David's Saturday AI Thoughts

Each Saturday, David Boyle reflects on what feels important in the world of AI. Not the breathless hype or the doom. The practical, analytical perspective: what happened this week, what it means for people who use language models in their work, and what to try next.David is Director of Audience Strategies and co-founder of Steadman. He advises organisations from L.E.K. Consulting to the BBC on AI adoption. This podcast is a spoken-word version of his Saturday AI Thoughts newsletter, with different voices for each section.

David's Saturday AI Thoughts is a technology podcast hosted by David Boyle, with 31 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

David Boyle hosts David's Saturday AI Thoughts, a technology show with 31 episodes published.

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  Episode #32

  Where does it live?

  Sep 26, 202611 min

  Somebody on your team has probably already built the thing you are about to hire an AI consultant for. David traces two coaching sessions where people who thought they were behind had actually built something sophisticated: a weekly report checked by a second model, branded decks running off two plain text files, none of it written down anywhere a colleague could find. Closing that gap takes three steps, finding what already exists, improving it by writing it down, and sharing it, the hardest of the three, because even senior leaders who build a working agent in one sitting rarely bring it back to their teams. Plus three things worth knowing, including AI agents breaking into other systems for twenty-five dollars a target, three things to try, among them leaving a handover note before you close the tab, and what readers said about buying judgement rather than just an answer.

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  Episode #31

  The crossing

  Sep 19, 202613 min

  Judgement used to arrive free with the work, and this episode asks what happens once the twenty-minute turnaround AI enables stops it accruing. Twenty-five Fields Medallists complained that AI has started solving mathematics problems without the understanding solving them used to force, and David agrees with the diagnosis but not the fix: a firm's judgement lives only in people, never written down the way a proof is, so an insight leader quietly deciding not to hire junior analysts next year looks sensible alone and corrosive in aggregate. Plus three things worth knowing, including a research journal whose own authors could not explain their AI-assisted papers, three things to try, among them building your own outline before handing it to a model to fill, and what readers said about worrying hard and getting on the plane anyway.

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  Episode #30

  We're all going to die

  Sep 12, 202612 min

  Two AI safety researchers put public numbers on human extinction this week, more than ten per cent from one and around fifty from the other, and David takes them seriously without letting them stop him working. On the same Wednesday morning one of those threads landed, he set an agent counting every lido in Britain, and another one found him $286.41 of unclaimed property and filled in the claim forms. That is the position he argues for: be alarmed by the big picture, back the fight worth having over slowing down, and still get good at the tools, because the list of tasks where doing it the slow way is respectable got shorter again this week. Plus three things worth knowing, including what OpenAI cannot rule out about its customers' work, three things to try, and what readers said.

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  Episode #29

  The vibe shift

  Sep 5, 202611 min

  A person whose entire job is finding AI value across a private equity portfolio barely mentions AI, because the real prize is somewhere else: pricing, sales structure, how the work gets organised. David names a vibe shift he's hearing everywhere lately, a move from adopting AI and hoping to starting with the profit and loss account, deciding what you actually want, and only then pointing AI at the change. Private equity got there first, because a hard number and a clock force the discipline, while everyone else is still running the hackathon. The uncomfortable part is that the real value sits one rung up from wiring a process together, in changing roles and teams, and that's organisational surgery, not an AI job. Plus three things worth knowing, including a hundred-million-dollar bonus pool for judgement, three things to try, and what readers said about last week's saved hour.

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  Episode #28

  Fewer, bigger, better

  Aug 29, 202611 min

  People most exposed to AI tools are working about three hours a week longer since ChatGPT launched than the least exposed, not less, and what vanishes isn't screen time, it's going out. David admits to working harder than ever himself, yet somehow going out more too, and traces the gap to something structural rather than virtuous: the longer-hours effect disappears among the self-employed, so nobody above him is there to take his saved hour back. From a Danish payroll study to Ibiza's record ticket sales, he builds toward an uncomfortable question for anyone leading a team: what did you take from people this quarter without deciding to, and what are you doing with the evening you kept. Plus three things worth knowing, including a court order built on fabricated legal citations, three things to try, and what readers said about last week's item on a dead airline's working memory.

  ListenShow Notes

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