Description

Episode 16: $500 Million in Tokens, AI Slop at Interview & Trigger's Broom 🍺

Week 16. The pantomime horse rolls on — and the transcript called it pantyhose again. Neil is blaming his Northern accent. Kieron is firmly in the back end. Nothing has changed.

Someone burned $500 million of Claude tokens in a month 💸 

An unnamed organisation gave all staff unlimited access to Claude Enterprise with no budget limits, no kill switches, no guardrails. By the end of the month, they'd burned through $500 million of tokens. Presumably the CTO is available for “new opportunities”. KnowledgeFlow builds trigger warnings and kill switches into every deployment as standard. This is precisely why.

Kieron's big talk 🎤 

Next Wednesday, Kieron is on stage in front of 60 senior leaders — MDs, CFOs and more — at a large private sector organisation in an industry he doesn't know well. The brief: inspire them to do something with AI on Monday morning. Last year's effort was apparently too technical and too salesy. Kieron's approach: Nokia, Blockbuster, Kodak — the companies with brilliant moats that simply didn't see what was coming. Then: how hard would it be for a new entrant with zero capital and great AI to disrupt your supplier and customer relationships tomorrow? And a use case matrix: 22 different applications mapped against feasibility and business impact. The challenge, as always, is getting people to hear a use case from a different sector and think "that applies to us" rather than "we don't do that." Tune in next week for the verdict.

BidWriter in bid writing season 📋 

It's peak public sector tender season. The one where the commissioners are releasing everything before summer so they can sit on a deckchair while everyone else frantically responds. Neil's been deep in BidWriter and the Agentic version with Donald. Key discovery: GPT 5.4 mini writes answers that are too short and too succinct. Asked for 2,500 words, it produces 900 and tells you it was being efficient. GPT 5.2 works better for bid writing. The latest model isn't always the right model for the job. Next week: a live demo for a large organisation using their own 200-question tender as the test.

The "build it themselves" customer 🔧 

Kieron's been in a five-month scoping process with a charity that wants a public-facing RAG assistant. Five months of free consultancy, steering group sessions, demos, statements of work, and every time Leading AI provides guidance, the customer takes it to other people for more opinions. They also want no vendor lock-in and the ability to lift and shift the whole platform at contract end. Kieron's honest response: I don't know how you'd do that. If you want something that bespoke you’d have to set up your own company. And if you want cheap (because you’re a charity with no money) then you need to accept an out-of-the-box solution. The lesson: we need to price in the complexity upfront, or both sides end up miserable.

Measuring AI by numbers of prompts is nonsense 📊 

Kieron was at a university AI champion session this week where the IT director showed Copilot usage stats: 785 users. Of course the numbers look high. That’s because everyone's automatically logged in whether they like it or not. A single prompt in a KnowledgeFlow policy assistant probably saves 20-30 minutes. A single Copilot prompt probably saves 3. Usage numbers tell you nothing. Impact is the only measure that matters.

Leading AI is now a Claude Partner 🤝 

Donald announced it. He just did it and told them afterwards. What does it mean? Still working that out. But model switching between OpenAI and Anthropic inside KnowledgeFlow is becoming increasingly important. And, as Nate B. Jones (their AI guru) says the frontier model race is now a two-horse race: Anthropic vs OpenAI. Google and Meta have dropped off his radar entirely.

Trigger's Broom and company culture 🧹 

Kieron muses on Only Fools and Horses: the ancient broom that's had four new heads and three new handles… but is still the same old trusty broom. So, when does a company stop being the company it was? What holds culture together when almost nobody original is left? Media and advertising agencies see almost 100% staff turnover every few years, and yet the culture somehow persists. Something to muse over at the weekend.

AI slop at interview 🤦 

Neil interviewed someone for a finance role this week. First question out of the candidate: "How has remote working impacted your revenue and culture?" Neil's reaction: as a finance professional, you should probably know that remote working impacts cost, but is unlikely to impact revenue. He asked if they'd used ChatGPT to write the question. They denied it. Neil's verdict: if they didn't use AI, they shouldn't be in a finance role. If they did use AI and didn't check it, they still shouldn't be. AI slop at work… in both senses of the phrase.

Neil ends the episode by blowing smoke up Kieron's backside. The Audient is presumably still drooling on his pillow somewhere.

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. 🍺