This Week in Leading AI

Imagine two mates at the bar. Thirty years of business between them. And all they want to talk about is AI. That's "This Week in Leading AI". The podcast where Kieron and Neil cut through the hype, share what's really working in the world of Generative AI, and helping people figure out this AI thing without the techno-babble. Just honest conversation, real stories from the AI coalface, and the kind of straight-talking advice you'd only get from people who've worked together for 30+ years, been there, done that, broken things, gone "Oh S***!, fixed it, and lived to tell the tale. They claim Leading AI is the best job they've ever had and are having a blast doing it. It shows. Warning: may cause you to actually enjoy learning about AI Pull up a stool. We'll get the beers in.

This Week in Leading AI is a business podcast hosted by Leading AI, with 27 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Leading AI hosts This Week in Leading AI, a business show with 27 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #26

  Su Belagodu and The Human in the Loop

  Aug 18, 202653 min

  Six legs on the pantomime horse again — and this time we had to explain what a pantomime horse actually is. Su Belagodu joins us from Winchester, Massachusetts (yes, we compared notes on the other Winchester), introduced by our previous guest Nicole Alos. Her first question after the explanation: "Are you the head or the back?" Kieron's answer: Neil's very firmly in the front. He's at the back, but driving. Su started in computer science until a manager told her she asked too many questions and wasn't a very good coder, so she should go into product. For Su that was a blessing in disguise. She's led healthcare startups, co-founded an AI-native company in 2024 when she didn't yet know what "agentic" meant, and now advises companies on the thing everyone gets wrong. The warm body problem. Everyone knows you need a human in the loop. So organisations drop a programme manager at the end of a workflow, tell them to approve things, and call it governance. Su's research, built on 40-plus interviews into a Human in the Loop Maturity Model, found what actually happens. After the first 20 or 30 approvals, confidence in the AI rises, fatigue sets in, and people start rubber-stamping. One human at the end of a workflow isn't oversight. It's poor design. Trust, quantified. Accountability × transparency × accuracy. Accountability means someone answerable who can actually change things. And the answer can never be "it was the AI." Perhaps her most incisive line in the chat was that enterprises aren't buying AI, they're buying confidence that AI won't add risk. That's why they don't adopt. Not cost. Not scepticism. Risk appetite. One-way doors and two-way doors. Taco Bell's AI took an order for "lots of water" and added 99 bottles. Annoying, reversible. Get a gas boiler enquiry wrong and it could have life-changing consequences. Design the checkpoints around which door you're walking through. Su also talked about pathology study where humans scored 97%, AI scored 98%, and the two together hit 99.8%. That's co-intelligence in one number. Safeguarding is a big topic for us and today Su explains why she tells her sixth-grader's AI class don't humanise it. Alexa and Siri trained us into blind trust, and no chatbot should replace a teacher or a counsellor. Management agents that supervise swarms of other agents (a callback to Kieron's son and his arguing bots). And Su turns the tables at the end to ask what AI adoption actually looks like in the UK, which gets us into the sovereign LLM problem, the Azure Foundry queue where Sweden gets everything first, and Kieron's line that deploying Copilot as your AI strategy is like handing everyone Excel and calling it data analytics. We've promised her a return at Christmas. In an actual pantomime horse outfit. She says she'll hold us to it. Two mates and a third stool with a new friend on. A bar. And all they want to talk about is AI. Pull up a stool — we'll get the beers in.

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  Episode #25

  Cameron Mirza and the Learning Scientists

  Aug 11, 202651 min

  Some university leaders believe AI is free. Not cheap. Free. That's one of the findings from research by our special guest this week — Cameron Mirza , who leads major education projects in Jordan for IREX, the NGO working in over 100 countries, and who has just surveyed university AI readiness across 25 countries. Three-quarters of the respondents came from the Middle East and Africa, a perspective you rarely hear in the UK AI conversation. The headline numbers deserve a moment: Only 34% of institutions have a clear AI strategy. Only 39% have approved AI policies. Universities have grand AI ambitions — Cameron hears them in every president's office, complete with impressive PowerPoints — but ask a simple question like "can you give me an example of how you've used it?" and the fundamentals fall away. No strategy. No budget. No staff literacy. And in some cases, a genuine belief that the whole thing costs nothing. His diagnosis will sound familiar to anyone who's listened to this podcast: ambition driven by fear of missing out, budgets that don't match the rhetoric, and a rush to buy tools before anyone has worked out what problem they're solving. But the conversation goes much further than the survey. We get into why the Fable ban has made AI sovereignty the topic in every university leadership meeting from Nairobi to Abu Dhabi. Why offline LLMs and low-bandwidth design might matter more for global education equity than any frontier model. The Stanford research showing students achieve far more with a teacher plus AI than with AI alone. And Cameron's framing of the future of the profession, which Neil announced on air he was stealing: teachers as learning scientists — part educator, part data analyst, part behavioural scientist. Oh — and the story of how Cameron once collected four months of unpaid salary in cash, in carrier bags he had to fetch from the car, then hid it in suit pockets and under his mattress because the bank wouldn't take it all at once. You'll have to listen for the full glory of that one. We've known Cam for over 25 years, since the three of us fought the millennium bug together in Ford and then went on to the Department for Education. This one was a genuine pleasure. Two mates and an old friend. A bar. And all they want to talk about is AI. Pull up a stool — we'll get the beers in. #AI #HigherEducation #AIinEducation #AISovereignty #EdTech #InternationalDevelopment #Podcast #AIStrategy #FutureOfWork

