But do you think AI can make better decisions than humans
when it comes to leadership role?
Fundamentally, no. That is exactly the wrong use of
AI. AI is there to be your copilot
is a leader. I'll give you examples.
Neural River have a product called Mayi and Mayi is about
creating a business brain and we upload all the documents, you
know, your accounts, your sales packs, your customer services,
your FAQs, we scrape your website and it creates a
knowledge of your business. We then we called every single
Zoom teams meeting and other meeting you have and phone call
you have. So everything is captured,
analysed and can be fed up to the leader to say this is what's
actually going in your business. But it's the leader's job to
make the decisions. It's a leader's job to show
leadership to it's human team. Yeah, the leader can you an AI
to communicate. For example, we've created a
town hall function and we've cloned that leader's voice so we
can just, you know, write what he wants to say, or the AI can
write what he says. He's the edge of it, and it goes
out to all his staff members that are fully aware what's
going on. But leadership and human
leadership is the ultimate power.
AI is just an enabler. Hi there, are you a professional
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Live ladies and gentlemen, once again welcome to the King James
podcast and Diary of the CFO. And today I've got with me a
very important guest are fighting out of the United
Kingdom. Make welcome Steve the AI man.
And the cart. How are you Steve?
I'm. Good, thanks.
Ready to rock'n'roll? Wow.
See what you've got to say? OK, OK, man, just before we hit
the record button, we're saying we don't know the Steve you're
getting today, either the real Steve or the AI Steve.
What is Steve are we getting today?
You're getting the real one that answers questions quickly
without me having to write a script for it.
OK, amazing. And the Steve without the prompt
engineering. So sit back why we'll read to
you your flowers. So today's episode is.
One of those rare conversations that sits at the intersection of
business, technology and legacy. Our.
Guest is a serial. Entrepreneur, investor and
Chairman who has built, skilled and exited multiple ventures
across travel, fintech and now artificial Intelligence.
From helping shape the modern travel industry to building AI
driven ventures like Neuro Voice and Co Founding Life's Echo, he
is now tackling one of the most profound questions of our time.
What does it mean to live on beyond your lifetime?
He is also the mind behind AI, Steve and AI powered political
candidates designed to rethink how democracy could work in the
digital age. This is a conversation about
innovation, risk, legacy and the future of humanity in an AI
driven world. Steve, welcome once again to The
Kingdom's podcast. Thanks for having me.
You're welcome, Sir. So let's go to the origin story.
You know the origin behind the authority.
So you've had an incredible journey from traditional
industries into AI. What were the key inflection
points that shaped your thinking as an entrepreneur?
I think the first thing that happened was my business went
bust. I was working with International
Leisure Group in 1990. I took a year out to travel
around the world. I came back on the 1st of March
and then the business went bust on the 8th of March.
So my job, my career went down the toilet overnight and we had
to start a new business. And we created a new business
called Sunworld. We made-up the name on a Sunday
afternoon, News of the World and the Sun.
We went and rented some offices and we pinched the computers
from the old company because we couldn't afford them and then
paid for them later. And it taught me how to be an
entrepreneur in a corporate world.
So it's a seismic shock to me, but it was one that taught me
that you can survive disaster, move forward and actually make
good profit from it. It's amazing, you know, that's
the spirit of resilience, you know, coming back from disaster,
but you know, you are a man of multiple feathers, right?
So from travel to AI, you you've got your hands in different pies
and of course, you've built an exceeded successful businesses,
you know, in travel industry before moving into the AI
industry. So what did travel industry
teach you about skill, about margins, and about timing?
I. Think it's probably not so much
travel but having a corporate career first.
Is unusual for an entrepreneur. So I was not a born
entrepreneur. I did not just risk everything.
I had a corporate career. I cheated my way through the
ranks because I knew how to. Fiddle the accounts.
Because I was an accountant, I understood the margins, I
understood where to go, where to make money, and I got to the top
of a largest tour operator in the world at the time I travel
and I was chief operating officer in the UK and I hated
the job and I hated the job because I didn't actually do a
job anymore. I just sat behind the desk and
had multiple meetings all week. And I did that top role, which
was my dream role for a year, and I went to.
Hell with this, it's ruining my marriage, it's ruining my life.
I don't like the job I'm leaving.
And then you have to work out that actually you can't just
leave. You need to get them to sack you
and give you a year's pay off so you can start your new business.
So that's exactly what I did. I became very.
Awkward in corporate life. Managed to persuade them to pay
me off and then I started my entrepreneurial life again and
launched a new business. So, yeah, interesting.
You know so many founders tend to chase trends, but you seem to
anticipate them. How do you spot where the world
is going before others? Do that.
I think you sit back. I tend to sit in the hot tub in
the morning and think about my sector, my industry, what's
going on. So for example, when I was
running my travel, we used to run what we call a vertically
integrated model where we had an airline, a torporator and a
retail shop network. And I could see these big rocks
coming. And we were a big juggernaut of
an oil tanker heading towards those rocks.
And the rocks were the Internet, because the Internet was going
to mean that people wouldn't book their holidays via travel
agent solely, and it would mean we'd lose control of our
distribution. And that would open the door for
new companies to come in. And at the same time, low cost
carriers were taking off. So for example, if you want to
get to Majorca in the old days, you used to own the aircraft, or
you had to charter a aircraft, or you had to take an allocation
of 20 seats. Yeah.
And then low cost carriers came along and as a tour operator, I
invented a product called Dynamic Packaging where it says,
well, hang on a minute, we don't have to commit to anything.
