AI From The Trenches

In this episode, JD talks with Kris (Pyramidal) about building a time-series foundation model trained on millions of hours of EEG, why healthcare AI is defensible but slow, and why regulation, reimbursement, and incentive misalignment are the real bottlenecks. The Bet: A foundation model for EEG brainwaves that makes brain disorder diagnosis scalable, starting with epilepsy and ICU monitoring. We...

How do you stay on top of science when over 500 cancer papers are published every day? In this episode of AI From the Trenches, Duncan talks with Dr Oliver Bogler about AI in cancer research, scientific curiosity, and what happens when the literature becomes impossible for humans to track on their own. They cover how AI can help with literature surveillance, what might replace the traditional scie...

JD and Duncan reflect on their journey from IBM Watson to founding Barnacle Labs. They talk about building AI too early, why Watson struggled to become a real product, what went wrong with Humanise, and how early access to GPT-3 reshaped their thinking. The conversation covers AI hype, agents, biotech, client responsibility, and what it actually takes to build systems that matter. A practical, hon...

Shopify’s Rich Brown tells the inside story of Scout, the internal AI tool that started as a side project, spread through the company, hit leadership meetings and even reached the board. This episode cuts through the hype and shows how AI actually gets adopted in a large organisation: How non-engineers used tools like Cursor and Claude Code to build real products How Scout merged support, sales an...

Muna started in old-school advertising, making one of the UK’s best-performing TV ads. Today, she runs Circler, an AI-driven platform for high-end secondhand fashion that personalises outfits down to body shape, style and budget. In this episode of AI From The Trenches, she explains how a “non-technical” founder built a serious AI product, automated styling with agents, and turned WhatsApp into a...