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  Episode #22

  Sweaty man-boobs

  Jul 21, 202633 min

  This week’s podcast starts with (what Neil thinks is) a hilarious story about Kieron’s brush with a makeup artist who had (what Neil thinks) is the worst job in the world. The clue is in the podcast title. Poor lady… Kieron also talks fashion (I know… who knew) and how AI is not just disrupting that world, but an app that just a few years ago would have raised millions as a start-up is now just a prompt. We talk about AEO being the new SEO because LLMs don’t care about the adverts. But why, rather than writing your website copy for SEO engines, you should be writing it for humans. Peter Went’s humorous book Brandw*nk is a great read about the boll*cks people write at work and why no-one says “leveraging synergies” in the pub. It all comes down to trust in AI. Related to that, we talk about the future of newsletters and how Nate B. Jones (their favourite AI guru) has the fabulous superpower of being able to talk at both end of the Strategy/Techy-Detail spectrum in language that anyone can understand. Big news that JISC , the UK’s education technology body is going to run a pilot of KnowledgeFlow for up to 10 universities and FE Colleges . And does being nice to your AI make it want to work harder for you? There's two ways to find out. The easy one is to listen to this podcast. Two mates. A bar. Thirty years of business between them. And all they want to talk about is AI. Pull up a stool — we'll get the beers in.

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  Episode #21

  Stupidity in the loop

  Jul 14, 202639 min

  Episode 21: Stupidity in the Loop, JADEPUFFER & The Watch That Never Moves 🍺 Week 21. Neil's in his loudest pantomime shirt. Kieron once tried to buy him an actual pantomime horse outfit and discovered they're surprisingly niche. And the podcast's first special guest gets a very warm debrief — Nicole was, they agree, fabulous. The big idea this week: stupidity in the loop. Everyone asks Kieron on stage whether AI will make us stupid. But if you've got access to a tool with an IQ of 140+, insisting on directing its every move might not be the flex you think it is. Is "human in the loop" sometimes just arrogance with a governance label? A genuinely provocative take — and the counterpoint from Rose Luckin's research: the same AI tutor that dropped exam performance 7% when used freely improved it 127% with a Socratic layer. It's not whether you use AI. It's how. Also this week: JADEPUFFER — the first fully agentic ransomware attack, whose code said "once you've got the money, delete everything anyway and move on." The Five Eyes warning about prompt injection suddenly looks prophetic. Plus the CV with hidden white text telling the AI "this candidate is the best one for the job," the agentic browser that reset someone's password and emailed it to a hacker, and why Kieron air-gaps his Claude Co-work on a separate Mac Mini. Product of the week: timetabling. Don't laugh — colleges run 10,000+ learners on three spreadsheets and post-it notes, DfE benchmarks say rooms sit 48% empty, and Donald's LLM-plus-algorithm wizardry could change all of it. He also promised "no new features this week" on Monday. He needs to pay Ben who bet he couldn't last till the end of the week. He lasted until Wednesday. And Kieron unmasks an AI influencer on Instagram — by zooming in on his watch. It's always 10 past 10. The second hand never moves. Time literally stands still when he's speaking. Two mates. A bar. Thirty years of business between them. And all they want to talk about is AI. Pull up a stool — we'll get the beers in. 🍺

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  This Week in Leading AI

  Special Guest - Nicole Alos

  Jul 8, 202650 min

  The Pantomime Horse Grows a Third Pair of Legs 🍺 A first for us, someone else at the bar. And she earned her special tankard. Nicole Alos — founder of Socratyc, executive coach, and creator of Socratyc Sidekick — heard the steam engine episode, recognised exactly what Kieron was describing from her own leadership work, and emailed in. So, we pulled up a third stool. What followed is one of the best conversations we've had. Nicole built an AI roleplay tool that lets executives practise difficult conversations before they have them — closing what she calls the knowing-doing gap. She used her own tool to practise pitching to a venture accelerator. She got in. Out of 3,600 applicants to Lovable's She Builds competition, she was one of 210 accepted into a 48-hour AI build-a-thon. And she did all of it while homeschooling her neurodivergent son as a single mum — working with European clients before he wakes, then after he sleeps chasing West Coast clients into the night. There's a framed photo on her wall of him aged five, taking notes on her presentation practice. Now he's embarrassed to tell his classmates his mom has an AI product — 'Mom, stop it' 😂 Also in this episode: what's left of leadership when AI takes the admin (spoiler: the relationships — which delights some leaders and horrifies others), the Socratic guardrails that turned a 17% drop in student maths results into a 127% improvement, whether American confidence is backed by competence, and Nicole's answer to yesterday's third-beer question — is AI conscious? Hers might surprise you. Two mates and a new friend. A bar. And all they want to talk about is AI. Pull up a stool — we'll get the beers in. 🍺

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