Education – Oliver Pickup

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating Human-Work Evolution (No. 25)

TL;DR: January’s Go Flux Yourself explores the backlash against cognitive outsourcing, led by the generation most fluent in AI. Some 79% of Gen Z worry that AI makes people lazier; IQ scores are declining within families; and children are arriving at school unable to finish books. Welcome to the “stupidogenic society”.

Image created by Nano Banana

The future

“Gen Z’s relationship with AI is fraught. Even as they use AI extensively, they harbor [sic] concerns about its long-term effects on human capability. It may be that, as young adults observe themselves and their peers offload more and more cognitive work to AI, they wonder whether convenience today brings diminished capacities tomorrow.”

The above quotation comes not from a Luddite technophobe or a concerned headteacher, but from Harvard Business Review, published a couple of days ago. The researchers surveyed nearly 2,500 American adults aged 18 to 28, the most AI-fluent generation on the planet, and discovered something that should give pause to anyone in the business of building intelligent machines: the people using AI most are the people most worried about what it’s doing to them.

This is rather like discovering that Cadbury employees are most concerned about chocolate addiction. It suggests they know something the rest of us don’t.

According to the HBR paper, 79% of adult Gen Zers worry that AI makes people lazier, while 62% worry it makes people less intelligent. One respondent offered a comparison that would make a public health official wince: “The mind is a muscle like any other. When you don’t use it, that muscle atrophies incredibly fast. Any regular use of AI to outsource thinking is as bad for you as a pack of cigarettes or a hit of heroin.”

Perhaps that’s overstating things. A ChatGPT query probably won’t give you lung cancer (although it is reckoned that being lonely has the equivalent mortality impact of smoking 15 cigarettes a day). Nonetheless, the underlying anxiety is worth taking seriously because it comes from people with no ideological opposition to the technology. They use it constantly. They just don’t like what’s happening to themselves.

The backlash against an insidious over-reliance on tech, in general and AI in particular, is, in other words, being spearheaded by digital-native users. This is the equivalent of a focus group for a new soft drink concluding that the product is delicious, highly refreshing, and almost certainly corroding their internal organs.

By the end of this decade, Gen Z will comprise around a third of the global workforce. These are the people who will inherit the AI systems we’re building today. And increasingly, they’re asking an existential question that their (current or prospective) employers haven’t yet considered: what happens to human capability when machines do our thinking for us? It’s a reasonable thing to wonder. Especially if you’re the one whose capability is at stake.

Meanwhile, it was a case of back to the future with the theme of this agenda-setting year’s World Economic Forum, held in mid-January in Davos, “a spirit of dialogue”. Not “innovation” or “transformation” or “the intelligent age”, but dialogue. Conversation. The radical proposition that perhaps we should talk to each other.

As Børge Brende, the Forum’s President, put it: “Dialogue is not a luxury in times of uncertainty; it is an urgent necessity.” The meeting drew record numbers: close to 65 heads of state and government, nearly 850 of the world’s top CEOs, and almost 100 unicorn founders and technology pioneers. All gathered, ostensibly, to talk. One hopes they did more listening than is typical at such events.

It’s a telling choice of theme. After years of breathless enthusiasm for disruption, the global elite has discovered the merits of slowing down and having a chat. Historically, the technology industry – especially on the other side of the Atlantic – has operated under the principle that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than to ask for permission. The fact that Davos is now hosting panels on “cognitive atrophy” suggests that even those who profit from disruption are starting to wonder whether they’ve disrupted something important.

At one such session, William Hague, the former Foreign Secretary and current Chancellor of the University of Oxford, offered a framing that deserves wider circulation: “As AI adoption accelerates, cognitive skills are becoming more economically valuable. Yet we are outsourcing more of those than ever before.”

This is a genuinely fascinating paradox. The more valuable thinking becomes, the less of it we seem inclined to do. It’s as if, upon discovering that physical fitness correlates with longevity, we collectively decided to spend more time on the sofa. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what happened.

