The Next Thing Now Podcast

Don’t Close the Academy: What business can learn from elite sport in the AI era If a Premier League club shut its academy because the first team was winning, nobody would notice for a season or two. Then injuries pile up, contracts run out, and the club has to buy its way out of trouble. So why are so many businesses doing exactly that with their talent pipelines right now? Rob is joined by Mark A...

AI Platform Wars | The Next Thing Now EP029 Meta launched Muse. OpenAI showed off Dots. Microsoft slipped out WorkIQ. In one week, the biggest names in tech all asked us to build the future on their agent platform. Rob Borley and Kev Smith ask whether this is the new cloud war, and what it means for the businesses buying in. They cover why the model is disappearing behind the product, how to avoid...

The Secret To A Successful AI Transformation | Yuliya Fontanetti, MMR Research When a graduate joins, we give them training, time and support. When an AI tool gets something wrong the first time, most organisations write it off. In this episode of The Next Thing Now, Rob is joined by Yuliya Fontanetti, Chief Digital Transformation Officer at MMR Research. She spent two decades in operations, compl...

Most leaders have bought AI by now. They have the licences, the consumption bill and the internal comms to prove it. What quite a lot of them don't have is a business that works any differently to the way it worked eighteen months ago. Dr Faye McDonald has spent her career in data, research and behavioural science, and her read on why these programmes stall has very little to do with the technolog...

Most organisations were never built to decide. Hierarchy, committees and sign-off chains exist to slow things down, spread the risk and keep any one person clear of the consequences. That was survivable while information was the moat. It isn't any more. Simon Cuthbert, co-founder of Arthurian Labs, joins Rob Borley to work through what happens when the thing businesses competed on for two hundred...

The era of instant access to frontier AI is ending. A big model launches, the benchmarks are stunning, and then you're told you can't use it. In this episode, Rob and Kev unpack what this change really means: the rise of gated frontier models, the AI sovereignty question nobody in Britain is asking, and why the real opportunity might not be the model at all. We get into the GPT-5.6 launch (Sol, Te...

AI that your security team will actually approve. Everyone wants to use AI. Almost nobody has worked out how to trust it. In this episode Rob Borley sits down with Abbas Khan, co-founder of Togii, to unpack the question sitting underneath every stalled AI rollout: what does trust even mean in an AI world, and how do you get it back? We get into the Fable Five withdrawal and what happens when a fro...

Everyone's being told they're miles behind on AI. At the AI Summit the floor told a very different story to the stage. This week we get into the gap between what gets said about AI and what's actually happening in the room: the two kinds of AI user and why only one of them is on stage, the cost gate that's catching the early adopters rather than the beginners, why so many organisations are solving...

The Free AI Era Is Over What happens when AI stops feeling free? In this episode of The Next Thing Now , Rob and Kev unpack the growing reality behind token pricing, disappearing “all-you-can-eat” AI plans, and why the economics of AI are starting to shift dramatically. From exploding enterprise AI bills to the sudden rise of local LLMs, they explore the next phase of the AI race: not just intelli...

The Future of Software Engineering What is actually changing inside engineering teams? In this episode of The Next Thing Now , Rob Borley is joined by Gordon Lucas, Group Software Engineering Director at PureGym, to explore how AI is really impacting software engineering. Away from the hype and headlines, this is a grounded conversation about what is happening inside real teams today. While AI too...

The Reality of AI in Critical National Infrastructure Can AI be trusted where failure isn’t an option? In this episode, we’re joined by Simon Ayley, Director of Strategic Growth Partnerships at WRC. Drawing on 30+ years of global industry experience, we explore what AI actually looks like inside critical national infrastructure. From regulated industries to complex operational environments, AI is...

What happens to higher education when knowledge becomes instantly accessible, essays can be generated on demand, and AI starts to challenge the very basis of assessment? In this episode of The Next Thing Now , Rob Borley, Kevin Smith and Simon Brookes explore the impact of AI on higher education and ask a deeper question: what is university actually for in an age of large language models? The conv...

