From data chaos to AI confidence

Announcer:
Ready to explore the extraordinary world of tech? Welcome to the XTech Podcast where we connect you with the sharpest minds and leading voices in the global tech community. Join us as we cut through the complexity to give you a clear picture of the ideas, innovations, and insight that are shaping our future.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Hello and welcome to XTech Podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Forster MBE. I’m a tech portfolio consultant and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion and innovation in the tech industry. Now, today I’m delighted to be joined by Adam Harding and he’s the Head of the Office of CTO at Softcat. Welcome, Adam.

Adam Harding:
Yeah, hi, Debbie. Thanks very much. Yeah, looking forward to this.

Debbie Forster MBE:
All right, well let’s get started then. So all the listeners like to get to know you as a human being before we know you as a techie. So I love hearing the journey about how people got into tech. How did it happen for you?

Adam Harding:
Well, to be fair, I think, if I’m being entirely honest with you-

Debbie Forster MBE:
Which is what we want on the podcast.

Adam Harding:
Yeah, no, it started with failure. I was a failed musician. Well, my course clearly wasn’t to be a rock and roll star, but that’s what I wanted.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yes.

Adam Harding:
Yes. Well, yeah. I’m getting a bit old for it now. So a bit of a failed musician. I had a good few years messing around with that stuff, had a great time, but I had to kind of go and get a real job because I couldn’t afford to buy things, and that happens. So started doing some temporary work actually, and ended up working for a design house, a fashion house that designed jeans and made jeans for everyone from George at Asda, if you’re in the UK, through to Armani. And it was a fantastic team of people, but they were so disorganized and chaotic. And I’d been working there for a few months, and what they’d do is they sketch out all these jeans, they then send the design off to India. That would take a few weeks. In India, they’d then make the prototypes, they’d then send them back, which would take a few more weeks. We’d hold them up and go, “Well, that’s not what I drew.” And this happened over and over and over again. And I was only young. I was really young at the time, and I said, “Why haven’t you guys got webcams so that you can literally hold the design up and they can hold the jeans up and you can give some thumbs up?” And they thought that was a great idea. And three days later I was shipped off to India with 10 webcams. And that was kind of my first foray into solving problems, I think.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Digital solutions.

Adam Harding:
Digital solutions. I was dead chuffed. I mean, I was a bit nervous, I’ll be entirely honest with you because it was a nice idea, but I’d never done it before. So yeah, so I went off and solved a real-world problem with some real-world tech that was ever so slightly innovative at that point in time, and they loved it. Cue a few months later, I went and got a proper job with a company, a big international logistics company, and I told them this story and they took a chance on me really because I wasn’t qualified, but they put me into their IT projects team because that seemed like a good start. And then over a few years I got involved with support with Citrix and Oracle and Lotus Notes and all this type of stuff. And I gradually worked my way up and a few years later I moved down south, which is when my path collided with Softcat, who I have now worked with for … Well in October this year it’ll be 20 years. So I’ve stuck around. So yeah. So through failure, but it’s panned out quite nicely to be honest.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And it is actually quite cool to start from rock and roll through via blue jeans is quite a-

Adam Harding:
That’s true. That is true.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Cool retro journey. I mean, staying at Softcat for 20 years and it’s not just any 20 years. That would’ve been 2005 to now. We’ve had a few things change in the sector while you’ve been in one company. So it’s interesting because a lot of us are moving while the sector’s moving, whereas you’ve had this opportunity to watch from the view of a company 20 years and what a 20 years it’s been.

Adam Harding:
Yeah, I mean when I started Softcat who, for those people that don’t know, we help customers source and modernize and optimize the software and the hardware and the services and the skills I suppose they need for their IT infrastructure. So we support businesses with their technology needs. When I started, there was only 70 people, maybe 75 people. We’re now 2,800 people. So for us, just internally, it’s been a crazy time of growth and a huge time of opportunity because as the company grew, new divisions spun up and new teams spun up and that type of stuff. So that’s why I’ve stuck around so long because the reality is I’ve probably had five different jobs inside that company during that period. But yeah, I mean early doors, I remember things like virtualization coming along and I thought wow-

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah, that was going to break the world, wasn’t it? Yeah, that was going to break the world.