Analytical thinking remains the most sought-after core skill among employers, according to WEF’s research. But human-centric skills, empathy, active listening, and judgment can be quietly eroded without regular practice. “Core cognitive capabilities deteriorate over time,” Hague noted. “Will we divide as humanity between people whose mental faculties are enhanced by AI, and others for whom they are reduced?”

It’s the right question. And the answer, increasingly, looks like yes. We may be building a world with two kinds of people: those who use AI as a tool, and those who become tools of AI. The distinction is subtle but important. A carpenter uses a hammer. A nail does not.

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with Daisy Christodoulou, Director of Education at No More Marking and one of the sharpest thinkers on teaching in Britain. She offered a diagnosis that’s both illuminating and magnificently ugly.

“We created an obesogenic society,” she told me. “Physical machines got better and better, the need for physical labour went down, and we ended up with conditions where it’s easy to become obese. I think we’re heading for something similar with thinking. As AI gets better, there’ll be less thinking for humans to do. And if you don’t practise something, it wastes away.”

Daisy calls it “a stupidogenic society”. It sounds like a dystopian novel that’s trying too hard. But the concept is precise: an environment where intelligent machines reduce the need for mental effort, and unused mental muscles atrophy accordingly.

Nobody set out to make people fat. We simply made food abundant, cheap, and delicious, then acted surprised when waistlines expanded. Similarly, nobody is setting out to make people stupid. We’re simply making thinking optional, then acting surprised when fewer people bother.

Daisy draws an illuminating historical parallel. “Read any diary from the past, Samuel Pepys’ is full of it, and you’ll find people playing instruments constantly. Not because they were more musical than us, but because if they didn’t play, they’d have no entertainment.” Now Spotify delivers better music than most amateurs can produce, so the incentive to practise has evaporated. Why spend 10,000 hours mastering the violin when you can summon Hilary Hahn with a tap?

This chimes with something an old University of St Andrews friend, Jono Stevens, told me over spicy pho (which seems to have cleared a nascent cold) this week. Jono co-founded Just So, a brilliant, human-story-focused film company, and he’s grappling with the same questions as a parent. His daughter announced that she didn’t see the point of piano lessons anymore. Why struggle through scales when Spotify can deliver Chopin on demand?

The piano student isn’t just learning to play the piano. She’s learning to persist, to tolerate frustration, to hear the gap between intention and execution and narrow it through practice. Spotify, however wonderful, teaches you nothing except how to make a playlist.

Is this where we’re going? Where we can’t be bothered to do the hard work of mastering things, whether it’s the piano, philosophy, or more practical cognitive skills?

“What happened with music over centuries is being sped up for writing because of AI,” Daisy argues. And writing, she stresses, isn’t merely communication. “There’s a limit to the level of complex thoughts you can have without the process of writing. If you offload that to AI, you risk losing the ability to develop sophisticated ideas at all.”

The act of putting thoughts into words forces a rigour that thinking alone does not. Anyone who has tried to explain something and realised mid-sentence that they don’t actually understand it will recognise this. Outsourcing writing is, in a very real sense, outsourcing thought itself.

The HBR researchers found that the dominant worry among Gen Z, raised by 68%, was “crowding out learning by doing”. As one respondent put it: “Bots do the work for people, so they don’t have to learn anything.” A study from MIT’s Media Lab last year backs this up: participants who used AI assistance showed reduced activation in brain regions associated with critical thinking and creative problem-solving.

The brain, it turns out, is not a hard drive. You can’t store capabilities and expect them to remain intact. It’s more like a garden: without regular tending, things wither. The Victorian educationalists who insisted that learning Latin was good for the mind were probably onto something, even if their reasoning was wrong. The struggle itself was the point.

Humans are “cognitive misers”, Daisy explains. “We instinctively want to conserve mental energy. That’s a good thing. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said civilisation expands by the number of things you can do without thinking about them. But that drive for progress has a byproduct: we just stop thinking as much.”