Agents Are Building Software Now A year ago, AI was helping engineers write code. Now, agents are building real enterprise software. In this episode of The Next Thing Now , we unpack what has changed and why it matters. This is not another conversation about copilots or productivity boosts. This is about agentic platforms that can reason over requirements, generate architecture, write services, re...

The high performance expert who has coached leadership teams in some of the biggest organisations on the planet, now questioning whether performance still means what we think it does. For more than 30 years, Matt Barker has worked with leaders, teams, and individuals at moments of pressure, transition, and change, helping humans perform better as their environment shifts around them. That experien...

AI Has a Constitution Now. What Does That Mean for Us? This week, Rob and Kev unpack one of the strangest and most revealing signals in AI right now. Anthropic has published a “constitution” for Claude. Not internal policy. Not developer guidelines. A document written for the AI itself , explaining the values it is expected to understand and reason from. That raises an uncomfortable question. Why...

OFFICIAL: AGI by 2030! Is this the moment everything quietly changed? In this episode of The Next Thing Now , we unpack the restructure of OpenAI, the reworked AGI clause with Microsoft, and why the date 2030 suddenly matters far more than most people realise. This is not about hype. It’s about incentives, contracts, infrastructure, and the uncomfortable signals buried in plain sight. We explore:...

Most companies talk confidently about net zero — but few can prove it. In this episode of The Next Thing Now , Rob and Kev sit down with Owen from Fynlo AI to explore one of the biggest hidden challenges in sustainability: the accuracy of carbon reporting . From freight fleets to finance teams, the data behind emissions reporting is often guesswork. Owen explains why this matters, how inaccurate d...

OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) signals the next evolution of e-commerce, replacing user interfaces with intelligent, intent-driven agents. e013 The Next Thing Now Podcast.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How AI Agents Are Transforming Financial Services | ProveIt x Dootrix In this episode, we speak with Adrian Defta , founder and CEO of ProveIt , about how AI agents are revolutionising financial services—starting with underserved communities. Adrian shares the journey behind ProveIt, a bootstrapped startup helping UK-based Romanians navigate financial complaints and reclaim lost money. What began...

🎙️ Episode 011 – Hope, Hype, and Heating Engineers: Agentic AI Gets Real In this episode of The Next Thing Now , Rob and Kev dive deep into the maturing world of agentic AI — and the quietly powerful new standard driving it: MCP. We explore: Why Canva’s new Claude-powered integration might be the first real MCP breakthrough What MCP actually is (with a heating engineer analogy you won’t forget) Wh...

The conversation delves into the recent redundancies at Microsoft, exploring the implications of AI integration in the workplace and the evolving dynamics of job roles. The discussion highlights the shift towards efficiency and productivity through AI, the future of work, and the challenges posed by ambient computing and SaaS products. Additionally, the conversation touches on the intersection of...

Apple's recent AI whitepaper caused a stir, but did it reveal anything new? We break down what it means, what it missed, and why the future may belong to agents and automation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this conversation, Kevin and Rob delve into the recent acquisition of Johnny Ive's design company by OpenAI, exploring the implications of this move in the context of AI technology and design. They discuss the potential dystopian future of AI, the rise of wearable technology, and the evolving expectations surrounding AI development. The conversation highlights the challenges and adaptations use...

In this episode of the Next Thing Now Podcast, Ang McKenna, an award-winning head of people and culture, shares her journey in HR and the evolving landscape of workplace culture. She discusses the importance of mental health, the shift from traditional HR to a people-centric approach, and the impact of AI on employee anxiety and job security. Ang emphasises the need for organisations to build trus...

In this conversation, Rob details his AI lead weekend trip. He just did as he was told. And it was an interesting experience! Rob and Kev explore the nature of AI as a predictive tool, drawing parallels between AI behaviour and human cognition. What does it mean as the AI enters the era of experience. They discuss the potential for AI to learn and adapt like humans, the challenges of integrating A...