If you're weighing up whether hybrid working is worth the hassle, or how far you can actually push AI into your own operations, this episode was made for you.

Andy Firth, owner of Leeds digital agency Ascensor, joins Martin to talk through both changes at once. He took his business fully remote and rebuilt the whole business around Claude.

They get into:

• Why "three days in the office" quietly became three or four people in a 10,000 square foot building most Fridays, and what that was costing Ascensor in recruitment
• Claude going from a personal experiment to what Andy calls an additional member of the team, wired into HubSpot, Teamwork, Slack and N8N
• A BCG stat on the gap between what leaders say about AI and what their business actually does.
• The apprentice who built an AI driven World Cup results tracker running through Slack. Yes, really
• What made Andy stick with Claude over ChatGPT and Gemini, and why he thinks tool choice gets stickier the longer you leave it
• Why GEO and AEO matter more than SEO now, in Andy's view, and what "agentic commerce" could do to the way people buy things
• And Andy's three takeaways, including a book on how much of what we call decision making might not actually be up to us

Resources mentioned:

• The Brain by David Eagleman https://link.amazon/B0hQsDSDB
• Luciqo, the AI marketing intelligence platform Andy's involved with www.luciqo.ai

Connect with Andy:

Website: ascensor.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/andrewjfirth

Time Stamps:

00:00 Intro

01:20 Meet Andy and Ascensor

04:26 Why hybrid stopped working

09:13 Staying connected, remote

12:59 Claude as the tool of choice

15:44 The BCG alignment stat

20:15 Balancing freedom and safety

21:41 Why Claude over ChatGPT, Gemini

25:26 What clients make of it

29:11 GEO, AEO and agentic search

34:29 ChatGPT ads in conversations

35:51 Three takeaways

44:26 Find Andy and Ascensor

Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.

www.theaileaderlab.com/roadmap

Connect with Martin:

Websites: www.theaileaderlab.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/martinjwheatley

Subscribe to The Frontier Leader Show wherever you listen to podcasts.

One person in your business builds twenty AI agents and is accountable for everything they produce. Proud, or terrified?

Amanda spent two decades in workforce advisory, built and sold Newance, a US recruitment and people operations consultancy, and now writes on Substack about what's shifting underneath the headlines in companies and the people who work in them. Her argument is that the job is no longer the smallest unit a business gets organised around. The workflow is. And because that reclassification happens inside the same job titles, the employment numbers don't show it.

We get into:

• Why "will AI replace jobs" is the wrong lens, and what's actually being reclassified underneath it
• Cog work versus marquee talent. Same title in the same company, and a completely different deal underneath
• The OpenAI finding that 43.5% of job-specific ChatGPT tasks fall outside the person's own role, and what that does to accountability
• Whether the CTO and the CHRO end up being the same person
• A client who still keeps paper files, and why adoption is running slower than the model releases suggest
• What acqui-hiring actually means, and why trust is the thing some companies are now trying to buy back
• Grief. Not a word I expected in a conversation about workforce data.

Amanda's takeaway for the week is one I've been chewing on since we recorded: check the weather, not the headlines.

Connect with Amanda:

Website: https://www.amandadaering.com

Substack: https://amandadaering.substack.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandadaering/

Time Stamps:

02:26 Amanda's background

04:15 Jobs vs workflows: the atomic unit

05:33 Cog work and marquee talent

07:35 Scope creep and the 43.5% study

09:41 Twenty agents: proud or terrified?

12:18 Should the CTO and CHRO be one job?

14:38 Paper files and fifth-generation CEOs

17:39 Start with the business model

20:58 Decks to desks: the coexistence era

24:40 Anxiety, grief and AI-native ensembles

26:25 What acqui-hiring actually means

30:21 The orchestration layer and $10m PMs

32:47 Checking the weather

35:22 The deal underneath the job title

37:05 How Amanda uses AI

40:14 Takeaways

Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.

www.theaileaderlab.com/roadmap

Connect with Martin:

Websites: www.theaileaderlab.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/martinjwheatley

Subscribe to The Frontier Leader Show wherever you listen to podcasts.

Dubai has given its entire private sector a two year deadline to adopt agentic AI. No pilot phase.

Meanwhile, the honest answer to "what does your AI tool actually do for you" can often be a shrug, or three minutes of enthusiasm that never lands on anything specific.

That is where this conversation with Jeff Ross lives. Jeff has spent 25 years being sent into businesses that had come loose, hotel groups, retail chains and service organisations across three continents, with stints at Starwood, St Regis, Swissôtel, TUI and Apple Retail.