Adam Harding:
I remember everybody was panicking that nobody was going to buy any new storage or any new servers and the infrastructure market was going to be cannibalized and quite the opposite happened. You ended up with 10 times as much stuff. But yeah, virtualization came along. I thought that’s it. That’s the big one. That’s the big one. And then the smartphone revolution happened and the introduction of apps onto mobile devices, another huge step forward. Again, I thought naively well, that’s it. That’s that big one that I’m going to-

Debbie Forster MBE:
Our phones are smart, we’re done now, we can go home.

Adam Harding:
Yeah. Then the cloud came along. Again, I don’t know how many times I need to learn a lesson, but a few times. Again, I thought, well, that’s it. That’s the big one. And obviously more recently, AI has really taken to the fore and sooner or later I’ve stopped thinking we’ve completed it by the way. Sooner or later we’re going to crack the quantum thing. Sooner or later we’re going to crack the robotics thing. So yeah, the waves of innovation have got closer and closer together, and the impact and difference they make have got bigger and bigger and bigger. So yeah, phenomenal. I mean, it’s luck, not judgement that I joined this industry at that time, but what a time to get involved.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And those waves keep, as you say, getting higher and faster. And so being in this industry is just being ready for that wave, that agility is probably the most valuable thing. And it’s interesting because people that build their teams around capacity, not existing skills are the ones that win because whatever skills you need today, you’re going to need 10 different ones in a year’s time. And that constant change is really, really important.

Adam Harding:
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know about a year’s time, but certainly the underlying ethos, I mean I refer to it as a wave. A wave is quite a good image actually. I’ve seen so many times, and this was true with virtualization, it was true with cloud, it’s true now with AI where people are, in the early days, are trying to hold back the wave. The only thing you can really do is learn to ride it.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Exactly.

Adam Harding:
You’ve got to learn to surf it. And that is about staying open and interested and agile and all those types of words. But we’re all fully aware that the world changes around us. You get a leading indicator because you can see stuff happening in the consumer space. All of those things were out there in the consumer space long before they came into the commercial space. So we know it’s coming. I think we’ve just got to get comfortable with the fact that we are going to have to … you know schooling, education, learning, development did not end when we left school. We have continued to develop and we must continue to develop and we must continue to respond and react positively to all the different stuff that’s being forced upon us.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And we’ll move into AI and how Softcat has leaned into that. But I think it’s important. I don’t think any of those waves that you talked about or when we talk about AI, LLMs, if we talk about quantum, it’s not a surprise that they’re coming, because as you say, anyone who’s looking beyond their desk can see them coming and it’s that stopping being surprised and that agility to learn how to head with it, not against it, and just be ready. Because I think the only thing that surprises people is, “Ooh, that happened a lot faster than I thought.” Because I think about even when we just started doing the podcast a few years ago, AI was talked about as a horizon thing. And then within two years, this is not a horizon. We are in the thick of things, but we’ll talk about as we go on.

I like the analogy of the wave, and we may return to that later because I think how we get people ready and happy about waves, there’s a whole thing. You can be a surfer rather than constantly seeing it as something that is a threat. So in doing that, in leaning into and thinking Softcat has done, as many companies have done, sometimes to accelerate that change, we acquire companies rather than just building internally. And I noticed that Softcat has recently acquired Oakland. Can you talk to me about what have been the key challenges of making Oakland part of Softcat? And what have you done within the Office of the CTO to really maximize that and remove the pain points of that acquisition?

Adam Harding:
Well, I think, let’s take it back a tiny piece. Take it back a tiny piece.

Debbie Forster MBE:
We’ll go anywhere you want, Adam. I’m here with you. Yeah.

Adam Harding:
You are right. So this is our first acquisition in over 30 years. So we’ve grown organically to this point. So this is a new lever we’ve pulled, we’ve always considered and we’ve always reviewed. It’s never been off the table, but this is a new lever we’ve pulled. And I do think that the focus of Oakland makes it stand out. So in my mind, data is a trail of evidence and AI is the detective.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Nice.

Adam Harding:
Data is the partial picture of fingerprints and footprints and clues left behind. And then AI pieces that all together to reveal the hidden truths, which is all great, unless I suppose your crime scene is littered with red herrings.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Nice.