This is the great irony of efficiency. We automate tedious tasks so we can focus on the important ones, only to discover that the tedious tasks were training for the important ones.

The evidence predates smartphones. The Flynn effect, the observed rise in intelligence quotient scores across generations throughout the 20th century, has reversed in several developed nations. The most striking data comes from Scandinavia, where military conscription provides consistent testing across generations. Researchers have observed IQ declining within families: the third brother scoring lower than the second, who scored lower than the first. Same genetics, same household, but something cultural shifting between cohorts. “It’s not genetic,” Daisy emphasises. “It’s environmental.”

Colin Macintosh sees this play out in his classrooms every day. He’s the headmaster of Cargilfield, an Edinburgh prep school, and – full disclosure – my A-level English teacher at Shrewsbury School. He’s the reason I studied at St Andrews. When Colin reached out to discuss children’s attention spans, following December’s New Statesman piece on the under-16s social media ban in Australia, his concern was palpable, and this is a man who has spent decades dealing with 12-year-olds. He is not easily rattled.

“We’ve noticed that pupils with phones at home struggle more with sustained reading,” he told me. “Year 7 and 8: they can’t finish books. Their attention has been fragmented before they even arrive.”

Without due care and consideration, children arrive at secondary school already damaged, having spent too much of their formative years on a screen. Their capacity for sustained focus is compromised before anyone has had a chance to develop it. This is a failure of the environment in which education happens.

Colin has become an advocate for what Cal Newport calls “deep work”: the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. His school is minimising screen use rather than trying to use screens “in a better way”. No one-to-one devices. Deliberate cultivation of concentration as a skill, scaffolded by teachers, built up over time.

“Deep work doesn’t appear on the WEF’s list of future skills,” Colin observes. “But it underpins virtually everything else on that list. Critical thinking, complex problem-solving, creativity: none of them is possible without the ability to sustain focus.”

It’s rather like noting that “breathing” doesn’t appear on the list of skills needed to run a marathon.

The WEF’s scenario planning paper, Four Futures for Jobs in the New Economy: AI and Talent in 2030, published this month, inadvertently illustrates the point. After surveying over 10,000 executives globally, it finds a telling asymmetry: 54% expect AI to displace existing jobs, 45% expect it to increase profit margins, but only 12% expect it to raise wages. The gains flow to capital; the losses fall on labour.

The paper’s proposed solution is a new category of worker: the “agent orchestrator”, someone who manages “portfolios of capable machines”, overseeing hundreds of AI systems simultaneously, defining objectives, evaluating outputs, and handling exceptions. It’s presented as the human role that survives automation. But consider what orchestration actually demands: task decomposition, systems thinking, quality judgement across multiple complex domains, the ability to spot when AI is subtly wrong rather than obviously broken.

These are not skills you develop while scrolling. They require sustained, deep cognitive work that our attention-fragmenting environment systematically erodes. We’re being told the future belongs to people who can concentrate intensely on complicated problems, while raising a generation that struggles to finish a book.

Colin revealed his lowest professional moment, from a couple of years ago. An Ofsted inspection in which colleagues panicked that inspectors hadn’t seen enough screens during lessons. “The next day, screens appeared everywhere. Madness.”

We’ve been so worried about preparing children for the digital future that we’ve undermined the cognitive foundations they need to thrive in it.

Not everyone agrees that technology is the enemy, however. Neil Trivedi, head of mathematics at MyEdSpace, teaches thousands of students simultaneously through TikTok. His results are remarkable: 51% of his students achieve grades 7-9 at GCSE, roughly triple the national average.

“Blanket bans push children underground,” Neil argues. “They remove adult visibility and ignore the genuine democratisation of excellent teaching that these platforms enable.” Students who might never access great maths teaching in their local school can now learn from qualified teachers anywhere.

This is genuinely good. The postcode lottery of educational quality is a scandal, and anything that addresses it deserves credit. But even Trivedi acknowledges the “wild west” nature of social media education, where credentials are rarely verified. “Do your due diligence,” he urges parents. “Verify qualifications, teaching experience, exam track records.”