We will just scan all the low cost airlines flights, create a
database of flights. We'll then negotiate lots of
hotel contracts with thousands of hotels.
And every night we'll just manufacture 150 million holiday
options like baking holidays, but every day we'd sell about
100 of them. And then we'd shut the ones we
hadn't used away and bake again. And only at the moment did the
customer say, yeah, I want that holiday.
Did we actually use the technologies behind the scenes
to click and buy the airline seat, buy the bed, buy the
transfer and put it all together for them.
So it's just in time tour rating which was diametrically opposed
to how the big tour raters work, which is all pre made, all fixed
risk and had to be sold at the last minute at huge losses.
So it was sitting back looking at the weaknesses of our market,
look at the opportunities coming along, which is low cost
carriers and the Internet and saying how can I do what I've
done for the last 20 years in a more flexible different way.
And that's the strategic thinking that's sitting back
understanding your market and understanding technology.
And that same opportunity is coming again.
And I love disruption and I love destroying other people's
businesses, and I think we can do that with AI.
So. You're actually to describe
yourself as a commercially driven, you know, leader with a
strong financial mindset. So how has finance shaped your
decision making as a founder and as an investor?
OK, I'll give you a couple of tips.
I became an accountant when I came out in university.
Never wanted to be an accountant, just wanted to get
into management. And it was the easiest route at
the time to get into management. But it taught me a lot of
things. It taught me how to read a
balance sheet. It taught me the power of cash.
So when you're starting a business up, you've got to
really understand that cash is more important than profit.
Scalability is more important than profit because you need to
raise money from investors who need to buy into that business
and you have to understand the tax benefits for those
investors. For example, SEIS in EIS
schemes, very simply our lovely government allow you to raise
£250,000 from Angel investors and if you invest £50,000, you
get half of that back of your next tax bill using SEIS.
Yep. So 50,000 LB becomes £25,000 and
if the business fails, you can claim enough 40% back.
So you need to go to investors and explain, give me £50,000 and
you're only risking 12 1/2. And that's why I'm, I've got
this nice juicy £2,000,000 valuation because you're, it's
punt money, you're taking a punt on my success.
And therefore you're basing that punt on have I got a management
team, am IA credible leader? Do I have an idea?
Can it scale? And the scale is the most
important thing because if they don't get 10 times their money,
they're not interested. So they're not interested in
real world businesses like building houses.
They're interested in things that can go from zero to hero
and a very quick time and become a Unicorn.
So, and you know, Speaking of compounding, what is one
decision you made early in your career that compounded into
massive long term value? For me, it was very simple.
It was walking away from a corporate job to do my own
thing. And that's a tough decision to
make. And actually, I'd advise most
people not to do it, yeah, because the risks are so great.
But I was in a lucky position that I've made enough money from
corporate life. I've just been paid off by my
travel. For a year, yeah.
And I went, you know what, I'm not going back to corporate
life. I'm going to build my own
businesses. And the first decision there is
I didn't want to build 1 business and put all my efforts
and time into one business. So I built a call center
business. I built a insurance business.
One of my mates came to me with an idea of a transfer business,
so I backed that and I built a technology hub to build all
those products. And of those three businesses,
one went bust, one was sold for 60.5 million and one was sold
for 22.5 million. But it took me 19 years to build
them and create them and sell them.
So it's not an overnight wow. Let's just walk out your
corporate life and success. This comes easily.
And that failure was incredibly painful because the most painful
thing of any entrepreneur is having to tell people that
you've brought into a business and have trusted you, that that
business has failed because you have let them down.
Personally, that's the biggest pain I've ever had in my career,
standing for front of 45 people and telling the business have
failed. Never want to go through it
again. So.
Let's talk about. The businesses you've built in,
especially in the AI sector, you've got neural voice.
So let's talk about our newer voice.
What problem are you solving? Why is voice such a powerful
interface in the AI era? OK, let's step back and start
with Newell River, which is the incubator.
So I've got three sons of my first marriage, the oldest and
the youngest, very sporty, come on holiday with dads, love
sunshine, love golf, love skiing.
And the middle one hated that and didn't particularly like his
brothers. And he was a geek who got the
first class degree in computer science.
And four years ago, I went down to see him in Horsham and he
blew my brains away by what he was doing.
What? What now is called AI.
It wasn't even called AI then. And I went, wow, yeah, what
could we do with this? But Chris, my son, is a typical
geek. He can't run a business, but
he'd make a great CTO or he'd make a great advisor to the CTO.
So we created Newell River to match grey haired people.
Been it's been there, seen it, done it, knew how to run
businesses, could help these young start-ups create a
business. And the pitch is don't work for
the man, work for yourself. So you come and work for us, we
pay you 30,000 LB one day a week, work on your own idea.
After six months that have to be half your time and after a year
was expected to spin you out as a separate business.
So the first three guys, it turned up, Jeremy Smith, Harry
and Jake looked at the Internet and they said these large
language models are conversational.
They remember what you said, what you've written last.
Yeah. And they build upon it.
So why don't we just talk to them?
And I went, OK, I like that idea.
And basically they built an interface which is you talk in
English, it records it, transcribes it, injects it into
a large language model, gets an answer, returns it, converts it
back into English, all in .42 seconds, So faster than me.
And you can talk and respond. And it also supports 42
different languages. So now I can talk with the power
of the Internet in 42 different languages.
Just think about how that drops the barriers of trade in Europe.
It's a fascinating technology. You just got to think ahead of
where it's going. So we looked at AI and said this
is the future, but we think it's going to be voice.
I'll give you another example in travel specifically.
Yeah. Large language models, A big
black holes. Losing the fortune at the
moment. Yeah.