Adam Harding:
And that kind of gets to the crux of dirty data is the key problem that’s holding us all back when it comes to embracing the positive stuff AI can do for us. And we’ve all heard this data is the new oil, but quite often I think that’s misinterpreted. What that was supposed to mean is that it needs to be collected and it needs to be refined and it needs to be processed before it is of any real value. That’s the bit that I think got missed in translation, lost in translation. And that is really hard. It’s a hard thing because it’s a big task and it requires really deep expertise, it requires huge expertise to build the lakes where your raw data can just swim, and the warehouses where the processed data can sit neatly on a shelf ready to be used, and the data streams where live data gets interpreted in motion. And that’s before we even split out onto the separate vocation, which is cybersecurity to try and make sure that we don’t hurt ourselves to be honest.

And because of that problem, Softcat in the spirit of control disruption, so disrupting ourselves rather than being disrupted, we engage with a company called Oakland about two or three years ago now to do that job for us.

So we spent a lot of time with them trying to go through that process for ourself. And over that time, because there are other companies that do similar things, but we were really impressed by these guys and girls. Over that time, over two years, you get to learn not just a company and not just their capabilities and not just their skills, but their attitudes and their behaviors and their culture and their values and all that type of stuff. And that element there where we saw that there was real cultural alignment with Softcat, which is relatively famous if you are from the UK for being a great company to work with, great company to work for, all that type of stuff.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Fabulous culture. You’re all about great culture.

Adam Harding:
Yeah, great culture. Absolutely. Absolutely. Being a IT reseller, that’s a business model. How you go about working together, whether it’s internally or with your clients or with your partners or with the vendors or whatever else, that’s about culture, there was real cultural alignment.
So we saw this kind of perfect storm, I suppose, of we can see through our customer engagements, through what the vendors tell us, through what the analysts tell us, through the surveys we do. All this type of stuff, we can see that AI is still front of mind for a lot of people, for the vast majority of people. However, we can also see that getting your data into the kind of shape and state it needs to be to actually make valuable, important, impactful decisions is a little bit lower down the list. So we know that there’s a real market for it. We realized that Oakland were a fantastic and unusual cultural fit for us. So that’s where the stars aligned and we decided, “This is the one guys, this is the one.” So obviously we did our homework and it was very rigorous and we did all our due diligence. But yeah, there was a real meeting of minds and the timing was perfect.

Debbie Forster MBE:
I think what’s interesting about that, and it is for companies that are thinking about, as you say, some companies make a habit of acquisition, so that is almost part of their culture, is that find and include, bring that in. But I think what’s interesting for you guys because that was a big step, but you went at it in a slightly different way that really made sense for you.

Yes, of course you do due diligence because only morons don’t, and there are morons out there. But it started with some deep understanding both of who you were, what you needed, but what this organization, I think in particular, the fact that you sat on the other side of the desk from them is a powerful way of seeing them and that deep understanding. And what I was hearing from you is there was as much about, as you say, the culture, how and why things are done as it was what they could do that would complement what Softcat was doing. So it feels like that’s made for a fairly seamless … It doesn’t even feel like a pure acquisition, that’s that bringing together that’s created the new company.

Adam Harding:
I think the reality is we went for a date before we got married. There’s a lot of things that shake out in a date or starting to live together that you go, “I’m not sure that’s something I can put up with in the end.” So yeah, I think that we went through that kind of shakedown process and it’s been great. And actually it’s very much like a personal relationship. We absolutely give Oakland full autonomy and space to … You know they’re a great company doing great things with a great brand. We are a great company doing great things with a great brand. We don’t need to butt up against each other. There’s mutually beneficial things there. We have the scale and the connections to find them more opportunities. They have the consultancy skills and deep expertise is something that our customers really need. So yeah, so far so good. We love it. And they’re great team. I’m really pleased.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Excellent. And I will enjoy watching that from the side.

So now this allows you to go even more deeply into that AI space. And I love the detective analogy, I’m pinching that, but I will credit you in future because I think that’s a great way of unpacking it for people. How do you at Softcat help your customers balance that hype and excitement with practical applications? How do you help them get the best out of it?

