The Next Thing Now Podcast

AI Platform Wars | The Next Thing Now EP029

Meta launched Muse. OpenAI showed off Dots. Microsoft slipped out WorkIQ. In one week, the biggest names in tech all asked us to build the future on their agent platform.

Rob Borley and Kev Smith ask whether this is the new cloud war, and what it means for the businesses buying in. They cover why the model is disappearing behind the product, how to avoid lock-in, and why agents with their own logins are a big step forward for security. They also ask who's going to pay for always-on agents, and who's accountable when they break the rules.

The Secret To A Successful AI Transformation | Yuliya Fontanetti, MMR Research

When a graduate joins, we give them training, time and support. When an AI tool gets something wrong the first time, most organisations write it off.

In this episode of The Next Thing Now, Rob is joined by Yuliya Fontanetti, Chief Digital Transformation Officer at MMR Research. She spent two decades in operations, compliance and ethics, mostly in pharma, before taking on the job of leading MMR's AI transformation. By her own admission, she's the least technical person in the room, and she thinks that's part of why it's working.

We talk about why AI transformation is a change management job first, and why they revisit tools they've shelved. We also get into retraining the pilot group, building an AI Task Force, and why GDPR is a useful guide to the EU AI Act. And Yuliya explains why asking for ROI on day one misses where the real return shows up.

If you haven't started yet, or you've started and it isn't going well, there's plenty here for your Monday morning.

#AI #DigitalTransformation #ChangeManagement #AIAdoption #TheNextThingNow

Most leaders have bought AI by now. They have the licences, the consumption bill and the internal comms to prove it. What quite a lot of them don't have is a business that works any differently to the way it worked eighteen months ago.

Dr Faye McDonald has spent her career in data, research and behavioural science, and her read on why these programmes stall has very little to do with the technology. Quite a few organisations bought AI without ever writing down the problem they were buying it for. That leaves employees with no reason for the change, so they supply their own, and the one they land on is the one that ends with their job going.

Faye's argument is that the resistance leaders keep describing as irrational is nothing of the sort. People have read the announcements. They watched both sides of the pandemic. They are doing the maths. That makes it a leadership problem, and it puts the awkward question back on the people running the programme: what have we done, over years, that means our people won't trust us with this?

In this episode we get into the two camps in every workforce, why licence uptake and login counts diagnose nothing at all, how to tell an AI literacy gap from a trust gap, and where Faye thinks human value sits once the producing is handled by something else.

Most organisations were never built to decide.

Hierarchy, committees and sign-off chains exist to slow things down, spread the risk and keep any one person clear of the consequences.

That was survivable while information was the moat.

It isn't any more. Simon Cuthbert, co-founder of Arthurian Labs, joins Rob Borley to work through what happens when the thing businesses competed on for two hundred years becomes a commodity, and the only advantage left sits either side of the decision: who asks the right question, and who can act on the answer.

We get into why many decisions are made on emotion rather than evidence and why AI should be recommending and not deciding.

FIND SIMON

Arthurian Labs: https://arthurian-labs.ai

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

#AI #DecisionMaking #Leadership #AIGovernance #BidManagement #TheNextThingNow #Dootrix

The era of instant access to frontier AI is ending.

A big model launches, the benchmarks are stunning, and then you're told you can't use it.

In this episode, Rob and Kev unpack what this change really means: the rise of gated frontier models, the AI sovereignty question nobody in Britain is asking, and why the real opportunity might not be the model at all.

We get into the GPT-5.6 launch (Sol, Terra, Luna), Fable as an orchestration engine, the great infrastructure pivot, X buying Cursor, Meta selling its compute ... and the debate the UK and EU should be having but aren't.

AI that your security team will actually approve.

Everyone wants to use AI. Almost nobody has worked out how to trust it. In this episode Rob Borley sits down with Abbas Khan, co-founder of Togii, to unpack the question sitting underneath every stalled AI rollout: what does trust even mean in an AI world, and how do you get it back?

We get into the Fable Five withdrawal and what happens when a frontier model you've built on simply disappears overnight, why compliance teams are the grown-ups in the room rather than the villains, the risk of "intelligence sprawl" as AI creeps into every tool in your stack, and why explainability and control now matter more than raw capability. If you're a CIO, a compliance lead, or anyone trying to get AI past the security team, this one's for you.

