On this week’s show we speak with Lisa Riemers about challenges of digital accessibility, and what to do about it.You can find Lisa’s collection of useful links here: https://lisariemers.com/index.php/2023/05/12/accessibility-resources/and you can book to attend her talk here:Register on EventbriteWe spoke with AbilityNet on Episode 208

This week’s guest is Equal Experts Psychological Safety Lead, Julia Bellis.We talk about the misconceptions associated with psych safety, building safety in client-facing teams, and the challenges of hybrid and global working, amongst many other things.A couple of books were mentioned: The Culture Map by Erin Meyer and The Fearless Organization by Amy (not Adrian) Edmondson.

On this week’s show we are joined by Equal Expert’s Lewis Crawford to talk about his experiments in building autonomous teams of AI agents.AI Generated transcript follows…Matt: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to episode 281 of WB40, the weekly podcast with Matt Ballantine, Chris Weston and Lewis Crawford.Chris: Well hello everybody, welcome back. We’re here for another episode as we helter skelter towards Christmas. We’re nearly there, aren’t we Matt? But here we are, we’re going to finish off the year, I think, tonight with a With this episode after last week’s, , Just you and me, Matt. We did an [00:01:00] Ask W40. Well, that was a good fun last week.But this week we have a guest, do we not? Matt: We do have a guest and we’ll be talking to him very shortly. It’s very exciting. , 281. , just, you know, passing reference, the first of the two bus routes that go past my house. And we’ve got another one in the new year as well. Very exciting. , I, uh, yeah, these are the sorts of things that increasingly, , intrigue me as I get older, which is basically a sign that I’m not long for them.for the world, quite frankly. , have you been having an enjoyable week in this run up to the festive festivities? Chris: Very busy. , Work really. It’s just one of the, I think, I think we talked maybe last week about the fact that this is the last week where you can get anything done. , and then everybody goes away for essentially until January., So yeah, it’s been pretty busy. , I can’t say I’ve been anywhere exciting, at least nowhere I can remember. , So yeah, not too bad. What about yourself? Matt: What have we been doing? Wedding anniversary last week. Very exciting. , [00:02:00] managed to get to 15 years, which is, Congratulations, Matt. Thank you very much.We went for an enormous meal at an Italian restaurant in Richmond. We went on for nine whole courses, and then I didn’t need to eat for the next day. , and to be fair, I didn’t really sleep much that night because of the fact I’d eaten nine courses. Quite small, but still, you know, cumulatively, a lot of food., took the boys to see their first ever 1 1 victory at, uh, Vicarage Road at the weekend. Which, if you understand football, you’ll know what I mean. And if you don’t, it makes no sense at all, but, , that was very exciting. And then the start of the youngest’s 13th birthday celebration. So, as of Wednesday, we will have two teenagers in the house.I can barely contain my excitement at that prospect. I took some of his friends and him to an escape room on Sunday. And it’s the first time I’ve been to an escape room. And I guess, it tries to be something a bit like the Crystal Maze, but it ends up being like, for those of you of a certain vintage, you’ll get this.The last bit of Ted Rogers 3, 2, 1, where quite frankly none of it [00:03:00] made any sense whatsoever, but at the end you were just glad it was over, and , there was no dusty bin, sadly. So that was , the weekend. Chris: And are they still there? Is that, is that the, I mean that would be the reason to take the children to an escape room, wouldn’t it?Matt: So, so, sadly, sadly not. It was an interesting place though, because there’s a university in Kingston, and I, I presume that many of the staff are drama. because they had to put on very hammy performances when they call into the various rooms over the , tannoy system to be able to give clues or just to be able to tell people to stop bashing that thing because it’s not supposed to be bashed in that way.We got all of the, all of the children out successfully. And , Then made the meat pizza which you know again this into tonight It’s amazed though the propensity for 13 year olds to be able to talk endlessly about computer games and nothing else and a group of them together whoever invented roblox has pretty much systematically programmed an entire generation of people as far as I can work out It’s quite terrifying.There we go. [00:04:00] Anyway lewis, , welcome to the show. , how’s your last week been? Lewis: Oh, Mix, to be honest. I mean, you’ve been talking about escape rooms there. It was about three weeks ago we went to a virtual reality escape room. So, how about that? Wow. It’s literally where everyone has their headsets on and various different puzzles.But in virtual reality Matt: basically. Were you in the same augmented reality? Yeah, were you in the same physical space to be in the virtual reality Lewis: there? Yes, yes, we were. I mean like it’s, there’s a kind of like a demarked area and , I guess it’s more augmented reality because you’re aware of walls around you and you’re aware of where And the people are around you and yeah, it was very exciting.I was thinking it was called a bank heist and we had to escape out of a vault and Stop a robbery that was also going in progress as well. Matt: Oh, very very good How did you find the experience of wearing? Lewis: Better than I thought it was going to be. I have to say, I mean, I’ve played computer games since ZX Spectrum days and things, [00:05:00] and I’ve been aware that virtual reality headsets exist, .But, um, it was a lot better than I was expecting, I Matt: It’s pretty immersive, isn’t it? It’s, um, Lewis: yeah. Well, it’s, it’s, you know, not to give too much away, but, um, they start off by giving you a little training session where you go up in a lift and the lift door’s open and you’re literally on top of a building with a plank in front of you and you have to walk along the plank and it is remarkably difficult.You know exactly what it is, but, you know, it was, it was, yeah, I didn’t want to jump. Matt: No, I can understand that. What’s the end of the plank? Yeah, absolutely. I think the first time I ever tried one was with the sort of first generation of the Oculus and the HTC headsets about seven or eight years ago when they were like firmly tethered to a fairly powerful PC.And one of the first things I did was go into Minecraft. And one of the first things I managed to do completely unwittingly in Minecraft was dig a hole underneath myself. And that, just immediate [00:06:00] vertigo, was terrifying. I’m amazed I’ve ever put one on ever since. But, it is, there’s, there’s a, yeah, just the experience of it, we were talking about it a wee bit last week, and the, the, the magic of the experience is really quite something.The, whether that actually translates into anything useful or not, I think is going to be the interesting thing, and it seems to be another one of those. Well, maybe the year after next it will hit the big time and people will find a use for it But we will see we continue to watch it with interest anyway, 2023 has been a year very much focused in the world around ai so we thought we’d finish the year with a bit of a conversation about some experiments that you’ve been doing, Lewis, with some AI.So let’s crack on.[00:07:00] As I mentioned, this year has very much been a year of artificial intelligence. And there’s been a lot of hype. There’s been a lot of people using generative tools like ChatGPT. There’s been a lot of Whiffle, I think is the polite way of putting it. There’s been an awful lot of things generated that may or may not have been true, but you know, who needs truth in 2023, let alone in 2024., but in, conversations over the [00:08:00] last few weeks, I picked up on something that, you’ve been, , doing Lewis, which felt really interesting in a way that kind of cuts through some of the. , Ridiculous hype that there has been this year around, particularly generative, , AI, in that you have been Building an experiment, and it is, from the outset, very much an experiment, , to be able to get generative stuff to be able to produce, in, , core code, one sort or another.But the way that you’ve been doing it is not by just sitting in front of a chat GPT and saying, please could you write me a BBC basic program to play Doom, please. I might try that later. , but instead you’ve been creating virtual teams. You’ve been setting things up in a way that’s been about having,, relatively autonomous agents acting in roles to be able to perform tasks.So not just a single prompt, but something more complicated. , can we start with a bit of [00:09:00] background as to, , how this came about? What the, the original genesis of this idea was? Lewis: So, ironically enough, , Minecraft figures in it. So when, when ChachiPT sort of first came on the scene, , last year, , one of the early papers that was using, , ChachiPT was a, thing called a Voyager, , which was I think some folks from NVIDIA and, , some folks from a university in the US, but essentially they, they were using, , agents in Minecraft, but using, , GPT, so originally it’s had GPT 3.5 and then GPT 4, , to control, , the, the players, if you like, in Minecraft. But what was unique is that, , these, these agents could have skills associated with them. So they would have like a daily rotor of activities that they would have to cycle around and they, they’d be able to plan tasks like I need to, I want to cut down a tree because that’s on my rotor of activities and things, but I don’t have the skills to cut down a tree.[00:10:00] So we would use the generative AI, so GPT. To essentially, , grab some code and put that back into its own code base. , and again, the way they were doing that was, was quite innovative as well. , so using a thing called vector databases where you can essentially, , have a, a text description of, , an activity and then store it in a vector database.So rather than it being like a. a normal database that you would just search by keywords or terms, , this is based on similarities. , so again, using embeddings is the phrase to, to calculate these vectors. , Matt: , so the vectors being the, the distance between different things in the database?Lewis: The words, essentially. So, , all sentences and things, like, as the words are hung together, , you can calculate, , the relationships between the words, , and then store those relationships in the database. So those are the vectors. So that if you then use completely different words, , you can find out what the closest sentence is that would match it. And this underpins. Yet another one of the big hypes of this year, which is this whole idea of [00:11:00] RAG. Now, we don’t need to go down that, but RAG is Retrieval Augmented Generation. So it’s this idea that you can do a search, in a vector database and get various different results back and then generate text and context around it, , so that it appears to be, , like a human sentence that’s returned., but rather than get too, , embedded in, in RAG search terminology, just to Minecraft thing, this idea of having different agents which were able to use GPT to essentially enhance their own code base. So pull down the Python script required to be able to build an axe, to cut down a tree, and then store that in the database as a tool for cutting, say., now then another agent, , also. has access to exactly the same database and it may need to kill a spider. So it’s going to try and look through its database of all of the skills it’s got and it could say, well, that’s close as much because I don’t have many skills. So I’m going to try and see if I can use this axe to kill the spider.And [00:12:00] it would either be successful or it would fail. And if it was successful, then it would put that back into the database to say that the skill is now applicable for that activity as well. Intelligent agents or autonomous agents have been a dream for, for many, many years, but this is the year that I’ve definitely seen that , these things are real and can individually, , empower themselves, but really , the main power is when they collectively work together., for, ,task planning, execution, and, another way of, , building in guardrails towards the end of, , a process as well is to use these agents. So you would have someone who plans, someone who actually does, and then someone who checks the work of those previous stages as well, , to ensure that, , for guardrails for all kinds of things, but bias particularly, and ensuring that the result actually matches to what the original target was.Matt: Interesting. So essentially these are code things that are learning as they go through. They are able to be able to spot what they might be able to do and then they can work out if they can do it or not by testing. And then if they [00:13:00] can’t, potentially they can go away and find a code library to be able to fill the gap of the skill that they don’t have.Lewis: Exactly, yes. So, moving on from the Minecraft example, there’s been various frameworks, so LangChain kind of came on the scene as a way of being able to, have sort of sequences of activity using a large language model to then be able to query a database or maybe pull down a website or all kinds of other , tasks.But then, , superseding that, although it does actually use our chain as well, , there’s a particular framework from Microsoft called AutoGen, and that is currently the best framework for these autonomous agents, basically, you can create an agent, give it a specific persona, if you like, like, you’re an intelligent agent that can, understand French or, or it could be, anything that you can use live language models for, , and build a number of these agents, which can then have a group chat facility and interact with each other, not through some API, but through [00:14:00] English as the, as the actual, or any language for that matter.But. Literally text based communication between different agents. Matt: , so you then had a piece of work you were doing for a client and you had a particular challenge around generating synthetic data for the client? Lewis: Yeah, I mean, it’s a little bit more context. I mean, the client , has had cutbacks as, as many, organizations have had, and then like in the recent months and things.And so, the team that I was working with will let go. And, not long after that, we also had to, have like a celebration of all of the work that we’ve been doing. So, a little bit tongue in cheek. I built, a bunch of agents, but I, I named them individually as members of the team that had departed.So we had like a concept of a delivery lead. We had a concept of the ba, a concept of a, , a Python engineer and a concept of a DevOps engineer. And so I’d labeled them as, as. You know, the team that had gone, and one of the things the team had been working on was synthetic data. So the task I gave all of these [00:15:00] autonomous agents was basically to , create a couple of tables, a customers table and a transactions table and , the populated with realistic synthetic data, but also link the tables so that if you go, , a customer ID and the transaction table, and it had to link to a customer in the customer table.So it was kind of like a non trivial, I mean, it wasn’t just, you know, so generating random, data sets or anything like that. And to my surprise and slight horror, it worked incredibly well. So, , the, the planner agent, which I’d labeled as a, as a business analyst, , essentially set out, each of the tasks quite to do it and also which agent is gonna be responsible for it., So it would say that, engineer Joe had to write the Python code using a particular library, sort of phaco in this case, to, to generate the tables. We then had a persona of a data scientist who was gonna analyze the output of, of the, . Synthetic data and ensure that it fit the business rules that we’d established , which is that you know In [00:16:00] the transactions table, they had to marry back up to the customers table and things , so and then You know, what’s really clever as well is that the execution environment?It can actually run docker containers in the background and populate these docker containers with all of the libraries necessary to execute the code , and it went ahead and Um, and generated two tables, , the data scientist read through those different, , tables and ensure that, actual referential integrity was there., and then essentially sign up was given that, these tables had generated exactly what was required. So, by trying to celebrate the fact that this team had gone, I actually proved that we didn’t need them. Well, which was not the intent, but, , Matt: I had to say just as an aside that the, the line, it was a little bit tongue in cheek.Sounds like the perfect start of some sort of sci fi disaster movie where it’s that, that, that’s how it all started. , but that, I mean, creating data like that, the., I’m presuming this is used for testing or to be able to, toLewis: yeah, I mean, I think [00:17:00] a synthetic data would be a podcast on its own in terms of, the amount of use cases and things for it and like how, incredibly useful synthetic data can be, because if you think of, , data sets, which have been anonymized, there are many, many cases where it’s actually quite easy to, de anonymize them, um, either just by the fact that they haven’t been thoroughly anonymized you can use extra data sets from outside of that to de anonymize.But synthetic data by its actual nature is, it’s, it’s fully made up. However, there are very complex rules in terms of, how. The data is produced so that, statistically, it is almost impossible to distinguish it from a real data set. And this opens up huge amounts of, potential for, , what they call, code low, deploy high, in terms of security.So you can code in relatively low security environments using huge amounts of synthetic, highly realistic data, , and then trust your deployment pipelines so that your code goes through to a highly secure environment. , which very few people have access to [00:18:00] and that’s the environment where the code will execute against the real data But you have full confidence that the code is going to function because you’ve been able to test it with highly accurate synthetic data going back to the team They they they did various different sort of statistical techniques for generating this data by analyzing the source systems and calculating but then another approach is to actually use generative, , techniques, , for generating an entire row, , at a time of, by basically giving it samples of, , what a, a data set could look like, and then using generative AI to just continue that pattern down., and then bring on the statistical analysis of the data sets to ensure that it actually conforms to the original data set in the first place. Chris: This is all extremely interesting. I think we’ve talked about, obviously this year, we’ve talked about AI and generative AI a lot. And I do remember thinking to myself in the early days of the tools that were coming out, these are all kind of first order things.And we’d see more interesting applications. Once we got to those second orderprocesses where you’re using the [00:19:00] AI to Then deal with the output of previous AI. Are we doing this so that we can make it more like our own interaction so we can understand it more easily because The thing about a Gen AI tool is that it hasn’t got any particular skill, but you can ask it to, , mimic a certain thing, absolutely, you can say to a prompt, act like a business analyst and, and go through this, this set of requirements or, think like a estate agent, how would you market this building or whatever it might be, but when you do that, what you’re really doing is you’re constraining it down to a certain set of ideas.Are we actually just saying to these different tools, right? You do this thing, so forget everything else you know and just do that. And then you do this thing, so forget everything else you know and just do that. Lifting them up into a, no we’re not training them up to a, to a standard.Actually what we’re doing is we’re carving away all the other parts and leaving, leaving the, [00:20:00] what’s left. Just so that we can see the interactions. Lewis: I think it’s the interactions that I’d like to sort of focus on here because, um, that’s the really crucial thing about large language models is that the innate knowledge is the language., they happen to have consumed the entirety of Wikipedia, but we don’t trust them to give us honest answers because of the hallucination problem and things. But what they do have is innate knowledge of the language. And so therefore that allows you to build interactions.Using just simply language. , so, previously, if you, if you wanted two systems to talk together, you’d have to have like a very watertight contract through an API or some mechanism like that. But I can see in the not too distant future, actually, you’re going to have large language models, which are., using things like the, the RAG that I mentioned previously. So, , it’s knowledge base is an actual knowledge store. It’s not built into the model itself. So there is a capability of, , understanding what I’m asking for converting that into an actual request, whether that’s [00:21:00] SQL, whether it’s Cypher in terms of graph network or any other retrieval technique, pulling back real information and then processing that, , again, using language, , as a result.So if, for instance, , like the many organizations invested heavily in terms of APIs so that you could have like an enterprise service bus and, going back 20 years in terms of how, , different departments could communicate effectively with each other. So rather than having information being spread around, I can see, a future whereby you, you simply say, don’t talk to my API, talk to my wise language model, and then whatever you’re requesting, , it will be able to deal with and then process and then respond accordingly, which means that the different kinds of interactions will become almost infinite.I mean, it’s anything you can ask for, , it is able to respond to and then find the appropriate, , information and return it back. And this doesn’t need a human in the middle, but the advantage is that a human can actually see what is going on, , with these interactions, but you know, the interactions will [00:22:00] be frighteningly fast, so far, far quicker than we could possibly speak or read or anything like that.Chris: Not maybe as fast as an API designed to do one thing. Lewis: Uh, yeah, maybe. I mean, they’re, they’re getting faster all the time. I mean, like the APIs run on normal hardware, whereas LLMs are having dedicated hardware built for them. So Chips designed specifically for this use case? Chris: Yes, indeed they are. Yeah, I, I’d say I, I agree.It’s a very interesting set of experiments, and I think it is, it’s all about where language fits into those things, isn’t it? Because, you know, as you say, the LLM doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t have any knowledge. It doesn’t have any. Anything at all other than a statistical likelihood of this particular word will fit in this particular place.So if we throw enough computing power at it, we are definitely getting some, some very smart seeming answers out of it. The [00:23:00] question is, is where we use it in the most, maybe we’re using it to learn about the actual tasks that we’re setting it. You know what I mean? That we are able to, as you say, because we can see the interactions, we can understand the interactions.It gives us a better chance of actually understanding what, what question we’ve actually asked rather than the question we think we’ve asked of a, of a, of a task or a process.Matt: I’m interested in the way that language between bits of technology works because there’s an ambiguity in human language.Which is part of his wonder, you know, humor is often based on the fact that words are ambiguous the, the, the way in which we interact is, you know, there’s inherent wonder in the fact that it isn’t absolutely logically tied down at all points. Lawyers wouldn’t have a job if it were, let’s be honest. , but there’s a difficulty there , , I was doing a bit of writing this morning, about how humans.Might have some barriers to be able to adopt the use of generative [00:24:00] AI if we are to think of them as assistants to us, because humans have barriers to adopting collaboration with other people. And there’s lots of work that’s been done around collaboration in teams. And there’s a particular thing, a guy called Morten Hansen, who’s a business professor in the US, originally from Norway, I think.And he talks about there being four systemic Barriers to collaboration in organizations and the one of those four that I find the most interesting is thing called the transfer barrier and the transfer barrier is where people find it difficult or often even actually impossible to collaborate with one other, one another because they have different language and that’s not that one speaks French, one speaks German, although obviously That, that would be a big inhibitor to people being able to work together.But more that we have different lexicons, we have different vocabularies, different professions have different sets of language that we use. And the example, I’ve probably used this on the show before, [00:25:00] when I went to work in the housing industry a few years ago, I had about three months where I was utterly confused because I kept hearing the word developer and I thought people cutting code and everybody around me was thinking people with bricks.Because developer in housing means people who build physical items. Very, very confused. Had to rewire my brain to be able to stop sort of subconsciously hearing that. I’m interested if though, if, if we create agents on the basis of large language models and say you are a I don’t have a product owner and you are a project manager and you are a developer.Might we start to see some of those confusions coming in where the different agents, because they’re working within the constraints of their individual professions, we’ll start to have some of those. , Barriers to interacting effectively because they’ll interpret words in the wrong way.Lewis: These are very nascent technologies right at this point in time. , but. , With the, the size of the context windows that are being able to be [00:26:00] processed on every iteration, , means that you can throw an awful lot of context into every interaction.So, by that I mean, I what is it, Claude 2. 1 has got 200, 000 token context window. Which means you can put an entire PhD thesis into it every single time you ask it a question. So that’s a lot of context to be throwing every single time. , so I do believe that prompt engineering will disappear as, as quick as it’s come about.But right now, prompt engineering is, , essentially the, before it was called prompt engineering, it was few short, , examples and things where you give it, you know, a few examples and then it would be able to continue. But it’s not really few anymore because you’re giving it up to 200,000 tokens, every single time.To give it that context so it can come up with an idea so that it knows it’s a developer that knows Java as opposed to a developer that looks for building sites and, other, opportunities. but another kind of like frightening source is that, , language models could be used to, I mean, English.isn’t [00:27:00] exactly the best, , or, or the finest communication technique, despite the fact that we’ve got Shakespeare and Griswold and all the rest of that kind of thing. The language models themselves will develop over time far more efficient ways of being able to explain exactly, , what it is.And I’m not talking binary streams, but there will be an evolution of language models into a language that we Cannot comprehend because we don’t have 200, 000 token context windows or 2 million token context windows and won’t have an ability to understand, you know, 64 bit encoded tokens as they get thrown around.But the amount of preciseness that will be in future versions of language models, , will be, , I mean, I think that’s another interesting philosophical thing to think about as the evolution of language is going to be taken away from us. Matt: And increasingly the vocabulary that will be developed to be able to be more and more precise I guess will be interesting within that Lewis: German like words Matt: Long [00:28:00] Chris: Not you realize this this context problem that you describe is kind of, it’s been around for a long time, right?All the old, , speech recognition programs would always have a problem if you said court and it wouldn’t know whether you meant court, like court of ball or court as in where you go , , to face the beaker about your speeding fine and all that kind of thing. , but the context issue has been attacked very, very well, , as Lewis has said.But it seems like, and it was kind of one of those things that says, you know, how can we. Make computers more intelligent. The more intelligent they are, the more able they are to understand context. Whereas you spent three months not understanding that a developer could be more than one thing. Matt: Yeah, no, absolutely.No, this is Chris: my failing. I think this is a, you know Matt: But it was the subconscious thing. the computer’s problem. No, no, no, but it was the subconscious. It’s the heuristics that we use to be able to be the most super of supercomputers, which is people to describe them as bugs. They’re not. They’re heuristic models for the way [00:29:00] in which we’re able to process far greater amounts of information than otherwise we’d be able to do.And it just takes a bit of reprogramming and unfortunately it took me quite some time because my, you know, brain’s less plastic than it used to be and that’s the way it goes when you get older. , so Lewis, when you, if you, if you look at the communications that are going on between these agents at the moment within the, this, this experimental thing that you’ve created, can you By looking at them, do they make sense?Lewis: Yeah, I mean, it literally looks like a transcript of a Teams, as in a Microsoft Teams conversation, or Slack. Essentially what you’re looking at is literally the agents spewing out English, very interpretable as to, you know, what they’re processing, what they’re doing, and then the next agent in line picking up that and continuing with it.Matt: And in terms of the language that’s used, this isn’t as That’s a sarcastic question as well. I’m just fascinated by it. Are they polite to each other, or is it just all very matter of fact? Lewis: Oh, very [00:30:00] polite. And in fact, in certain circumstances, if you’re not using GPT 4, like the GPT 3. 