Adam Harding:
I think to be honest, whether it’s AI or something entirely separate, my personal view is it comes down to usefulness. Is the thing actually useful? And then how big a difference will it really make? And it’s difficult when you’ve got, especially when it’s new vendors, new vendors coming out, the hype’s huge, the marketing’s huge, maybe not quite all the products are there yet. It’s all living on a promise. But the reality is you know how your organization serves your customers, your clients, your patients, your students, whoever it might be. You’ve also got to be able to ask yourself the question, what would make that go faster? Or the flip side, what’s getting in the way of us doing an even better job of that? I think if you sell bread, the question is what’s going to help us sell more bread? If you start to unpack where your pinch points are, then I think you can quite quickly go from a list of all the things you could do down to all the things you should do and then to all the things you can do.

And I think putting decision principles in place that helps you quite quickly assess that is really important. And in my personal job where I have to look at the whole world of technology things we could do, I have to have some gates as to … I have to filter that down really quickly as to what’s going to actually be useful and actually make a real difference. There’s loads of great technology out there that’s interesting and exciting, but would make no difference to anybody’s lives, no difference to anybody’s customers, no difference to any of that stuff. So I think figuring out your own decision principles is really important. I’m not going to share mine, but yeah, I think figuring those decision principles out, and I’m talking like 4 or 5 things, not two pages of A4, 4 or 5 things that quite quickly allow you to see whether that style, the difference that’s going to make is going to impact your core offering. Is it going to disrupt it or is it going to enhance it, or is it a natural next step? So is it the connected natural next step?

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah, and I think that’s the bit, because I think both when we’re working with clients, but then helping clients get through because hype is that starry eyed, very excited, wouldn’t it be cool if. And you don’t want to lose the wonder of cool if, but then bringing that down into, but what can we actually do that makes a difference? Get past that ‘so what’ because nobody has infinite budget, infinite time, infinite capacity to implement everything. And it’s that proof of concept, we can all come up with a dozen, but it’s actually deciding which ones, that’s where skill, success and profit margins start showing. It’s that ability to sift through those things.

Adam Harding:
Yeah. In the early days, we were kind of considered by our other technical colleagues as the Blue Sky Boys, the art of the possible rather than the art of the plausible. That was always unfair, but it was kind of like, oh, you are talking so big and you’re talking so far in the future and all this type of stuff that we were kind of considered the Blue Sky Boys. And I always hated that. And that for me translates to where hype lives. And actually in having this conversation, you’ve made me realize that one of the reasons that I put a lot of time and effort into coming up with some simple decision principles was to turn it from possible to plausible really quickly, to help people understand that what we’re talking about isn’t just vaporware. So I think, yeah, there you go, I’ve learned something today as well.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And that really helps me because, and maybe I’m just feeling this, whenever you’re in a hype curve, it feels like this is the biggest hype curve ever. This is crazier than anything else, but AI does feel particularly hypey at the moment. And I love the way you started breaking it down of, yeah, okay. And there is a place, there is a place in the world for our futurologists that are just the Blue Sky Boys and Girls that are out doing those sorts of things.

But then thinking for our companies when we are the office of the CTO or if you are the CTO, et cetera, I love that idea of moving things from the art of the possible to the art of the plausible, because that’s where businesses have to start doubling down. And I like that you’re saying, and you’re right to hold it as your IP, but because that’s what will make every company different, that’s what’s making each organization having their USP is what are their design principles that they’re offering their clients? But for a company, what is it? What is our filter? Because you’ve got to get something a little objective there or you do get swept along with that, “Oh my God, wouldn’t it be cool if…” and “What if we …” And you don’t want to stifle innovation, but if innovation doesn’t actually turn into something, for most of us as companies, it’s not worth our time or brain power.

Adam Harding:
It feels to me that it is really important to understand what it is that you uniquely offer to the world. And the way I personally think about this at a very high level is using the Hedgehog Principle, which is what could you be world-class at? What are your people genuinely excited by and passionate about? Because you need that energy because things are hard at the beginning. And then the third thing is what works with your economic model? You bring those three things together, you’d be amazed how quickly you can shortlist a long list of stuff that you could do down to the things that will actually make an impact on your business, on your students, on your clients, on your patients, on your customers.