👤 Guest: Abbas Khan (Togii)

🔗 Abbas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbas-khan-04596811a/

🔗 Togii: https://www.togii.ai/

🎧 The Next Thing Now is a weekly conversation about where AI is really heading, cutting through the hype to the stuff that actually matters. New episodes regularly.

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💬 What would it take for you to trust AI with your real data? Let us know in the comments.

#TheNextThingNow #AI #DataSecurity #Compliance #EnterpriseAI #Togii #AIgovernance

Everyone's being told they're miles behind on AI.

At the AI Summit the floor told a very different story to the stage. This week we get into the gap between what gets said about AI and what's actually happening in the room: the two kinds of AI user and why only one of them is on stage, the cost gate that's catching the early adopters rather than the beginners, why so many organisations are solving governance and compliance for tools they haven't deployed yet, and what the sudden disappearance of Anthropic's Fable model tells us about a new kind of risk that no contract protects you from.

We also get into shadow AI, the training lag, AI as a national security asset, the UK's social media and VPN plans, and why people are putting boxes back under desks.

The Free AI Era Is Over

What happens when AI stops feeling free?

In this episode of The Next Thing Now, Rob and Kev unpack the growing reality behind token pricing, disappearing “all-you-can-eat” AI plans, and why the economics of AI are starting to shift dramatically.

From exploding enterprise AI bills to the sudden rise of local LLMs, they explore the next phase of the AI race: not just intelligence, but compute, infrastructure, and cost.

They cover:

• Why frontier AI companies are killing unlimited plans
• How token costs are becoming the new cloud bill
• Why Macs with huge amounts of RAM are suddenly selling out
• The rise of local LLMs and “bring your own model” architectures
• Why AI usage inside companies is growing faster than costs are falling
• The hidden operational cost of agentic AI workflows
• Why “vibe coding” breaks at enterprise scale
• The growing gap between AI experimentation and AI maturity
• Why organisations now need AI governance, policy and consultancy
• The rise of “flat is the new up” in AI-driven businesses
• Whether frontier models are becoming too expensive to democratise
• And the mystery surrounding Anthropic’s rumoured Mythos model

The future of AI may still be extraordinary.

But it is increasingly clear it will not be cheap.

The Future of Software Engineering

What is actually changing inside engineering teams?

In this episode of The Next Thing Now, Rob Borley is joined by Gordon Lucas, Group Software Engineering Director at PureGym, to explore how AI is really impacting software engineering.

Away from the hype and headlines, this is a grounded conversation about what is happening inside real teams today.

While AI tools promise dramatic productivity gains, most engineering organisations are still working through a much messier reality. Backlogs still exist. Delivery pressure has not changed. And the day-to-day experience of engineers is evolving in ways that are as human as they are technical.

We explore:

• Why AI has not yet transformed engineering teams in the way people expected
• The growing tension between code as craft and code as output
• How the role of the software engineer is shifting towards orchestration and higher-level thinking
• The leadership challenge of taking teams through rapid, uncertain change
• Whether teams will get smaller, or simply produce more
• What happens to junior engineers in an AI-driven world
• Why decision-making, not coding, is becoming the real bottleneck

This is is a conversation about people, pressure, and the future shape of the profession.

If you are a CIO, CTO, Head of Engineering, or product leader trying to make sense of AI in your organisation, this episode will help you think more clearly about what actually matters next.

The Reality of AI in Critical National Infrastructure
Can AI be trusted where failure isn’t an option?

In this episode, we’re joined by Simon Ayley, Director of Strategic Growth Partnerships at WRC. Drawing on 30+ years of global industry experience, we explore what AI actually looks like inside critical national infrastructure.

From regulated industries to complex operational environments, AI is no longer theoretical. It is already being tested, challenged, and in some cases embedded into systems that millions of people rely on every day.

We discuss:

• Why innovation inside large, regulated organisations is fundamentally different
• The tension between speed, safety, and accountability
• What it really takes to move from experimentation to production
• How leaders should think about risk, regulation, and responsibility in an AI-driven world

If you are responsible for technology, operations, or strategy in a complex environment, this is a conversation you need to hear.