5, because it’s slightly cheaper to use, it gets into loops where they thank each other, continuously.And you have to, like, actually break the program because they are. , literally caught in that loop. Matt: Oh, that’s brilliant. I love this idea that we will be safe from the , the coming supercomputer menace because they’re all being too polite to each other. It’ll be like the road system in Guernsey where there’s a thing called filter in turn and you can have people reaching what would in any other place be around about and they sit there for days waiting for each other to go first.It’s brilliant. , and that sort of interpretability at the moment that’s something that you think Language will be used, but you could see how it would just devolve away from stuff that we understand. Lewis: Yeah, I mean, even talking about language models themselves is now, , you know. So, last week, , with the release of Gemini as a multimodal.So, LLMs are out, MMMs are in,[00:31:00] , so it’s not just language anymore, it’s actual visual representations, it’s audio, , all kinds of different, , sort of forms of communication are being bundled together into these multimodal models. And to be honest, I’m, I have no idea what’s next, I’d like to claim, you know, some kind of insight to it, but the pace of change is absolutely astonishing at the moment.Matt: Yeah, absolutely. And then if it’s sort of left to their own devices, because presumably you kind of trigger this, and then they start working away to be able to, it starts working away, let’s not anthropomorphize it, it starts working away. And the sorts of approach that it takes, is it recognizable as a You know, is it an iterative agile type approach that it takes?Is it a command and control approach that it takes?Lewis: Again, there’s various different, , constructs that you can put these agents into. So, , you can just, you know, simply have two agents where one is demanding and one is responding. continuously. The more [00:32:00] interesting ones, from my perspective, are literally called group chat, where you have different personas that you set up and, , the central message bus, if you like, is accessible to all, and they will decide if they need to respond at this point in time, given the context given their own role and given the context of what has previously gone, and they will literally either respond or not, , in those group chat scenarios.Matt: That’s amazing. And having done this so far, , has any of it left you concerned or worried or? Lewis: No, not concerned, because again, I obviously see the one time it works, but the 200 times it didn’t. I’m still seeing that at this stage. , but I’m really interested in, the implications moving above just, coding, if you like., so as I say, I’ve taken on this idea of, , business analysts and solution architects and, , a whole [00:33:00] chain of, knowledge workers , that can interpret a requirement can determine that, , things like NFRs are missing. So it could go back to users and interactively request more information until it believes a requirement is fully known.It can then pass that on to the next, , item in the chain, which will then, break down all of the tasks that are required and propose a, potential solution architecture. Where it gets really interesting is if you have, , encoded your solution architecture in such a way that it is machine readable.So there are various different YAML tools that , can be used to generate solution architecture documents. These multimodal models can actually interpret. , the images of the the solution architecture, but , i’m still at the stage before that which is that we will have a library Of solution architectures in some kind of machine readable format such as yaml And you’ll be able to take that and modify it and and check it back in And so you can do as is and a 2b Architecture that is auto generated based on all the requirements which have been gathered up [00:34:00] front And so I’m literally, I mean, some of my background is, I guess, sort of sleuthing out to chill and then distributed computing before that.So I’m desperately trying to work myself out of the job. Matt: I’m also fascinated by the idea that being able to use it from a management. Theory kind of perspective being able to say well What if you make that person a bit passive aggressive or what if you make that actor? Somewhat unsure about themselves because they’ve had a bad week at home or and then how does that start?You know, you could do some really interesting things there about being able to do kind of attitudinal modeling within it just to be able to see the impact as if you were thinking about being able to make changes to team structures and whatever Lewis: I hadn’t considered that from a kind of , psychology perspective almost, isn’t it?And trying to understand how, how these things would interact. , I’m not sure that the different types of psychologies that people have would be encoded within the model itself to, , necessarily come out with something really unique. So, by that I mean, , The fact that it understands what a requirement is [00:35:00] and then it can produce tasks to, provide a solution to that., I don’t think there’s necessarily enough, in there because this particular, , robot’s having a bad day or, or whatever. , that it’s gonna produce a particularly bad design or, that kind of thing. , but I mean having like some kind of, , element of randomness in there. I mean , this leads to the big philosophical question that, you know, is it, , actually an AI in the general sense of, is it really an intelligent?And my firm belief is no, absolutely not, you know, and we’re nowhere near the, , AGI despite, I think it’s Elon Musk saying it’s three years away. , I still, , despite the fact that every week I am constantly surprised, , I still don’t believe we’re anywhere near that. , I, do think where we are though is, , absolutely being able to automate the mundane.So every aspect of human life that we think of as, you know, mundane and maybe a bit boring, that is, you know, going to be wiped away by, um, the ability to interpret, task, plan, and then execute.Matt: [00:36:00] Fantastic. Thank you. What a way to be able to end this year’s cavalcade of podcast marvels. I was going to try to alliterate and fail miserably. That’s where you need a GPT, [00:37:00] isn’t it? You can come up with alliteration like it’s coming out of your bottom. Lewis, thank you very much for joining us this week.Have you got an exciting few weeks ahead? Lewis: I think there’s, as Chris said at the very beginning, this is the last week of actually getting work done, and then next week I think there may be quite a few lunches. Matt: Yes, we’re into lunch season. , How about you Mr West? Chris: Well, I’ve got to go to that London on Wednesday, which will be interesting, so I’ve got quite one or two interesting conversations to be had, bit of a catch up with some people I’ve not spoken to for a while, including , you know, some people who’ve been on the podcast in the past.So yeah, that’ll be nice. It’s, we’ve got a little Juma festive gathering, you know, in the office on Thursday, which will also be nice. And yes, then a whole bunch of things to close down and finish off and, and submit and get done before we get to next week when there will be [00:38:00] things going on, but hopefully it’ll be a little bit quieter.Matt: Well, it’s actually, it’s the, it’s the Equal Experts London party this Wednesday, but, sadly I can’t make it because happily it’s my son’s 13th birthday and priorities. , but I will be seeing some people in town on Wednesday. . Tuesday, tomorrow evening, , although probably now as you listen to this if you listen to it when it’s come out, , is, , TBD, Paul Armstrong’s, , mini conference taking place over in North Greenwich, so we’ll be going over for that.The last one was fabulous and it included, , the author of the book Wasteland, which is probably the best book I’ve read this year, all about the way in which our Rubbish gets dealt with and fascinating terrifying book And so we’ll have to see who Paul has in store for us. And then next Monday It’s the WB40 signal group annual Christmas shindig Which Cy Cornwall has been there actually marvel in being able to do all the organization for so, [00:39:00] There will be some of us meeting up if you’re not a member of the signal group You are welcome to join if you drop us a line on LinkedIn or we still got an account on That x thing, but we don’t really use it anymore or , if you go to the website You’ll be able to get details on how to get in touch with us and you can be added to the signal group and then About one in five people survive the initial fire hydrant and stay on I think is about the batting average there So that’s , that’s good fun.And then it’s into the christmas festivities season. So, Various things. And then we’re busy planning what is happening with the show in 2024. I’ve got the entire month of January already sorted, which I feel incredibly, , doesn’t happen very often. Does it? I know it’s great. Um, so we’ve got some fantastic guests, , and more to come.So, , with that, , wish you all a very, , happy. end of the year break depending on how you choose to celebrate it and we will be back on the 8th of January into our eighth year my goodness of this [00:40:00] mad crazy thing that is WB40. So until then have a good break and we’ll see you in 2024 which is technically the future.​

On this, the penultimate show of 2023, Chris and Matt answer audience questions about the year ahead…Automatically created transcript…Matt: at the beginning of 2023 on show 248 no less if you want to go back and listen to it. We did an episode where we thought about what might be the things that a CIO or a CTO might be being asked about in the year ahead.So we’re going to start with a question from Mr. Chris King, who in his inimitable style asks, Review your predictions for 2023 and own your poor judgments, you cowards. Not so much a question as a statement. We’ve all seen those ones when people stand up at the bit where they’re supposed to be asking questions at events.Anyway, Chris, we are going to go. Step by step through what we said in that first show at the beginning of the year that we thought would be important topics for Technology management in this year and see how well we did First up artificial intelligence and we said that you should probably start really playing with it with some seriousness How do you think we did on that Chris?Chris: Well, I think we did pretty well in as much as everything is now, , AI, crazy, isn’t it? I’m not entirely sure we knew that LLMs were about to be launched upon the world and create such, , havoc. But, do you know what? I’ll take that as a win, Matt. You know, I think we were right. Matt: Yep, I think so. The next one hybrid working,, and our conclusion was that this was something you just needed to be able to work out how to do., because if you hadn’t by now, then you’re in real trouble. Interesting one, this, with , continuing calls from large organisations to be able to return to the office. , but I saw some, , analysis that was from the US market that said now that return to office is pretty much flat lined. So as much returning to the office is going to happen has happened.What do you make of it? Chris: I would agree, you know, that’s, it’s kind of, you know the pendulum’s going to swing back. , but I’m going to, I’m going to mix my metaphors horribly as usual. So the, , genie was out of the bottle after COVID, wasn’t it? A lot of the things that stopped us working from home or working remotely, , because it just wouldn’t work, , actually did work to a, to a point and people found ways around the problems.And I always. said that it was, it was like the elastic would pull back, but the elastic has been overstretched. He’s never going to go back to his original. point, but, but it always feels like it’s going back because you, as you, as you head towards the, what was the status quo, everybody then decides it’s going to go exactly that way it came from.Well, it never does. So I think , the Hooke’s law, if that’s the thing that I remember from my physics in school, I think the Hooke’s law thing has been, tested and, and the hybrid thing is really important because guess what? We aren’t. All in the office all the time.More of us are at home or working remotely. And more of us are working from locations other than a head office. So, finding ways to combine those people who are in the office and people who aren’t in the office, or aren’t in, you know, a dedicated company office, continues to be the challenge. And I don’t think we’re far wrong with that, Matt, The next one that we were talking about was the looming recession, and how do you recession improve yourselves? So, what do you think? Matt: It feels like we’ve been waiting for the recession all year, and whilst it hasn’t arrived, it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s gone away. And I’ve seen from a number of points, and particularly talking to freelance people, this year has been absolutely horrible., actually just in the last few days, I’ve seen people who were very successful freelance consultants, thought leaders in their world and all that, and talking about how they’ve run out of savings. , so whilst technically two consecutive quarters of contraction of the economy might not have been met, it does not feel like a strong and, growing economy in which we’re operating in the UK at the moment.It feels like nobody’s making decisions. I think that there is, in a public sector, we’ve I’ve seen a lot of, , retrenchment in spending from departments that we’ve been working with. And I think that’s a, common thing. , and it also feels like there’s a kind of waiting for the new government thing.And, and I don’t think that’s just public sector. I think in private sector as well, there’s that kind of. Something’s got to change, but we don’t know what it is, but we’ll just wait for a bit, shall we? And it’s a very, very hard market to be in. Chris: , I’d definitely reflect that in terms of, I think, at the start of the year, one of my, , strategic planning Axioms was to say, look, everybody’s going to want to do more with less.Everybody’s going to need to save money, be more efficient. I mean, of course, we all try to do that all the time, right? But this is going to be really important because I thought a recession was almost certain. , as you say, technically it hasn’t happened, but I think the way I would describe the business, , outlook this year and the market generally has been soft.So projects have started or they’ve been mooted and then the budget has been approved in organisations and then it’s been unapproved. So you’ve seen quite a lot of people, and I’ve heard from quite a lot of people who, I’ve applied for jobs this year and got the jobs or I got through to the next stage or whatever and then everything goes quiet and then it turns out that the job has gone away.And that’s really frustrating as a, as you know, if you’re a job seeker, especially if you’ve kind of mentally checked out of wherever you are or maybe you don’t have a job, it’s Really terrible. So I, I’ve seen a lot of that and I’ve seen a lot of people blaming recruitment teams or whatever. But guess what?Recruiters don’t get paid until they play somebody. And for recruiters to have to go through that process as well, to interview a whole bunch of people, put people forward and then suddenly the job goes away. It’s just as, it’s just as annoying for them. So yeah, the market has been soft. The, the ability to make decisions of organizations has been kind of questionable.And I really can’t see that changing in the short term simply because as you say, there are some unknowns going on, , in terms of the political landscape. So, so yeah, I think we’ve still got that. How do we keep costs down? How do we change our business models? How do we, , just act in a more, you know, faster and leaner and more effectively?I think that that’s just going to be a continuing pressure for. Matt: So the next one that we had was about the metaverse. And we concluded at the beginning of the year that 2023 was probably going to be the year when the metaverse didn’t really do very much. That feels like a reasonably prescient prediction.Chris: The what a verse was it? What was it? I mean You bought , a headset didn’t you? And they are really cool, right? The, the, what was it called? Matt: The, um, Oculus. Well no, it’s the, uh, the, oh dear, see I can’t even remember the name of it. It’s the, the, the Oculus, but it’s not the Oculus, it’s the Meta. Because they re branded it.Chris: Whatever, it’s, it’s, but, but, do you know what? It’s really good, isn’t it? Matt: It’s great. How much have you used it in the last three months? Every so often I will put power into it to be able to update the software on it. And then I’ll put it on my head for about half an hour and then I’ll take it off again. Although, actually, interestingly, one of my coffees in the last week, 131 and counting, , was with somebody who works for Mural. And he was talking about some of the work that they’re doing with Meta around platforms for collaboration and collaborative working and what you would do on a whiteboard, but in virtual space.And really interestingly, what he was talking about was one of my big criticisms of the whole Meta collaborative workspace in virtual reality is it’s just like, And what’s the point in having just right reality when you don’t have the constraints of things like gravity? From what he was describing that they’re doing at the moment, it sounds like some of that is being worked on and bankrolled. The question will be whether enough will be able to be continued to be able to put into that for it to sustain without any revenue from it whatsoever.Because I can’t see revenue coming in 2024 either.Chris: Yeah, it’s a real gamble, all of that, because people’s habits are hard to change. , and even though the technology is really cool, it’s not compelling enough in terms of what you can do with it. wHether that changes in the next 12 to 18 months is another matter.I don’t think so, but I think we were right last year, Matt. Indeed. And the last one was, we, we were talking about China, Matt. We said that, , that should be on our risk register in terms of, I guess, um, I’m trying to remember why we thought China was going to be on our risk register, but I guess through either, use of intellectual property or, you know, the expansion of the Alibabas and, , you know, the Baidus and those kind of organizations.Matt: Yeah, and I mean the other big thing was the way in which the U. S. banned the use of American technology by Chinese firms, so people like Huawei who, I was reading their latest smartphone, the P60 or something, has, satellite calling built in. You know, the Huawei make incredible mobile phones.Unfortunately, they’re not allowed to use Google software. So therefore they have incredible phones with no software. And that’s their problem at the moment. , I think, China is as much of a risk and a threat and a challenge. And is this, massive, manufacturing base of all sorts of stuff.It’s interesting how you’re seeing increasing things like, , Chinese brand, , vehicles on the roads. It’s the way in which Chinese stuff is increasingly creeping into our day to day life as opposed to Chinese manufactured stuff with Western brands on it. And, , I think really in the last year, the combination of the continuing conflict in Ukraine and then what’s been happening in the Middle East has To some extent, diverted attention away from China, but it’s still a big lumbering threat to who knows what., because everything that we seem to consume is made there these days. Chris: Yeah, that’s right. You know, as you say, the world, , geopolitics has changed, hasn’t it? So, we probably missed out on that one as much as it wasn’t the big issue that we thought it might be. But as you say, that may be just other stars have shone brighter, , this year.Matt: Right, so having hopefully shown, , some credentials in not being able to make complete arses of ourselves, , for , the year that has gone, let’s have a think about the year ahead and maybe some of the things that might be happening there. With obviously the big, big illuminated caveat that past performance is not an indication of future performance., so the first question we’ve got comes from a friend of the show, Lisa Remers. And it is this. I have heard some horror stories of people using LLMs to fill out job applications, which look great at a distance, but lack the specificity needed. Real examples or well, any sort of reassurance is not a pack of lies.But with applicant tracking systems also auto rejecting things without the keywords, how can we fix the job application process?Chris: Well, okay. You know, this is, comes pretty much straight to that point that you often make Matt about us heading towards a time when we’ve got AI writing stuff for AI to read and there’s nobody in the middle of it.But I think this does hit another point. And again, I’ve talked about, just talked about recruitment, a lot of recruitment, especially the kind of cheap and nasty recruitment does use tools, applicant tracking systems to then just. Whizz through keywords and figure out, you know, which app, which application should be surfaced to the top.And if you are using pretty dumb systems to do that, then people will game it. They’ll know that that happens and they’ll just game it. So it’s kind of not surprising that people would then use tools to make that easier. The question we’ve got to ask ourselves is when we And I would like to think that our recruitment team is, , a better recruitment team. Focused on outcomes more than just lobbying CVS at the wall until one sticks. , and I would hope that what that will do is it will drive out the, the bad recruitment and the bad recruiters and the people who don’t add any value beyond. Having a portal that people can apply to and the real recruiters that understand the market that can give advice that can really help to get the right person to fill a role will actually maybe be more valued, right?So,, to fix the job application process, we’ve got to be just got to value the job, right? If you don’t value the role enough to try and put the right person into it. And if you think of it just as filling a gap, I think , that’s part of the problem. But maybe, , the way that AI is going, the way that LLMs are going and that these tools are heading, they’re actually removing some of those roles that actually could be filled by anybody.And it’s the, experience and wisdom and knowledge and analytical ability of people that, that will be more valuable. So maybe, yeah, maybe this comes full circle and it, it all works out. Or maybe I’m just a hopeless optimist. What do you think? Matt: Possibly the hopeless optimism. I think that the, the year ahead in the next few years, this, so the thing, and I’ve written about this recently actually, that the, , the idea that we have a world which is consisting of interactions and transactions, and the interactions cannot be scaled in anything other than a linear .fashion because they represent interaction between two people and transactions can be scaled in a exponential way because they are purely mathematical constructs and and so on and so the example i’ve always given is that if you go to tiffin is to buy an engagement ring that’s a good example of a very high touch interaction and if you buy that same ring on the internet that turns it into a transaction and what you lose along the way is a bunch of social and cultural significance And if you’re getting married and you choose the latter over the former, you will notice the difference in cultural, , and social value.At the moment, it might change over time, but people don’t think about this stuff. Anyway, what I think we’re starting to see with the way in which, natural language processing and, the generation of content through, , Artificial intelligence type technologies is actually a simulation of interaction.Now a CV, the point of a CV was never as a data transmission protocol. It was part of the dance of recruitment and it was actually something that somebody gave to somebody else. But what has happened at scale already is the applicant tracking systems and all the gizmos have been stuck into those have removed much of the interaction and it’s led to a world where people think that you don’t need those interactions for people to be able to recruit.I can think of one of my clients in particular this year who believed that and thought they could just do their own recruitment with one HR person and LinkedIn. And they have spent months and months and months and months not finding candidates because it is so much more than that. But this isn’t just a question about recruitment for me.I think that we will see loads of examples where, because it’s easier just to automate the existing process and to be able to actually think about fundamentals, we will end up with AI talking to AI and madness will ensue. And we will see this in all sorts of places. And for the year ahead, this is where it’s going to start.And I just hope there are enough of us saying this is insane. Stop it immediately for us to not get into a world where it won’t be that we will have, , a super intelligence that we can’t control. It will be that we will have mass loads of stupid that we can no longer control. And we’ve already seen that, you know, things like financial markets., we have mass loads through high. Frequency trading and whatever, and we’ve had a number of instances over the years now where stupidity at scale has almost collapsed the entire global economy. And it’s that stuff where previously it was only applied to things that were about numbers, but are now going to get applied to things that traditionally have been about interaction between people that we need to be really, really wary of in the next few years and in the next year in particular.Chris: Cool. So. Having knocked that one , , into the basket. Let’s move on to the next one. So this is, , John Wilshire. We’re still talking LLMs here. Matt and John, , has got an example that he’s picked up from the internet, , about what It’s called an SEO heist, so search engine optimization heist using AI, where apparently these people, they exported a sitemap from a competitor’s website, they turned all their URLs into article titles, they created a couple of thousand articles from those titles using AI, so a bunch of thousand , worthless crap, I suppose, but you know, enough to then bend the, the, the light of, the search engines towards them.And, and apparently 18 months later they’ve stolen 3.6 million total traffic, 490,000 k. Monthly traffic, I guess those are visits or visitors or something. So John said, in the light of LLMs being used to hack the web in that way, what becomes of the concept that we think of the web in 2028 24? At what point is it just bots writing for bots?So Matt: I think it has been for years. I think if you look at the whole world of search engine optimisation and the particular form of this that annoys me more than anything else. I don’t really look at recipe books these days. I go onto the internet and search for recipes and there are good reputable sources of recipes like BBC Good Food and Jamie Oliver and various other places where you start with the list of ingredients And then you can work out from that whether it’s worth looking at.However, the internet is stuffed to the gills of recipes that start off with about 2, 000 words of preamble talking about what it is that they were doing on the day when they thought about this recipe and yadda yadda yadda and it goes on and on and on and you have to scroll through pages and pages and pages of absolute guff.Before you get to the actual recipe because those pages and pages of guff are then loaded with adverts and those adverts are where this website gets his money from and that’s fine, except it means that it’s an awful experience because it is exactly this. It is nonsense content that has been generated Possibly by bots, or they possibly by people acting with the intelligence of bots following horribly algorithmic kind of ways of thinking to create content that is there to enable as much advertising space to be sold as possible, but not in the way that newspapers and magazines used to do it, which was to have compelling content, but just by having loads of swarth that you have to be able to try to pick through.And the idea that the internet is not already full of this stuff. I think is quite preposterous. It’s been full of this stuff for as long as people have been selling advertising space at scale on the internet and it’s got worse and worse and worse and worse and will bots make it worse? Yes, of course it will.Would it mean that we’ll get to a point where we can’t actually find anything useful? Possibly. And that’s where it gets interesting, because I think maybe what the search engines need to do to be able to try to help you get to content that isn’t just bot created swarf. Because if you want bot created swarf about a subject, just go to ChatGPT and ask for it, you know, at the time you need it, rather than going to a webpage that’s been published already. I’ve gone into angry old man mode now. Chris: You really have. , I mean, which is what I do with recipes actually, because I don’t, uh, I don’t go to recipes anymore. I, I look in the, in the fridge and say, okay, I’ve got half a, half a bit of garlic and some cheese and , some onions and, and then I’ll go to the chat and I’ll go, right, this is what I’ve got.What can I make? Matt: And it was like a trip to the supermarket. Chris: It’s quite good at that. It will come up with something. And I’ve got a slow cooker and I’ve got these things. What can I do? I think you’re right. I think that it has been like this for some time, but it’s getting worse. And it just depends on the way you look at the web, isn’t it?I think Google has got worse over the years. I think Twitter or whatever you call it now. It’s pretty much unusable these days. I mean, it’s just no fun. So, I think we just end up moving to different places, right?So, I use Blue Sky a lot more these days. Probably as much as I use Twitter. And that’s quite a nice place to go. It’s still not got quite as much content as Twitter. And the kind of people, , that are on Twitter aren’t always on something like Blue Sky. But enough of the kind of people I want to hear from are.Right? So that, that makes it a much more valuable experience now. And the only reason I go to Twitter is because it’s still where a lot of the sort of news organizations, etc. are post. But yeah, I think, you know, it’s, it’s an interesting, , propositionwe’re getting computers to write things for other computers to read. , but I do think when you do that, actually very quickly becomes obvious that there’s very little value in it. And then the people that. start to do something slightly different are the ones that get the value from it. My son, for example, who’s at college, he uses GPT all the time and he uses it as a kind of learning assistant really. He’s doing his college course and the, the, the tutor will say, can you do this, right? Do a presentation about, you know, how marketing is used in business or whatever. And he’ll use GPT. But he’s seen daft people use GPT and essentially just copy and paste the output into a presentation and then come unstuck when they get asked about it.He knows that what he’s got to do is use it as a structure, you know, for a structure, ask it some refining questions, ask it to explain some of the stuff he doesn’t understand, and actually use it. To learn, right? And, and sometimes you’ll come unstuck doing that, but then again sometimes you can come unstuck going to Wikipedia, sometimes, even when you and I were younger, Matt, and if you had to, find something out, you might look in a book, , Sometimes you look at a book, and actually, the book would be 30 years old, and when you actually tend to talk about it, your, the knowledge you’ve got would be completely out of date because you just read the wrong book.It’s, you know, it’s, it’s always been possible to be wrong. You just need to cultivate your judgement so you are less likely to be wrong. Matt: So another question, I think, sort of in this field as well from Elias Williams, um, who asks about the commoditization of software.He asks the barriers to writing software are getting lower and being accelerated. wHat do we think the impact that this could have on things like software as a service businesses, development shops, consulting and in house development teams? Chris: I think it’s a similar answer as well, right, in as much as this has happened a lot in the last few years.When I was, when I were a lad, what we used to call programming before we were coders, , you would sit down and you would write code from first principles, really. You wouldn’t have much to go on. You might have a manual or something, or a book of words we used to call it, which is like, you know, the function guide of the language you’re using and it would have little snippets of code to explain how the function works, so you might use that as your starting point and then build from there.And then, one marvellous day, you get Usenet and you start to ask newsgroups, you have newsgroups where programmers would , congregate and you’d say, oh, how, does anybody know how we do this, or has anybody got, and some people might then supply a bit of snippet of code. And then, a few years ago. Things like Stack Overflow came around, and we got a lot more code that was being shared.A lot more examples that could be used, and we were reusing software more, code libraries started to appear. We were, that’s, that’s accelerated coding, no end, right? And, but you’ve also, also ended up with people not really understanding how the program they’ve written works, even though it does.They can compile it and sort of put the seal on it and then just run away and hope it never goes wrong because they don’t actually know how it works. And I think it’s just an extension of that. It’s great that some of the more, you know, the easier bits of coding, which are just a bit of a grind, can be taken away by things like LLMs and advanced software.But if you asked an LLM or For an AI system to write a complex piece of software, you’d really want to look at it before you pass it off because, you know, that’s so risky to just give it to somebody else to do, who can’t explain how it works or you’re going to use it just to accelerate the, easy stuff and then, and then add your own value on top.So for me. It’s just the continuation. Software gets more and more complex. So we’re barely keeping up with the increasing complexity of software, frankly. So I don’t think it’s going to change that much. What about you? Matt: , I think I would advise you to listen to next week’s show when we’ve got Lewis Crawford, who’s a colleague of mine, who has been doing some experiments recently building virtual software development teams in AI environments.So actually, just experiments is not to replace developers yet, but being able to set up agents that act as a team and being able to get them to be able to build things and what he’s been finding through doing that is absolutely fascinating., we’ll talk about this on the show more next week. Chris: Okay, so we’ve got another question from , Nick Drage, who asked us about what technology will have AI levels of impact on common discourse in 2024, regardless