But the world moves really, really quick. If I look at the Gartner reports, there are umpteen hype cycles with 20 or 30 things on each one. You’ll spin around in circles and go absolutely nowhere if you get too distracted by the hype. But there’s plenty of leading indicators. You don’t always have to be the absolute bleeding edge. If you’re 6 months late to something that’s going to be in place for the next 20 years, that’s okay guys. There’s a huge fear of missing out. FOMO is a real thing, but you don’t have to make too many guesses. Sometimes you’re going to have to make a big bet, but to be honest, most of the time it’s quite obvious because you can see the signs.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And sometimes as a CTO being in tech, we have to hold people’s hands through that and we have to give them that reassurance because if they’re standing outside, those hype curves, dozens and dozens, hitting and hitting. It’s like you said, that FOMO, that bit that I think does plague tech, not because necessarily the techies have that FOMO, but we do. But it’s the business and that calmness of this is how we go forward. You can make it simple. And I think that is always the thing.

I love going back to the first story you told about the jeans. You came up with a really innovative solution, but sometimes the most innovative solutions are really simple. What if we just use some cameras? So it’s that ability to bring things down to a simple solution, to a problem. It requires us really deeply understanding the problem. And then as you say, really deeply understanding our strengths, what we do, what our people do. But once you have that clarity, a lot of the solutions that come in are not easy, but they don’t have to be complicated. That actually the more complexity, the more you’ve got to ask yourself, have you actually got down to the root of the problem or the root of the solution? Do you think that’s fair?

Adam Harding:
I think it’s fair. I think a lot of the time people spend, rather than solving the root problem, they solve the symptoms. So that’s where the distraction comes in. They solve all the symptoms of the problem rather than actually get into the crux of what’s causing those symptoms over and over again. And that’s true, whether that’s an issue with user experience, customer experience, I feel that quite often we’re trying to solve problems that you should just remove.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah, I like that. And I think sometimes … I can think of the number of times in the room using my mantra and people go, “Oh, that’s a really good question.” It’s the same question. I just find myself, when the discussions start going all over the place and all the complexity starts coming in, is that clarifying, can I just remind ourselves of what is the problem we’re actually trying to solve? And I like what you’re saying, is that a symptom or is that the problem? And that idea of not everything needs to be solved, some can just be removed. Super. Really, really love that.

Now, you’ve referred several times, and I know Softcat, fabulous culture, great team. There’s a real sense of people when you’re working with Softcat. Is AI changing that? Is the proliferation of AI changing things within your team? How the culture rates, how people feel about that? Because I do know in some companies people are getting spooked, people are getting threatened. What are you seeing and feeling and how do you in your role, help manage that at Softcat?

Adam Harding:
Oh, I feel from a cultural aspect, no, I don’t think AI is having a cultural impact. There’s an underlying optimism. There’s an overt positivity behind the way we embrace new opportunities and we work with customers and I suppose in our very specific setup it is genuinely an opportunity for us to work with customers to help them deploy AI, help them get on top of data, help them automate workloads, all that type of stuff. So maybe it’s a little bit different, but exactly where we squarely fit, it’s definitely been embraced as a good opportunity.

Internally and thinking about the business model rather than the cultural strategy, but the business model, AI definitely starts to change that. It starts to change the focus from humans being about efficiency to being creative because you can’t be any more efficient than a well-organized AI can be. So that’s quite an interesting shift to, well, how do we help people get more comfortable exploring the creative sides, the human sides, the human connection sides of the job or of them as people?

I feel that we are broadly knowledge workers, so it is the first time that if we look at technology from the past, technology revolutions from the past, they’ve broadly been about replacing muscle. This one’s about replacing intelligence. So it is something that I can understand why there’s uncertainty, why there’s scepticism, why, “Oh my God, I’ve spent the last 20 years learning how to do this thing. All of a sudden, a little machine can come along and do it in 40 seconds.” I can understand that uncertainty, and it is uncertain. I don’t know how it’s going to pan out, but at the moment, in the short term and probably the midterm, it all looks like upside. It all looks like upside. Yes, we probably won’t need to recruit as many people in the same positions as we have previously because we can use AI to help individuals that are already there that have the underlying knowledge and experience to go further without killing them.

And actually in this kind of pocket where we still need … AI’s like a child and it still needs parents to nurture it and nudge it and check it and keep it on track. Actually, the people that have the experience, because they’ve been doing it for the last 5, 10, 15, whatever it is, years, they’re the parents. They just adopted a load of AI children that they need to nurture to help them out. So I can see why people are uncertain, I can see why they’re unsettled because it’s change and I like running towards change and lots of people like running away from it.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Well, and I think this is where again, you benefit from your culture because you’ve already said several times of, “Well, we disrupt ourselves rather than waiting for disruption. We change different things. We’ve built … There’s optimism, there’s resilience.” And these are the kinds of qualities within culture that are standing companies in good stead, understanding as much as any of us can, what’s happening in this space.