So they've created this concept called MCPUCP, which is
basically little bricks that convert APIs into bricks that
the large language models can Hoover up and build buildings
with, shops with. So what that means is the
decision point from making your holiday is going to go from the
form filling on the travel site. And by the way, that's very
crap. They don't even ask what age you
are, who you are, what money you've got.
They just say where you want to go and give you thousands of
options you have to choose from. All of that is going out the
window because the decision point will be in within the
large language model and you won't type because typing.
I want to go on holiday to Majorca 7 nights from Manchester
on the 14th of July with my two adults and my two kids aged XX
takes too long, you'll just say it.
So therefore voice will be the future of travel because travel
will be booked within large language models and it will be
done in a spoken format, outputting all your offers and
recommendations to you. A prediction.
Before we dive back into today's conversation, I want to share
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first step. If you've been thinking about
it, sometimes the best investment you can make these in
yourself. So you've got this AI incubator,
and of course it's focused on creating new ventures.
But what would you say makes a winning AI startup into these
worlds? OK, let's look at the
difficulties of AI. Anything you create with AI can
be copied within minutes, if not hours.
So therefore you have to have speed to market.
So you have to have an idea that's going to take off on AB
to C virally, probably involved in social media or other
elements like that. So you can get to market fast
and expand. Or actually, a sensible AI
product is AB to B to C product, where we create the technology
and you go to businesses. We've already got the customers
because that will connect you and create the marketplace and
get to the customers fast. Because the only thing that
protects your idea is you've got more scale and more customers
before the next person behind you copying the same idea.
That's the rules when I'm looking for investment.
Is it a smart management team? Is it scalable?
Ideally it would be B to C rather than pure B to C where
you have to establish a brand and get your product to market.
Interesting, So you've actually said that AI can significantly
reshape employment. What does the future
realistically look like for business leaders?
Well, I'm glad I'm old because this is going to be a tough ten
years for a lot of people. It's a turn on its head, the
world order. In the old days we used to look
down on plumbers and builders and people use their hands that
a lot harder to replace. If you're an accountant, you're
buggered. If you're a lawyer, change your
job now. Yeah.
If you're an admin person, no future.
If you work in a call centre, get a new job.
That's the impact AI is going to have across multiple sectors
within the next five years. And this isn't 10 years off.
This is coming fast, fast, fast. And what will the first wave
will be will be Co pilots. So AI will work with humans to
make them more efficient. But instead of having a hundred
staff, you only need 50 staff. But after a period of time that
will go down. And the biggest fear I have
about AI is the rich will get richer and the poor will get
poorer, and it will happen so fast that our government will be
asleep while it happens to their society.
This is a doomsday prediction for AI, but you know, let's talk
about a live echo. And the ethics?
Now let's come back about that comment.
Now I'm going to come back on that comment.
It's not doomsday. It can go different ways.
For example, if I got into politics and I was in
government, over the next two to three years I would enforce a
four day week across every single business.
You still have to pay everybody the same salary, but they only
work for four days. And then five years later,
they'd probably go down to three days because we have to share
the work around. Yeah.
And we have to have a fair democracy where everybody's got
enough money to live. I don't want to work live in a
world where I walk down the street and I'm.
I'm afraid somebody's going to stab me because they're poor.
Yet we have a Great Society in the UK.
We have a great balance of wealth.
We need to maintain that. But the government needs to wake
up, start regulating AI, start understanding what's going to
happen, and start coming up some policies that actually mean it
does good. For example, if you work less,
you can do more sport. If you work less, you can drink
more coffee. If you work less, you can go on
more holidays. So there'll still be jobs, but
we have to reinvent those jobs. It's like the industrial
revolution. Yep.
When you take the plow away from somebody and the machine starts
plowing the land, they need a new job.
When the looms go because the machine can go it, they need a
new job. Those jobs came and they will
come again. The problem this time it's the
speed of the change is probably going to overwhelm most
governments if they don't think it through and react.
Sorry, pessimistic, but also vaguely optimistic about the
future. We could have a lovely life
where most of the work's done by AI and we just had more leisure
time. Could happen.
So how do you get to regulate what you don't understand?
I think the problem is most governments right now do not
have the level of understanding of AI as the private sector.
So how can the public sector regulate something that they do
not have enough understanding of?
So first of all, it's more people like me have to get
involved and say what are we going to do about this?
Because otherwise there's a doomsday coming.
So I'm standing for election in the next set of elections.
I hope to get inside the tent and start changing from the top.
So we need our own dodge. We need to modernize the whole
of the civil service. We need to get loads of experts
on AI in the tent thinking about it and how can shape government
policy. So it really is an exercise of
being in government and commerciality together.
A lot of people say to me, oh, well, you'll have a bias.
You only do it because you want to make money from it and
benefit your businesses. Absolute rubbish.
I've got enough money but yes I need to take my business skills
into government. Yes I may have to bring some of
the people I've worked before with to work there and yes they
may have to be paid. But long as you're benefiting
Mr. Voter, think about what you want.
A load of plunk of politicians that have never had proper jobs
in their lives and only went to Oxford and Cambridge and did
politics or some proper business people helping shaping the world
and the government. And no, I'm not Donald Trump.
I'm a loudmouth idiot, but I'm not that bad.
Wow. So coming, coming back to.
Business, right? Life's echo, right?
With life's echo, you're viewed in digital versions of people
that can out lead them. And what actually inspired this
idea? You've gone to the most scary
version, Digital Ghost. That's not where we came from.