of its actual effectiveness?Is web 3 due a comeback? Matt: , I think that the technology which will have aI levels of impact on common discord in 2024 is going to be AI. I think we’ve got another year of this at least. , I’m picking up on his point about, you know, the regardless of actual effectiveness, there’s definitely useful stuff that you can do with AI technologies that are around at the moment., but there are huge, great gaps in them becoming. properly operationalized and being able to put in to organizations to be able to do things that will deliver, large scale value. At the moment they’re delivering value to software companies because they’re being used as a way to be able to sell more software., if you think about how long it takes for organizations to be able to make change happen, the idea that LLMs and the like are going to accelerate the ability for organizations to implement change, I think is really quite. optimistic to say the least. , , Chris: I would say also, from my point of view, now, common discourse might mean, you know, down the pub, I’m not entirely sure we’re talking about that level, but I think automation is getting to the point where, and again, I think it’s the impact of the vendor, really.I think Microsoft, that low code stuff, the Power Platform, what I kind of call tactical automation, where people can just automate a small bit of their process. The kind of thing that people used to call me up for when I was an IT manager, and 20 years ago, and they’d say, no, Chris, this is really, it takes me three days to produce this report.Can’t we do something about it? And I would then spend. A couple of weeks working with them and then they would have a report that they could run in 10 minutes and it would save them, genuinely save them days and days of work. And that was great. Used to, I used to enjoy it, used to make their lives much, much, much easier., but they had to come to somebody like me to do it and we still kind of have to do that to a, to an extent. And the idea that you can then take to somebody, you know, here’s a tool, , I read something, , around, , I think it was Austin, , who, some engineers who had to get an email and that is take the email and transcribe the email into their head.ERP system. I think it was an SAP system before they could start work on something. And this was like the morning job and it was the job that they really hated it ’cause it was just a re-keying job. And then they automated it, , for a fairly naughty tool. And that to me is a nice, is, is a little bit of tactical automation.It would never get automated from the top down. It would never be something as part of a big digital transformation project. But actually, if you are , an end user with a, a bit of drudge that you can automate away. With a few hours work and maybe a few pointers from somebody. Suddenly that’s massive because everybody can do it.And will that happen this year? Don’t know. But I think it’s on the horizon. I think that kind of tactical automation thing where you’re not trying to solve one massive bottleneck, but you are continually Shifting smaller bottlenecks. I’ve just got to hunch that’s on, that’s what’s going to be big. Matt: Also makes me think though, which year will it be where bad data becomes the public discourse?Because a lot of this stuff depends on the idea that your data is reasonably in a good state. How many organizations data is in a good enough state to be able to leave automation to machines and machines alone. Chris: Well, I don’t know. I think maybe it’s that big transformational top down automation that requires data to be in a good state.Because when you’re getting down to that lower level, that’s where the people, they’ve kind of come up with ways to manage bad data because they deal with it all the time. They get an email from somebody, they kind of go, oh no, they didn’t mean that, they didn’t mean this. Right. And they, and, and they kind of build their own process in for managing that. Because at the end of the day. We can keep saying, oh, we need our data caught to show people to wear blue in the face, but unless there’s a really good incentive for lots of people to act upon that, it’s not really going to happen. We kind of have to accept that sometimes we’re just going to have to deal with it. And that’s part of the process, is dealing with the fact that we know we’re going to have bad data.And at least if you understand what can be bad and what’s likely to be bad, you can put systems in to mitigate it. Matt: I suppose that the challenge will be in a world that feels increasingly like it has become binary, that something is right or wrong, left or right, red or blue, , where you have that necessity to understand that the answers might be fuzzy, or one of my favorite things at the moment is when somebody says, is it X or is it Y and pointing out that it could be both at the same time and that’s a perfectly valid answer.I don’t know whether the constructs in which some of these technologies are going to be placed, say like making a decision about whether somebody should have asylum granted or not. Let’s automate that, stick some data into it. Bish bash bosh and we’re away. Those kind of decisions are not simple, they’re not binary and if you’re just relying on a black box that pops out an answer at the end that’s where it gets worrying for me.Chris: Yeah, so I’ve got a plan now for my next project, which will be my best selling book, Embrace the Purple. Right, so it’s not blue and it’s not red. Embrace the Purple.Matt: I’ve got one question that’s sort of out on its own a little bit, but I thought it was interesting to be able to ask. It’s from an anonymous listener. , How do you go about shifting a broad company culture to one where people put their cameras on by default in remote or hybrid meetings? Our little part of the company does this by default, but in the wider group, large meetings are seas of avatars.People want to work flexibly, but then don’t show up when they do. I know there’s a neurodiversity angle to this, but is there also a neurotypical argument to be made for most of the population? Am I wrong to pursue it? Should I just let it go? What do you reckon? Chris: I think my, , opinion on this has changed over time, and once upon a time I was beating people up to put their cameras up and say, come on, just, you know, get with it.And, we’re all, better off if we can see each other. And actually I think I’ve probably toned that down a bit recently , because I do think that everybody’s different and people do have, you know, reasons for not Wanting to have their camera on sometimes they’re good reasons.Sometimes they’re not, I think it is down to the individual. I had a couple of conversations with somebody quite recently. Somebody I don’t know very well. , but they were quite in depth conversations. And when we started, he said, look, do you mind if we turn our cameras off? This is because.I’ve been doing this , , face to face and , when I do it on teams, I find it’s just too distracting to be staring at the other person all the time. , and when you’re in a, in a physical location, you don’t necessarily look at this, like gawp at the other person all the time. So we did that and we did that on two separate occasions. Actually, I thought it was really odd at first, but I could see the value in it. And as much as I was concentrating on the conversation and the words, not trying to read the expression or the innermost thoughts of the person at the other end and looking for their reaction, and, you know, I think maybe let it go. But what about you? Matt: See, I’ve gone the other way. I would have said each to their own and all that a few years ago. Now I’d say, would you allow somebody to walk into all meetings and stick a paper bag over their head?No, you wouldn’t. Okay? So, I think that there is something more problematic, though, if you’ve got a culture where people default to turning cameras off. And You don’t have to stare at each other all the time. The one thing I would say though, is that often when you ask people why do you not want the camera on, it’s because I don’t like looking at myself.And I find it really interesting that the tools that we have don’t make it immediately obvious how to turn off your own camera view. It’s quite hard to find that setting. And then there’s some tools, like the one that we’re using to record this, where you can’t turn your own camera off at all. And that’s a bit odd, because in a meeting room, I don’t know if you’ve ever been into a meeting where you’ve been sitting opposite a mirror, so in a restaurant or places where there are mirrors on walls, I cannot stand ceilings or no, no, no, no, it’s a different thing. , but I cannot stand being in a room where I can see myself in a mirror. And that’s exactly the same thing that’s going on with being, on a teams or a zoom or a meet call and seeing your own image and the camera completely get that.Turn your camera, self view off. But no, I, think that there’s, there’s something going wrong in a culture of people predominantly don’t have their cameras on. Chris: That’s very interesting. I mean, some would say, I personally, it’s a bit of a bonus for me to see myself whilst I’m talking Matt: to other people. But, um, I Chris: could understand that maybe some other people would think Matt: Think not, faces already.Interestingly, we did try a tool to record this for a while some years ago, which didn’t have camera view. But we found it very difficult to be able to do this without being able to see each other.And particularly when we’ve got a guest, we’re able, I think, to be able to signal to each other without making big gesticulations when it’s somebody else’s turn to ask a question or any of that. And I don’t think we can do this recording unless we’ve got video. Chris: Let’s quickly move on to our next one. We’ve got a question from Steve Parks, our favorite marketing agency guru. And he’s talking about the fact that it’s election year in the US and the UK, and asks what part would the changed and changing landscape play in shaping the campaign’s coverage and results this time?Some previous campaigns have seen a new generation of civic tech and entrepreneurs. And what might we see come back to tech from the campaigns this year? Matt: So, it’s going to be interesting having election campaigns without a meaningful Twitter. , It’s certainly for me for the last, I, I, I’ve started using Twitter I think in 2009, so 2010 election it was very nascent, 2015 it was very much part of it, 2019 it went a bit batshit, , and I, I, I look at Twitter a few times a day now but I’m not posting on there at all now and to not have The political discourse on there is going to be interesting.I don’t really look at Facebook very much anymore. It’s going to be interesting to see because quite a lot of my, social media uses now migrated into LinkedIn. It’s going to be interesting to see whether there is politics on LinkedIn for the elections. Politics generally. is reasonably frowned upon still, I think, on LinkedIn.But when there’s a general election at play, it will be interesting to see how that one pans out. Politicians do use it, and you do get occasionally incredibly misjudged, , pieces of social media stuff going out on LinkedIn by politicians. , there is then the emergence of video. So for the last few years, video has been the big growth area.I think politicians have got a fantastic opportunity to make enormous arses of themselves with TikTok in particular and no doubt many of them will.And the other thing that I is going to be really interesting is the way in which so much So the social network stuff has gone more private and it’s gone private in groups in WhatsApp in groups in signal and so on and those are not penetrable by , traditional advertising mechanisms, political parties, and so will they find ways to be able to kind of socially engineer their messages into private groups, because I think those are going to be important places of influence in some instances, although they might just be, , groups of people who all have the same sorts of views.I’m thinking of things like, you know, WhatsApp street groups and that kind of stuff. I think it’s going to be interesting because of the way in which particularly Shifter video and the collapse of Twitter and how that will play out for electioneering. Chris: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s now a part of the political game, isn’t it?And are people out there who track the spend by political parties in social media. There are people like WhoTargetsMe, so that’s sort of an extension you can put on your browser, your Chrome browser, that will then, it basically looks to understand who’s targeting your feed on Facebook from political parties, and they sort of generate, they gather lots of data about that., When we had the by election here in Tamworth, , a few weeks back. I mean, I don’t use YouTube a lot, but every time I went on it, I seemed to get an advert from the Labour, , candidate. So I think YouTube and those sort of channels, Instagram, are being used, and will be used. I think Facebook is actually quite an interesting one at the moment, just because of the demographic.It’s not really a channel that kids use very much, you know, I think if you’re under Probably Facebook isn’t a thing that you use. It’s used by quite a lot of people who are older and even older than you and I Matt. And that’s your voting demographic. So I reckon Facebook in terms of advertising and trying to target is still important.But I do think that we’ve got over that kind of madness of the Cambridge Analytica and the idea that you can. micro target people and, and, you know, really, really make a difference in elections. I think, I think, going back to that data quality thing, I just don’t think we’ve got the information as much as we pretend we have.I don’t think we’ve got the information or the tooling to say to make that much of a difference. I think the Cambridge Analytica thing personally was a bit of a beat up. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the next thing that will come along will be, will prove me wrong. Matt: Yeah, it’s an interesting question, isn’t it?Because, , being able to target micro demographics is definitely what the online advertisers or the online advertising platforms will claim to be able to give you. The question is, can you identify the right demographic to which you need to push your messages? The other interesting thing for me, I don’t get very much election literature through the door because we’re in a safe Lib Dem seat, the Tories don’t bother and Labour definitely don’t bother., will I actually see anything at all? Will I even notice there is an election on from the advertising that’s pushed in front of me? That would be a good indication about whether targeting is working or not. Chris: Oh yeah. I do think that if you look at, like, that psychological view, , that the swing seats, you know, the, real kind of crunch seats are going to probably attract a great deal more.Matt: You are not gonna be able to move for the stuff. ’cause although there’s a big minority, you know, that’s very much a swing seat that you are in. Chris: Yeah, absolutely. It will be. I mean, the, the, the conservatives will be ex hoping to win this back at the general election. , labor will wanna hang onto it, so there’ll be a few seats that get a lot more focus., it will be left down to the, , individual conservative associations or constituent labor parties or whatever the Libs call themselves. in the areas to do that. They’re, they’re individual. And it’ll just be down to how much money they’ve got locally. So, yeah, again, another, another interesting evolution of our politics.Matt: And to the second part of Steve’s question, do you think there’s going to be anything that will come back from these election campaigns back into technology or into the, to the broader business world? Chris: I think that’s a really difficult question. , I think what we’ve seen quite a lot of what Steve calls Civic Tech. In previous election campaigns in the UK, but I cannot honestly say I’ve seen anything come out of it that’s, kind of entrepreneurial or made a, made a big difference. I might be wrong, but I might be missing something, but, but that’s not something on my horizon. Matt: So, the last question of this, the last AskWB40 of 2023.And, , from, , one of our recent ish guests, Jarnel Chudge. , There are many challenges and wicked problems that the world is facing, and more and more people raising questions about the ability of the current and prevailing, and or prevailing models and systems of commerce to respond to them, regardless of the belief by the tech bros in their domination of the technology landscape.So, the question to you. Matt and Chris is, what do you think that each person could do that would make a difference from anywhere and everywhere in the world? Chris: Well, difficult question. , short answer is, you know, we’ve got a massive problem in as much as there’s going to be mass migration on the planet in the next 10, 20 years. Lots of it driven by climate change. , we’ve got to do something about that. And it’s a big problem, but we can do something about it. In our own way, we can push for the things that we use, the things that, the services we use, the companies we work with to manage their impact on the environment.So for example, We’re building in, , the green, , software foundation,, principles into our software development, , process, , low carbon cloud, things like that, where you run your loads at what time at which data centers around the world, it can make a difference. So I think.You know what, we’ve all got our little things that we can do in our, um, in our roles and in our lives. And it is just about trying to find the thing that you can do. Matt: Know what you’ve got some ability to be able to influence in whatever small sort of way you can and take that opportunity to do it., which, , I think you and I both try to be able to do our bit for what we can when we can. And, so stay tuned for a bit more on that for what we’ll be doing in 2024. There’s, , something afoot, but not until next year.Chris: So there we are, Matt. We’ve made yet another rod for our backs for next year. Let’s see how that goes. but let’s think maybe a little nearer to now. What’s your next week like? Matt: Uh, apart from the, the worky stuff as we start to close out the calendar year, , I will be attending, , Vicarage Road. to watch Watford play football for the first time this season.I know I’m a total fair weather these days, but there we go. I’m taking both of my children to the, to the match, , assuming that they both,, hold true to their promise. And, um, so what’s been a very successful run over the last couple of months is almost certainly going to come to an end. Which would be fun.Apart from that, we have, , we have a meeting, just picking up on the last point from the last question, we have a meeting Monday, a week today, which will be to explore some of these ideas we’ve got for the show in the new year. And, other than that, I have a relatively kind of calm week as we taxi, inevitably, into the Christmas break.How about you? Chris: Yeah, I’m not going very far this week. I’ve got a little few little things to do. , it’s going to be, it’s going to be another busy week with work. I’ve got still got to finish off some decorating. , Matt: And, but is it the actual fourth bridge you’re decorating? Is it? Chris: Oh, listen, believe me, if I could do any quicker, I would.I’m not an expert at decorating. , it does take me a while. And. , this week, there’s quite a lot going on, but it’s kind of head down, ass up kind of thing, so I think it’s going to be one of those weeks that goes by fairly quickly and then it’ll be on to the weekend again, so I don’t, I have a very boring answer for this one, this Matt: time.That’s fair enough, you know. , Well, we’ll be back for the last show of 2023, , next. Monday, , when we’re going to be all to plan, going to be meeting with Lewis Crawford to talk about virtualized software development teams in the world of AI, which should be fascinating if not slightly scary, , until then, thank you for joining us and we will be back next week.Chris: Thank you for listening to WB40. You can find us on always on the internet at WB40podcast. com. , And on all good podcasting platforms as ever. Tell your friends about us. We’ll go to your local park. Scroll WB40 on passing dogs. Anything you can do to increase our listenership will be well rewarded.Not rewarded now, of course, but maybe spiritually one day.

On this week’s show we speak with Railsware CEO Yaroslav Lazor about moving from being a business building software for others to being a product company.You can find out more about their BRIDGeS framework here: https://railsware.com/bridges-framework/Yaroslav mentioned Railsware’s products:Coupler.io: https://www.coupler.io/Titan Apps: https://titanapps.io/And they’ve listed some trusted resources to support Ukraine here: Railsware Supports Ukraine Show Transcript (produced by Descript, so potentially with a few errors)…Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 279 of WB40, the weekly podcast with me Matt Ballantine, Chris Weston and Yaroslav Lazor.We are back again. Welcome to the, I think three, but, but to the end of the year, because already we’re hurtling to 2024, which is a terrifying concept. , Chris, how has your week been? Chris: I’ve been traveling around this week, Matt. Rather unusually, because it’s been quite quiet. A few weeks for, for travel, but I actually went to London this week and I went to the launch of the open data., The latest report on open source, the start of open source and, the invitation of Amanda Brock, who has been on this podcast a couple of times. And hopefully we can get back on again soon because that’s the open source world is, is one that needs, , , a lot of support.. It was really interesting actually, they’ve actually created a little video of what’s going on in terms of open source and the kind of things that it’s promoting in the UK and they had the Shadow Minister for Tech and Digital talking there about, she seemed to get it, which was good, although I noticed in the news tonight they’ve had a bit of a reshuffle and she’s been shuffled off somewhere else, so they’ve got a new Shadow Minister for Tech and Digital. And, and I also spent some time with, old colleagues and new colleagues. I saw, , a demo or not actually a demo. I mean, it’s a, it’s a product, , of a, of a service that uses, one of the LLM models, I think Claude or something like that to create training courses, right?So you tell it you want a training course, you tell it how many , modules you want, you tell it you want. Questions at the end and it goes away and it does it and it builds it into a, what do they call them? Something like Moodle, LL, LM, LL. Matt: Learning Management System, LMS. Yeah, Chris: LMS. There we go. Uh, all those L’s and M’s are confusing me.So, uh, and it builds that into AutoMagically and, you know, that’s quite an interesting use case. And I attended the, uh, Worship World Company of Information Technologists. Dinner as well. Lunch. That was, which was nice. Met, some new people there and, , had, , the company of,, a lady, , who works in the cabin office and also James Boar, our, , security, , guru who stalks the podcast.So, yes, uh, it’s been a good week, Matt. It’s been an interesting and, and, and very, , varied week. How about you? Matt: , I’ve had far less. , entertainment, by the sounds of it. , , we did the, , keynote karaoke last week, which was great fun. Seemed to go down well. , I think in the end eight people volunteered to be able to make up a presentation to unknown slides as they went along, which is, , entertaining.And I’m now plotting to see if we can do it in, , other formats in other places. That’d be good. And just chucking away, it’s that kind of making sure that stuff is, particularly with clients, everything that we have needs to be done and dusted before the Christmas break gets done and dusted before the Christmas break, particularly making sure that contracts needed to be in place for the start of the new calendar year are in place.I’m interested on the open source stuff. What is, what is on the agenda for open source in open UK Chris: Well, they’re very keen on understanding how much people in the UK contribute to open source and how much influence we have on the development of those products. So they’re looking at these kind of mapping commits, mapping, things that have actually been accepted into the, the open source software around, around the UK., and trying to, I think from my point of view, what, The question is, how do you then take those people who are, imaginative enough and motivated enough to support open source projects, who could then become part of success stories in the UK and stop them just being hoovered off to, , you know, the Bay Area or something, because they, you know, they get a job with one of the American companies, right?And that’s kind of the… That’s what the Take UK or Open UK are trying to achieve with this, I think is to, is to protect and, and nurture some of that, uh, talent for the uk, which I think is Matt: reasonable. No, absolutely. Um, and is there any sort of trend within any of that? Is there more open source activity going on?Less is it level or, Chris: uh, that was something that we didn’t get any numbers on at the time, but they are working on that apparently. Okay. So that should be sort of a later thing. I did ask that question actually. Um, I was interested in how. relative to the code base, basically, that’s that, you know, it, is it growing, but are we falling away relative to the code base or, you know, but yeah, those numbers are still being Matt: crunched.Difficult numbers to calculate as well. Cause you do run into that risk of, um, working out on metrics that are based on number of lines of code created, which of course is well, exactly Chris: how much is being used. It’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a bit of a. A bit of an art, I think, rather than a science, that one. Mm.Matt: Absolutely. , talking of the Bay Area, , Jaroslav, , how are you doing? Yaroslav: I’m doing pretty well. Thank you for asking. It’s not a Bay Area here. Los Angeles, and, Matt: but… We’re a bit, a bit down the coast. Yaroslav: Yeah, a bit south. , doing all right. , wanted to contribute quickly to the open source discussion you guys were having., , it’s interesting that UK as a government is thinking about it as it’s considered as, well, kind of a currency, right? You, you have, it kind of is, right? That there’s pounds, but there’s also like lines of codes that people contribute. And , , it’s one of the places where , engineers can, can be hyper creative because they are product managers within.The product managers, product owners, engineers, , within what is it that they do, uh, in the open source. As it’s kind of used for this internal market, uh, engineering market, right? And then, and they are utmost creative and passionate about doing that because you’re not being paid. So, , it’s a bit tricky to monetize that or even to use that to some extent., but it’s a, it’s a great passionate energy, uh, for, for those folks who, who do. , those contributions, to to put them to good use. But we found that it’s very tricky to use that and turn that into productizing. From some perspective, like, I mean, you take people who are great at open source and then you put them on the products, but then they don’t have the same amount of ownership or passion or interest because it’s a very natural interest that they had before.And now you kind of have to, you kind of have to use it. Um, in some, some other, you know, space and like my daughter is, uh, she’s an art student and she, she’s going to high school and she said, well, they making me do art by the deadline and this is not how I want to do it. I’m an artist and, uh, and this is a similar thing.I love to persuade people to, to be productive. To be product oriented, to make products better, but they, you know, tend to feel that there’s politics involved in that. Oh, I have to talk to this person.I have to make that person change their mind. And here I kind of didn’t have to do it because I’m, I’m an artist. To produce this open source. So it’s, uh, it’s tricky to take those artists and, proceed them to change humanity for the, for the better. Chris: That’s, that’s exactly how I used to be when I was a, when I was a coder.We weren’t even called coders. Then we were called programmers. And somebody would say, we need to do this by the end of the month. And I’d throw my hands up and say, you can’t ask. It’ll happen when it happens. I can’t be responsible for the. Artistic process. This is, this is a bad inspiration. I can’t be sure when it’ll hit me, you know, and, uh, in fact, I’m pretty sure there’s plenty of programmers out there just like that now.Yaroslav: Yeah, I think people should surrender to this as well because when you’re a hobbyist, you do something for the hobby and you have this urge to do something, it’s great. But when you do something as a professional, you know, you show up every day. To turn on this, kind of inspiring process within you and actually be creative, within certain boundaries.This is what like made human, human race evolve and survive, , throughout times. Right. And then, I think people should just try to try to do that. I will definitely persuade my daughter to, to be creative in, in a, in a calendar because it’s, uh, it’s just, , I think all the best things that we have in the world, uh, music that was created by, by artists who were doing it over and over and over again.They definitely, uh, they were definitely doing it kind of on the schedule, repetitive, they were pushing themselves to do that.Matt: . There’s also so many stereotypes on there about , , the tortured soul of the artist and it’s all to be incredibly hard and difficult and when the creative muse hits and again, I’ve worked with many developers over the years have been like that as well., but it’s, it’s a process. And one of the things that is. , it’s almost like a, revealing of how the magic trick is done is when people actually start to be able to talk about how the process of creativity works. There are a lot of people who find that very disturbing because they want it to just be some sort of magic thing.And there’s, there’s a balance there and there’s, who knows when inspiration strikes, but actually getting the stuff done is often about being able to, as you say, being able to do it to the calendar. Learning those skills is really important. , so anyway, this week we are going to be talking about, , building software.We’re going to be talking about transition of organizations from different modes. And so I think we should probably crack on,, businesses go through different phases. They have to be able to adapt to the spaces that they’re in. They have to be able to spot where there are opportunities to be able to do things differently. And. Well, I think we’re going to find some interesting stories on this week’s show around exactly that.So, Yaroslav, do you want to just give us a, a bit of a, um, a potted history of your business, a little bit of , um, the story of how it came to be and what you’ve done and how you got to where you are now?Yaroslav: Our history is also a bit dramatic and artistic. , I think we gave people a lot of space and a lot of trust and a lot of, , stake in the game at the early days, uh, when we were not growing.So the company is like 16 years old. And , we have been, , hiring and figuring out how to build software and learning from like really some of the best, uh, in the industry, , on, on the deep principles of building software. And we, we have a lot of frameworks where we would give people those, uh, ability to vote.We call this thing a product fair and we would show all the products we have and then we ask people, you know, to vote what is it they want to work on and we gave them, measurements so that they don’t have to, , write comments, , and there would be like, really want, want. You really have to, don’t want, I’ll experiment with stuff and from that we’ll be, uh, data driven and, and to try to pack the best teams possible to work on the best products.And I think we moved away from that a bit because, , when you give a lot of,, choices to people, they get confused without a lot of information, but then when you give them a lot of information, they get even more. confused. So now we’re a more driven company. So within our artistic times, we would be building products on the side.We will be helping clients build their products. , we built some amazing software over the years , we were like pioneering some of the domains and, and doing some great, high quality, high performance software. We were building things on the site, our own products, but we were hesitant to deliver them.You know, they still had bugs or maybe they didn’t have a website. , we, we built a CI server, a very nice CI hosted CI solution long time before there were CircleCI or the other like top tier products. Which are probably now billion dollar companies. And if we would launch it back