three months - Josh Lachkovic

    How Ballpoint went AI-first in three months (on their third attempt). Josh runs Ballpoint, a UK growth agency managing £60M of brand revenue with a team of 12 and 90% of its work is now AI-first where AI does the task. He also tells me why he thinks the agency model is going to die, and what he's building to replace it. We unpick exactly how he got there: the two-day automation sprint that failed, the January Claude Code month that didn't, the memo and off-site that reset the culture, the team members who chose a different future, and the agent named after a Mad Men character that writes better meeting notes than any transcription tool. What you'll take away: › AI-native means AI does the task and you review it. Assisting is the stage before — and most teams are stuck there. › The adoption playbook: one memo making the change non-optional, one off-site forcing everyone into the command line, build sessions every other Friday. › Context is the difference between a demo and a tool. Cosgrove, Ballpoint's account-manager agent, works because it reads Notion, Slack, and meeting history — and was tuned against a scoring system until it hit 95%. › Build the data layer first. Models and tools on top swap in and out. › Junior roles as we knew them are disappearing. Josh's bet: apprenticeship-style learning by hand before you're allowed to delegate to AI. › For grads: build something real with Claude Code and put it in a public repo. That's the new CV. Links › Josh Lachkovic: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshlachkovic/ › Ballpoint: https://www.weareballpoint.com/ › Josh's blog: https://read.earlystagegrowth.com/ › The True Believer, Eric Hoffer — the book Josh references on mass movements Hosted by Alasdair Bell, fractional head of AI for startups and partner at AI consultancy Turing Works.

    58 min
  • 2 Episodes

About

Most leaders feel behind on AI. AI Native Speakers talks to the ones who got ahead. Each episode, we interview an executive whose company has become AI native. We get into the weeds: how they structured their data, how they managed culture and skills, and the tools they used to make it happen. The episodes form a playbook to transform your own organisation. Hosted by Alasdair Bell, fractional head of AI for startups and partner at AI consultancy Turing Works.

Information

  • Creator
    Alasdair Bell
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    2
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Alasdair Bell
  • Show Website
    AI Native Speakers