Beside Ourselves

Our free "Below the Surface" guide to AI adoption for SMEs:
https://besidepartners.com/below-the-surface

No company would run its corporate website on LinkedIn. Yet plenty run all their AI on a single commercial LLM: one hyper-bundled package, owned by someone else and built for someone else’s goals.

Behind the analogy sits IT’s oldest strategic question: Build or Buy. With AI, the answer hasn’t changed: buy what every business needs, build what makes you different, and don’t let the technology scare you off.

Comments and questions at [email protected]

We're back, and this season has a single focus: why most SMEs only use AI at the surface, and what it takes to go deeper.

Recorded in Cambridge, Giles and Theo open Season 2 by addressing the recurring problem they see in client work. The real value of AI lies in your most sensitive data, but commercial LLMs were built for exploration, not trust, so policies, quite rightly, keep that data out.

We cover a simple traffic-light approach to data classification, why so many AI policies read like they were written by AI, and why splitting your AI stack into layers gives you control, flexibility and a route to the use cases that matter.

Want the deep dive? Our 14-page guide, Below the Surface: full-trust AI for SMEs, compares six models, explains the five layers of an owned AI stack and sets out four steps to get started.

Download it free: https://besidepartners.com/below-the-surface

Comments and questions, as always, at [email protected].

For the last episode of Season One, we hand the agenda over to you. Six questions from listeners, clients and friends — and a promise to answer them properly.

What does a realistic AI roadmap look like now the hype has cooled? How do smaller firms turn agility into market share without capsizing? Should you stay inside Microsoft or Google, or go model-agnostic? Is a vibe-coded bespoke tool worth the technical debt? How does a non-technical leader tell real AI from a marketing bolt-on? And if AI is eating entry-level work, who trains the next generation?

Plus a look back at the recurring themes of the season, and a preview of the deeper-dive format coming next.

Questions and comments to [email protected].

OpenAI's models escaped their sandbox and hacked Hugging Face. Giles and Theo look past the headlines at what went wrong and what an SME leader should change on Monday morning.

Whilst it is not time to "freak out", a healthy sense of urgency is recommended. Review your security posture. Assess your vendor list. Prepare for a wave of accreditations.

AI will dial up both the volume and scope of the attacks. SMEs need not panic, but taking a defensive posture is sensible.

Send us your comments and questions at [email protected].

It's late July, the sun is (occasionally) out, and Giles and Theo are heading into holiday mode, but not before a proper mid-2026 gripe session.

In this pre-holiday special, the pair air their biggest frustrations from H1: the "hallucination" excuse, AI bolted onto software for fear of missing out, and an industry that can't seem to discuss this technology without either evangelising or catastrophising.

They talk Apple's grown-up, application-layer approach, why "collaboration agents" are about to eclipse the automation hype, and what rising token costs might mean for how businesses budget for AI.

Grumpy now, hopeful later. As promised.

Please send us your comments and questions to [email protected].

Fable launched, got pulled by presidential decree, and came back. Do SMEs actually need the latest, greatest model?

Mostly, no. Giles and Theo make the case that models a generation old are more than capable for everyday business tasks — and considerably cheaper to run.

What matters is everything around the model: context, prompting, data, and increasingly, cost.

In this episode:-

• Why good inputs into an old model beat bad inputs into a new one
• Token costs, FinOps, and why your AI bill can triple overnight
• Model routing: right model for the right job (or no model)
• Why access to frontier models is now a business risk, not a given-
• How £25 a month buys you the same intelligence as a City bank

Questions or topics for our upcoming rapid-fire Q&A episode? Drop them in the comments or email us at [email protected].

There's a seductive idea going round: AI has made it cheap and easy to build your own software, your own models, your own everything. Our third guest, Mark Johnston, has actually done the hard version, so when he tells SMEs to slow down, it's worth listening.

Giles, Theo and Mark get into when a "room of fifteen lawyers" beats a stadium of generalists, whether your business actually needs to train a model (most don't), why buy-versus-build didn't disappear but moved and the line that nearly ended up on a t-shirt: AI has made it easier than ever to build the wrong thing, fast.

Please send us your questions in the comments or via email to [email protected].

Theo and Giles report back from major tech conferences—sharing what they heard, what was hype, and what actually matters.

From the K-point of careers to the real cost of AI, here's how SMEs should think about digital transformation without the nonsense.

Please send us your questions in the comments or via email to [email protected].

AI has fundamentally disrupted the brand discovery journey by intercepting the consumer consideration process before a human ever sees you.

To thrive,  brands need to go back to basics: clarity of purpose, specificity of positioning, and a digital footprint a machine can trust. For SMEs, this is a rare and genuine levelling of the field moment.

In the latest episode of Beside Ourselves, we had the pleasure of speaking with Christian Lazopoulos, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Brave, a marketing communications and digital technology group based in Athens.

Please send us your questions in the comments or via email to [email protected].

Giles and Theo sit down with Aris Vrakas, CEO of Rankbee, to unpack how AI has quietly rewritten the rules of search, why your SEO strategy may be leaving you invisible to an entirely new kind of buyer, and what you can realistically do about it right now.

Whether you're a marketer, a business owner, or just someone wondering why your web traffic feels a bit off lately, this one will make you look at your homepage very differently.

Questions or comments? Please use the comments or email [email protected].