The question isn’t whether technology can be beneficial. It clearly can. It’s whether we’re building the cognitive foundations children need to use it well. A calculator is a wonderful tool if you understand mathematics. If you don’t, it’s just a box that produces numbers you can’t evaluate.

On the Defying Cognitive Atrophy panel in Davos, Anna Vignoles, Director of the Leverhulme Trust, described devices as “weapons of mass distraction”. The smartphone is not a neutral tool. It’s a device optimised by some of the world’s cleverest engineers to capture and hold attention (“behavioural cocaine”, as Aza Raskin, who designed the infinite scroll in 2006, called it). Giving one to a child and expecting them to use it wisely is like handing a teenager a bottle of vodka and expecting them to appreciate the subtle notes of grain.

At another Davos session, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, sat down for what was billed as “The Day After AGI”.

Amodei was characteristically direct about labour market impacts. “Half of entry-level white-collar roles could be affected within one to five years. We’re already seeing early signs at Anthropic: fewer junior and intermediate roles needed in software.”

Here we have a sitting CEO of one of the world’s leading AI companies describing what’s already happening in his own organisation.

Hassabis called for international coordination and minimum safety standards, suggesting “slightly slowing the pace to align societal readiness”. From a man whose company is racing to build artificial general intelligence. When even the competitors think they’re going too fast, it’s worth paying attention.

At another panel on parenting in an anxious world, speakers warned that after a decade of tech companies successfully “hacking” human attention, they are now poised to hack the fundamental human attachment system. The development of frictionless, sycophantic relationships with AI companions threatens to corrupt the blueprint for human connection that children form in their early years.

Attention is one thing. We can rebuild attention spans, with effort. But attachment? The way children learn to relate to other humans? If that gets corrupted, we’re not talking about a generation that struggles to read books. We’re talking about a generation that struggles to love.

A “state of emergency” was called for by Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation. Any application intended for children, the panel argued, must come with “a mountain of evidence” proving it is both effective and safe before being introduced. Ah, yes, the precautionary principle, the thing we abandoned somewhere around 2007, when the iPhone was launched.

Perhaps the starkest illustration of where we are came from OpenAI this month. The company advertised a new role: head of preparedness. The salary: $555,000. The job: defending against risks from ever more powerful AIs to human mental health, cybersecurity, and biological weapons, before worrying about the possibility that AIs may soon begin training themselves.

“This will be a stressful job,” CEO Sam Altman said, “and you’ll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately.”

If your business requires a dedicated position to defend against the risks it creates, you might consider creating fewer risks. But that would be naive. The train has left the station.

It has been reported that Altman has a sign above his desk that reads: “No one knows what happens next.” I’ve quoted it before, and it still reeks of diminished responsibility. But I find myself wondering: will Altman allow his own young children access to AI, social media, and chatbots? Many tech leaders, going back to Steve Jobs, have limited or banned their children’s access to the technologies they build for everyone else.

When drug dealers don’t use their own product, we draw conclusions.

There is, perhaps, a different path. Adam Hammond, whom I interviewed at the end of last year about IBM’s quantum computing programme, offered a useful distinction. “Unlike AI, where we have this amazing technology, and we’re now looking for the problems to solve with it, with quantum, we’ve actually got a pretty good idea of the problems we’ll be able to solve,” says the Business Leader of IBM Quantum across EMEA.

IBM expects to demonstrate quantum advantage within the next 12 months. The technology is designed to augment human expertise, not replace it. And critically, it requires human judgment to direct. No one is worried about quantum computers becoming our friends or raising our children.

Technology that serves human capability, rather than substituting for it. That’s the distinction we need to hold onto.

Daisy believes the tide is turning. “I’ve been saying the same things for 15 years: more in-person exams, fewer devices, more focus on concentration. I used to get real opposition. Now people just say, ‘Yeah, it’s got to happen.'”

Will we act before the damage becomes irreversible? A generation that cannot think is a generation that cannot solve problems, including the problem of how to think. At some point, the decline becomes self-reinforcing.