These days he runs Nexus Point Project Management from Dubai, helping owners across the UAE, the GCC and Southeast Asia get the important things done once growth has outpaced what the founder can hold in their own head.

We get into:

• Why Dubai's two year agentic AI mandate is different from every AI strategy document sitting in a drawer elsewhere
• The one line test Jeff uses on leaders: if you can't explain how your AI tool helps you, you're not ready for anything bigger
• What a post-acquisition integration between two of the biggest players in a Swiss market could look like with today's tools, instead of the manual pattern recognition it took at the time
• Why employees quietly resist big AI rollouts long before the rollout is even announced
• What Jeff still believes only a human leader can do, whatever the tools end up being capable of
• And a story about self-driving taxis, his 14 year old son, and why he trusts the cars more than some of the human drivers

The mandate is arriving whether leaders are ready or not. Readiness starts with being able to explain, in one sentence, what the tool in front of you is actually for.

Connect with Jeff:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrossme/

Website: https://www.nexuspoint.me/

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction to Leadership in an AI World

03:30 Jeff Ross: A Journey Through Hospitality and Business

05:46 AI Implementation in Dubai: A Bold Mandate

09:33 Challenges in Leadership and AI Adoption

12:05 Change Management: Lessons from Experience

16:33 Utilizing AI Tools for Business Efficiency

17:17 Transformative Potential of AI in Past Projects

19:07 Leveraging AI for Process Improvement

20:11 Embracing Technology in Education

22:03 Generational Perspectives on AI and Employment

24:10 Leadership in the Age of AI

27:54 Knowledge Retention in Organizations

30:43 Client Engagement and Ideal Partnerships

33:45 Leadership Ethos and AI Implementation

Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.

www.theaileaderlab.com/roadmap

Connect with Martin:

Websites: www.theaileaderlab.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/martinjwheatley

Subscribe to The Frontier Leader Show wherever you listen to podcasts.

Ask most businesses who actually owns AI and you get a pause, followed by a name and a caveat about how it isn't really that person's job. Jim Spignardo reckons that has about twelve months left to run.

Jim's the Director of Cloud Strategy and AI Enablement at ProArch, a global IT services and consulting firm, and he's the person doing that job inside his company.

He reports an assisted value figure of AI to his executive team every single month. It's gone from a few thousand dollars a month to somewhere around $75,000, across 160 licensed users in a company of roughly 400.

In this episode we get into:

• Why the twelve month clock, and why that person doesn't have to be a new hire or a full time role
• How he builds the baseline that makes a monthly ROI number possible, when nobody has ever measured what the work costs today
• Why governance is there to protect the organisation and not shackle it, and who belongs on the council
• The one toggle in agent builder that Jim tells everyone to switch off before anything else
• Why archived and untouched data quietly drags down the quality of what Copilot hands back
• What happened at ProArch when free Cowork credits became paid ones. He uses the word "riot"

Jim's book, The AI Turning Point, came out in March and there's a second one on the way.

Share this with whoever in your business has quietly been doing the AI job without the title.

Connect with Jim:

Website: https://spignardo.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spignardo/

Jim's Book: https://link.amazon/B0dNQNvL3

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction to AI Leadership

02:09 Jim Spignardo's Role and Focus

04:06 The AI Turning Point Book Overview

07:18 Challenges of Legacy Systems and AI Integration

09:55 Measuring ROI in AI Adoption

12:47 The Importance of Governance in AI

18:10 Navigating Change in Organizations with AI

18:37 Navigating AI Governance and Strategy

19:27 Data Security in AI Implementation

21:52 Understanding AI Usage and Monitoring

23:19 The Future of AI: Risks and Opportunities

25:23 Public Sentiment on AI: A Complex Landscape

27:53 Key Takeaways for Business Leaders

Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.

www.theaileaderlab.com/roadmap

Connect with Martin:

Websites: www.theaileaderlab.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/martinjwheatley

Subscribe to The Frontier Leader Show wherever you listen to podcasts.

What happens to your AI-powered workflows if the model you built them on disappears overnight?

I'm on my own this week, catching leaders up on what actually happened in AI through July, because it was a genuinely packed month even by this year's standards.

In this episode:

• Why Fable 5 vanishing for two and a half weeks in June still matters even though it's back
• Satya Nadella's "reverse information paradox," and what he says every prompt is quietly costing you
• There's closed weight, and then open weight, and then full open source. All three explained with one car analogy
• China's most crowded month yet for open weight releases, and the distillation row that followed
• A letter fifty companies signed on open weight regulation this week. Anthropic wasn't one of them

Whether you're trying to work out what "open weight" actually means or you're just wondering what your backup plan is if your AI vendor gets cut off tomorrow, this one's for you.