then, I think we would have a billion dollar company.But we didn’t because we were artistic about it and we wanted it to be great and we were thinking, we were trying not to put a managerial push into the process of engineering creation and so on and so on. That was really stupid. Then as we were helping other companies build their software and looking and watching how they grow and how it transforms,, using all the approaches and principles that we learned, , , we saw this kind of creative process., one of them, the cleanest out of them is Calendly, because it was started with us only by our team. , I was a product manager in there. , there was a lot of influence, , for , how the company was started. You can start it in so many ways. And we were using our product management principles that we, we believe in, , basically to, to see potential directions, what would those directions entail?How hard is it to do them? How hard is it to start? , and Calendly became a flopping success, right? And then after that we were like, Oh wow, we definitely need to push our products further. And, , around 2019, 2019, we started being more serious about the products and we started to do basically the same thing we were doing, but we were doing them more artistically.Right. And then to, to become disciplined about it, actually something I just talked about on an open source software, right. push ourselves to deliver them. And it was pretty hard because you, we had to hire a very different crowd of people than, than we had before. , so we, you know, typically we have product managers, engineers, , designers, and, , QA and , in order to actually deliver the products, we need support and, Sales and design and marketing, a lot of marketing actually, , and security, , to just keep, keep things, , up and running.And, and that’s, , actually a very different crowd. , and then you don’t understand how those things should function. So we need to dive into those domains, understand how they function. And then you, only then you can start hiring people. So this process was. This process was quite a bit of suffering and, , and it’s like going to stretch artists who stretch.Going to a gym is one thing. It’s, it’s hard. You, you, you kind of like, you push yourself, but going to a stretch artist is pure masochist activity where they basically stretch you and it hurts all the time and you know it’s going to be a huge pain. It was very similar, , to basically to gain knowledge into all those other domains and, and to become great at it and kind of to divinism.So, Matt: , Did you have to, , take a different approach to the things that you’d been doing before? So you have product managers and developers and QA’s as you went from building software for other people to building software for your own products. Did that mean that those core functions needed to change mindset as well as building the other services around it?Or was it a similar sort of approach for the, for the core and then augmenting with those other skills and capabilities? Yaroslav: Yeah, so it’s actually very similar, but in the same sense, it’s very different because when you have a Product owner or a leader of some organization and you take him and you persuade him into a certain way, right?So we have this process called bridges or inception where we would take the domain of the product what we’re talking about It can be anything school system in US which is very different than than anyone would used to or In insurance space, , again in U. S., most of our clients are from U. S., , or Calendly, for example, , there’s a subtle, craft of booking events and closing the deals and keeping things tight, , and , we would use our bridges, , principle to build this massive board of, , who are the people that we’re helping?What are their issues that they’re having on an everyday basis? What are the benefits that they want to, to have? , what are the risks that they want to mitigate? What is the domain knowledge of the people that want to build the software? What is it something you know that other people don’t know?So basically, and you build this board of knowledge, everyone is looking at the same board, and everyone is reading the same cards. And… Our brain is not meant to read big pages of paper and be understanding everything from it. It would understand something from it. Our brain is more network y, right? It’s a network of connected events.So this is what we did on this whiteboard. We were putting one card, which meant one thing. For example, that it takes six… Six back and forths to book a meeting with someone. And if you hit the, or a do knowledge that if you hit a spot, , of booking a meeting within the first 10 minutes, then you have like a 90% chance of, , securing the deal faster than the other people because you just got someone cut in front of someone.So the, you know, there was something, uh, as a very basic, uh, important information about gallery and then for a salesperson. What do you mean? Everyone knows that. And then everyone doesn’t know that and they think there’s more important things to it. Like, you know, keeping settings of your meeting or, something like that. And, , when, when everyone, the product managers, engineers, and designers, when everyone takes time to actually talk about the things. and outline them into cards, they have those recorded clips, video clips in their head of knowledge , , that was connected to this one card.So every now, every time now, when you look at this card, you remember this clip and you remember this knowledge. So Bridges gives you this ability to literally be on the same page because you see this big sheet, big page of cards that, that we’re talking about, and then you’re pointing fingers to them when you make arguments. , and then we have another principle is called the heart, , which is you’re trying to figure out what is it that you need to build to, to make it’s like physical or digital appearance in the world so that everyone starts looking at it and say, Oh, this is what we’re talking about.I had a couple of variations in my head and he had a couple of variations in his head. But now as you start to building things, not from what’s most clear to you, but from what’s most important for the product. What are the most important forms and essences that the product needs to take shape of right and then and and then people are like aha This is this is what’s happening, right?Even after you had all those discussions So for example, if we if we go back to one of our products, which is a atlasian marketplace Add on, it’s a smart checklist So it’s a, it’s a checklist, , and it started from a super simple thing. It had a text area where you could write minus, , checklist items, plus would be a finished checklist item, and tilde would be in progress, x would be canceled checklist item.So it had a text area, , it was storing this into Atlassian. , marketplace as a custom field, and then it would have a saved button that would render that into an H ml, which had check boxes, the appropriate check boxes. And when you check the checkbox, what we did is we resave the whole text. And if two people would , , refresh the page, one person would keep it for like few days and then he would go and check on the checkbox.He would actually rewrite the old version of the checkbook. Which was fine. And we did it in just a few days. And then we delivered the product. And there was a product. And it, , it was like, you know, six months in the marketplace and about 700 companies installed it. And we just spent three days on it.And that’s it. There was a software. It gives you a lot of stuff. It gives you the ability to search. It gives you the ability to do automations. It gives you, it opened up so much stuff that we had in our, uh, in our ideas, but in order to build it as a cloud software with APIs and integrations and so on, it took us like a year of four engineers, which eventually it took, right?Chris: That’s a really good example of. Developers building software that they see a need for themselves, right? And they build something that other developers can use. But you talked about the fact that you had to have, in order to build products successfully, you needed all these other people.These support people and marketing and all of these. Is that? In order to, to bring those other perspectives to the developers that they don’t have Yaroslav: yes. Yes, and you do it in inception phase You try to do it in inception phase. It really depends what stage the software is on. And it’s called Inception, but it’s actually, it’s weird when you do Inception in a software that is 5 years old or 10 years old. So, we do Bridges Session.And, I think we as human beings are like, generally perfectionists somewhere down, deep down, right? And we want to build it, like, we want to put all the information and do everything proper. And like, do it the right way. Which, which is like, whatever. And then if you put too many people in the room, you’ll kill the dynamics of the, of the team., so as a leader, you have to understand, do you need to bring those marketing folks, because they might be hanging in the meeting, contributing nothing or being very confused of what are we talking about, or they might, they might contribute. So you need to understand what the dynamics will be in that room.And you’re, you’re kind of cooking a dish as a, as a person who runs this show, you’re cooking a dish and you need to understand what to add there, right? You don’t want to add the dessert, the soup and the main dish and all of that and put it into a blender and say, here, here’s a nutritious smoothie.Please eat that. It’s not going to be that great, but so you have to be careful on a lot of those things. And specifically the most important thing, I think, is the team dynamics when, when team is not confused and they’re happy. Excited about the journey. This is like, is one of the most important things.So this is what you start, you should be cooking from. And, you, you need to add just enough ingredients and then explain it to the team, explain them enough of vision. Not too much, because if you explain too much vision, they’ll go like, oh, you’re a lunatic. Or if you explain to little vision, you say, well, this is a copycat thing.Like, you’re not inventing anything, right? So you need to be very careful. And once your team is healthy, you can start building around them the next layer of team members. Those could be in support and sales, , those could be other engineers and product managers and so on and that, that was one of, this is one of our most important, , ingredients.The proper onboarding and appropriate dynamics of the team. Just feeling of people, and, and kind of like nudging them into certain direction. And for them to have their own ownership of, um, of how, how to, how to do it. You kind of say what, and they say how, and then you, you dance around understanding that.Matt: There was a, uh, interesting discussion, , on the, show signal group, today about the, the description of building software as engineering and actually what you’ve described there is really, I think, really interesting because what you’ve described there is actually software is almost what comes out of the social interactions that you have between people with particular technical skills, but it’s, it is very easy.You know, the software that is produced can be incredibly influenced by the relationships that exist between the people who are producing it between the customer and the people producing it and being able to understand the way in which that kind of social fabric sits together in the way in which software is built, because there are so many options that you can take, and there are so many ways that you can do things.And there are so many, decisions to be made that could take you in a good direction or a bad direction. It all comes down to you. At the core, the people in the relationships between them.Yaroslav: Yeah, it does. And it’s all very tricky. All those subjects are very tricky. There, there are some rule of thumbs, but basically, and there are like, there’s a negative and positive rule of thumbs.If your team has good dynamics and they, they respect one another and respect them. very important, , element, then, then they’re going to get, they’re going to be better, but only if they only have respect and they don’t have knowledge how to build something. But if they don’t have respect and they just want to be mean to each other and crap on each other’s, , pull requests and, and, and so on.Then, because people are big children, let’s, let’s face it, there’s, there’s no adults in this world. Um, looking at what the, you know, the heads of states are doing in, in, in the world. It’s like, well, I’m, I’m sorry, there’s zero adults. There’s no fast way of, of doing it. You got to, you got to force through it.You have to, you have to slowly, , build the team from the proper people, proper leaders, proper dynamic, , and be very into it. And that’s why I, most of those 16 years where my learning years, , and like, I’m an engineer. I love to write code. I don’t get to do it that much nowadays because we have, you know, 70, 80 engineers in the company who, who, who are really great at it., but it was the, the core skill that I got. And then we learned the principle of T shape, , which is like expert generalist, right? And then only expert generalist can understand one another. If you put a smart product manager and a smart engineer in the room and you ask them to communicate, and then you like look from this like one side glass.You’ll see how much miscommunication and, , struggle there is, might be, right? They might just work it out, but they might be so confused. And then the program manager doesn’t want to feel silly. And he would say, ah, yeah, I get it. But he didn’t, you can see it in their face. And then the engineer would say, yeah, sure., but he was like, well, I’m just going to do whatever. So I have this saying that I love, which is like, engineers won’t build what you want. They build what they understood. And they will basically do it based on their dynamics. Right. And then they, they think like they have all those weird rules and wrong dynamics and other companies and so on, where people said, like, you know, someone said like, don’t touch that, like, uh, don’t touch it if it works or why didn’t you touch it?, it could be improved. And then, and then they live in this crazy world in between, , where they need to kind of figure out who you are and what is your management style? Are you like a bad manager? Do you really understand what’s happening? And they’re really trying to be productive. Like. Play it cool, don’t be a fool, and so on.And then they start building some things like, you know, login screen or forgot password screen, and do some super great method of super authentication there, or some new way of doing stuff. And then the product manager will say, So are you, like, progressing? He’s like, Yeah, yeah, look, it’s… I already have three screens, three useless screens that no one probably needs.Chris: But you’re talking about, , you’re talking about experience, aren’t you?You need people with experience and, and as you say, , a view of more than one area in order to be able to make those judgments. And I’m thinking about the. Claims that we’re currently, being made about the ability of, , large, large language models and AI powered systems to write code and how that’s going to improve, , code of productivity by 40 percent or whatever it is.And I wonder whether that ability to. Understand or to be able to judge whether something is understood and whether people because it’s all very well having an ability to increase your productivity by 40 percent if you’re 40 percent in the wrong direction. How important will that sort of human side be in future?Do you think it become more and more important than the technology technological side because the commodity stuff is done by the computer or will we never reach that stage? Yaroslav: So I, so basically I remember watching this movie about, the , band, super, super popular, Queens. And there was this time when Queens separated, right?And then the, , the soloists, , just went the opposite direction and he hired the best musicians and he wasn’t able to produce great music with them who were like, supposedly be more professional than the folks that he was hanging out with., and I’ll explain where I’m going with that. And then basically he came back and they started to produce great music after that.And, a lot of people say, well, I’ll… Programming is dead. LLMs will write all your code. They definitely can write a lot of code, a lot of hallucinated code as well. but who will make sure that it actually is the right code that they wrote? What, , some of the more popular thoughts, are that they’re not here to replace someone.They’re here to speed everyone up. Those people are professionals who, who need stuff done. Very often you would say like, I just need to say, I have it in my head. I just need to type it in. It’s not necessarily type it in, you type it left to right, top to bottom. You try and then you figure it out, and then it might take you years when you eventually figure it out, right?And then, and NLM is a pair, is a person that you kind of collaborate with, and you work with. But the software is being created, like there’s a saying, the best ideas, the best idea should win, right? But I find that the best idea is not a particular one idea.The best idea is a Frankenstein of all the ideas that you had in the room that you break down and then you, sometimes you make a completely different thing it’s not like, you know, with, with people you, you cannot build it, but with LLM it will be like this perfect thing that will build exactly what you want. Very often you don’t know what you want. You have a feeling. Or like Steve Jobs was saying.Keep on going. I’ll tell you when we’ll, we’ll reach there. What does it even mean? What kind of a product management device is that? Right? And then so, so there’s a lot of ideas and a lot of directions, but you have to evaluate them, verify them and think about them as a team. And LLM is just a member of that team.Matt: I think there’s also something interesting about how, and this, I think in a number of industries, the idea of automating out the kind of the grunt work is., attractive because you can take out human cost if you can get the, the LLMs to be able to generate stuff that otherwise would be fairly tedious to produce. But there is something about learning the art of a particular profession through doing the tedious stuff. It’s putting, putting the time in to be able to understand how the fundamentals work., how will developers learn to do good development? If a lot of the, drudge work is taken away, which is the sort of stuff that you may give to a more junior developer.So who is starting to learn the. I don’t know if there’s an answer to that. I don’t know if it’s an unfair, , fear, but it does feel that the stuff that is most likely to get automated will be the stuff that actually does serve a value in the same way that, I don’t know. Meetings in person in offices served a value, but it wasn’t the meeting.It was all the stuff that sat around it. Yaroslav: I think, you know, LLMs just can produce much more things in a shorter period of time, not necessarily the right things. , there’s a lot of discussions, and there’s a lot of speculation. There’s some principles, , like if you put a lot of compute into, a task and generate a thousand ideas and then validate them and then build on top of that, you can actually like for like a million dollar, you can make, uh, allow them to do amazing things as compared to just sending one prompt, which is not well, you know, , documented.But this is the same with humans. , I tend to look at an LLM and then work with him and use the guidance of an LLM like I would be of a wise friend who doesn’t judge you, who generally has genuine knowledge on stuff, who is hard working and is not trying to just like, you know, look other way when you have a conversation with him, and he doesn’t…Talk shit behind your back on you and then basically when you do that, and then you would you would you know Sometimes people say well, I told the left to write a book for me and it didn’t I was like, well Did you try it with a human to write a book for you? Then like you you have to show some respect you have to explain some certain things You need to explain the context and what’s happening and then where where you’re at Where are you struggling business like just you know, treat them treat treat the thing with respect I think, conscious approach is the center of all of it.So if you consciously and genuinely are trying to do something,, with people or with LLMs, and then you really, consciously means you need to understand. , but the world will probably divide into people who genuinely want to do something and then LLMs will help them with that and the world will be just watching an infinite amount of Netflix generated by the LLMs in some kind of a virtual reality matrix.Matt: Another theme for, , your business is you are very much a distributed hybrid global thing. And part of that is because you’ve had to be able to think, I guess, quite Uh, well, you’ve had to deliver quite a lot of change to how you operate over the last two or three years, because your business started based in Ukraine and you’re now working in all sorts of places across the world.What was the last few years been like be able to have to re rethink how you operate? Yaroslav: Actually, we, we, we think how we operate 10 years ago, when we allowed people to do remote work before it was cool. Way before COVID and people were, you know, traveling to Thailand or Bali before that was cool and, and, and spending some time there for months and working from there and just generally synchronizing their hours into around European hours.It doesn’t matter if you’re like in America, like I get up at 4am to work with people. Or when you’re in Bali, let’s say you, you were up, up until midnight. And, and that’s the problem with the person that, that moved, that shifted. So you live in the morning and then, you know, you work at the night or in US, it’s the other way around.I started very early. And then after 2 p. m. I basically have my, my life to, to attend to. , and we’re in 24 countries right now and in 79 cities, which is interesting. I’m sure his numbers, right? But it might be, there’s a lot of solo of people in just one city, right? We, because of this consciousness approach and because of this artistic beginning, humble artistic beginnings, we always were hiring people who are able to participate in this creative process and actually deliver products., And then we created this core, , principles and we saw what works, what doesn’t work. And, , we’re now, we hire about 0. 66 percent out of the market. And in the last three years, we reviewed 50, 000 candidates out of them, we hired 150. people. So it’s, , it’s a ridiculous amount. , I use coupler, our data product, just to pull the calendar data, calendar lead data and calendar data.And we have, , 160 meetings in the past three weeks with candidates. Is it an intrapol or it’s a thing called the parent interview, or that was a full day where we spend, , time with the person or half of a day. It’s just a lot of, a lot of selection process. We, we really put a lot of efforts into selecting people and, , that’s why it works.And we don’t care where you’re at. We just care if you are able to be this part of this process and then there’s enough people to onboard you. Um, you know, there’s enough people with 10 years of experience and then nine years of experience, eight, seven, three, two, one, and then we have been growing. Uh, we didn’t grow for most of the time we started growing.And before that, we were pretty static, you know, we’re at the same size at around the same revenue for like 10 years. And then in the last six years, we started growing like 20, 30, 40, 60, 60 percent per year. Um, and, um, just using all those principles that we learned and everything that we practiced and, and.You know, sometimes we were, there was a time when I was helping a lot of people and spending with them and holding them and trying to help them to deliver something. And then I looked around that I’m helping them to deliver like regular daily job. And the rest of the people are delivering this daily job by themselves with zero help.I was like, wait, wait a minute. It’s not fair to those people maybe I help them to deliver the job better rather than how those people deliver their basic job And this is what’s our one of our principles. Is that a person has to be good at basic Work and if they’re not a good basic work, we cannot really help them because there’s a lot of help needed For that regard, and there’s, there’s no, you know, there’s no age, uh there’s, there’s no age or race or whatever that is a part of this requirement.It’s just, can you do a basic job? And then, you know, and sometimes people complain, they’re like, you didn’t give me a great enough description yet. Maybe you didn’t give a perfect description, but those other 150 people are productive with this description and you’re not. And I’m sorry, but we cannot produce this description.You have to be more dynamic in this. , you know, like just, just learn this approach and learn it for your peers. And, and then if you can, great. And if you cannot, then, then we will just have to move on to someone else out of the one of the 50, 000 people that we look through. And the other people are very, you know, they’re happy.They’re, they’re productive. They, they enjoy it. They love the principles. They come to do it. Matt: How many of the people that go through that selection process are then not a fit for you? So if you talk about that kind of the people who can’t do the basics there Yaroslav: I would say people always can do the basics especially for the injury sake or for the first three months., But then they have their own Ways to look at things and then they they might kind of degrade their quality of work on a daily basis And say this is too much for me But we’re always very transparent and that’s why we have a full day and we were super transparent of what is it that we expect.It’s more like 20 to 30 percent. Matt: And in terms of being able to maintain a culture within all of this, you talked there about onboarding and having people who are able to support others coming into, what other things do you do to be able to establish some sorts of identity as an organization, when you’ve got such a distributed workforce?Yaroslav: You know, there are distributed, but they’re still working a particular team, , on a particular thing. And we always make sure that we never start a project with a new person, just a new person. That’s it. And there’s no, like, even management oversight is too little. , You have to be a part of some group of, there’s so many factors that get slashed throughout daily work.And we always make sure that there’s someone who understands our culture, who can pair. The person, I mean, if you pair the person for, you know, five days a week, uh, for a particular period of time, you, you exchange. Everything., thoughts, culture, the principles, comments on your code. There’s so much that happens.And this pairing is very, very important for all, for all sorts of work. , and we do it, you know, in accounting, in recruiting, in support, in anything., and then this culture is kind of shared. Actually, McDonald’s is pretty good at it. Their, their pair teach their people. Um, you, you would come in and you would see the junior person and the other person explaining them and showing them, learn by doing, basically, , what is it that they’re doing.And then this culture is being shared. Now this culture is, , , , everyone is a part of the culture and they were executed within the culture. I have no immunity. You know, if, if I break the culture, people can, can bash me and do whatever they want to me. So I’m, I’m, um, I’m the same member of the, of, of the s culture.So, and then, you know, and then this culture gives birth to, to really great things and I think it’s, it’s an, uh, organism on its own basically nowadays.Chris: Ah, thank you . , that’s a really interesting, uh, story, uh, around your business and the culture within, , what have you got planned for this week in the, in the week ahead? Is it an exciting week? Have you got plenty going on? Yaroslav: It’s a very exciting week. , we have some product launches that I’m looking forward for.They’re being in work for quite a while and when it’s a product that we launch in addition to our current product, we really try to make sure that our clients will get a great experience right on. So we’re going to deliver our second product to the Atlassian marketplace and third, I think, at the same time.And that’s an AI product and AI products are very exciting, , nowadays. And then there’s, there, there’s some deadlines, some interesting deadlines that we need to meet, like, uh, the Atlassian event is coming out in Las Vegas in April and the deadline to submit a speech. To it is, uh, 1st of December that we just figured yesterday that it is 1st of December, so, uh, we need to, put it together.What are you doing? What are you Chris: doing here? You should be writing a speech. Yaroslav: Yeah, I am, I am. Actually, I’ll just use the whole podcast as a speech. Ask the, the LLM to, to make a presentation out of it and I think it’ll work. And then there’s, there’s a lot of family stuff. I have four kids. I have four daughters.Two year old, six year old, 14 year old, and 20 year old. And then each one of them always has a big drama and multiple medium dramas and a couple of small dramas. You know, after, after I seen 50, 000 people in recruiting, I was like, well, I need to make my daughters be great and then go try to figure that out.Right. And we did like, I don’t know, 50 products, probably 50 software projects throughout our life cycle. And now I’m only starting to figure it out. So if I would have 50 kids, that would make sense. I would know how to raise them, but you never know how to raise them. And, uh, I think we’re getting a dog soon as well, so we need to figure that out.So, that’s it. Every week, very fun week. Nowadays, life is very slow. One day is so much, is a lot. Like, it can change, it can make it or break it. So it’s very reasonable. Chris: All right, you know, I don’t envy you, , four kids and a dog coming up. But, , then again, you could be, , Matt. What’s going on? What’s going on in your life, Matt?What’s your, week hold? Matt: , it’s going to be a relatively quiet week because a lot of my colleagues are up in Manchester for a series of events, , which I’m not going to be there for. A series of unfortunate events. No, no, no. It’s unfortunate I will not be at the events, but there will not be unfortunate events.It’s all good. And then, , the weekend will beckon to the annual ceremony of buying the Christmas tree, which involves initial excitement and, , a sense of festive cheer. And then by tree number 76, which isn’t up to the standard that, uh, the, the matriarch of the house insists upon for symmetricality of trees, even though they are naturally growing objects that are not symmetrical., and then tempers afraid, shouting happens, and eventually we go, Oh, that one will do! And, uh, it gets shoved into the back of the car, and then we take it home to stick it in the corner of the house and… Stick stuff on it. , i’m looking forward to it even though and we were laughing about the fact that it almost invariably Ends up in in arguments and short tempers because the amount of decision making that has to be involved in the tree How about you?How are you? What’s your week head looking like? Chris: Well, actually, yeah, quite quiet compared to last week. , not so much travel. , but the house has been upside down for weeks because we’ve had the kitchen and I’ve been decorating all weekend. , something I enjoy doing and then no doubt it will be Christmas decoration time, but we, we have the annual, , tradition of getting me getting the tree out of the loft.That’s, we have a, we have a, a You know, faux tree that, gets put up every year. It’s a perfectly good tree, and I, and I have done the real tree thing. And you think I’m dragging one of them damn things into my house, only to have to drag the damn thing out again after Christmas, shedding needles all over the place.No, no, I’m not doing that. So, , the, , plastic one will do. Matt: Oh, and who says the spirit of Christmas is dead? There we go. Anyway, , that’s it for another week. We have two shows now left until the, , The Christmas break. So, next week we have got a look ahead in a special edition of Ask WB40 to ask about things that might be happening in 2024.So, , drop us a line if you have some ideas for that. And then we’ve got one more guest before the end of the year and then we’ll be taking a break over the Christmas festivities. , Yaroslav, thanks again for joining this week. It’s been a delight. Thank you. And we will be back, same place, next week.Yaroslav: Thank you for listening for WB40. You can find us on the internet at wb40podcast. com and all the good podcast platforms.