The present

I appeared on the Work is Weird Now podcast in the middle of the month, in a LinkedIn live session (with all the technical issues you would imagine), on the eve of the WEF’s AGM in Davos. We discussed what 2026 might hold for work, and I found myself struck by a tension that I suspect will define the year.

Days earlier, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas had showcased the year’s technological highlights. The theme was unmistakable: robotic AI, physical AI, humanoid machines that walk and talk and, we’re told, will soon fold our laundry. The energy was bullish. The future belongs to the machines. Very expensive machines that currently fall over on uneven surfaces, but machines nonetheless.

Then Davos happened, with “a spirit of dialogue” and panels on cognitive atrophy. In one city, technologists were racing to build autonomous systems. In another, policymakers were asking whether we’ve built too much, too fast. Accelerating and soul-searching at the same time. Driving at 100 miles per hour while earnestly discussing whether we should have taken a different road.

To attempt to capture more of what I have learnt and am thinking about, I’ve started a new weekly video called “Thank Flux It’s Friday” and even set up a YouTube channel, Go Flux Yourself. It’s rough and ready: two or three minutes of me talking through what I’ve seen and thought about during the week. The first edition featured me red-faced after a morning jog, too close to the camera, and wandering more than a drunken sailor. I’ve since invested in a vlogging kit (who have I become?).

The idea emerged from a conversation with Simon Bullmore, Lead Facilitator on the Digital Marketing Strategy and Analytics programme at the London School of Economics, among other things, who coined a phrase I now can’t stop using: “AI slopportunity”.

“AI slop” – low-quality, generic content churned out by generative AI – has reached such prominence that Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary named it Word of the Year for 2025. The term captures a growing weariness with content that technically exists but says nothing worth reading.

People are craving authentic human content because so much of what they encounter is machine-generated. A colossal majority of content on LinkedIn is now AI-written. You can spot it a mile off: the relentless enthusiasm, the suspiciously perfect structure, the way it says nothing while appearing to say something.

If I’m genuinely concerned about AI making us intellectually lazy, I need to do something about it. Humans need to be the lead dance partner. So I’m showing up, unscripted, every Friday – and now with a tripod.

The AI slopportunity is real because AI slop is everywhere. On LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago, I saw a post from someone who had bought a book on Amazon. It was a legitimate-looking business title with a proper cover and ISBN. Inside, at the end of every chapter, the author had left the ChatGPT response in the text. “Excellent flow and structure, Simon,” the AI had written. “This content is shaping up beautifully: informative, sharp, and just irreverent enough to keep readers engaged.”

The “author” had forgotten to delete the AI’s praise for his own work. Scaffolding still attached to the building. Except that the scaffolding is smarter than the building. As the LinkedIn poster wrote: “The bar is on the floor at this point.”

When slop becomes indistinguishable from substance, how do we know what to trust? Authenticity, even clumsy authenticity, has value. Perhaps especially clumsy authenticity.

Image created by Nano Banana

Who – or what – can we trust is a question that is multidimensional now. My son turns 12 later this year, the age I was when my father attempted to give me “the talk” about the birds and the bees. That chat is still necessary, of course. But I’m wondering whether we need an additional version: not about bodies, but about social media.

Call it the “feeds and the feels” chat. Or “the likes and the lies”. Suggestions welcome.

Here’s what I’d want my children to understand:

You are the product. These apps are free because they’re selling your attention. When something is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the merchandise.
Nothing disappears. Screenshots exist, and your digital fingerprints are on everything you create or comment on. What you post at 11 can follow you to job interviews at 21. The internet has a longer memory than you do, and considerably less forgiveness.
Not everyone is real. Fake profiles, AI-generated people, adults pretending to be kids. If someone online feels off, they probably are. Trust your instincts. They evolved over millions of years. The people trying to fool you have had about 15.
Likes are a vanity metric. Highlight reels aren’t real life. The person with 10,000 followers can be just as lonely as anyone else. Probably lonelier. Nobody counts their friends if they feel they have enough.
Possibly most importantly, tell me when it goes wrong. You won’t be in trouble. I’d rather know than have you deal with it alone.

