How to Get Loads of Marks
EP 29: Alan King - Purpose First, AI Second
Something a little different this time, I left the virtual studio behind and recorded this one in Alan King's living room in the lovely town of Mumbles, South Wales. Alan is the founder and CEO of AI consultancy ITAA.ai, founder of the AI-Your-Org community (which I'm a member of), and AI Strategy Director at the Global AI Association. He's also the author of Harnessing the Power of AI in Organisations and, more recently, Further State, a book about how intelligent systems reshape organisational logic. All built on a background spanning automation and robotics at Hewlett Packard and an MBA from Brunel. Alan spends his time both pushing organisations forward with AI and pulling them back to do it safely, so we dig into that tension: why risk and purpose should be your first two questions, how to build a "brain" that genuinely knows your subject rather than just firing questions at an empty chat box, and why defining the problem matters far more than the answer. Along the way we cover needle-in-a-haystack tests and models that seem to know when they're being watched, Blockbuster and Kodak getting their organisational logic completely wrong, the case for an AI CEO of Amazon, and why for all its power AI still hasn't written The Great Gatsby or given us a Taylor Swift. There's loads in here for any student trying to use these tools to do better work, not just less of it. You can find out more about Alan at itaa.ai and aiyourorg.org , or through the Global AI Association.