So where this came from is. And again, we were down the pub
and we'd done a hackathon with the Newell River guys and I
said, I love all this voice technology.
As a politician, the biggest problem is I'm disconnected from
my voters because I can't talk to them all the time.
And they went, well, why don't we just create an AI avatar of
you? Let's create AI Steve.
And AI Steve was born that night and they literally made me talk
through all my policies. Write them all up, upload them
into a small language model, which is, you know, a database
only this AI can access it then can talk to the voters, answer
any of their questions, tell them about my policies.
And also it captures anything they're asking about.
I don't have a policy for prompts it to me.
And I had a panel of five other people we'd sit around the room
every night and we'd come up new policies based on what voters
are asking for. But before we launch those
policies, we also emailed them to 1000 commuters going from
Brighton to London to say, right, just do a quick vote on
this will you? Which one's sensible?
Which one's absolute rubbish? Yeah.
So that we had the common man and the common lady's view of
policies, not just some left wing or white wing idiot that
wanted to come up with a policy, not just our ideas.
So policies for the people, by the people.
And I also pledged that unlike most politicians who get elected
and disappear to parliament, you'd never seen them for four
years, that I'd always be contactable.
And every major vote I would go out to my voters in my local
area, Brighton, and I'd ask them which way they want me to vote.
And if I didn't agree with that, I could try to persuade them.
But if they said no, that's how we want you to vote.
I have to vote that way or I have to resign.
That are my options. That are the rules of my party.
So it's a radical retake on politics, trying to connect to
the people using AI, but not AI to write the policies.
Just AI is a communication tool, and that's a good use of AI, I
think. Anyway, I didn't ask you the
question. That was AI.
Steve. How did that lead you to Lysa?
Well, actually, again, it sounds like a lot of stories start in
restaurants in the pub. So my wife was telling somebody
about AI Steve and saying what an egotistical idiot I was.
And the next thing I'd do is download myself entirely.
And I went, oh, that's not a bad idea.
And you can't download yourself entirely.
And that's why it's called Life's Echo.
So what happens is you're interviewed over 545 minute
segments about different parts of your life, early life,
education, your family, your jobs, Yeah, your political
views. And you literally chat to the AI
and it's interactive. It's got 1000 questions behind
it, but it builds on what you say.
And only when you stop talking does it move on to the next
question. Or you give a short answer, it
moves on to the next question. So it's a very easy way of
creating a database about your life, your views, what's
happened. And then we use AI to write a
full autobiography with you. For you, it's 100 pages long, 50
pages of Word, 50 pages of your photos.
It can be printed out, and that becomes a book of your life.
But here's the interesting bit. We all can also clone your
voice, which we do. It only takes a couple of
minutes. Yeah.
And you can talk to future generations.
They don't want to read your boring book.
Yeah. They can just come online and
chat to you and say, Steve, why did you stand to be the first
AIMP? Are you mad?
Yeah. Or.
Hey. Yeah.
Granddad, where did my money come from for my school fees?
Oh, that's how it got there. Because the problem is at the
moment is you live and you die. I'm not religious.
You live and you die and you know something about your dad
and your mum, you'll know something about your
grandparents. You may know the name of your
great grandparents, but most people don't know anything about
our lives or even what they did. So we've been 3 generations.
We're right from the face of the earth.
That ain't happening for me, so I'm leaving a legacy.
I'm happy enough that people leave a legacy.
It's £199, it's very low cost. You get an autobiography and you
get a talking legacy that lasts for 100 years and could talk to
future generations about your life.
I think that's a positive thing. It is a positive thing, but then
it does raise deep ethical questions and concern.
So where do you you personally draw the line between innovation
and responsibility? OK, this is So what I did
because this also worried me that we could do a lot of harm
here. How do we make sure we don't
damage the grieving process? So we created an Ethics
Committee. I recruited a well known top
author in the dying and grieving process, Janet.
I recruited Sarah, who's a palliative care specialist
doctor. I recruited a Funeral Home
owner. I recruited the old people's
home owner. And we sat around the table for
literally hours and hours coming up with Oranga.
What? How do we stop harm here?
So, for example, you can only listen one hour at a time before
it makes you take a break. We've generated a whole lot of
words, keywords to listen for that flag up anybody who may be
in distress. And then we send them advice of
where to go and talk to people because we can't physically talk
to them all, but we send them advice of where they can get
help if they're in distress. Yeah, we've came up with dying,
a death policy, for example. This has to outlast you by 100
years. So who controls it when you've
gone? Yeah.
So we've got an executive and a deputy executive you appoint
during your life and when you die, they control access because
most of these are very private. Only I've made my public.
Most will only be available to the family.
So you've got to think through all these rules.
We've created a trust fund, so we've got enough money to power
the technology for 100 years. So this is sort of things that
you have to have an Ethics Committee for that go when is
just because you can doesn't mean you should.
So for example, we've kept a wave in creating virtual
holograms because I just think it's too dangerous.
I think it's too addictive. I think it's too Jesus, this is
too real. It's a lice echo.
It's not trying to download you. It's trying to leave a legacy
for future generations about your life, not a complete
digital clone of you because that would be too scary in my
opinion. Interesting.
So Speaking of AI adoption, so if every business leader listing
today had to integrate AI in the next 12 months, where should
they start from? I love the way you think.
It's a it's an option if they had to.
It's not an option. If you don't adopt AI, you're
going to be less efficient, your competitor, you will go out of
business. So therefore, there's so much AI
coming at you that you probably need to sit down, get in some
consultants, For example, Neuwa River AM Patterson offers his
service. So Ian is.
Yeah. Google.