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

01:57 Reverse Information Paradox

03:28 Open vs Closed Models

05:46 July Updates

06:54 The Emergence of Open Weighted Models

10:16 Closed or In-house?

12:15 Future of AI: Open Models vs. Frontier Models

Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.

www.theaileaderlab.com/roadmap

Connect with Martin:

Websites: www.theaileaderlab.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/martinjwheatley

Subscribe to The Frontier Leader Show wherever you listen to podcasts.

AI can generate a thousand polished slides that say absolutely nothing. So what actually makes a leader worth listening to now?

Rob D. Willis went from producing top 10 records in Germany to coaching executives on narrative. He calls himself a strategic story producer, and the parallel holds up. An artist used to walk into his studio with an eight minute song and no chorus, and his job was working out what they were really trying to say. He does the same thing now for leaders at HelloFresh, Moneybox, Salesforce, Babbel and Pfizer.

Rob also hosts the fantastic Chief Story Officer podcast.

In this episode we get into:

• The pronoun pattern in Andy Burnham's first speech outside Number 10
• How to be strategic by answering Kendall Haven's three questions
• Why the investor deck grows from eight slides to forty, and what that says about being too close to your own idea
• What AI is genuinely good at for helping leaders with stories
• Three great things leaders can take away to become better storytellers
• And a scene from Margin Call that does more for executive communication than most presentation training

Key takeaway: the stories you need are already sitting inside your organisation. AI is unusually good at surfacing them but working out which ones matter is still your job.

Connect with Rob:

Website: https://robdwillis.com/

Chief Story Officer Podcast - Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/chief-story-officer/id1852972717

Chief Story Officer Podcast - Spotify : https://open.spotify.com/show/1SY7gFeUEMFZz9hCcoCd3G?si=f4ff0a957a1b4967

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robdwillis/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/robdwillis

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@robdwillis

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@strategic-stories

Time Stamps:

00:00 Welcome

02:33 From music studio to boardroom

05:32 What Burnham does with pronouns

08:08 When HR and compliance flatten it

10:11 Be strategic before structural

12:07 Eight slides became forty

13:59 Context, direction, action, consequence

16:56 How to open, and how not to

19:11 What AI is good at with stories

23:34 Rob's Obsidian and Claude setup

28:57 Three takeaways

Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.

www.theaileaderlab.com/roadmap

Connect with Martin:

Websites: www.theaileaderlab.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/martinjwheatley

Subscribe to The Frontier Leader Show wherever you listen to podcasts.

In this solo episode, I break down how AI token pricing actually works, and why it's about to matter for a lot more people than it used to.

I get into:

✳️ Why input tokens and output tokens are priced completely differently

✳️ What my own email triage agent cost the first day the meter switched on, and what that scales to

✳️ The Jevons paradox: token prices have fallen roughly tenfold in a year, and the bills have gone up anyway

✳️ A KPMG stat that a third of UK leaders admit they don't really understand how their AI costs are structured

✳️ Why running every task on the frontier model instead of a cheaper one can cost five times as much for no real gain

✳️ How to set a budget for something you can't price until you've run it once

✳️ And when self-hosting a model stops being overkill and starts being the sensible option

Useful whether you're piloting your first AI agent or already running several across a team.

Time stamps:

00:00 Introduction to Token Costs

04:59 The Impact of Token Costs on Businesses

10:00 Navigating the Future of AI Costs

Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.

www.theaileaderlab.com/roadmap

Connect with Martin:

Websites: www.theaileaderlab.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/martinjwheatley

Subscribe to The Frontier Leader Show wherever you listen to podcasts.

Everyone's reading the same headline... Billions poured into AI, and most CEOs still can't point to the productivity gains. Greg Hoffman reads it differently.

In this episode, Greg Hoffman (Chief Legal Officer turned Chief Transformation Officer, now author of the leadership parable Performance Through People) joins Martin to work through why AI keeps amplifying the wrong things.

And the through line: AI is a multiplier, and it multiplies whatever environment it lands in. Good leadership or bad, it scales both.

We get into:

✳️ Greg's PTP methodology and the background for his new book

✳️ Why we're sitting in the valley of a J curve, and how it echoes the dot com adoption dip

✳️ The thesis that clarity plus capability equals trust, and why trust is what actually lets a team move fast

✳️ Empowerment as a dial, not a lever

✳️ Lauren, the AI coach Greg built into his PTP programme, and why good coaching no longer has to stay locked to the executive floor

✳️ The one thing he's convinced AI will never replace

✳️ And why he now walks round his house talking to Claude through his AirPods

Whether you're rolling AI across a team or still working out where it actually helps, this one's worth your time.