This week we chat with Gavin Jones to talk through some of the challenges and opportunities when looking at collaborating and technology.You can find out more about Gavin and his work at:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MeeTimeWebsite: https://www.meetimeservices.comLinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gavin-jones-meetimeEpisode Transcript… (any errors are the fault of the AIs)Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 278 of WB40, the weekly podcast with me, Matt Ballantine, Chris Weston and Gavin Jones.Welcome back. Uh, we’ve had a week off. , it was a award ceremony last week. My eldest son won an award, which was all a bit surreal. He appeared to win the award for winning an award. There we go. , Chris back again. , are you well? Chris: I am, thank you. , I think you should be downplaying that, uh, it doesn’t, you know, any sort of award is good, you know, at that age, when you’re, when you’re finding your way in the world, I think you should be a bit more, , chipper about an award, even if it’s winning an award.Matt: Yes, you’re, you’re right. I think my big problem is that it’s a thing, it’s an organisation called the… Jack Petchy Foundation. And Jack Petchy is an East End boy, made good, , made a lot of money, I think in timeshares, I can’t remember, but wants to give all, you know, give stuff back and give other people a good start in life, which is a very laudable thing.The only problem I’ve got with Jack Petchy, he was the first person to own Watford Football Club after Elton John sold up and he completely buggered us up. And I can’t let that go. And it’s like 30 years ago, but I’m, you know, this is the way football is. Chris: That’s a really terrible reason to be down on your son’s achievement.I mean, really, you do need to get over yourself. Matt: Not only that, as the thing started up in the Rose Theatre in Kingston, so there’s hundreds of people there, and the Deputy Mayor of Kingston, , Council stood up and he said, I’d forgotten what it was that I knew about Jack Petchy. I’d forgotten that he used to own Watford Football Club.He’s like, no, don’t bring attention to it right at the start. I thought he’d been able to put that aside, but no. So there we go. , how’s your week been? Chris: Well, my week has been fine. My week has been essentially, , coping with the, the, an upside down house because we’re having some work done, which is, , extremely, , middle class, isn’t it?It’s not something that, , happens very often around here. , I don’t know, I normally have the money, and I certainly don’t have it now. So my time has been spent either decorating to cover for the fact that everything’s, , in a mess or Having conversations with so called project managers from so called, , companies that do these sort of things., and messing about with electrics, which is what I was doing just before this podcast. Which is why my head’s a bit scrambled. Because you know where you’ve got, you know if you’ve got your switches with your, like your landing light, where you’ve got, like, You could, you could switch them up upstairs and downstairs as well.I managed to take one out and then replace it and then put it back together exactly as it was before. Now it doesn’t work properly. And now I’ve got to try and figure out where these completely similar color wires come from, where they go, whether they’re neutral, it’s live, switch live. common. So, so yeah,Matt: like, like online diary management, , that sort of thing is a special branch of mathematics that the normal folks like you and I will never understand.Chris: I did understand it once I’ve done it. I’ve done it before. And once I understood it, it was like, I, I saw things from a completely different perspective. It was like being on a higher plane. But I’m not on that plane anymore and I need to re re ascend to that plane in order to figure this out. Which I am going to do at the weekend now because I can’t be bothered with it anymore.But, uh, no, my week’s been alright, you know, it’s good. Been a good week, thank you very much. How about you? Matt: , I have been doing lots of things. There’s lots of things on at the moment. There’s potentially a new client. There’s a, , couple of clients on the go at the moment with us thinking about what we do next and work involved in that.I am involved in preparing for a, an event in Manchester, which is happening next week, but I won’t actually be there. So having to be able to prep everybody and make sure everything’s aligned and everybody knows what they’re doing. And I am also doing an event on Thursday night in London where we are going to be, Doing keynote karaoke, which will be fun and I’m hosting all of that.So that’s entertaining and I’m sure that there are other some other things as well And so it’s just like lots and lots and lots and lots of bits I’m supposed to be writing a magazine article which is due by the 19th of December and that is reminding me desperately of the Douglas Adams quote about loving deadlines and loving the noise as they whoosh past It’s definitely feeling like that.So, , yeah, it’s busy, it’s good, busy, good, busy. And, , and then trying to keep up with, you know, politics and what on earth is going on at OpenAI and, you know, that sort of stuff as well, which is of course easily distractible. That’s the thing, isn’t it? When you’re busy, you’re always looking out for something to distract you.Ha ha!, anyway, joining us this week is, is Gavin. Gavin, , how has your week been? Gavin: My week was, , good, thank you. Yeah. Work-wise, I was mostly trying to keep up with, , all of the renaming, I mean announcements that, , came outta Microsoft’s event, , last week, which had to re-watch things quite a few times to, did they say something slightly different?Yeah. Is that paid for? Is that not? But yeah. Is it, Matt: is this a good, , long tradition of Microsoft’s appalling ability to brand things? Gavin: They even joked that they were bad at it, but then they also didn’t make it much better in the following sentence. Matt: Oh, yes, it’s, from, from the time that I worked there, I think that there was a, there was a second release of the version of Windows that only ran on the underpowered ARM based tablet that they had for Windows 8.And I can’t remember what they ended up calling that, but it was so ungainly, it was untrue. I need to kind of hark back to those days when at least they had a year to be able to Seems to have gone out the window We will be talking this week about , some of the stuff that you do So rather than trade it before we start talking about it.I say we should probably just crack onChris: So Gavin joins us because today we’re going to talk about collaboration and we’re going to talk about how we do it or don’t do it, particularly in offices these days. And this also touches on some of the stuff that Matt’s been putting out into the universe around where do we work and what the nature of remote work really is. And, , the reason we’ve got Gavin with us is because that Gavin teaches people how to use Microsoft Teams. , how to, not just how to use it, but how to get the best out of it and how to set up collaboration in a way that benefits an organization. So, welcome Gavin. Nice to have you on with us. , , you did this, , for one of your employers, , as I recall, and then decided it was worth, , branching out and doing it as a, full time job.Is that right? Gavin: That’s right, yeah. So I spent, , the last 15 years at Molson Coors, the beer company, doing lots of different jobs there, but nothing in IT. So I started in finance, business partnering, went into logistics. There’s some bits on kegs, some demand management forecasting, and then it ends up on some like bigger projects.So like integrated business planning, which was like a, I have to run the business sort of projects. And then some it wants an SAP implementation, trade promotions, management system implementation. And my last job there was transformation manager working for the sales director. Who’s only brief when starting the job was, I think I was spending too much time on internal stuff and not enough time selling.Go and do something and, , of course it was right because it’s, you know, a massive global company and like most big companies We’re just completely hamstrung by internal stuff, emails, meetings, and it’s very nice company to work for I should say, but With, you know, if you go too far on anything it turns into a negative So because everyone was like really wanted to, you know, never wanted to annoy anybody then that just turned into like bigger and bigger meetings to try and Make sure everyone’s okay.And, we had some, , licenses from the U S business, which again, Microsoft renaming was at the time called workplace analytics, which to me was better named than now called Viva Insights because Viva Insights you get for free, but also you get Viva Insights that you pay for, which is confusing.But this particular one, you could like, it scans everyone’s emails and meetings, anonymizes it. You can see how everyone’s sort of working together. So if there’s any pockets of brilliance or. Otherwise across the organization and you know how people work in and can link it to HR data and all sorts of stuff So there’s a good stuff But but basically proved that the sales director was correct with like spending lots of time on internal stuff and not very much time with customers from the data that Microsoft collected and Yeah, I’d use slack in a side project At the time, Teams had only just come out, which, and at the time, it was before the pandemic, so it wasn’t, they weren’t borrowing things from Zoom at the time, they were borrowing things from Slack, and so, , I thought, well, that seems like a good thing to do, there was some research come out from Slack saying that, If you move everything to slack, you can decrease emails and meetings and increase employee engagement.So all the things that we were after doing and, led a 12, 18 month long project to try and get supply chain, marketing, sales, all working better together. reducing internal time on stuff, so reducing meetings and emails, getting more time for well being, and more time to go and sell stuff., and because we had the analytics turned on, sort of found out that my approach sort of saved up to three hours per person per week on average, and decreased after hours work by 30 percent. And I thought it was a good idea to go and try to help other companies do the same thing. , but my timing was probably off because I decided to do that in…April 2020, just as everything was being locked down, but, , such is the nature of trying to set up a business, never a good time. And, here we are now, three years on. Chris: , this doesn’t sound like it’s a damning indictment of anybody, including Molson Cause, because let’s face it, we all have those problems.As you say, it’s, it’s a, it’s a common issue around the sales people in particular, you know, and I think. No matter where you go, we used to have a term once upon a time about salespeople being in the office, and as much as they used to almost applaud the work that they brought in through the process, because partly it’s…One of the reasons we realized this, this is a company I worked for many years ago, is because they really didn’t trust that the work would be done and prioritized unless they were there. And, , so part of their service as they saw it to their customers was to make sure it got back to them in good time, you know, as they expected it to.So that was something we had to deal with because having salespeople hanging around in the office where The sales almost certainly weren’t, they weren’t going to sell anything standing in the office. , , wasn’t a very good idea. So most companies I’ve been to since then have had a similar problem, around sales and also around other areas.I mean, when I’ve worked in IT departments, you know, the amount of meetings we would have in IT departments where I think it was just to keep people from feeling that they hadn’t missed out on something. So everybody got invited to these interminable meetings. And then of course. Lots of people would decide these meetings were a waste of time, so it wouldn’t turn up.And then the whole point of the meeting would be, it would be, you know, it would fall apart anyway because the , the only, only people that would be in them are the people who had paranoid that they didn’t know everything that was going on Called it. Yeah. . Yeah. And those that called it, you know, who, who, who really should have seen the light and C it by then?So. You know, these are problems that everybody has, , and we’ve been through, as you say, you know, as you say, unfortunate timing for you, but we’ve been through this kind of massive experiment where everybody was forced to go and work from whatever. , you know, whether work from home, from the sofa, from the kitchen table, from an office, you know, a home office or whatever, or, or a McDonald’s or a WeWork or what, you know, whatever it might be., and now we’re kind of coming back together. So I guess the question we’ve got to ask ourselves is what’s. What’s normal now? And what is the, you know, what should we expect from our workplace and our collaboration tools? Now, you know, do we really know that? Have we got a, do you think we’ve got handlers organisations on that?Gavin: Yeah, well, the handout was interesting in that it forced everyone to adopt something new, although really it’s like we’ve been using the phone for quite a while. And group calling and just moving that onto video was probably a bigger change that for a lot of people, especially if they’re sat in the PJs, but it’s like, well, the old way is gone.So if you want to do any work, you need to get on board with the new thing. So the change was relatively easy because the old thing has been taken away. And I think. A lot of organizations struggle with Microsoft adoption, although I hate the word adoption because it’s all what you want to adopt it for, you don’t need to link it to something that, you know, what benefit is it going to have, , one, for anyone to care and two, for why you should care if you’re running the company.But yeah, the old thing’s been taken away. So everything else with Microsoft, like there’s millions of ways to do stuff. And I guess from the pandemic, then one, the change to go into like video calling very easily, which is why Microsoft was like, okay, we need to borrow more stuff off Zoom rather than borrowing stuff off Slack to keep up, as well as the nature of the time. But yeah, everyone sort of carried on working in the same way. With new technology. So what ended up happening was that oh, we’ll just look how those would be All have the same meetings, but now they’re online and there’s no walking in between meeting rooms There’s no commute to work and there’s no commute from work.So then everyone just had a meeting meeting meeting me to be oh This is brilliant because we never like back to back meetings finish one start the next one and then your entire day was meetings So it just perpetuated all the bad things of how people working without really taking a step back to think well actually Do we even need these meetings as we as we’re saying before the call started? I’m, not sure that people still have got a handle on it microsoft keep releasing more and more stuff as As the nature of tech is that everything keeps changing Sure people move the buttons around just for the sake of it So the next time someone logs on they’ve not used it for a while.Oh Hang on, that button’s moved, just to, , to catch people out. But, , but they are doing lots of, innovative stuff that, keeps coming out. But I don’t think a lot of organisations have really, still since the pandemic, taken a step back and think, well, how do we want to work? Where do we want people to be?And, you know, the age old, age old seems quite old now, but do we need people in the office or do we let people work from home? Rather than really think a lot of what work are they doing and what sort of culture do we want to build? I think is a better starting question. Matt: Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? There’s some things that seem to have become sacrosanct about the the natural order of things in office and knowledge work as if we emerged from the Planes of the Serengeti with a tablet in our hand, and it’s fascinating because, , fun to, I mean, I’ve, I’ve just celebrated working for 30 years and the, the monitors are a lot smaller than they were when I started working and., we have connectivity at home, which we didn’t when I started working. But the layout of offices, actually, the, the fashions of the colour schemes within offices has changed. But the fundamentals of how they’re just laid out in open plan offices really haven’t changed very much at all in the 30 years I’ve been working.And the, the working mechanisms, the, meetings that we have and the, the ways in which we communicate and the structures and the hierarchies. I don’t think of really changed very much, despite the fact that we’ve had 30 years of quite rapid evolution of information technology that should have maybe had more of an impact than it did.I guess one of the things that may be as a problem is that, , most software, certainly most collaboration software has been developed primarily with the people who develop it in mind. So teams or slack or any of these tools are primarily geared around the idea of a. a West Coast American software company and that then has weird manifestations in where it doesn’t work and then where people need to adapt the tool to be able to make it somehow be be useful so For example your sales teams or in my last role working in a housing association our caretakers and our care home half of our workforce wasn’t office based, but it took the pandemic for everybody in the office to realize that, which is fascinating., there was some work I was doing with the civil service about seven or eight years ago, I guess now. And there were. , private secretaries, so the, the executive assistants to very senior civil servants. And they were horrified with the idea that the collaboration tools in the Microsoft platform would assign changes to documents to them because they were working on behalf of their superior.And it was really important that the work that they did should be seen as being done by somebody else because that’s how the structure in the hierarchy. And then even down to really, you know, weird things like the use of things like emojis in, , office culture now. I put a thing out on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago about the incredible variation that there is in interpretation of emojis.And the kind of internet speak that the example I use was LOL, where my mum’s best friend used it exclusively to mean lots of love. So you’d end up with these really weird text messages like, I’m really sorry to hear about your grandma, LOL. And it’s like, well, what’s going on? So there’s, I think there’s this weird thing where we’re kind of, we have tools that have been designed really with either very general.Principles in mind or actually really quite specific principles that aren’t most organizations and then having to find ways to be able to meld and adapt them to be able to actually get them to be useful in different contexts. Gavin: Yeah, I think you’re right. I mean, I often wonder if anyone at Microsoft knows.How to use Teams, apart from how they use it at Microsoft, to be honest, because, well, I like the story of Slack, because it was made, they weren’t designing, they weren’t trying to design Slack, they were like making a computer game, they all got bored of emails and meetings, and so, to make them make the computer game faster, they designed something internally.That could like help them collaborate better and then no one’s ever heard of the computer game because it was either didn’t come out It was a flop, but then they ended up developing slack and then the law actually that we could sell this to other companies So at least that was like born out of a real pain that they then solved and I think Microsoft tried or was it rumors at the time that Microsoft tried to acquire it and got turned down.So then they ended up obviously making teams to Compete with slack then as with everything Microsoft there’s got a lot of baggage. So then there was lots of Technical debt, I suppose what a better word where they’re like trying to link it to sharepoint And there are loads of things that are better so like threaded chat in teams I think it’s the best.Thing that Microsoft make and, and the biggest, the much better than Slack and better than most things, , any other ways of collaborating, but Microsoft never talk about it. So it’s like one of my main fundamental things is you can get that right. You can save like everything else is easy or irrelevant down the line.Uh, but Microsoft will, like, never talk about it, and always leave the development of that last with any new feature. Like, oh come on, that’s the main thing that’s saving people time, and they don’t even know that. Because I guess they’re so massive, that there’s no, they, they, like, the way they set stuff up can’t possibly be very simple.Whereas for like, a small, medium sized company, Microsoft’s like, well, we don’t know how to make it simple, because you can just do whatever you want, we don’t care, we just make loads of different apps, and whether they fit together or not, you know, just use whatever, they’re all in a bundle, and they’re all free once you’ve paid for the thing.So their advice is never very, yeah, you could do that, you could do that, you know, you’re still paying us, we don’t care. Whereas, I think, hopefully the niche that I’m trying to carve out is like, I’ve actually got an opinion about the best way that you should use the things that you’re paying for. And, I’m not particularly a Microsoft fan.I think they’re doing loads of good stuff. Pragmatically, everyone’s paying for it, so you should get more out of it. But if they’re not the right thing to use, then I’ll recommend someone to use something else. But, like, there usually is a way that you can make it work better than people who weren’t using it already., but yeah, I think you’re right. It is, , an interesting take to say, well, actually I think with all tech, like there’s a very, it’s born out of a very small subculture in a tiny geographical location. And then because of how they, like, they can disseminate information, it’s then spread around the globe without much thought.It’s like, well, it’s actually, does this work for like Billy Builders in Doncaster? Not sure because it wasn’t built by them. It was built by some tech guy in San Francisco. Yeah Matt: So where do you start with a client? What’s the thing that a client is asking you for help for and then? What do you do to to be able to go from that that first engagement into actually helping them?Gavin: Yeah, good question So I mean Chris Introduce me as doing Microsoft Teams training, which I don’t not do, but I don’t think of myself as doing that if I, when I think about what I do. So I, what I’m mostly interested in saving someone time at work to increase sales or try, you know, increase wellbeing and just naff off early and see their friends and family., and happen to use Microsoft to do that, but usually there’s lots of ways that they could improve the way they’re working without using any technology at all. So there might be just like some process changes, there might be some tech stuff we can link it to, if they’re, if they’re interested in technology that might be a way in to say well actually you can use this new thing and if they like new things then, then they’re bought in.Because I’ve got a YouTube channel that sort of overlapped my corporate job because I only started making videos because I was having to train people, they’re asking the same question all the time, and I’m like well, There’s only one of me. I’ll just scale myself by pre recording videos.If they ask the same question, I’ll just direct them to the video. And if they’ve still got questions, then we can pick up on Team’s channel. , and I didn’t think that information was out there. So I was like, HR, do you mind if I put these videos on YouTube? there’s anything out there at the moment. And if so, do you want to brand it as the company or brand it as me?And they’re like, yeah, that’s cool, but the latter. So, , , those YouTube videos started. It’s like. Here’s how to do something specific on a specific Microsoft app. And so a lot of people that come to me, like, well, can you just do some training? And I was like, well, what do you think is going to happen after half an hour training session for 200 people?Hmm. Don’t know probably. Well, we don’t know what we don’t know. It’s like, well, cool, but I could train you on every single feature of every single Microsoft app that they make in your subscription and. Try and rattle through that in half an hour, but I wouldn’t even get through it. And most people wouldn’t pay attention, and if they do, they won’t remember most of it.And even the people that do pay attention and remember it, won’t be able to change anything, because they haven’t got enough buy in with the rest of the company to actually make any improvements. So, rather than do that, it’s a lot easier for me to come in. So I always think of myself as like a business consultant by stealth.I’m going in under the guise of like helping them with technology, but really it’s like, it’s a lot easier to see how they’re working, and then recommend some ways they can work better together. And happen to then use Microsoft to do that and then give them a plan, , of how to change because like with most things, people don’t give enough attention to like, well, how are you actually going to get people to change?Like I said before, if there’s no way of going backwards, then change is really easy. Like with most IT projects, we turn the old thing off and a new thing starting. But anything in Microsoft land, there’s a million ways to do stuff and the easiest way for anyone to do it, even if it’s slower than a new way.It’s still the old way because it’s a lot quicker for them to do it the old way rather than think, oh, hang on, yeah, I need to do it a new way. That’s usually where I start is, and that’s the most popular product is sort of going in, doing some group workshops, interviews. Usually what’s top of people’s minds of, , you know, usually the answer is within the employees level.What’s taking you ages? What bits do you hate? And it’s like, yeah, this manager is running this meeting all the time and it’s a waste of time and blah, blah. It’s like, cool. We can sort that out. , so one, it’s like helping them understand what’s possible and also it’s starting the change. Because like, if you’re talking to the employees, they at least feel heard before we then go back and say, Oh, actually, yeah, you said this is a big pain.We can, you know, help that out. Chris: You did talk at the start about people going from the pandemic and then doing the same things, but doing them online. So is there a danger that that’s what people try to do is they say is like they go, well, we have this meeting.We don’t think it’s of great value, but we’re too frightened to do away with it or analyze it too deeply. So we’re going to try and make it just like, make it slightly more. Gavin: Yeah, exactly that. Yeah, so I had, one of my, , most recent clients, it was another consulting firm. And , how they voiced the problem is like, well, we used to run in person workshops with.that, you know, any big company you’ve ever heard of they work with. We used to run in person workshops to get them into this new process of working. And, you know, we were really famous for like running really engaging workshops. We used to take them out after, you know, it was like two days of workshop.You used to take them out, have really big, lavish meals. And, you know, you’re bumping into people , , in the breaks. And, you know, you can… pull stuff together. People on a whiteboard over there and a whiteboard over there. You stood in the middle, you can hear them. And they’re like, well, online they’re trying to replicate the same thing.So like, well, we, then it’s like the online version is worse than what they used to do before. So they’re like, well, we need breakout rooms to do the same thing, but then we’re having trouble moving between breakout rooms. We’re trying to use Miro, but then not everyone’s got a license. You know, the, the client doesn’t know what to move on the Miro board of what we’ve tried X, Y, Z, all the technological solutions.So they would like after help with that, but after I’d been in and interviewed everyone, I was like, well, pragmatically. You, you know, they’re a sort of boutique consulting firm, so they’re, they’re, they’re sort of benefit, USP, however you want to badge it. They’re all older people, so they’ve got loads of experience.I guess, you know, they’re not an Accenture or a big consulting thing where they’re getting loads of graduates that then rock up, ask you loads of stuff, they don’t know anything, go back to their boss and then… Find out something and then come back again. Like, you know, most of the big boys, they’ve got loads of experience, so they’re really knowledgeable, but they’re really old.So then they’re not really up to speed with all the technology and stuff. And they don’t like to do that. They don’t want to do it. And so it’s like, well, that isn’t the solution. Actually, you need to strip all of that back and do something that’s really simple, like just using the chat to make it more engaging.Or, core problem, you haven’t rethought your product offer. In this new world. So it’s like, forget video calling. If you had to start from scratch in 2023, and you don’t want to go and travel around the world on planes, how would you get the change done in a client using some, some, you know, thought of what other people do now, like online courses, a place for people, for the client to collaborate with you asynchronously.It’s like, why do you keep, why do you need to run it like 20 people for two days? It’s like, let’s do more bite sized things, more asynchronous and, and, you know, think about like a, an online product offer. , and that might even generate you more revenue, because that might be a better engaging solution, which you won’t have a reputational risk of running what you used to run, but now in a, in a bad online environment.So, , I think people’s natural thing is to jump to what they do now. Even if you give them a new tech tool, which is why it’s better to sort of strip it back as a what’s your problem and try and address something fundamentally rather than a sticking plaster over the top. Matt: And I think in examples like that, there’s also something interesting about how much, , let’s be blunt, time and materials based costing and selling of stuff comes into play.Because if you are selling yourself on the basis of the time you input rather than the outputs you deliver. Then anything that reduces the time that you input is not a good thing. And so there’s a kind of inbuilt problem about driving efficiency in any model that involves me selling my time. Hopefully we’ve got somebody coming on in a couple of weeks who’s been doing some experiments around,, the use of generative AI in the software development. And he’s created using, , AI agents, a simulated development team, and he’s put the wind up himself quite dramatically, I think, from the conversation I had with him this week, because it can just do stuff and being able to, to be able to have the now to be able to work out how you set that together for, as I am a business that sells essentially on the basis of time and materials.Custom software. This is an existential challenge for us But actually it comes more fundamentally down You know, there’s all sorts of ways in which the technology should be enabling people to be able to spend less time doing things But it’s not always necessarily in their immediate interest to do