He spent 28 years at IBM, headed blockchain, moved to Google,
headed AI and sustainability. This guy is a brain box.
Yeah. And you sit down with him.
You sit down with somebody in your sector understands AI.
Yeah. And then you bring your team in.
Now, you don't just bring it in the old guys, you put it in.
Half of them have to be young. Yeah.
Because they just, the old guys won't get it.
Yeah. And the old guys have you do
bring have to be flexible and willing to look at how they
change their practices because you've got to develop a road
map. You've got to stand the art as
possible. And then you've got to create a
list of bite sized chunks that you can do one at a time,
otherwise you'll never start. It's such a massive elephant
that most people just look at it and run away scared.
So you've got to chop it up into bits, and you've got to use your
own internal results, but you probably need some external
experts to come and help guide you through the process.
So what is it that founders are still getting wrong right now
when it comes to AI adoption? What I found is getting wrong.
I got something wrong with Newell Voice.
We were at least 18 months too early because, you know, we
created something that everybody went, oh, that's quite clever,
but couldn't actually see how it fitted into their busy
structures. And then the obvious user case
for voice within travel is customer services.
Yeah, because you can scale agents from nought to 10,000 in
a second. So no call ever goes unanswered
and 60% of the enquiries we believe could be handled by the
AI because it's repetitive questions, etcetera.
And even the other 40% are passed to human beings to deal
with, but they already know what the customer wants.
To me that was an absolute no brainer.
But then all the businesses introduced me to the head of
customer services and it's like Turkey's voting for Christmas.
It's like I'm not doing that, that's my job and I'm going to
have to get rid of loads of people.
So the first resistance to AI is if you present it as a cost
saving, replacing people, people really don't like it and they
really don't go for it. So we had to work around and
say, OK, let's use it where they haven't got.
So for example, most OTAs and most travel agents don't have
reps in result anymore. So we created an AI Rep that
could guide their customers and look after the customers in
result. Big tick like that.
Not replacing anybody helping me get more information about my
customers. We created reviews so you could
just do voice reviews with customers about the holidays.
Big tit like that not replacing anybody.
Yeah, we created the ability to send out outbound emails to ask
customers when they want to go next year.
So instead of they send them those boring emails, that one to
many hope they stimulate some return to the website.
We went out and asked them where do they want to go and put that
into their database. So they're marketing improved.
So using AI to surround an existing business rather than
tacking the heart of it and using it for cost saving is
where AI is currently being adopted.
That will change, but that's where it's currently being used.
And I didn't know that 18 months ago and it took us about a year
to get traction because I didn't realise that people didn't want
to save money with AI. They just want to extend the
functionalities. Interesting.
So let's talk about your big ideas.
You are a man of big ideas, legacy and society, right?
And of course you are one of those.
Would I say that the pathfinders when it comes to AI in politics,
AI in democracy? And of course you created AI
Steve to explore AI in politics, right?
So what problem would you say you are trying to solve and what
problem would you say you have been able to solve so far using
AI Steve? OK, I'll tell you what problems
I would like to solve. The biggest problem facing us is
how we generate electricity. At the moment, 45% is gas.
And as we can see from the Middle East action, not very
smart. Yeah, so we do have clean
energy, wind, solar, but the biggest clean energy is actually
nuclear. And I would build another 10
nuclear power stations over the next 10 years and massively
invest that. Amelia wanted to host a webinar,
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boss. If you don't have electricity,
you can't have the power to power AI, you can't have the
data centers. So if you want to be an AI force
and the big opportunity is AI will be a global tool, you can
create global businesses with AI that may be based in the UK, but
sell their their wares all across the world.
But you can't do that if you haven't got an adequate power
platform. So more nuclear immediately to
power AI. Also, I own a business called
Electric Car Organization because I want to clean up the
planet. 40% of your emissions are the gas and the heating in
your house. That's hard to replace because
gas is 4 times cheaper than electricity for heating.
Your house was probably 3 Times Now.
Yeah, but 28% of your emissions are your car.
Get off your ass. Unplug that petrol pump, put in
a home charger. 58% of us can charge that car overnight, so it
doesn't affect the grid. Yeah.
And we've just cleaned up the air in our local environments.
We've cleaned up the air in the world.
And it's another use of electricity.
But you've got to start the foundations.
More nuclear power, more data centres, more electric cars.
Yeah. More ambition for the UK to be a
global power of AI. Exported our wares because we've
got the brain powers to create this stuff.
So big enough. Ambition, You know, let's talk
about decision making when it comes to leadership roles, a lot
of people are now. Would I say replacing humans
when it comes to that driver's seat of making decisions?
But do you think AI can make better decisions than humans
when it comes to leadership roles?
Fundamentally, no, that is exactly the wrong use of AIAI.
Is there to be your copilot is a leader.
I'll give you an example. So Newell River have a product
called Mayai and Mayai is about creating a business brain and we
upload all the documents. You know your accounts, your
sales packs, your customer services, your FAQs, you scrape
your website and it creates a knowledge of your business.
We then recalled every single Zoom Teams meeting and other
meeting you have and phone call you have.
So everything is captured, analysed, and can be fed up to
the leader to say this is what's actually going in your business.
But it's the leader's job to make the decisions.
It's the leader's job to show leadership to its human team.
Yep, the leader can use AI to communicate.
For example, we've created a town hall function and we've
cloned that leader's voice so we can just, you know, write what
he wants to say or the AI can write what it says.
He edges it, and it goes out to all his staff members that are
fully aware what's going on. But leadership and human
leadership is the ultimate power.
AI is just an enabler. Yeah, it can't.