Okay, so think about then the horizon, because I suspect we’re going to start coming back to some of the same ideas. We tend to start to wind up the podcast asking people what’s on the horizon that grabs your interest, good or bad? What about you?

Adam Harding:
So much to the dismay of my wife, I’m a natural-born fixer, so I’m generally and genuinely interested in way too much stuff. But the reality is AI brings into sharp focus the biggest opportunity to make the biggest difference to the most amount of people, to the most amount of industries right now and for the foreseeable future. Yes, quantum will come along. Yes, robotics will come along and will probably extend it, but still at the core of it, artificial intelligence is going to be the most impactful thing. I don’t think we’ve completed it, but it’s probably the most impactful thing, advancement in my lifetime anyway.

On the plus sides, I think we’re going to really collapse the amount of time it takes to make huge scientific jumps forwards, which is fantastic for humanity. On the negative side, I feel that there really is going to be job displacement. The technological revolutions we’ve had in the past have broadly replaced muscle. This one replaces knowledge. And it’s funny actually, when the technological changes in the past have happened, the knowledge workers have just told the muscle workers, the blue collar workers, “Don’t worry, re-skill, go and find another job.” This is the first one where it’s the knowledge workers that are going to be massively impacted.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And we’re not quite as sanguine about the whole thing. I think that’s very important.

Adam Harding:
No, no, everyone’s panicking now.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Because even in looking across, talking to people, actually people who are doing things with muscle are the only ones that might survive all this.

Adam Harding:
That’s it. 100%.

Debbie Forster MBE:
In looking at my kids, my nephews, my nieces, et cetera, I look across and only the midwife do I see, okay, I don’t think AI is coming quite for your job because I don’t see an AI companion, but everything else, and we all have to … I think in tech we’ve got quite complacent on, yeah, digital is going to eat journalism, digital is going to eat this. No, digital is going to eat digital, and we need to think about what that means.

Adam Harding:
Yeah, I think the reality is there’s a lot of people at both ends of the AI spectrum. There’s some people that believe that the world will end, and there’s some people that believe that it is the best thing since sliced bread. The reality is we don’t know. We don’t know. And it’ll be a bit of both. We probably will make the kind of scientific advances that would’ve taken 250 years in the next 25 years. That will have a lot of good. But some of the things I’m more concerned about is, well, I’m not entirely sure that AI tech bros are telling you the full story of their opinion. And yes, it’s going to help humanity, but it is going to displace a lot of jobs.

Debbie Forster MBE:
I completely agree.

Adam Harding:
I think that does lead to a bigger problem, which is purpose. I’d like to suggest that people don’t find that much purpose from their work and they find it elsewhere in their lives, but that’s not the reality. A lot of people find a lot of purpose from the work they do, and I do feel it’s something that we as a world genuinely need to start thinking about as to how are we going to deal with that. But I’m still optimistic about it. I think all of this pins on trust actually, us trusting our employers, us trusting our governments, us trusting each other. I think AI and how well it develops as part of how well society develops alongside AI is going to be down to a massive team effort from governments and big organizations and small organizations and us as individuals.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And that requires us to lean forward and demand the accountability to build the trust, doesn’t it? I do worry too often if we’re not careful, because it is so enormous, it’s easy to sort of lean back and say, “Well, governments are going to figure that out, or big companies are going to do that,” and we’ve got to start asking those questions so that governments, et cetera are leaning forward to understand they’ve got to do that. There’s push and pull, I think. There’s nothing we can do as individuals except keep pushing or create our own accountability.

Adam Harding:
As individuals, I think we need to … You’re absolutely right. We’ve got to lobby for accountability at the high levels. There is a challenge. Over the past many thousands of years, we have gone from groups of 20 or 30 in tribes that could trust each other, to nation states that could trust each other, to continents that can trust each other, to global systems that trust each other. We’re at a funny point in time right now whereby the global order is changing. There is more isolationism than there is global cooperation.