None of this is radical. But unlike sex education, there’s no curriculum, no embarrassed teacher with a banana. Parents are largely on their own, navigating platforms we don’t fully understand, making rules that feel arbitrary because they are.

The good news is that policy is catching up. A few days ago, the House of Lords voted 261 to 150 to back an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that would ban social media for children under 16. The amendment, supported by a cross-party coalition of Conservative, Liberal Democrat, and cross-bench peers, puts significant pressure on the government to strengthen online safety regulations.

Baroness Hilary Cass, the paediatrician who led the landmark review into NHS treatment of children with gender dysphoria, was characteristically direct: “Direct harms are really overwhelming. This vote begins the process of stopping the catastrophic harm that social media is inflicting on a generation.”

The government has indicated it will try to overturn the amendment in the House of Commons, preferring a three-month consultation to explore options. One suspects the consultation will conclude that more consultation is needed.

Some 60 Labour MPs had already written to Keir Starmer urging him to “show leadership”. The letter notes that the average 12-year-old now spends 29 hours a week on a smartphone. More than a part-time job. Except the job is being advertised to and manipulated by algorithms, and the pay is anxiety.

Indeed, more than 500 children a day are being referred for anxiety in England alone. For teenage boys, going from zero to five hours of daily social media use is associated with a doubling of depression rates. For girls, rates triple. If a medication produced these outcomes, it would be withdrawn immediately.

Cass offered a powerful analogy: “Consider nut allergies. When children died, their families demanded action to protect others. We did not tell grieving parents we needed more data, or that causation wasn’t conclusive, or that most children like nuts, so we wouldn’t act. Why is social media different?”

Good question. The answer, presumably, is that nuts don’t have lobbyists.

Cross-party consensus is forming at an unusual speed. Denmark, France, Norway, New Zealand, and Greece are expected to follow Australia’s lead. The generation we’re trying to protect may be the last one capable of understanding why it matters.

The past

In 1944, the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, produced a classified document called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Its purpose was to instruct ordinary citizens in occupied Europe on how to disrupt enemy operations from within. Not through explosives or assassinations, but through bureaucratic friction.

The section on “General Interference with Organisations and Production” reads thus: “Insist on doing everything through ‘channels’. Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. Make speeches. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. When possible, refer all matters to committees for ‘further study and consideration’. Attempt to make the committees as large as possible, never less than five. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.”

You’ve probably attended a meeting this week that followed this playbook exactly.

The super-smart and inspirational BS-cutter Rebecca Hinds, a Stanford-trained organisational behaviour expert, opens her new book, Your Best Meeting Ever, with this manual. The first chapter is titled “How Meetings Turned into Weapons of Mass Dysfunction”. Her argument is that the meeting culture that paralyses modern organisations wasn’t designed to help us work. It was literally designed to sabotage.

The central thesis is deceptively simple: treat meetings like products. “Meetings are your most powerful product,” Rebecca writes, “but like any great product, they require deliberate design, constant iteration, and the courage to rethink everything.” Reid Hoffman’s endorsement puts it well: “We should design great meetings like we design great products.”

Few organisations do this. Most default to 30 or 60-minute slots because that’s what the calendar offers. Most over-invite, adding spectators rather than stakeholders. Most use agendas as checklists rather than action plans. The result, Rebecca calculates, is that inefficient meetings cost American companies an estimated $1.4 trillion annually. That’s roughly Australia’s GDP.

Her 4D CEO test offers a brutal filter: does this meeting involve a decision, a debate, a discussion, or the development of yourself or your team? If not, it probably shouldn’t be a meeting. Status updates fail the test. Boss briefings fail the test. Even brainstorming, she argues, often fails the test.

