KIMRA CONVERSATIONS

Max Friberg spent years as a consultant using expert networks for due diligence work before founding Inex One, built specifically to bring together the fragmented world of expert networks into one place. In this episode, he tells Simon Burton what actually made him build the business, and why aggregating across so many different networks, rather than running just one, turned out to be the more valuable position to sit in.

We talk about the huge value that vantage point brings to Inex One's clients, being able to see across a whole industry's worth of expert network usage rather than just one relationship, and what that reveals about how the industry is actually changing. Max shares where he sees real opportunity for clients in AI right now, and where, just as importantly, he thinks it still falls well short of what genuine expertise and tacit knowledge can offer.

In this episode, Simon Burton talks to CJ Anderson, a qualified librarian with over 30 years in the information profession, and now founder of Iron Carrot a specialist data governance consultancy.

CJ explains how she helps firms build the right foundations for AI, by having the right conversations, and building the accountability, ownership and clear decision making processes around data that set a firm up to enable AI. We discuss why real AI readiness starts with getting your data in order, why that foundation is built through people and process.

We dig into what actually causes AI projects to go wrong inside law firms, where the accountability gaps tend to sit, who should actually own data governance within a firm, and the real risks of not having it in place. We also talk about what good governance looks like in practice versus governance that exists purely to tick a box, and the genuine opportunity all of this creates for knowledge and information professionals, who are often well suited to support or toead this work. CJ also shares her own career story, from her early years as a librarian through two decades of hands-on data governance work, and what ultimately led her to found Iron Carrot.

A conversation about the unglamorous groundwork that actually determines whether AI adoption succeeds or quietly fails.

Our latest KIMRA Conversations podcast with Dominic King from Accenture Research covered his latest book, "Tools or Traps? The Rising Social Cost of Unchecked Innovation" which talks about technology and the dependencies we build that are created with new technologies and how instant gratification is baked into the business models of many of these new technologies from social media to AI. We talked about technology, particularly AI, and how it's impacting the work of business researchers, what it means to truly think vs just deliver. As well as really digging into some of the issues around synthetic data and what that means in a market research context.

In our first ever KIMRA Podcast episode, Simon Burton talks to Ben Longman, founder and CEO of Trendtype, a specialist market intelligence company covering FMCG, consumer health and retail across Africa and the Middle East. Ben explains why so much data on African markets is poor or simply doesn't exist, why on-the-ground fieldwork keeps surfacing things desk research never would, and why AI can confidently hallucinate an entire academic source when the underlying evidence just isn't there.

"we'll suddenly realize that that there is a value in expertise, a value in specialism, a value in on the ground research and and we'll realise that when people start making bad decisions and hitting some of those roadblocks."