And that leads a little bit to … Well, it leads a lot to, that distrust leads a lot to the arms race in AI between nation states, between big organizations, and we’re all going to need to get on the same page to make sure that the right global guardrails are put in place to ensure that AI is, at a huge level, safe for humanity moving forward. This is of our own creation. We are creating something that’s going to be more intelligent than us. But there is evidence, those thousands of years of increased trust, increased trust. There have been pockets of war, there have been pockets of isolationism, but we’ve always managed to get there in the end to do what’s best for the whole.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And we can build that as well. We can begin modelling that and discovering that within tech, within our teams, within our companies. What are those guardrails? What do they look like? What do they look like when they work? When they don’t work? And make sure that we’re demanding top down, but building from bottom up, what are the guardrails we need? And thinking about the meaning and purpose. What is the human value add? How can we continue to build? Because that value add isn’t just adding value. That’s part of that trust, the guardrails, et cetera. So there’s, I think like you, a solution-focused approach. I think I’m like you, neither wholly optimistic or pessimistic. It’s just we need to get cracking. We need to start leaning forward to try and understand short, medium, and long, what can we do it? Because this is, as you say, this is something we are architecting. This is not alien invasion we’re facing in terms of this is existential. This is what we’re building ourselves. But if we’re building it, we can try and build in, as you say, the guardrails.

Adam Harding:
Yeah, and I say I’m a skeptical optimist, actually. Just thinking about how you phrase that.

Debbie Forster MBE:
I do that as well. Yeah. Or sometimes do a pragmatic, I’m a pragmatic optimist of, okay, super. That’s great. I’m sure it’s going to … Well, my motto is always hope for the best, plan for the worst, and have feedback and then you’re ready to go.

Adam Harding:
It’s all interesting. Something I think people miss is that AI learns by observing. It doesn’t learn by being instructed. You can give it some instructions, but it learns by observing. So when it comes to the ethics and you want it to be kind and you don’t want it to be racist or sexist or homophobic or any of the other things, well, if it observes us doing that, that’s what it does. That’s why it starts to blackmail people.

Debbie Forster MBE:
It is what we feed it. Okay. So big lessons, big things to be thinking about as well as you’ve given us some really simple ways to think about in the here and now, how we filter things.

I love to close things out of, we’re always on the hunt for a great book, a great podcast, a great something to listen, read, watch, et cetera. What is that for you, Adam? What are you reading, watching, or listening? One or two things that we might find valuable?

Adam Harding:
Well, obviously, I don’t know, any great podcasts.

Debbie Forster MBE:
[Laughter] Oh, and you have one too. So we’re both wounded.

Adam Harding:
Yeah, exactly. We do have one too. We do have one too.
So I tell you what, kind of on the same topic, I listened to a band the other day called The Velvet Sundown, and I was both appalled and delighted. I was appalled because I thought it was pretty good. And I continued to be appalled when I realized that they’re an AI band. No human hand has touched that thing or written that song. And then I was absolutely delighted that the second I realized it was an AI band, it left me cold. There was no emotional connection. Nobody had gone through any struggle to figure it out or put their heart on a page or any of that type of stuff. So I would encourage you to give them one listen so they don’t get paid too much via Spotify just to see how clever it is.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Or get a group of friends to listen to it at the same time so we get maximum …

Adam Harding:
Listen to it once to hear how clever it is, and then take a moment to realize how much you don’t care. So when AI films and AI books and AI music and those AI emails you receive land in your inbox, just realize that there’s going to be an element of human connection that’s missing and we’ve got to be careful. And it’s great that we still want that human presence, that human hand in it.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah, I think we’re always going to have that hunger for the real, for the different. You’ve got the backlash from the fast food movement into the slow food movement. I do think you’re right. I think there’s always going to be that hunger for what is truly human, whatever we decide to define that.

Okay, super. Listen, we’ve gone everywhere. Rock and roll, blue jeans, we’ve gone through the hype curves. It’s been fantastic. Adam, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been really great having you.

Adam Harding:
Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s been fun.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Thank you for listening. If you’re a tech innovator and would like to appear as a guest on the show, email us now at [email protected]. And finally, thank you to the team of experts at Fox Agency who make this podcast happen. I’m Debbie Forster and you’ve been listening to the XTech Podcast.

Announcer:
Keep exploring the world of tech. Subscribe to our podcast and never miss an episode. To discover more opportunities for global B2B tech brands, visit fox.agency today.