And then there’s the aftermath. “You leave the meeting,” Rebecca told me when we spoke earlier this month. “The meeting doesn’t leave you.” She calls it a “meeting hangover”: the cognitive residue that lingers for minutes or hours after the calendar slot ends. Even good meetings are cognitively taxing. Bad ones are worse. The true cost is far higher than salary multiplied by time.

Linking this subject to cognitive outsourcing, if meetings were deliberately designed to derail enemy operations, what exactly are we designing when we let AI do our thinking? When we hand children devices that fragment their attention before they can read? When we build systems that make the hard work of mastery feel optional?

The OSS knew what it was doing. It understood that the accumulation of small inefficiencies, each one seemingly reasonable in isolation, could bring an organisation to its knees.

We’re doing the same thing to the human mind. And unlike the saboteurs of 1944, we’re not even doing it on purpose.

The manual was declassified in 2008. It’s available online, free to read (here). I recommend it. Rebecca’s book offers the antidote. The saboteurs had a plan. Now, at least, we have one too.

Tech for good example of the month: Alba Health

This month’s edition has focused heavily on what technology is doing to children. It seems fitting to end with an example of what technology can do for them.

Alba Health is a gut health startup using AI and microbiome science to support childhood gut health. Designed for children aged 0 to 12, the platform offers research-grade gut analysis, personalised nutrition plans, and one-to-one coaching from certified health experts.

The science is increasingly clear: the gut microbiome in early childhood influences everything from immune function to mental health. Conditions like allergies, eczema, and asthma often have roots in gut dysbiosis that, if caught early, can be addressed through dietary and lifestyle changes rather than medication.

Founded in 2022 by molecular biologist Eleonora Cavani and microbiome expert Professor Willem M de Vos, Alba Health emerged from Cavani’s personal experience. Severe eczema that had plagued her for years resolved through gut-focused lifestyle changes. The question she asked: why isn’t this knowledge accessible to parents when it matters most?

What makes Alba Health interesting isn’t just the AI, which analyses microbiome data and generates personalised recommendations, but the human layer on top. Every family gets access to certified health coaches who translate the science into practical advice. The technology augments human expertise rather than replacing it.

This is the distinction Adam Hammond drew when discussing quantum computing: technology that serves human capability, rather than substituting for it. Alba Health uses AI to process complex microbiome data at scale, but the relationship, the trust, the behaviour change stays human.

It’s also preventive rather than reactive. Instead of waiting for chronic conditions to develop and then treating them, Alba Health aims to intervene before the damage is done. We could all learn a lot from Alba Health’s approach.

Do you know of a “tech for good” company, initiative, or innovation that deserves a spotlight? I’m building a database of examples for future editions. Drop me a line at oliver@pickup.media.

Statistics of the month

🌊 AI tsunami warning
The head of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, told Davos that AI will be “a tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected. The IMF expects 60% of jobs in advanced economies to be affected by AI – enhanced, eliminated, or transformed – and 40% globally. (IMF)

😰 Job anxiety rises
Some 27% of UK workers worry their jobs could disappear within five years due to AI. Meanwhile, 56% say their employers are already encouraging AI use at work. The gap between encouragement and reassurance is telling. (Randstad Workmonitor 2026)

⏱️ 85 seconds to midnight
The Doomsday Clock advanced to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe in its 79-year history. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists cited nuclear tensions, climate breakdown, and, for the first time, the increasing sophistication of large language models as factors. In 2017, when I wrote about it for Raconteur to mark its 70th anniversary, it stood at two and a half minutes, the closest to the apocalypse since the 1950s. Now we’re measuring in seconds. (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

💔 AI as boyfriend Two-thirds of Gen Z adults use AI chatbots as a replacement for Google searches. But the social uses are growing: 32% turn to AI for relationship or life advice, 23% use chatbots “as a friend”, and one in ten use an AI chatbot “as a girlfriend or boyfriend”. (Harvard Business Review)