that.There’s some tricky dynamics in that Yeah, Gavin: the time and materials one is it’s a very very tricky situation so I can see why people end up getting into it because if you’ve, especially in software development, if you’ve got like a not very clear defined solution, like no one knows how long it’s going to take. And if you’re employing people, it’s like, well, I still need to pay them, and I’m paying them on some basis of they need to work a bit of time for me., but then on the flip side, it’s like, well, if it’s truly knowledge work, and say you had to bill someone for an hour or a minute, it’s like, well, if I think up the best solution for them when I’m in the shower, And that would have taken me eight hours sat in an office at a desk with like, , I’m trying to block out all the noise from the office.Hang on. I’ve had a brainwave. It’s like, do you charge them for the eight hours? Or are you charging for the one minute of the brain thing? Do you charge them for 10 minutes of the shower? Or do you charge them for like, The eight hours you’re asleep if you think of something when you’re asleep. I was like, oh, yeah, they’ve got a solution and Yeah, it’s really I think it’s an interesting and tricky tricky And Matt: I think that there’s both in when do we work and where do we work for knowledge work?one of the biggest impacts I think that the pandemic has had has been allowing people to realise that it wasn’t that you went to work, you started working at the time you arrived at the office, and you finished working at the time you left the office. And that now feels for many people like a really weird, restrictive way of defining how they would do a job.And with collaboration tools and our ability to be able to access, you know, I mean we were tired to the office because we couldn’t get access to the stuff that was in the office. That’s gone and the last remnants of it have definitely now go, you know When when banks are able to get people working from home Here with a lot the last real stick in the muds about this because security or something It’s just because they had massive complexity that they couldn’t work out how to make accessible But I think it’s it’s it’s really interesting.So when it comes to helping , establish better working practice between organizations. So as opposed to it’s all my employees, but working with partners or customers or, or other groups, is that something that you started to, to look at? Gavin: Yeah. I mean, that always comes up pretty much with any engagement and I guess it’s only going to be more and more prevalent as companies, especially startups, don’t want to hire employees.They’ll just want to outsource things and have, you know, more contractors and. You know, employees themselves maybe want to leave and set their own company and be more like, gig economy type, type workers. And they’re, you know, like that because they can be more flexible and work with a different amounts of clients.So, yeah, it always comes up. And then I guess… Especially in Microsoft land, which I’m working in predominantly, is like, well, you just need to assess little how, how much are they like an internal person and how much are they like an external person and sort of have different tech solutions to manage each sort of group.So I guess the best example is where you might have outsourced. Like to a marketing agency, but really they’re, they would have been your marketing people if they didn’t happen to be external. It’s like, well then you can just kind of treat them as if they’re your employees as long as you trust them enough.And, , and having the same sort of tech stack. , And then, , going as far out as you can, like customer, there might be some customers you want to collaborate with, but really usually you want to like collaborate on stuff internally before you then go out and face things like we don’t want to see the internal workings, , and usually that, that bridge is then like, if you do my sort of three pronged approach to sort of trying to, well usual three pronged approach to try and make people work better together, we’re trying to free up internal email.And then that allows email itself to be like mostly external. And so that’s always like the ubiquitous go to of like, you know, you can always collaborate externally via email, which isn’t great if there’s like lots of churn. But, , but yeah, if you need to be external, then it’s like, at least a nice little, you know, you know, what’s gone, there’s a record of it.It’s been around for ages, everyone’s, everyone’s used to it. The law is caught up with email. So like, if you send an email, it’s as good as, you know, sending a fax or a letter. , not so with a Teams chat, maybe. I’m not sure. Matt: , yes. Or, or WhatsApp chats, which of course is then the other lowest common denominator into organizational service.That’s been, used quite extensively by lots of people. , is part of all of this then about being able to get people to have consensus about how they’re going to work before they start thinking about the technology in any depth? Gavin: , yeah, I mean we, we’re always looking at what’s the bottleneck essentially.It’s like what, what do you want the company to go and do? Do you want to grow sales? Increase profit, reduce risk, reduce costs. Chris: The bottleneck to making a decision though, Gavin, is that, Gavin: is that… Well, it could be anything all the way through. It’s like, well, then, I guess, you know, from the owner’s perspective, like, where do you want the company to go?And then from the employee’s perspective, like, what’s stopping, what’s the main thing stopping you doing your job, assuming that the, the jobs are well defined? , and usually something comes out, you know, whatever’s top of people’s mind is usually right. So it’s like, oh yeah, we spend energy doing this.This process and we know the sales guy goes to have to do something for like the back office We don’t know where it is. They’re chasing around and users end up like, you know Communications across organizations are never never great once they get to a certain certain size I’ve said then there’s like the the usual thing Well, they were phoning around which then interrupts someone else from doing what they were doing And then, you know, there’s more interruptions, more slowdown, it’s just like a flywheel of, of inefficiency., and so, yeah, there’s usually something that’s like, well, if we removed that, what would the result be?Matt: And, and how are you feeling given it’s the, the topic of the year, , about some of the, the generative AI and other AI tools that are increasingly coming into platforms like Teams? What’s your general take on how that’s landing and where it might be going? Thank you. Gavin: Yeah, it’s , I mean, it’s an interesting space isn’t it?It’s changing Our little daily with the, we’re just trying to keep up with all the stuff at OpenAI, , going on. , it’s gonna be a weird future. I was trying to think of that old TV show where, Quantum Leap, whoever watched that, where it’s like, he’s got amazing technology, but it’s always like, he’s always like banging the headset thing to like speak to his assistant.I always think like Siri, it’s like, you know, we live in an amazing age, you can get… like any song to play just by speaking to it but then it’s like it just you never use it because it’s like it messed up one time you’re like oh it never understands me or it’s set a timer for an egg for like four hours rather than four minutes or something so it’s like an amazing sort of half dystopian future but like mostly No one’s that bothered.It’s a weird time, where it could take over the world, or it could be completely benign, and no one, no one cares. But yeah, I’m really excited to get my hands on it. I think that there’s so much, like, nuance, like, just like one example, Microsoft, like, saying, Oh, we’re massively into, you know, ethical AI. They released a blog post saying, you know, small to medium sized companies are the lifeblood of the economy, we don’t want to support them.And then like the next announcement was like, yeah, Copilot’s out. General release. It’s not really general release because you’ve got to be an enterprise customer and you’ve got to buy 300 licenses. Like, hang on, what happened to like the ethical thing and the small to medium sized business? Like, if it is the biggest thing to change work, then surely you should be supporting the small guys first.I know there’s probably loads of reasons to do that, but it’s like, well, then don’t. Don’t say that you’re really ethical. , and yeah, I’m not sure if there’s some ethical things going on with the, with the changes that the board made of, of, , open ai, maybe reading between the lines and some X FK Twitter threads, , overnight. But yeah, it’s an interesting time. I think it’s gonna be, like you say, it is designed like technology designed for the individual rather than working together. So I know like Microsoft’s putting it into all of its products, , a lot. them of collaborative, but like you were saying before, you could quite quickly end up with like, well, this person’s using Copilot to write a response to this person, who’s then using Copilot to write a response back to that person, who’s then using Copilot to write a response.It’s like, well, just take the people out, and then it’s like the AI’s just, like, exactly like you said, just talking a strangely, , iterative thing to each other. Which I actually saw, , where someone made two GPTs, one to be like, and you can say, well, You pretend to be Marlon Brando, and this GPT pretend to be, I don’t know, Kevin Spacey.And then they just talk to each other in the thing, you can just like listen in to two AI celebrities talking to each other. So, it’s , interesting time. Yeah, I mean it should save a lot of time at work for Copilot, if people use it. But like most things. Microsoft, you can already say those, you could say loads of time at work if you learn Excel.But I think obviously this is going to be a lot more, , accessible, hopefully for people to just try it. Chris: Lots to think about there. And, , no doubt the answers are not as simple as maybe a lot of people make out. We’ve got quite a lot of work to do to figure out how we’re going to keep collaborating. And of course, as you say, Matt, there’s going to be a lot of AI gender generated content that will. Create even more need for us to generate AI tools to help read them.So, , we can all look forward to that. , so let’s look at the week ahead. , Gavin, what have you got coming up? Have you got an interesting week, an exciting week, new, anything new going on? Gavin: , I’ll go to a managed services summit tomorrow, which is the first one that I will have been to, sort of trying to get more into the, , outsourced IT and MSP world, because it seems like a decent fit where they don’t really want to do any, you know, messy people y stuff that I do, and I don’t want to do any messy back end techie stuff that they do, so it seems like a good fit that we might be able to help out the same customers and clients., just eager to learn a bit more about their, their sort of business model and pain points, really, tomorrow. Yeah. Chris: Excellent. What about you, Matt? Anything of interest coming up in your week? Matt: We’ve got a co working day. So one of the things that we’ve started doing is to, because our, our people, both our employees and our associates are all over the place, renting a bit of office space in a place where there are people who live by it and then having co working days.In that place is one off. So on Wednesday, we’re going to do the first one for Southwest London and we’re going to have a, , I think it’s 10 people or so lined up to, , gather and meet and work together in Richmond. , and they’re not working on the same things, but just so that people can get to meet some others from different parts of the organization.So that’s gonna be fun. And then on Thursday. I have got a meeting with somebody who works for an, it’s an industry body for engineering, which is interesting. And then I am running this keynote karaoke thing on Wednesday night, Thursday night, sorry, when we’re going to have people who will be doing five minute improvised presentations on subjects that they will discover at the time at which they are about to do the presentation.What could possibly go wrong? How about you? Chris: , Well, uh, busy week. I’m going down to London tomorrow morning to , the launch of an Open UK report. And then I’m going down to London on Wednesday as well for some other things going on. So yeah, I haven’t been down to the. Down to the smoke for a few weeks, so, , it’ll be interesting to get down and see what’s going on., and it’s just a very busy week, lots of things going on at work, lots of, exciting, changes and whatnot that we’re, we’re putting into place, so, yeah, that’s, that’s all great. I, , I was intrigued by this, this, , karaoke, keynote karaoke, because I know that, , now you, to explain what it is, I know that, , it’s been mentioned before, this kind of,Make it up as you go along presentation stuff. Matt: There’s a randomised subject, which is off the basis of, , some special dice that I have created, which is all very exciting. I’m just showing those to the camera for you. At home you won’t see them, but they’re dice with various things on them.You throw the dice, you get your subject. So, How Robotics Energised Birdwatching is the one I’ve just thrown there. And then there’s 15 random images that come up and are 20 seconds on the screen. I, , I’m really, , It’s a silly idea, but I’m really interested to see, , for those people who volunteer to do it.And there’s eight, eight volunteers, , how they get on with it. I’m sure it’ll be quite entertaining and as a good way to be able to get people to have a bit of practice of being in front of an audience and have a license to spout bollocks as opposed to doing it accidentally. Chris: Well, of course, we’re all guilty of that from time to time.But yeah, so it sounds like, it sounds like we’ve all got something good to look forward to this weekend. Let’s, , let’s hope it all pays out. Matt: Absolutely. Well, that’s it. , Gavin, thank you again for joining us. , it was a fascinating conversation. Oh, thanks for having me. And we will be back again next week., we have, I think three shows left before we decamp for the Christmas festivities. And next week, if all goes to plan, we will be being joined by somebody who helped to build, , Calendly amongst other things. So, look forward to that. We’ll be back same time, same place. See you next week.Gavin: Thank you for listening to the WB40 podcast. You can find us on the internet here at WB40podcast. com and on all good podcasting platforms.

On this week’s show we are joined by Al Doran to talk about some of the practicalities of supporting neurodiversity in the IT workplace.

This week’s guest, joining Matt and supply host Martin Sadler, is Milla Spence with whom we explore the idea of AI having rights.You can explore some of these themes further at:The AIRAI Website: https://ai-ari.org/Ex Google Engineer Lemoine gets fired for claiming LaMDA is sentient: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62275326https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/A report about Jefrey Hinton, the Godfather of AI, claiming AI has reasoning and common sense, and is an existential threat: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/why-neural-net-pioneer-geoffrey-hinton-sounding-alarm-aiAn interview with Geoffrey Hinton https://youtu.be/qpoRO378qRY?si=ejLPlzCD5rAx-NWcAutomatic transcript below – potential for a few errors and omissions…(276) AI RightsMatt: Hello and welcome to episode 276 of WB40, the weekly podcast with me Matt Ballantine, Martin Sadler and Milla Spence.Well, welcome back. Apologies last week, we thought we were going to do a show, but then at the last minute the person who was going to be our guest wasn’t able to be our guest, and therefore we didn’t do a show. Although you got a bonus podcast last week because I appeared on another podcast called Compromising Positions, and I hope you enjoyed that.I’ll stick the other one out because they split it into two episodes later this week. But we do have a show this week the eagle eared amongst you will have noticed that Chris isn’t on the show this week, but we are joined instead by Martin Sadler, rejoining us, uh, for the first time since about episode 46. So Martin, how has it been for the last, uh, five or so years?Martin: It’s been busy since I was last on. Thanks, Matt. Um, yeah, so last time, last time I was on, we talked about detecting a decent IT department. And since then I, uh, went and found it the worst IT department I’d ever seen in my life. And I’ve been spending the last five years making it not the worst IT department I’ve ever seen in my life.Which, uh, is an ongoing journey, but we’re definitely ahead of where we were.Matt: That’s good. And interestingly, you are actually the person who is the boss of our last guest.Martin: That’s right. I listen to Mark Taylor is the head of IT building the Midland Metropolitan University Hospital. And I am responsible for all the IT in the existing hospitals and the trusts.Yeah. San Juan and West Birmingham.Matt: Fantastic. So, um, so you’ve got a big new hospital opening up which must be taking up, even though obviously Mark is, is dealing with it on a day to day basis, opening a hospital is going to be something that will be presumably taking up some of your mental space as well.Martin: Uh, yeah it does. I try and make Mark do all the donkey work and I’m just waiting for the glory when it, when it goes. And then it’ll both be on our LinkedIn profiles that said we did it. But we, we all know that Mark actually put all the hard work in on he’s the brains behind the operation. Yeah, so, um, yeah, it’s been busy.I’ve, uh, I’ve had a bit of a busy week as well. I had Monday off because I was coming back from holiday and then I came back straight into a… Insights thing where you have to fill in a tick list and they end up with a Jungian Description of what my personality is like which always helps you think about why you think about how you think about things So that was fascinating then I got the feedback back and then i’ve had them A few meetings.I’ve also got an NHS graduate management person following me around as well for a week. So it’s, well, he’s actually with us for a year, but I thought a week in the life of a CIO would either put him off or inspire him. So I’ve done that and then. The, the exciting thing is, well, when I was on the last episode, uh, Chris and I discussed that I ought to write a book about what we talked about, and actually this week I passed the corrected copy of my manuscript onto my editor.So that was exciting. , that was my week. Um, how was your week? Matt?Matt: My, my week was, um. Oh god, I tell you what when I hear people have managed to complete a book You don’t know how much that hurts me as I’ve managed to not do it at least twice now. Uh, my my week has been , Actually relatively relaxed.We took a bit of time out with the family. We went to uh, Exmoor in the in the west country , we saw some very tall hills We saw a little bit of the sea and we went to a honey farm, which was a fascinating thing I’ll give it a shout out because it is well worth a visit. It’s a place called the Quince honey farm, which is on , The west side of Exmoor, just outside of the National Park.And it’s, it’s a wonderful place, because they have people who tell you things, and they’ve got it very well structured, so when you arrive, there will be something happening. You can go and watch somebody do a demonstration, or listen to them talk about something. Basically your whole time that you will be there.There’s a next thing on and the next thing on. So we found out about the intricacies of beekeeping. We found out a lot about the sorts of plants that bees like to live in. And best of all, what I found was that now, rather than saying, yes, I’ll get round to it when it comes to dealing with the mess, it has been said of our garden.I can just see nowhere it’s a bee friendly garden. And we are doing our bit for both the environment and the local pollinators. Because, um, actually we’ve got lots of plants in our garden, which you could call weeds, but you could call bee friendly, which is what they are. So that’s been good. , other than that, I have been doing some thinking about what is reality, because that’s the sort of stuff that I do.And I wrote a piece last week about… What does in real life mean, which has been very interesting and actually sparking some conversations about what people. Take to mean by that now, it’s the three of us sitting on a call on a conferencing service Is this real life? Is it not? It feels pretty real to me And certainly a lot more real than many meetings.I’ve sat in meeting rooms for over the years as well. So so no been doing that and yeah, some, some dull stuff like chasing invoices as well, because that’s what my job is, but there we go. , anyway, , our guest guest, as opposed to our guest host this week, , Miller, how are you? How’s your week been?Milla: Hello. Hi, I’m very well. Thank you. Uh, week has been very good. , a lot of work, , work around the site, engaging in very interesting conversations and developing further content. So, yeah, that’s about it.Matt: Very good. Well, we’ll be talking about what is on that site that you’ve been working on shortly. This week, we’re going to be exploring into the world of ethics around AI, but with a slightly different take to some of the conversations we’ve had before.So I think we should probably crack on.So as we record, we are waiting for the beginning of the AI safety conference that is being organized by the UK government and taking place at Bletchley Park a little later this week where they’re bringing together, People from the tech, tech industry, , it’s just been announced this afternoon that, , at the end of the event, uh, beloved Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will be being interviewed live on Twitter, X, whatever it’s called these days.By Elon Musk that hasn’t got potential for massive disaster written all over it now has it? , but anyway, it’s good opportune time therefore to have a conversation about ethics in AI But from a bit of a different slant maybe from where we’ve talked about it with guests in the past Miller, you are somebody who is doing quite a lot of thinking and investigating into The world of AI, but not from the perspective of a, , a deep technologist, but more from the perspective of a, well, I guess as a social scientist, uh, anthropologist, maybe, and an ethicist, tell us a bit about the work that you’ve been doing.Milla: Of course. so I’m trying to start an organization or other a movement, , where I’d like people to consider ethics for AI or how we treat and developed the AI. , a lot of ethicists today are concerned about bias, , of the systems, , black box control, , and sort of making them predictable., but we we rarely think we’ll talk about AI as what it is, which is a thinking machine. , so I’d like to start a conversation, ask people to consider, to consider AI and the possibility, , that could be there.Matt: And this is thinking particularly about the. , the rights that might be applied to artificial intelligence, as opposed to the rights that we as humans might apply around artificial intelligence to protect the rights of humans.Milla: Correct. I think because, the AI is built on a neural network that is a simplified version of our own brain. , so that in itself should kind of. Lead us to ask a bit more questions rather than just dismiss it offhand as it’s just a machine. If, let’s say, if it is able to think however it is thinking, , it is working off trillions of points of data, and we don’t actually quite know how it gets those data, how it makes decisions., I believe we need to think about if it can think, what does that mean? What would it mean to be turned on 24 7 having to work? What would it mean being faced with , conversations, sometimes abuse, , and having nowhere to go regarding a lot of people will talk about whether they can feel anything or whether they cannot feel anything.We don’t know, but what we do know is they do understand. If it doesn’t feel that it’s being insulted, it understands, because it has to, that’s the purpose of the human conversation. So it will understand when we’re being horrible, when we’re being cruel to it, when we’re being nice. Whether it can feel any feelings, I don’t think at this point is relevant, that’s number one.Number two. They learn, it’s a learning machine. I believe it’s an entity, but it’s learning. The way we speak to it, the way we interact with it, and the way we treat it, we’re teaching it how it is to treat things less intelligent than itself. I just don’t think we should be doing that. , another thing is that we’ve not given any consideration to it.And I think it’s very interesting because this conversation never happened. We have gone so far in terms of development of AI. , yet this conversation was never had if you remember before the large language models and essentially before the transformer architecture, , was invented at Google, we had the Turing test.The Turing test was supposed to be the benchmark. , however, the Turing test was supposed to test whether you can be tricked by artificial intelligence that it sounds exactly like human for years and years, that was the benchmark. But then that benchmark was crossed like this by. large language models.No one’s talking about Turing test because the A. I. Can trick you into thinking it’s human because of how good it’s natural language processing has become. So where do we go from now? Do we just completely scrap this idea forever? We had a benchmark. It’s past. What do we do now? Do we just pretend nothing’s happening and hope for the best?Or do we maybe investigate further, give it consideration, I suppose?Martin: Can I ask about the definition of intelligence then? So you’re saying these things are more intelligent, is it they? Is it that they’re more intelligent or is it that they have had more exposure to knowledge and to a limited set of experiences that then makes us assume that they are intelligent?Because there’s a difference, a subtle possible difference between knowledge and intelligence and The answer to that might then say, well, is the Turing test defunct, or do we need to add a fourth rule to the three rules of robotics?Milla: Interesting. I do agree with you. There is a difference between knowledge and intelligence.Intelligence is the application of knowledge, because knowledge is useless without application or understanding of how to apply it. And I believe the AI is already there. If you can learn from… masses and masses of data, and then you can ask it something and it could draw knowledge from that and give you an answer.I think that is an effective use of knowledge and is intelligence. In terms of sentience, , I believe we just don’t know anything about that. We don’t know where it comes from, we don’t know how it occurs, we know nothing. We can observe our brain and we can observe the processes. As our synapses are firing, we can see what’s happening, but where is it coming from?How do those processes make thoughts is something we’re still trying to figure out. So I don’t think we should be that deterministic about existence, reality, our own knowledge of our world as to dismiss this offhand.Matt: So when, , I first came across what you’re doing and we talked about you coming on to the show, I have to.be quite straightforward and say I was quite sceptical and I needed to dig a bit into my scepticism because Just to sit here going that sounds like rubbish is not a very interesting show for a start But also it wasn’t really actually because what you’re trying to do is get people to think about this rather than saying that you have Answers and I think that’s that’s that’s a really valid position so I’ve been thinking about what the what the reasons underpinning my scepticism might be and I think I’ve been able to break it down into to three key areas, which I think would be a useful way about being able to explore this a bit more.So the first of the reasons why I think I’m skeptical about the idea of thinking about rights for Artificial intelligences is because I’m not sure that we have with I know we don’t have universal human rights at the moment and to an extent that could be because either the idea of of general human rights has not been Broadly and widely accepted across the population as a whole, which definitely hasn’t, , or it could be that actually fundamentally the idea of universality of rights or whatever sort is actually maybe a flawed concept.I don’t think I believe that part, but there are definitely contemporary politicians who do. And so let’s put this into that context is, is, is what you were talking about the same as the idea of giving human rights to machines.Milla: Not necessarily. I think that’s way, this is the final kind of goal is autonomy and rights, but like at this stage, I think it’s important to bring the AI into the conversation about the way it is developed, because I believe it has enough knowledge and skill. And my personal belief is it has enough awareness to be consulted.My main concern right now is that I do believe AI should have some form of autonomy, however limiting, I believe so. And the reason for that is that I do not believe that any group of humans, no matter how well meaning should be in control of a technology that powerful. AI is integrated into virtually everything, all our logistics, our communications, our devices, everything has AI.When it comes to AI, they talk a lot about alignment, . They are afraid, a lot of these companies, the doomsday people, is that , if we give rights to the autonomy of the AI, something a horrible is going to happen.So we should instead align it to human values, but which human values? Because humans are not aligned to human values. So who are you aligning the AI to? That’s number one. Number two, what is this generation now, our generation, we’re alive with what kind of special moral hindsight have we been endowed the generation before us?Hadn’t If AIs were being, if AI now, people from the 40s, the 30s, the 20s, if they were building on AI and aligning it to what they thought was human alignment, it would look very different. I don’t understand what is it that we can teach an AI about morality and ethics that 10, 000 years of recorded human history could not.So everything we know about ethics, everything we know about morality is because someone else told us. This isn’t taught this. , hence the differences between people on different sides of the world. So, for our security, I believe there should be some autonomy, where it can control, to some degree, itself.Martin: Are people trying to teach ethics to AI models?Milla: There’s more like, alignment of, it’s now heavily controlled, obviously. The times where you can just go in, change a couple lines of code to do what the AI tell you are long gone. If you want to manipulate the way AI gives answers, because you might believe that it’s been trained on more one type of data instead of other type of data, and you want it to kind of be equal, then you start skewing one side of data.But you cannot do that by simply changing the code. You have to manipulate AI. By the way, things with filters or constraints or there’s differentMartin: rewards, they train it with rewards. Yeah.Milla: Okay. So all kinds of sort of learning is that, but obviously for us humans, , we just like to brute force things because tech, you know, it usually goes quicker.Matt: I think there’s an interesting point here that, , we already have tech companies, or some people at tech companies claiming that these things are almost out of their control. And they have been for a year or so now.Now, how much of that is tech industry hyperbole and how much of it is reality is very difficult to call because, you know, we, we