If you want to sell to a human, I'll never use AI.
I'll use a fellow human. If you want to do customer
services where the human's trying to find information
perfectly valuable to use AI. So you've just got to understand
that humans want to work with humans, and AI is enabler, not a
replacer. And the day it starts making
decisions about things, we're in deep shit.
Oh yeah, deep shit. I need some deep sick.
So Speaking of legacy, Speaking of legacy, you've actually said
it. Here that most people are
forgotten within just three generations.
Why does that really matter? Because we have egos.
Yeah. So yeah, I live my life.
I want to leave. The legs and alter egos it's.
My ego. That's too fair.
We've done a lot of research on LYS echo and the UK is a test
bed, but it's got 10 times better reaction in the US
because they have bigger egos. We all think, oh, we haven't
done enough to record an autopilot feed, we don't know
enough. So other generations that care
about this bullshit, Yeah, listen to the Americans.
They love the concept and also go to some other cultures like
Arabic cultures where storytelling and the heritage is
a big part of their culture. So again, they love the product.
It's only us odd little humans in the UK that don't have the
egos to say actually I should leave a legacy.
So how should founders, how should entrepreneurs think
differently about wealth versus impact anybody?
Wants wealth. First make your money be rich,
then worry about impact. The only thing that matters is
money, because that's how you measure success in our society.
Yeah. Once you have enough money, then
you can have a social conscience.
And that's typical of me. Yeah.
I've got money, so I can afford to worry about the planet.
I can afford to have a loss making business, electric car
organization, not-for-profit. I can afford to stand for
politics. I can afford to actually do what
I think is right with humanity because I've got my life
covered. My base wealth is there.
Yeah, that's a really arrogant thing to say, but it's the
truth. Yeah, You shouldn't trust a
politician that doesn't have enough money to be a politician
because they're going to take the back and and screw you over.
That is very true. So if AI allows people to leave
on, how does that change how we think?
About time, purpose and meaning. AI doesn't allow the people live
on. You live, you die, you're dead.
It's an echo. Yeah.
And I think we're a long way off from being able to digitally
clone ourselves. And I'm don't sure many people,
I'm not sure many people want to be digitally cloned so they live
forever. It's not something I want.
I want to enjoy my life while I'm here.
I want to leave a legacy. And once I'm dead, I'm dead.
See you later. It's over to the kids, and
that's my legacy. My family are my legacy.
They are my future and their kids are their future.
You have your time. You bug them off and you die.
Interesting. So Speaking of AI powered
businesses, so we keep hearing about AI native businesses, AI
powered businesses. What does a truly AI powered
business look like looking into the future?
Say OK the next 5 to 10 years. Right.
It's not 5 to 10 years off. This already exists.
There's big businesses in America run by one person using
AI resource all over the business.
Only him. Yeah, it's called Everett.
Have a look at it again. Newell River are building tools
and saying right here's a sales function, here's an accounting
function using AI, here's a reporting function, here's a
customer services function. Now what business do you want to
run? Business leader, because here's
all your tools to go and play with and if you can go into 42
different languages and the Europe suddenly becomes a very
local, very attractive, very large market.
Yet that's never existed before because the language barrier
stopped you going to Estonia or to Russia or to the Ukraine or
to wherever. That is all disappearing.
And that technology is available today, young man.
So think about what business you want to do, think about how
you're going to promote it with social media, think about how
you can promote it on podcasts, and then go and build it.
Interesting. So Speaking of a business from
ACF OS lens, right, So we would be considering the financial
risks in AI. So from ACF OS lens, what are
the biggest financial risks that leaders should be thinking about
when investing in AI? The problem investing AI at the
moment is there's so many ideas and it's developing so fast and
it's so easy to copy. It's really hard to spot the
winners and only back winners. So I have a policy in Newell
River that will launch 10 businesses, and I hope 2 are
superstars. I hope 2 survive, and I probably
expect 6 to fail. So.
And you have to fail fast. So recognize something's failing
and stop the funding before you burn too much money and make
sure you plow the money into the ones that are working.
So you cannot predict success at the outcome.
You have to monitor, set KPIs, understand where to pull the
plug, understand when to switch the money you're investing into
the more successful project because everything has to be a
gambling in AI. It's too early.
It's too fast. Yeah, it's impossible to
predict, so you have to go with it.
Go with gut judgement and be flexible.
And of course, you know, Speaking of being flexible, you
talk about monitoring important KPIs metrics.
So. So what metrics actually matter
when building AI driven businesses?
Custom acquisition, custom acquisition, custom acquisition
and custom acquisition all. That.
Are you scaling faster than anybody else?
Because once you've got the customers, as I said before,
anybody can copy your idea. They can't nick your customers
Once the customers are signed up for your product.
And most customers, once they got used to something, don't
move the user of the ChatGPT are not using Gemini, using the
Gemini are not using ChatGPT using the perplexity are not
using the other two. Once you've got a customer, you
tend to keep them because dislike your iPhone.
I never have an Android phone because I've been using an
iPhone too long. So customers, customers and
customers, the faster you scale, the more customers you have, the
more chance you've got success. But don't blow loads of money
getting those customers. So the more you've got a social
media play rather than Google advertising, the more attractive
you are. The more you're using podcasts,
PR and advertising in a social channels rather than additional
printed advertiser or newspapers or TV adverts, the more
attractive you are. So it's all about getting those
customers, understanding modern channels to market and it's not
TV. People don't watch TV like they
used to. It's now cash up TV where I cut
all the adverts out. So you've got to think about how
you scale your business and it's all about using social media
channels, using influencers and understanding the power of
influencers. So that's why I'm piling into
the influencer market because I think the next big travel
company will be influences becoming travel agents
themselves or pushing their recommendations, generating that
dream into a price compulsive site we've built.