Connect with Greg:

Greg's Book: Performance Through People, https://amzn.to/4vwtibj

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-hoffman-leader/

Website: https://ascensionpg.com/

Email: [email protected]

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction to Leadership in an AI World

02:04 Greg Hoffman's Career Journey

05:29 The Connection Between Trust and Leadership

06:04 AI Adoption and the J-Curve

09:09 Public Perception of AI and Trust Issues

10:33 The Need for Leadership in AI Implementation

11:23 Extreme Ownership and Empowerment

12:28 Performance Through People Framework Overview

15:31 Operational Clarity in Leadership

19:21 Capability Analysis for High Performance

21:04 Empowerment and Trust Dynamics

22:20 Measuring Impact and Continuous Improvement

23:54 Transformative Leadership in Practice

27:21 The Role of AI in Leadership Development

30:03 Human Judgment vs. AI in Leadership

34:33 Building Intentional Leadership Environments

36:13 Key Takeaways for Effective Leadership

Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.

www.theaileaderlab.com/roadmap

Connect with Martin:

Websites: www.theaileaderlab.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/martinjwheatley

Subscribe to The Frontier Leader Show wherever you listen to podcasts.

When Paula Carter took over one national rollout, adoption was sitting at 42%. By the time she left, it was 98%. The technology never changed.

Paula has spent over two decades leading change at scale, from digitalising the NHS Spine to rolling out near real-time school attendance data across the UK, alongside global roles at BT and change frameworks inside the Ministry of Justice. She now runs Inicio Success, working with leaders on people-centred change that actually sticks.

In this episode we get into:

✳️ Why AI adoption tends to live or die on the people work, long before the tool goes anywhere near a desk

✳️ Her what, why, how and when starting point, and why the "how" has to be built with the people doing the job today

✳️ The bus analogy she uses for change: willing passengers versus a coach full of people who feel dragged aboard

✳️ Why resistance usually turns up as "I'm too busy", and a kinder way to handle it

✳️ The three AI tools she actually reaches for, plus the odd brand test she runs on herself using her own photo

✳️ One quirky detective-drama habit that tells you more about change management than it has any right to

Whether you're about to start an AI programme or trying to rescue one that's stalled, this one's worth your time.

Connect with Paula:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paula-carter-b4145549/

Website: https://iniciosuccess.co.uk/

Email: [email protected]

Timestamp:

00:00 Introduction to Leadership in an AI World

01:22 Paula Carter's Background and Experience

04:33 The Importance of Change Management

07:15 Understanding People in Change Initiatives

08:39 Case Study: Digitalizing School Attendance

13:24 People-Centered Change at Scale

17:00 The Evolving Role of Leadership

18:49 Implementing AI: The What, Why, How, and When

21:26 The Role of Trust in Change Management

26:15 Conclusion: Navigating Change in a Fast-Paced Environment

26:35 The Pace of AI Adoption

27:41 Building Relationships with AI Tools

31:02 Navigating Change in Organizations

33:27 Empowering Teams for Change

35:19 Personal Growth Through Change

38:48 The Importance of Clarity in Change Management

41:24 Hydration and Mental Clarity

Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.

www.theaileaderlab.com/roadmap

Connect with Martin:

Websites: www.theaileaderlab.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/martinjwheatley

Subscribe to The Frontier Leader Show wherever you listen to podcasts.

"Where do you see yourself in five years?" used to be an easy interview question. With the AI job-apocalypse headlines flying around, it's a much harder one to answer now.

This week is a solo one. No guest. I'm sharing a talk I gave last week on the gap between what the media says AI is doing to jobs and what the data actually shows on the ground.

I get into:

✳️ Why paying for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot puts you in the top 0.8% of the world, and how early that means we still are
✳️ The OpenAI and Anthropic numbers showing AI could handle most finance tasks while only about a third of that shows up in real use
✳️ What's really behind the headline tech layoffs, and why it isn't AI productivity
✳️ The 63% drop in junior finance hiring across Europe, and the quiet damage that does to your 2036 leadership pipeline
✳️ A five-minute aged-debtor report I built live in Claude, and the one question that beats "where can we cut?"

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

01:32 Introduction to AI in Transactional Finance

04:05 Understanding AI Adoption and Usage

08:43 AI's Role in Enhancing Productivity

13:43 Enterprise Data Models and AI Integration

19:06 Governance and Control in AI Usage

Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.

www.theaileaderlab.com/roadmap

Connect with Martin:

Websites: www.theaileaderlab.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/martinjwheatley

Subscribe to The Frontier Leader Show wherever you listen to podcasts.