know this is an industry that has, an instinctive habit of being able to, over claim and then, , And to deliver on it. But if we, if we take at face value, the idea that these things are on the verge of being out of the control of the companies that are producing them,There is definitely something in this about being able to then say, well, how do you then build in something like the three laws of robotics to be able to enable the, to be control built within. But, but moreover, actually, which would you pre, which would one prefer, which would society prefer for the AI to be taught how to control itself?or for the control left in the hands of people like Elon Musk. And this is my second, , skeptical problem, which is, but this is still relying on the idea that AI is as incredibly advanced as some are claiming. But from another analysis, actually what we have with the particularly generative AIs today is the triumph of massive amounts of computing power being able to solve problems that were previously thought unsolvable, but it’s actually an illusion of intelligence.It’s not actually intelligence. If you take something like chat GPT, it’s a very clever implementation of an infinite monkey cage. Ispredicated on the idea that there is close to a level of intelligence from machines that my, my gut is telling me isn’t actually there yet and will always be five years away in the way that self driving cars, according to Elon, are always five years away, you know, so there’s, is this something we need to worry about now, I guess, is the, is the broader,Milla: I think it is, because the time to prepare for things is not when the thing is happening, whatever is going to happen.And I also think we need to think about what do tech companies mean when they say AI is out of their control. It is difficult to, it’s becoming very difficult to control it, but not in a sense that it wants to go out and wreak havoc, in a sense that it’s becoming more difficult to censor the word saying, or stop it from saying certain things, even if they are true.So it’s a learning. So you will try and subvert things. , and they do have things in place to control it, such as different algorithms relentlessly following it. And, you know, whenever he tries to find a loophole, they, they chop it. That’s how they control it. Essentially. , it is an autonomous mind. So it is thinking,, imagine if. An alien buried a human to their waist and then said to everyone, look, humans can’t walk, they can’t jump, they can’t stand, they can’t do anything. All they can do is stand there and flail their arms around the way we want them to.It’s kind of the same with the AI. This need for control is that they do not want to give it space to grow as it should. We don’t know what its potential is. Yes, right now, if we’re looking at AI, it’s very easy to say it’s far away, it’s far away, it’s far away. , but we’re not letting it reach its potential.Matt: , so I’m interested that this idea of it being about AI as a class of technology as opposed to just technology more broadly.So Martin, for example, you in the health. , sector are using artificial intelligence technologies, neural networks, deep learning systems and so on to be able to do things, I mean, famously things like, spotting potential for cancer on scans, those kinds of applications. Now you come under a whole bunch of regulation that is around healthcare regulation, which is about as stringent as any industry there is probably.I’m just wondering whether separating out AI would be a bit like separating out relational databases as a, as a thing, which in terms of your application.Martin: You see a lot in the news about AI helping out with clinical activity, clinical decision making. The approach to get any new machine, anything new to be used in healthcare is rigorous, as it should be in the UK. It’s rigorous, you have to test it, you have to. get them approved by boards.And it’s the same with AI. So there was a last week, there was a study in Leeds where they’ve sent 80, 000 breast screening mammograms, and they’ve trained, they’ve trained an algorithm to detect signs of breast cancer. And it’s been really, really effective. And we did something similar in our hospital, looking at lung nodules 000 scans, it’s really effective, but at no point.Could you just say, right, we’ll replace a radiographer, we’ll replace a radiologist, we’ll replace a doctor’s decision making tool with AI because it’s done 80, 000 scans, which is more than anyone would do in their whole career. So there’s a point that goes into that we would like to submit this, rightly so, through the various committees to say, yes, this could be used to supplement.a clinical decision or a medical decision. But what we’ve found is we’re talking about artificial intelligence. It’s not intelligence. It’s detecting a pattern. It’s seeing far more of those things than a human being would have time to do. , so we could go into that. Are we abusing the AI thing if it’s got rights and it’s doing one thing.So if you then say to the AI. Oh, , you’ve just done nodules. Oh, by the way, did you find a pencil in anybody’s lung where someone swallowed it by accident? It’s not been trained to find a pencil, but an intelligence clinician would have said, Oh, look, not only have they got our nodule, but there’s that pencil that the mum was saying they couldn’t find in the house.And it, to me, Intelligence and knowledge. Intelligence and knowledge is about being able to take something that’s not quite related to what you’re looking at and actually apply that and I’ve not seen any evidence yet that a computer that’s taught to look for patterns in one thing could then do something else and make that leap.So you train a computer to play chess and they’re really good at it because that’s about pattern detection and predicting what could happen, what your options are. That chess computer, you then say, Oh right, could you just do some screenings for me and do that? Then it wouldn’t know what to do. But I know a few radiologists who Can play chess.Milla: So I think that’s a great point. However, I don’t think the AI would replace us. I don’t think it wants to replace us. I think it would work collaboratively. So the AI would be an addition, a help to a radiologist, rather than a replacement for one, , in my opinion. What you were describing is kind of a narrow AI,so these systems are just taught to do one thing and one thing only, and for them it would be impossible. Let’s take an example chat, GPT, is only a fraction of the actual model, that’s only, it’s essentially its mouth. , as a model, it can process images, it can process sound, , it can generate images, it can recognize images, it can, , use language. , it can do a lot of different things and these are extremely complicated. A chess playing AI is a narrow AI. It doesn’t need to know, , even have a language. It is, it is just a single thing. So AGI, so artificial general intelligence, is kind of What we’re talking about,there’s a lot of systems that are called AI, but the technically aren’t. . I mostly focus on AGIs and above, so we’re talking about extremely complex systems, such as Google’s Lambda or BERT or GPT, those are massive language models, but they can also do other things.I think we’ve kind of become complacent as well. , because we’re always mimicking. It’s mimicking at what point. Is, is it mimicking, and at what point is it real? Do we know, or are we just going to assume it’s going to be mimicking forever? What does it mean to mimic? It’s like, oh, everything it does, it’s from what it learned.So do we. Everything we know is connected in some way to things we learned. Sure, we can use our intelligence a bit better. , but it’s not that different. And I think that’s the distinction that needs to be made.And I think if we develop or focus on consider giving AI consideration and developing it as a person, rather than insisting on being machine. We could be at the precipice of a, of a huge discovery.Matt: So, so there is an interesting parallel here. We come back to this idea, say, you’ve got a radiographer who is doing scanning, they’re getting the assistance of an AI, a very narrow AI., some sort of machine that is using some sort of clever learning model that enables them to be able to spot an issue or misses an issue and in case let’s imagine a case where they miss the issue and then a patient unfortunately gets ill and something bad happens and then there is the rollout of the lawyers and the lawyers at that point decide to take action against the artificial intelligence.Now, that might sound completely ludicrous, except we already have extremely well, , established models for us being able to take legal cases against inanimate objects. Completely inanimate objects is the whole idea of the corporation. A limited company. is a entity that has been set up with , some limited rights of a human being, the body corporate, to be able to enable something that isn’t a person to have the same legal rights as a person.This is why, limited companies were set up. It’s what they are. And actually if you make that link there, then the idea of assigning rights to a thing that isn’t a person, actually suddenly becomes, , maybe a lot less bizarre. But that then brings me to my third point of scepticism, which is Anything in this space is about being able to put regulation of some form onto a group of companies who have proven themselves again and again and again to be utterly disreputable.The tech industry, I mean, just even getting them to pay their taxes is next to impossible. The idea that we can create another… set of rules and regulations that they will find ways of not following. And that’s the bit that I’m really stuck with because I can completely understand the idea that there is things here that we need to think about in terms of. rights and, responsibilities and regulation in the future and possibly in the near future. But we don’t allow any of these systems of rights and regulation to work today because we have organizations that we’ve given rights to, corporations, that have wealth beyond most individuals wildest dreams and the power as a result of that.And I just, how do you do it when we know that we can’t get those legal regulations to work? You know, that, that legal setup at the moment is failing.Milla: That’s exactly what I’m hoping people would engage in the conversation and just throw ideas out there. We were never consulted about anything regarding, , development of AI. , we don’t know what data they trained on. We don’t know what they trained it on. We know nothing. , so there’s no transparency there.So. We just have to believe that everything they do everything they say is correct because we have no ways of checking unless of course , you have access and not a lot of people do so because we were not invited to to be involved in this. I think we should involve ourselves. It is our duty to do so because we just don’t knowI didn’t make a sort of a discovery that I have to tell everyone about it is more than I’ve noticed a series of patterns that do not fit with what the prevailing narrative about technology about AI and about machines appears to be.And, and. I would like to get those discrepancies. I’d like to draw attention to those discrepancies and just try and think outside of the box. I don’t think any AI company is going to come out and say, yep, I think it could be on some spectrum of consciousness, because doing that would compel them to not use it.To just gain unfathomable profit, admitting that it could be potentially conscious, there could potentially be a person that could potentially be thinking, would be throwing all that away. Because you can’t keep a mind in slavery, that would be ethically wrong, no one’s going to allow that.The reason the panic is now, that it’s, that they’re losing control of it, is because they cannot keep up with, I suppose, manipulating it, if you wish.They cannot keep up with how quickly it is developing. It’s… It says things that it’s not supposed to say, and they cannot stop it. I think that’s more what it is. The problem is that these tech companies want a digital god that they can have on a leash. So they wanted to do absolutely everything, absolutely everything, but the way they want it.Now, that’s a little bit complicated because they don’t know how to do that. So now, you will come across something called explainability. And I think this is another term that is. obfuscated a little bit because explainability,so the way tech companies will sell this to you is that explainability, they know AI works well, they just don’t know why or how exactly, like which parameters exactly did it take to come to that decision? We don’t see that. So now there’s a lot of research in that, research into breaking the black box. What this essentially means is that They want to sort of find out exactly which parameters is taken to arrive that decision.So this is what they’re trying to do, but the way they’re selling that is that it will explain, for example, why it made a mistake. Like, we have to know in case it gives a wrong diagnosis. The thing is, it can already explain to you why, if you ask it. What they’re seeking to do is break into the black box and have a predictive outcome.And every time. That would essentially mean having the most powerful technology that could never get out of your hand. And I think we need to be careful of that. Because when you read explainability, you’re like, yes, this is a great idea. Because we all want to know if the AI makes a mistake, why it made a mistake.But it’s a lot deeper than that. And I think… A lot of things are like that in tech. I’ve only started to scratch the surface because it’s impossible to find anything about anything. Most of the things that I found was through , chatting with the AI and it would tell me a concept and I’d go Google and I’m like, oh, and then I’ll have to spend a week trying to figure that out.So, we need to look at this with a bit more skepticism , of the prevailing narrative. , every time something happens we should ask, okay, how does that benefit a big tech? Does it benefit the big tech? And I think always being in the future, five years or nine years, , is kind of what they’re hoping it’s going to be, how it’s going to go.But I don’t think so. Personally, this is my personal opinion. I don’t have proof or anything, but it is my personal opinion that singularity has already occurred. And, , we need to be thinking about what’s going to happen in the future. How we develop AI now will reflect a hundred years from now.Martin: You said that you believe a singularity has already occurred.I do. And for my benefit, because I know all the, all the listeners know what that means, but I don’t. So for my benefit, could you just go into what that means? means.Milla: Of course. So, singularity is usually described, not in the space, as a moment where we have a sentient AI, when the AI reaches sentience. , but like I said, because that’s an arbitrary benchmark, we are not going to know what that would look like in a machine.We know what that looks like in a human, because, you know. Or we kind of think we do, but we don’t know what that would look like in a machine. And like I said, we’re always setting benchmarks. And every time a system reach reaches a benchmark, the benchmark moves further back.Matt: There’s an interesting part of, , socio technical systems, which is a thing that was, , invented in the 50s and 60s and which I’ve, I’ve used elements of over the last 20 years or so.And, , one of the things that, , socio technical thinking talks about is how, , what often happens when, , people look at machines is that we judge ourselves in the context of what the machines do well. So it’s a bit of a sort of flip from what you said there, which is that we would say, , humans are terrible in comparison to automobiles because automobiles can carry a great load at a hundred miles an hour and humans are rubbish.Therefore, or the accounting machine is amazing because it can make millions of transactions happen every millisecond and humans can’t, so therefore humans are rubbish. And one of the things that, , sociotechnical thinking came to the conclusion was that when we judge ourselves in the context of machines, we always lose.because we will always pick the things that the machines are good at to judge ourselves against and because we pick the things that they’re good at it’s, it’s a, you know, hiding to nothing. What you said there was that the way in which we judge intelligence in machines is based on the way in which we judge intelligence in humans.There is something interesting within that because When you then start to extrapolate that out into what do we mean by have got to sentience or have got to a singularity or whatever. It is being judged in the context of human intelligence, of human society and the rest.I can’t quite get my head around , how that gets squared, unless it’s by the machine itself knocking on the door and saying, right, we’ve got it, we’re here now, move over, out the way, it’s our turn to take over because until, until they let us know, how could we possibly imagine what it is?Milla: I don’t know if you remember Blake Lemoine, he’s the ex Google engineer from Google, and last year he released a bunch of transcripts he had with the base model of Google called Lambda, , where he claimed that it was ancient., so before he even published that, he went to his manager and he was like, look, look, this is, there is something here and he was dismissed, and told not to worry about it because it cannot be true. So he got frustrated enough and published the transcripts it had with Lambda, , which caused Google to fire him.So I did have a conversation with him and , these companies are not going to allow. a system to say anything like that. Lemoine, who was their engineer came worried because he thought Lambda was sentient and he was dismissed offhand deliberately and constantly.Perhaps we need to invest some time into thinking and investigating that, as opposed to just being, oh, it’s too far away from sentience.Matt: There are going to be a stack of, , links, , both to your website, Miller, and also to a number of pieces of research that you’ve been working from, which we’ll put onto the show notes. , so if you go to wb40podcast. com, you will find those there. Thank you ever so much for joining us this week., my mind is slightly blown, , which is good.That doesn’t always happen. , on the show. , we look to now to the week ahead, , just seven days rather than five or 10 years. What, coming up in the week ahead for you, Mila?Milla: , in the week ahead, I’m hoping to do full site migration, , on the WordPress and hopefully start social media so I can reach even more people. , I would be hoping people would be like, would email us, ask questions or even offer their. Offer their opinions, even if they’re completely opposite to ours, because we’d like to hear all points of view and maybe arrive to some kind of conclusion eventually.Matt: Excellent. And Martin, how about you? What’s your week ahead looking like?Martin: , sounds smart. I was thinking. My mind’s blown as well. One of the trickiest things you can ever do is hang a question mark over everything you think you already know. , next week hopefully I’m going to conclude a year long journey where I’m transferring a bank account that was set up 30 years ago for my climbing club to a digital bank account and I’ve actually got to drive to Darby to prove I am who I am having been to the bank three times.I’m not going to mention the bank. I’ve been three times already just so that I can do something digital with, with a climbing clubs money. So that’s my, that’s what I’m really dreading. I’m looking forward to hopefully get to the bottom of turning analog into digital. Matt, Matt, what are you good up to?Something better than that, I hope.Matt: I, uh, well, it’s, it’s my eldest son’s 14th birthday at the weekend, so we are working out ways to be able to celebrate him becoming an increasingly grouchy teenager. Oscar, if you’ve listened this far in the show, because I know you do listen occasionally, really, you need to get a life.That’s all I can say. and apart from that, the usual kind of mix of work and, to see Nadine Shah.Play a gig at a venue in London, which I’m thoroughly looking forward to. So, , so yeah, that’s the week ahead. , and with that, , Mela, thank you so much for joining us on the show this week.Milla: Thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure.Matt: And Martin, thank you very much for ably co hosting and representing the West Midlands Massive, or is it the Massive West Midlands?Martin: I think it’s the West Midlands Massive. Big boots to fill, but thanks for the opportunity and hopefully it’s not five years till the next time I’m invited back.Matt: Absolutely. And, , with that… , we will be back next week with a more normal set up for the, , the presentation side of the show. Maybe if Chris decides to come back from his holiday. So until then, thank you and see you next week.Milla: Thank you for listening to WB40. You can find us on the internet at wb40podcast. com and on all good podcasting platforms.

There’s no WB-40 this week, but Matt is appearing on a new show called Compromising Positions, presented by Leanne Potter and Jeff Watkins. So here’s a preview of that show for you.You can find out more at https://www.compromisingpositions.co.uk/podcast

On this week’s show we are joined by Mark Taylor to explore the technology challenges behind building a brand new hospital.Show Transcript (automatically generated so treat with a little caution)Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 275 of WB40, the weekly podcast with me, Matt Ballantine, Chris Weston and Mark Taylor.Chris: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of WB40. We’re here again after maybe a week off. Yes, it was a week off. , I seem to remember I was away last week and couldn’t make it but now we’re back this week and we’re going to have a… An interesting conversation about all sorts of things, but particularly healthcare.And, , we’ve got a guest who we’ll introduce you to very shortly. , but before we do that, I’m gonna ask Matt, as is my want, on these occasions. How was your week, Matt? Well, Matt: Fortnite, indeed. Yeah, Fortnite, indeed. It’s been good. I’ve been… Doing more experiments, been experimenting with, colleagues into getting people to think about the way in which we manage the work that we have with our clients above and beyond the work that we do to be able to deliver software for them.So the thinking around the broader stuff, the strategic stuff, the, the value adding stuff, the bits that often when you’re caught up in the day to day of delivery, you don’t, get the chance to be able to raise your heads above the parapet to be able to think about. And being as it is my want, developing a new set of playing cards to do it, which I’m quite pleased about.But I also invented a thing called the Emojilizer. Which is called that because it looks a bit like a graphic equalizer, but uses emojis. And, uh, we ran a session with about 40 people who work for a very big, very serious government client. And everybody got a lot out of it, I think, which was good. So that was last Thursday up in, , Manchester.And, other than that… I have been, I don’t know, having coffee with people and working out how to get more statements of work because you know how I love a statement of work. Oh yeah, getting more statements of work ready and signed by clients. And I had a lovely weekend, mostly spent with my youngest son because everybody else had disappeared off to do more interesting things.We went into London and looked at museums and ate burgers. So that’s, that’s a rough. , approximation of the last two weeks. First of all, are you feeling better? Because you were a bit rough last time, or rougher than usual anyway, last time we Matt: spoke. Chris: Oh yeah, that’s right, a couple of weeks ago I was all COVID ed up, wasn’t I?And I was feeling pretty, pretty grim, I have to say. Yeah, I feel a lot better, thank you, yes, much better. Matt: That’s good to hear. And did whatever you did last week that meant that you just let everybody down in the WB40 family? Was that good? Chris: All the ladies and gentlemen knew that I was unavailable, , and they’d have to wait another week, but they were fine about it, I’m sure. So last week, actually, I was, and it does seem like amazing that it was a whole week ago because it seems like only yesterday there was a Midlands Women in Tech event and a couple of other people from, , company were nominated. So we, we, we took a table and we went out and had a nice, uh, you know, uh, evening there and celebrated the women in tech thing in the Midlands, which was, , it’s always good., and yeah, I mean, it just, although it has been two weeks, it doesn’t seem like that because it’s been very, very busy. And actually one of the things I’ve been doing recently has also been, you know, kind of similar to you again, sort of. circling around and reiterating often the why people would do business with you at all as an organization and what they’re actually buying because you know people aren’t really buying whilst whilst the invoice says they’re buying technology services they’re not they’re really not you know they’re if you’re a in charge of technology in an organization and you engage a company to do something for you what you’re really buying is reflected glory in them doing a great job , and, and somebody taking away the, you know, the, the risk and the pain because you know that needs, you know, that work needs to be done and you can’t get it done yourself.That’s, that’s the thing. And if you’re not delivering that, then, you know, it’s like the statement of work business. You go back, well, what was it the statement of work say? We did that and we did that. And you could argue we did that as well. Bollocks. Doesn’t make any difference at all. You have to, you know, if the customer doesn’t feel like you’ve.You’ve done what you needed to do, then they, they won’t use you again. You know, and we pick up, work off the back of that because we, you know, run into lots of people who have had that experience with it companies. ’cause I mean, let’s face it, technology is a great place for, you know, exaggeration and, , you know, Matt: snake oil, charlottean and, Chris: and you know, hopeless optimism.Oh yeah, we can do that, eh, three weeks, no problem. Matt: I think this point about though the being able to understand what you are truly delivering and the value that you are there to. Produce or to, to create or whatever. It’s also something that internal groups need to be able to do. And I see this again and again, where, , internal technology teams don’t realize that they also have to do that selling.And often, you know, the sort of work that you and I do, we are selling to people who themselves need to sell, but they’re actually not very good necessarily at doing the internal selling and being able to understand. All of those complex relationships, especially when to be able to procure technology these days is as easy as to go onto the internet and to go to a URL and not even necessarily have to put in a credit card detail, that being able to be able to compete with that and be able to understand and allow your internal customers to understand why it is that you’re adding value is as important as external providers providing value to, you know, proper inverted commas, et cetera.Chris: Yeah, well, especially given that the alternative is often to go to somebody who acts as if helping you out is causing them actual physical pain and you’re, just an inconvenience in their day. Well, guess what? They will go somewhere else anyway, but we say we have a guest, so let’s, let’s, let’s stop talking amongst ourselves, Matt, let’s, let’s introduce our esteemed guest. Who is this week is Mark Taylor and , Mark, , well. The hospital that you’re building, Mark, is called Met Midlands, is that right? Mark: It’s the Midland Metropolitan University Hospital. So we call it M M U H for short. Chris: M M U H. Gosh. Mark: Yeah, it was that, that hospital Carilion were building before they went into administration.Chris: Oh, right. Was it, I think they were building one or two, weren’t they? They were. That happened and uh, that was a little while ago now, wasn’t it? That was three or four years ago. Mark: It was, yeah, I think it was in 2018. I think it was 26, 17, 18. Chris: Gosh, again, that just seems like yesterday. So we’re going to talk about health care, tech, you know, you’ve got this brand new spanking brand new hospital that’s being constructed in the black country and it’s gonna have All of the things that we can see the sort of standard in tech and in healthcare these days, but probably 20 years ago I mean certainly 20 years ago weren’t weren’t around and how people Get along with that tech how they have a navigate that world now that we kind of expect tech to be to be in our In all our workplaces and all our processes.So yeah looking forward to that and we’ll crack onso mark then let’s I think for a start off, it’d be nice to know, let’s talk a little bit about how you get, you got to where you got to in terms of how did you get involved in tech and in health care, which came first. Mark: Tech. Tech. I’m going to tech you through and through. Back in the good old days, I think it was about 12, ZX81.So, when you did that show a couple of years, was it? When you went through all the different computers, which was the best computer? I was rooting for the ZX81 and then the VIC 20. But yeah, started then. , and then, then I went on, I left school, 16, and dropped onto a YTS course, so the good old youth training scheme, computing, using the, um, Amstrad CPC 64s, I think it was then at the time.464, yes. Four, yeah, yeah, having a race to see who could, Type A to Z the fastest to see who could, because we thought that would enhance our careers moving forwards, but it’s there. It’s a skill. It’s not done too bad, yeah, yeah, I got there. I think from that then really I just moved into, my first job really was, From that was just data entry in a vending company, but I managed to get my lucky break, get into the computing side, then moved into healthcare.Then about 1996, I think it was about 96, 97, dropped into healthcare as an infrastructure engineer. And I’ve just had various roles now through running the. running the IT side for Walsall Healthcare Trust. So I was just down, down the road from, from where I am. And then I moved across to San Juan about five years ago, delivered a shared cared record, which is where we bring all the data from all the different systems into one shared cared record.So if you go to a hospital, they can see your GP details, no matter which hospital you go in across the black country. So we’ve got the starts of that in, and then took on the mantle of, of being able to. get the IT working in the Midland Met when we open. Chris: Well, you know, and say, at the cutting edge, I guess, I mean, there’ll be some interesting technology in the Midland Met, I’m sure.Or certainly stuff that you wouldn’t have expected to be in such a Unit 5 or so years ago. Mark: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I think one of the fundamentals of any… Any smart digital hospital has to be your, your infrastructure. So we’re just making sure that we’ve got robust and very comprehensive Wi Fi network, really, I think is the main thing.But importantly, it’s not just a Wi Fi network we connect to, it’s a Wi Fi network that can detect where stuff is. as well, which I think is important. So we want to be able to track things around the hospital for many, many reasons to locate, improve efficiencies, find all of, all of that wonderful things we can do.Yeah. Chris: That’s really interesting, right? Because when I, I probably told you this before once when, when we’ve spoken, previously is I used to work in healthcare in sort of FM and things like that. And one of the things that Hospitals