And that price compulsive site creates a funnel of demand from
dream, which influences a great at stimulating actually into
booking. Because at the moment none of
those videos create bookings. They only create awareness and
the desire to go on holiday. That needs to change.
And again, I've got a business looking at how to change that
because for me it's obvious. Nothing be subject to holiday.
Nothing great. Big best things going, viable
projector on social media. You're right there.
Well, you know, Speaking of innovation versus profitability,
so. How should founders balance
innovation, you know spend with profitability in on certain
markets? You also remember where I
started from, Cash is king. You don't go bust because you're
not making a profit, you go bust because you're spending your
cash too fast. So founders need to raise enough
money every stage to make sure they've always got a 12 month
runway to pay their staff. Because if you get down to six
months, you get down to three months.
Any investors can look at that and go, ha, ha, ha, ha, I can
have your trousers down on your valuation.
So you have to manage your cash. I also do a lot of work in early
stages with businesses where I say, right, you're working for
sort of equity, not paying your cash until this business has got
off the ground. So I work out a day rate for
you. I'll allocate your number of
shares, our value of the business, say 500,000 LB.
Your, your work is at 500 LB. Yep.
So if you do 5G worth of work, you get 1%.
And how many days you've got to do for 5G worth of work?
Yeah. So you get people to work for
nothing for shares because they also believe in the idea.
And that also shows they've got commitment before they just jump
in and take a salary from the business.
And quite often I leave people in their existing jobs taking
salaries for the first six months to a year, working as a
side hustle because I don't want their overhead.
But when they do come, I know the business is big enough to
take their salary and everybody's happy.
So there's lots of tricks of the trade.
But the key thing is cash is king.
Don't allow too much cash, don't spend it too fast.
Make sure you've got a runway. Make sure people committed by
doing sweat equity as well as cash work.
Any investor that comes along and just gives you cash is
probably a waste of time. They also need to give you their
black book of contacts. So look at who you're taking
money from and saying I don't just want their money, I want
their assistance. Once they've given you their
money, they tend to help you, funny enough.
Yeah, that's you. But of course, you know, I'll
give you this. Revenues, vanity, profit,
insanity, and cash is king. Cash, if you wish, is reality.
So I love that. I love that.
So Speaking of wealth creation, where do you see the biggest
wealth creation opportunities over the next decade?
Sadly, the rich will get richer, the poor will get poorer.
So look at the superpowers that you've got in AI already.
So five companies in the US make up 50% of the value of the US
stock market. They're all AI based businesses.
Yeah, open AI, et cetera. the US is 50% of the world's stock
market. So 25% of the world's wealth is
invested into five AI businesses.
Now they're just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
But here's the opportunity. So an AI engine is like an
engine of the car. It doesn't do anything unless
you've got a car built around it.
So who's going to build the cars?
What's the color of the car? What's the shape of the car?
How many doors has it got? What's the SAT NAV?
That is the business application of AI.
So all the products we build have interchangeable engines.
We can change from Gemini to GDP to, you know, perplexity,
whatever, but the skill is understanding how to embed that
product into a business, into a business user case, how you
design that car. And those cars will be designed
by smaller businesses that are more flexible, understand the
business market they're trying to work with because of the
massive companies will never get to that.
So you're either going to be really, really big or you're
going to be small and flexible, understand your local market and
build AI into that local market and productize it and sell it to
multiple countries is my prediction.
Amazing. So let's speak your brain right
now. You know, let's get some juice
from your human personal edge. So, Speaking of your world, to
you behind all of the innovation, what personal
experiences have shaped your own personal worldview?
The first one was taking a year out at the age of 25, so I was
getting engaged. I was saving up to buy a house
and I was offered my first director role at Intersun to be
finance director. And I had a meltdown.
I went whoa, whoa, whoa. I said I was going to travel the
world and go around the world. So I went in the next day to a
guy called Peter Long, resigned the day after he made me a
director. And he said you'll never get a
job again. You're ruining your career.
And I went off around the world and it taught me independence.
It taught me the ability to take risks.
And I came back a year later and he gave me more money in the
same job, but as I said, it only lasted 5 days before the company
went bust. So that was a wake up call.
But having the balls to do what I wanted to do and take that
year out set my attitude for the rest of my life.
I will work, I will work hard, but there's more to work.
And if I'm not enjoying my life and I'm not enjoying what I'm
doing, I'm out of it. Interesting.
Now up next, there's mental resilience.
So building at this level comes with a lot of pressure.
How do you stay mentally resilient?
I think experience, to be honest, we all get, I still get
stressed, I still worry about things.
I still wake up in the middle of the night worrying about things.
But as you get a little bit old, I hate saying older.
I used to hate people saying this.
Oh, when you get older, you'll understand a bit more.
Well, sometimes they're right. And as you get older, you do get
more because you've been through the knocks.
I've had business failures. I've had businesses collapse
during the Gulf War on me. And that teaches the resilience.
It teaches that there is a job the next day to do.
There is money that you can bring back in to support your
household. But you know, being young is
tough, having a mortgage is tough, having kids that drain
your cash is tough. And risking that and doing
entrepreneurial stuff when you've got a family, you've got
a mortgage, is tough. And generally, I'd say don't do
it. Yeah, do a side hustle with your
current job, get it to a scale where it's got enough money to
pay you, and then take the jump. And then take the risk because
entrepreneurial life can be extremely lonely.