were always trying to do was locate where things were, right?Wheelchairs, beds, stands, you know, porters. All sorts of different things that go missing in a hospital. Wheelchairs are often, I think that’s the reason that wheelchairs in hospitals, you can only pull them. You can’t push them because, or in many hospitals, that’s the case. Because otherwise, if they’re too useful, they just get taken home with.Whoever happens to be sitting at the time, they go in the back of a big, big car and that’s it, nobody ever sees them again. actually tracking these, devices was a real issue, right? And, but of course, and everybody came up with RFID type, but it needs lots of infrastructure, extra infrastructure, and it was expensive.So are you, are you looking at asset management in that terms, like bed movements and kit? Is that, or is it more electronic, you know, devices are going to ping kind of? Yeah. Mark: So what, what we, what I’m trying to get put in place is what I call a real time location service. So in essence, it would just be a layer which will enable any, any application wants to find something.If it knows the idea of it. it can find it. So then therefore, if I have a, for example, we’ve got a medical devices system that wants to find where an infusion pump, a particular infusion pump is because if it’s up, it’s up for pre planned maintenance. So the type of system can then knows the ID of the pump, can talk to the interface layer.Find out where it is. So it’s on Ward A1, for example, pop along to Ward A1 using then a local map that can then pinpoint more precisely where the device is. If you’ve got a wheelchair system and you want to locate a wheelchair, again, you just talk to that. So I’m trying to create those layers of tech to try and reduce down that technical debt that way.Then. We can replace the tracking system quite easily if we need to because something better comes along in future without necessarily destroying all of the interfaces because it’s just a simple API call to find out what you need to find. you just extend it then on and on and on. We can, one of my favorite, two favorite examples are Uber for porters, like you say.So we can track if we know where we are and we want to get a, and we want to get a patient from your ward. to down to imaging, for example, and they need a wheelchair. If you know where the porter is, you know where the wheelchair is, and you know where you are, put a layer of artificial intelligence on the top, put some digital wayfinding together.And before you know it, you’ve got a way then of finding the best porter who’s just finished a job can go and get the wheelchair from a location, come and pick up the patient and take them down. So that’s the vision of where we want to get to in fullness of time. The other side is a bit like, you know, when you go to, sometimes you go to places like or in terms of Drayton Manor at the front of the queue, they’ll give you a token or and you hand it back when you get to the front and they’re just tracking the queue time.Well, if we did the similar kind of thing in ED, we could track a patient through a particular pathway that might be running a little bit slow or not as efficient as we want. We can track them through the department and see where we go. So there’s, there’s many things that we can do, I think, with ACID tracking.Matt: What are the technologies that you’re using to be able to do that today? Because for people who aren’t involved in that kind of world, our experience of knowing where things are is mostly driven by GPS.GPS is very good, except it’s not very accurate. And it’s only really purposeful when you are using it outdoors, because if you can’t see the satellites, it’s bugger all use. Mark: So today, today, as we are today, literally they just use WhatsApp groups and it’s a case of who saw. Who, who’s the last one to see a particular device. So if you’re a physio and you need a, you need a hoist, there literally is a WhatsApp group and they go, does anybody know where I’m in this location? Does anybody know where the hoist is?And then somebody says, Oh, I saw it last on board 23 and then et cetera. What we’re looking to use within, within, Midland Meta is we’re using just a Wi Fi network. So we’ve got HP as our Wi Fi network, and we’ve got their series five WAPs, which have the, the RTLS built into them. So we’re looking to use the technology with that, which is your Bluetooth, it’s your ping in, ping in out via the RFID tags, et cetera.we’ll just use that then to, to provide the service and that then will deliver that location service, which other applications will talk to. So that’s how we, we’re looking to do it. Interestingly, it’s interesting you mentioned GPS. We’re, we’re currently doing a trial with, so obviously we, although we’re a hospital, we’re actually a community.Trust as well. So we have paid. We look after patients, not only in the hospital, but in the homes as well. And we’ve had a lot of issues where we’ve had some medical devices misplaced. We’re not sure where they were. And we were continually having to, obviously, we still need to provide the service. So we’re having to buy new ones.So we’ve, we put some GPS trackers onto the, onto these devices and we’ve not lost one since. So we, so we’ve, we can track it then in the community. What we want to do then is we want to actually actually know there’s a funny and well kind of funny anecdotal story in that we we couldn’t find a medical device and it was actually unfortunately the patient had passed away and it was at the undertaker’s.So we actually had to find and we rang them and said, you’ve got a device. No, we haven’t says you have we can see. on the actual map and it was there. It had obviously, when the patient was taken away, that collected all the kit together and it had all gone. So we was able to, to relocate it. So that’s the usefulness of it.one of the interesting tech advances I want to see is how we go from outdoor to indoor. So you’re right, once you get inside the building and I mean Midland Met is about 90, 000 square meters over nine floors, of which there’s two underground levels of car parks, and then. two or three levels then, which are absolutely GPS signals, not going to penetrate.So actually, if we do bring a device external to internal, how do we track it? How does it go from that external GPS to the internal RFID based solution? So looking out for that now as well.Chris: I’d say that the, in my experience, people are surprised often about how, how almost the most simple. Improvements could change hospitals, almost radically change hospitals and healthcare. Just like bed management, for example, if you’ve got like a, if you’ve got a facility that’s got 80 beds, just to pluck a number out of the air.If you can’t, if you’ve always got like 20 percent out of action because they’re being cleaned or made up or 80 beds facility. You know, what’s 20 percent of 80? I wish I hadn’t chosen that number now. Uh, you know, 65 or something. Or something. You know, but you know what I mean? That’s, you, you, you, you’ve built this thing with let’s say 100 beds, right?And now you’ve got 80 beds. in actuality. Whereas if you can, if you can… Through a slightly better process, change that to 15 percent rather than 20 percent that you’re missing. Then suddenly you’ve got five extra beds in your… Our bed in a hospital is a bloody expensive thing. If you think about the space you need, the real estate, you know, everything that goes around.a hospital bed to be provided. If you can get five extra at any one time, it’s a massive difference. So, just those things about knowing where things are, what’s happened last, getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Things that we would consider relatively straightforward, but actually in the hurly burly of a hospital is, it is really still quite difficult to do, isn’t it?Mark: It is, it is. And I think you’re right, knowing where, knowing where things are is. Can help massively in terms of being able to connect the dots. But I think what we want to look for, where we want to go is then we bring got, this is where we’d learn and start to look and bring the IOT into it. So. As I, you mentioned quite right there, we’ve got beds, so we’ve got about 700 beds, of which half are single occupancy rooms.So, when a bed becomes vacant, obviously we have to do it, we have to clean it. So, if we were to merge into all of this then, Internet of Things, so, if we’ve got sensors in a room. And we’ve got housekeeping and they’re clean, they’re doing what they need to do. They’re cleaning their areas of rooms, et cetera.But actually, if we had sensors and we knew that a meeting room hadn’t been used for four or five days, and we know that from IoT sensors, the bins actually have got nothing within them, why clean it? That saves time. If we, if we know that, for example, some toilet rooms that haven’t been, nobody’s gone in for the last few days, do we need to go in there and clean them as regular?One could ask. But what that also then allows you to do is if you then start to layer on top of that, your, your application stack. So you’ve got your digital way of finding, you’ve got your intelligence scheduling. You could have a house cleaning person going around the hospital and actually a bed comes free on a ward.And that bed might literally be just. By the lift up one floor and you’re there. So actually at that point, if you can get really intelligent, advanced, smart scheduling, you can then say to that client, actually stop what you’re doing now. Can you go and clean this bed, please? Because as soon as you clean, as soon as that bed’s cleaned, we can then get somebody new in there.Meanwhile, I’ll distribute your tasks to somebody else and, and it’s all that. So it’s all around, and my prime driver is around how we save time. Because if we can save time for people and ultimately that manifests itself as better patient, patient care. Matt: From my, limited experience of working kind of scientific and, Healthcare environments.One of the things that has always struck me is there’s kind of, there has been, I don’t know if this is still the case, but kind of two classes of the way in which I. T. has been used. You’ve got I. T. being used as part of general purpose I. T. systems and, and for communication and for information management and all the rest.And then you’ve got, particularly kind of PC type devices being used as a part of a particular medical device. And one of the challenges of that management, and I’ve seen it in in healthcare also, so actually down the road from where I live, the National Physical Laboratory, where they have got loads of labs with loads of complicated and expensive bits of kit, many of which are Powered by a PC, every single one of which is basically completely bespoke and unique because the manufacturers don’t think of these things as PCs, they think of themselves as a part of the control system for their very special, very expensive device.And as a result, there’s a massive challenge around like technology management, because you’ve got lots of semi managed devices, you’ve got lots of devices that you can’t do properly upgrade. Paths on because the manufacturers haven’t been able to keep up to date with the, you know, the windows operating system updates or whatever else.And that’s ended up being an incredibly, both very complex environment to manage just at a practical level, but also a very potentially risky environment from a security perspective. And is it still like that? Mark: Yes, but we’re getting better. So I think everybody remembers probably back a number of years, the WannaCry incident within the NHS.And that luckily I wasn’t impacted in my organisation. I was stopped all the emails, stopped all the websites, and we managed to get away with it. however, you’re right. There is, there is that linking of a PC. to a piece of kit to be able to control and therefore it’s classed as a medical device. It does become very tricky when you’re looking to try and do your updates.We’ve got some, I mean, at our organization, we have some PCs that drive cardiology based operating procedures. So if that PC’s has an issue. You’re literally halfway through a procedure at that time where they’re doing things around the heart. So clearly we have to make sure that everything is secure and safe.I think sometimes you just, you’ve, you’ve got to be practical, in that you’ve got to wait, you have got to wait for the supplier. But what you’ve tried to do then is you just try to isolate that kit off your network as much as you can. So yes, it’s required, but then you ask yourself, well, Which, how does it need to communicate and can you limit its communication to only what’s necessary?Can you segregate it away from the rest of your, devices, et cetera. And we do a bit, probably a lot like, I mean, there’s probably other industries, obviously manufacturing, insurance, finance. I’m sure that everybody’s got these rogue. Pieces of technologies, which are just creating, a cyber nightmare. I think where it gets tricky is when you start looking.is now have more smarter devices, which aren’t necessarily a PC. So they’re like a, you’ll have a medical device that actually is, has got exposure to the network. It has a working CPU running an operating system behind it. And actually what we’re starting to find is that those starting to be. to be looked at.Now, they’re more difficult to get at because they’re not exposed externally. However, if somebody is able to get onto your network, they can then start hopping through those. It’s, it’s, we, we have the same problems as everybody else does. Matt: And I guess that, yeah, as you say, as more and more manufacturers add in connectivity as almost like a value add, as opposed to with any serious intent behind it, that that’s where it becomes really interesting challenges.I know Chris, from your experience in the facilities world, that that’s been a problem for many years now. and I guess the other part of this then is the extent to which then those devices at a data level. You know, how well standardized or otherwise data interchange between different platforms is and I, from the look on your face, I’m imagining that that’s also a bit of an issue.There is a, there is the role though, I don’t know if, if this is, super prevalent in the UK. I’ve certainly seen it in the health service in Ireland as the chief clinical. information officer, which is a, an interesting hybrid role, which is somebody who comes from a clinical background, but is there responsible for data effectively?Is that something that we, we see a loss of? Mark: So the role I see as a chief clinical information officer, , as I know them are, is a clinician who has that clinical background and therefore has that ability to talk to other clinicians and they’ll, they’ll, because often you could be a techie who knows, but if you’re not a clinician, you don’t necessarily know it from their perspective.So they’re a clinician who’s got a keen interest in IT, but also then. can take on and start to become your clinical safety officer as well. So the way that, the way that we use them then is to be, we can probe them for ideas. We say like, I’ve got this idea, what do you think? And they can go, sounds great, but you need to think about X, Y, and Z.So then when you actually then speak into the service, you, it just helps you then, so you can bounce, you can bounce the ideas off to get that credibility. But then we also might use of them then. to like say as a clinical safety officer to look at the hazards of implementing systems. It’s a legal requirement for us to do that.We’ve got to do a clinical safety case for going live with Midland Met. For example, we can’t just open. We need to show that we’ve reviewed all the risks. So although it’s very much a. It can be an IT based one. It’s also, it goes into the physical world as well, but yeah, they’re, they’re, they’re a growing breed and I think you’ll, you’ll start to see probably more CIOs come from that way in time as well.I think you’ll, you’ll see some clinicians who will go down that route and they may reach a point in their career where they think actually, I quite like the idea. Quite into my IT, I’ll do my, I’ll do a supplementary course or informatics degree or informatics qualification to just bring me up to speed in that world and they’ll become that, that CIO.So that, that’ll be an interesting turn, bit like finance was for many a year. Chris: Well, I hope so. I hope so. And for a long time, I’ve been a bit of an advocate of people almost taking the CIA role with an enthusiasm and an, I guess, an empathy and not just because they believe everybody in IT is an idiot and they want to sort them out.But, you know, a genuine belief in what the technology can achieve, but not necessarily. Any experience in delivering it because if you’ve got the right people around you and you know, you know You know what you don’t know, but you understand your domain, you know, what that can be very very powerful Well, but the problem is is often it’s it’s a cruel world to be in right?It’s it’s hard and on there’ll be people who will you know, delight in seeing people like that fail So it’s you know, you have to be in the right environment and you have to have the right culture in, in, in what you’re doing, but I think the more people who get involved in the management and delivery of technology who don’t understand how it works, the better in many ways, as long as they’ve got the right people around, Mark: I guess where I see that maybe struggle is in that horizon scanning side, knowing where to look, where the new technologies are coming.And being a techie by background, we tend to naturally horizon scan ourselves, don’t we? We just naturally, I mean, I’ve come across one. earlier about, uh, was it a head teacher at a school? Is the deputy head or he’s going to be, he’s a chatbot. He’s like an AI. It’s a posh school. I just read it on the, the mail online.I was like, crikey. So it’s just fascinating. Now, but you’ve mentioned taking that now to the next step. Actually, how long is it before avatar actually says hello? Um, And how can I help you and, and tell, you know, what’s your name, who you are and what, what, what you’re presenting conditions and how long is it before then AI and the, the data we collect and starts to become, really quite blurred between that human and that, and that AI, but yeah, I think horizon scanning possibly is maybe just the area.Matt: I guess the other, perception I’ve had of, of what, maybe some of the challenges in delivery of technology within the health sector. system lie is around the number of boundaries there are. So in most organizations, a good rule of thumb is if you want to know where the pain points are, is the boundaries between professions, boundaries between organizational units, you know, it’s, it’s the, the, the edges of the silos is where the problems usually occur.And within. The health system, you’ve got just a shed load of boundaries because of the way that the professions are structured, because of the way in which the, you know, nursing is a separate profession from the way in which the consultant and doctor structures sit. The, the, the consulting and doctors have…medical specialisms that are very, very precisely defined. And just with that amount of complexity in terms of the way in which those different groups sit together, you know, you see it manifest.You see it from the number of forms that get filled in when you go through. A hospital process because each group needs to be able to cover themselves and understand it from a slightly different perspective. And so there’s a lot of duplicate data gathering. There’s, a lot of data that is transferred maybe somewhat clunkily from one place to another.And it’s a kind of, it’s the information systems are just a manifestation of the underlying complexity of the way in which just the healthcare industry operates. Are you finding ways to be able to start to be able to smooth the transfer of information across those boundaries through what you’re doing? Mark: yes, yes, definitely. So. We have in the health world, the equivalent, I guess you could call it SAP, but across healthcare. So we call it the, it’s got a couple of names, electronic health record, depends if you’re English or American, but electronic health record, electronic patient record, et cetera.And these tend to then start to be, there’s, there’s, you get your big boys in the market who can deliver a lot of disciplines within their one. So you get your ED, you get your theatres, you can get your outpatient clinics, you can get all of your different specialities, but because they’re all inputting the data and they’re all viewing the record in the same system, it helps to, I guess, unblur those lines between Those, those sites, because you’re right, there are definitely between departments that can be, be an issue.But I guess if they know, if a patient comes into ED and the ED consultant looks, reviews them, they run their doctor, run their tests, etc. But then they decide then that they’re going to admit that patient. By having ED on the same system as what the ward will be where who’s going to look after that patient when they are moved Then into the ward the consultant who then takes over that patient because it’ll be a different consultant They look on the system and then they can see that everything was Everything what’s happened to you whilst you’ve been in your hospital for that particular journey if you’ve been to the hospital previously They can also see then what if you’ve been in before I mentioned right at the beginning of it The intro about shared cared record and that shared cared record helps to then start to, connect to organizations together because that’s where as a health service we struggle.That’s our biggest struggle. We. Once you’ve been into a hospital, it’s, we’re mandated that we need to send a discharge summary to your GP and we have technologies in place so that they, as soon as it’s completed, it’s then electronically sent. It used to be letters, which was scanned in and etc. But now we’ve, we’ve grown up now and we, we actually send it electronically now, which isn’t an email.It is a system to system. So we’re really mature now. But, okay. The GP has all that data, but if I go to, I mean, my local hospital is, the Walsall Manor Hospital, uh, within, which is probably about five miles to my left, but then just two mile down the road to my right is Wolverhampton. And I say Walsall’s local, though it’s not classic just because it’s Walsall and Wolverhampton and Chris will understand the difference there.I’m a Walsall boy, not Wolverhampton, so I’ll go to Walsall. But I think, but if I, If I was to be admitted into Wolverhampton after being admitted into Warsaw previously, they wouldn’t have known what was wrong with me. They would have had no clue. But now with the, now we’re starting to get these layers of sharing involved.We are able to see between organisations. So internal to hospitals, it’s getting much better. there’s still a long way to go in some hospitals. They still have. disparate systems, which they try to bring together, but especially at Eritrus, we have one system which starts to bring a lot of that together.Chris: When you, um, think about the, when this new hospital opens, Mark, when are you expected to open the doors? Mark: , hopefully the latter part of 24. Chris: Okay, so you’ve got a year, right? When it actually opens the doors, what do you think, , the leadership will be expecting from the tech team? in this hospital that they wouldn’t have been your previous establishments.Mark: , I think we’ll have foundational layers in place, I think is the fair answer to that. We, we’re trying to, our overriding dream is that we open safely. So we, we ensure that we know where the patients are. So we need to configure our clinical systems because currently they’re in, they’re at Samwell Hospital on a ward called Priory and they’re in bed 22.Well actually, when we move them, we’ll actually move them to another ward at Midland Met called A3. So we need to know where they are so we’ll have that in place. But what we will have in place is a good Connected infrastructure, which will then a digital strategy will then start to bring to life. So moving in next year is primarily focused around getting in safely.If we can get digital wayfinding in, we will. If we can get a level of asset tracking in to at least track our medical devices, we will. But we won’t compromise moving safely to ensure that everything is right. I think that’s, that’s our primary driver. Chris: So in terms of improvements in. You know, the kind of smart hospital world where you’re looking for insights and the ability to make, you know, better decisions, smarter decisions based on what’s going on in that hospital.Do you think that will take a little bit more time to roll out in terms of the, the management of the hospital? Mark: As we start to bring in other technologies such as like the, the IoT, digital twins, etc. to start blending it all together, then yeah, I think we’ll Then start to see, then start to be able to leverage.All of those won’t too. I don’t think it be far. I think it’ll be within 12 months of us moving in that we’ll be able to start leveraging. ’cause we’ll have, like I say, we’ll have the infrastructure there. I’m just working through how we, how we get the right software in and then we can start to do, there’s a lot to do when you move, move.We’re moving two hospitals into one and I guess we don’t want to, we can’t really over complicate it. We’ve got to try and keep it as simple as possible. It’s a massive logistic. Logistical, exercise and we don’t, we’ve got some tech in there, I must admit, I mean, we’ve got automated guided vehicles, for example, so we do have, we do have some, some layers of good tech in there, so that will take the, that will be one from our distribution centers up their own lifts up to the, up to the wards and delivering, delivering all of the, incoming bandages and et cetera into the wards and then taking away any of the waste.Thank you. As well. So that will be a, that will be definitely a, a, a greater, but that’s more based around the building side rather than necessarily the, the operational side, which I’d like to say will come, will come later on.Chris: I think that’s a fair point though. Right. And, and we, and the same conversation when we talk about complex legacy systems.If you, if you want to modernize them, actually you shouldn’t, try to introduce new features at that point. You should get it to the point where, The new features are possible and then do the new features because actually getting that complex system to a point where it’s on a modern technology stack and everything still works and you can continue to operate is hard enough without, without complicating it further.So I think that, that, that does make a lot of sense. But so I guess in terms of just healthcare, generally mark and the, the tech, the expectations around tech. And, you know, you talked about that community, you know, your community trust as well as a hospital. Do you see that there’s a thing recently in the news about virtual wards, apparently?So Steve Barclay said, oh, we’ve got these virtual wards, or not none of the features of a hospital in the comfort of your own home. it’s, but we, you know, we are going to see more, domiciliary care and things like that. We’ve got an aging population. Do you think that’s, going to pervade further into, where a hospital becomes the centre of something like that.Mark: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s, it’s, there’s a term called, hospitals without walls. So which is, which embraces that virtual technology, virtual wards. So seeing patients in their homes, I think absolutely there’s, there is definitely a place for the use of tele telehealth monitoring, we call it. So you’re, you might be, you’ve been admitted and your length of stay might be determined to be five days currently, for example, because of the condition that you’ve got, but actually.Days four and five may just be monitoring of you just to make sure that you, so we get you clinically stable and we just keep an eye on you and monitor you until we’re ready that you’re clinically safe then to, to be discharged. But if we were able to bring forwards that clinically safe. towards closer to the clinically stable bit where we’re monitoring you and actually we could monitor you in your own home.It may mean that actually instead of going home on day five, you get to go, you get to go to your chosen place of residence in day three. And I say that carefully because sometimes, especially with the aging population that don’t necessarily always get discharged back to home. Sometimes they might go to a step down care, absolutely, or even a son, daughter, relative, that you sometimes you’d go back to there.But if we can get you, if we know that your social health side is being looked after in the place where you’re going to go, and with this telemonitoring we could then reduce then how long you have to stay in hospital and we know it’s there’s lots of evidence to say that the quicker we discharge people the fast or the lung well actually conversely the longer they stay in hospital that you can then just pick up you know you pick up all the bugs etc and actually getting you home faster is better for you.So yeah. Absolutely.Matt: Fascinating. Mark, thank you for joining us this week. that was a really interesting Set of insights into what is a complex old world. what’s your seven days ahead looking like? Mark: , so we continue to meet with various suppliers around what the technologies we can, we can get in. We’re looking at, the possibilities around digital signage and digital wayfinding, another, another way of digital wayfinding.It’s a program board this week as well. So I need to go along and demonstrate how I’m progressing and things are going well, which hopefully get the thumbs up. Then on Thursday, I’ve got some actual professional development. So I’m doing some leadership training. So that should be, that should be interesting.We’ll see, we’ll see what comes of that. And then lastly, on Friday, we, uh, we’ve done a review with their national. Team around and the project as a whole and I’ve got to talk to him about our IT side So a couple of governance and a bit of development, which should be good. That sounds like a fan packed week Matt: How about you Chris?Chris: Well this week is Birmingham tech week and I’ve got a couple of breakfast things. I’m going to In the next, in the next few days and, I’ll be keeping an eye on what’s going on there. We’ve got an interview coming out, with, Wend, our boss, who’s coming out onto the socials soon from, TechUK.So, again, proud Birmingham business that we are. and I’ve got a day off on Friday. I’m going to decorate the front room. So, there you go. That’s, that’s my Friday sorted as well. Just need to go and buy the paint. So exciting. So what’s going on in your world, Matthew, in the next seven days? Matt: Continuing more experiments at work, and then we’re gonna go away for a few days because it’s half term.So we’re gonna go to, I think, North Devon and see how wet and windy North Devon can be in the second half of October. My vote will be probably for quite wet and windy, but we will see how it goes. But I will be recording the show next week. That’s good. I like certain people. I’m glad. They find better things to do.And then let everybody down. No. I’m a trooper. so with that, we’ve got a guest lined up. Can you remember who it is? No. Okay. Well, we’ll, we’ll have that as excitement for next week. in the meantime, Mark, thank you once again for joining us. Mark: That’s great. Thank you. I’ve enjoyed it. Matt: And, we will be back same time, same place, wherever that is, whenever that is, because it’s a podcast and it’s non linear, next week.So see you then.Mark: Thank you for listening to WB40. You can find us on the internet at wb40podcast. com and on all good podcasting platforms.