Who do you talk to at the top? There's nobody above you.
You're the only one making the decisions.
Yeah, that is a tough place to be.
It has massive rewards, but it can also damage your wealth,
damage your health and damage your social life.
Yeah, I'm on a second marriage and that's my biggest regret is
I messed up my first marriage because of my work.
And I'll never allow that happen again.
And I'm lucky to have a great second wife.
Most people don't get that lucky.
So yeah, be be aware of what you wish for.
Be careful what you reach. For so So what?
Would you say is 1 belief that you once held strongly but with
the passage of time you have? Changed your mind about it now.
I'm not sure it's a belief. It's an approach to building the
team. So when I was young I thought I
was brilliant and I thought all people like me would be
brilliant and I'll put them into my team.
Absolute disaster. Do not do that.
As you get older, you realize that you have to.
If you're the leader, you have to counterbalance yourself.
So I'm Mr. Fool, I'm Mr. Charge Ahead.
I'm Mr. Let's do it yesterday. And I need cautious people
around me. So in a holiday group, I had a
guy called Bill Adams, Mr. Half full question everything.
I've always had Miserables, bugger finance directors that
question everything. I always have a management team
that question everything. The worst thing you can ever be
is a strong personality leading the business with no controls
around you. You've got to put people around
you that balance you control you, and then you have a team.
And when you have a team, you've got a chance of winning.
Doesn't mean you're going to win, but you've got a good and
better chance of winning because you counterbalance to the leader
with other people and put the right structures in place.
And I guess that comes from corporate life and what I've got
taught there. But I'd advise all entrepreneurs
that you need it more than most. Look at Donald Trump for
example. Who is not controlling Donald
Trump in the White House? Who is allowing that idiot to
put pictures up of him as Jesus Christ queuing people?
What Muppets are in charge at the White House?
What's going on? Surely I understand he's a big
bad naughty, but needs some people around in to control him.
So come on guys, where's the US team?
There I tell Americans I love America, but I love to watch
America from outside of America you know it's lovely watching
America outside of America Let's.
Look at contrast to America though.
Yeah, let's pick up on that point.
America is a dollar ocracy where the last 8 presidents have all
been millionaires before they got elected.
So you can't be in politics in America unless you got money.
Yeah, but at least some of them are business people.
In the UK the last nine prime ministers all went to Oxford and
Cambridge and have a school tie and quite often went to Eton and
have never done a job in their life yet.
And in politics to be politicians.
I think I choose America. Thanks.
And look at the consequences of our government because we don't
have proper people in our business and don't have.
I will take Elon Musk to sort out the civil service in a harp
link. Yeah, I wouldn't take Donald
Trump immediately. He's a plaited idiot.
We always need a violence, we always need a violence and of
course, interesting thing before we get into the quick fire
round, we have a culture here. You need to select somebody you
would love to see on the forecast.
So who would you like to see on the forecast?
e-mail Name you'd love to see on the forecast.
So one name for you to invite, one name for me to invite.
So who are the names you'd? Like David Speakman.
David Speakman, founder of Travel Counsellors.
Opinionated, outright funny. Yeah.
Wise. And he's created a huge business
from nothing. I think you should talk to him.
OK, OK. So is is that the mind you are
going to invite yourself? Yes, I will invite you and
connect you up. OK, interesting.
So who should I put a word out to?
Myself. Who should you approach that?
I don't know. OK, get one of the UK
politicians in the cabinet and ask them to explain what the
hell is going on in the world. OK, I hear you.
I hear you. I hear you.
Let's go for the quick fire round.
Are you ready to rumble? Are you ready?
OK, so I've. Got my I'm ready.
I have 5 questions, 5 questions and of course quick answers.
So our number one question is on jobs.
So AI will create more jobs or destroy more jobs.
What's your answer? Destruction, destruction,
destruction. Big problem.
Government's got to sort it out. Less jobs got to be spread
around, more people who work less.
OK, interesting. So #2 what is 1 business trend
everyone is overhyping right now?
AI. Everybody's talking about AI
without understanding what it is, without implementing it, and
the UK is falling behind the US in terms of busy structure and
implementation of AI, and we've got to sort it out quick.
OK interesting. So what is 1 skill every young
person must learn today? Ambition.
If you don't back yourself, nobody else will Be ambitious.
Work hard and other people will back you well.
I love that. OK.
So #4 question is, if you could invest $1 million today, where
would it go to? Nuclear power, data centres and
the infrastructure required to run AI.
If you own petrol, you own the fuel, you own the future.
Interesting. And of course, the very last
question for you is legacy or wealth, Which matters more?
You can't have legacy without wealth.
So have enough wealth to enjoy your life and then have a
legacy. Okay, interested, interested
stuff. So, Steve.
For founders, leaders and entrepreneurs listening to us
today, what is the one action they should take this week to
feature prove themselves in an AI driven word?
Going to ChatGPT or Gemini? Create a newsletter that
collects all the information about activities in your sector
related to AI. So you increase your
understanding, read it, understand it and try to
implement it. Amazing, amazing advice.
So thank you very much for me to you.
It's, you know, love and of course respect across.
You are a man. You know, a lot of would I say.
A lot of knowledge and of course they say knowledge is power,
right? And of course they say health is
wealth. So to the leasters right now
guys, you've heard it all today. Like you know what to do, keep
supporting the show, like, comment, subscribe and of course
share with your network. And of course, always go for
something in your lives. Conceive, believe, strike to
thrive and achieve. And of course, so I come your
way again. It's goodbye for me.
And of course from Steve Endercurt, it is also goodbye
guys. And of course, take care.