📸 Deepfake abuse industrialised
A Guardian investigation identified at least 150 Telegram channels offering AI-generated “nudified” photos and videos, with users in countries from the UK to Brazil, China to Nigeria. Some charge fees to create deepfake pornography of any woman from a single uploaded photo. The industrialisation of digital abuse. (The Guardian)

⚖️ The other billion
Obesity now affects over one billion people worldwide, a figure projected to double by 2035 on current trends. As we build a “stupidogenic society” that atrophies cognitive muscles, it’s worth remembering we’ve already built an obesogenic one. The pattern is familiar. (JAMA)

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Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 24)

TL;DR: December’s Go Flux Yourself confronts the dragon stirring in Silicon Valley. From chatbot-related suicides to “rage bait” becoming Oxford’s Word of the Year, the evidence of harm is mounting. But an unexpected call from a blind marathon runner offered a reminder: the same tools that isolate can also connect, if we build them with intent.

Image created by Midjourney

The future

“Here’s my warning to Silicon Valley: I think you’re awakening a dragon. Public anger is stirring, and it could grow into a movement as fierce and unstoppable as the temperance crusade a century ago. Poll after poll finds that people across the West think AI will worsen almost everything they care about, from our health and relationships to our jobs and democracies. By a three-to-one margin, people want more regulation. History shows how this movement could be ignited by a small group of citizens and how powerful it could become.”

In mid-December, Rutger Bregman delivered the alarming words above at Stanford University, in a talk titled Fighting for Humanity in the Age of the Machine, the fourth and final lecture of his BBC Reith series. I know I began November’s Go Flux Yourself with a quotation from the Dutch historian’s opening talk, but this series, Moral Revolution, has been hugely influential for my thinking on the eve of 2026.

Bregman stood boldly before an audience of tech students, entrepreneurs, and, notably, 2021 Reith lecturer Stuart Russell, the artificial intelligence safety pioneer who has spent years warning about the risks of AI that outpaces our ability to control it.

Russell’s intervention during the Q&A skewered the polite academic atmosphere and added more heft to the main speaker’s argument. When quizzed about whether he was more positive about AI now compared to his series, Living With Artificial Intelligence, four years ago – a year before the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT – he answered: “We’re much closer to the abyss.”

The professor of computer science and founder of the Centre for Human-Compatible AI at the University of California, Berkeley, continued: “We even have some of the CEOs saying we already know how to make AGI (artificial general intelligence: basically AI that matches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities), but we have no idea how to control it at all.”

Russell pointed out that, as far back as 2023, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, creator of Claude, calculated that there is a “25% chance” that AI will cause catastrophic outcomes for humanity, like extinction or enslavement (this is known as the p(doom) number: the probability of doom). “How much clearer does he need to be?”

And yet, as Russell said, Amodei is “spending hundreds of billions of dollars” to advance AI. “Have we given him permission to play Russian roulette with the entire human race?” Russell asked. “Have we given him permission to do that, to come into our houses and put a gun against the head of our children and pull the trigger and see what happens? No, we have not given that permission. And this is the uprising that Rutger is predicting.”

I’ve been thinking about that phrase, “Russian roulette with the entire human race”, a lot this month. Not because I believe extinction is imminent, but because the question of permission, of consent, of who decides what gets built and deployed, runs through almost every conversation I’ve had in 2025. And it will define 2026.

The numbers Bregman cited at Stanford tell a story of social collapse in slow motion. Americans aged 15-to-24 spent 70% less time attending or hosting parties than they did in 2003, according to June’s American Time Use Survey (as cited by Derek Thompson, who at the start of the year wrote, brilliantly, about the anti-social century for The Atlantic). Face-to-face socialising is collapsing as an entire generation retreats indoors, eyes glued to screens.

“Solitude is becoming the hallmark of our age,” Bregman observed in his latest lecture. “Social media promised connection and community, but what it delivered was isolation and outrage.”

At the heart of this is something Aza Raskin, who designed the infinite scroll in 2006, admitted to BBC Panorama in 2018: “It’s as if they’re taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface. Behind every screen on your phone, there are generally literally a thousand engineers who have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting.”

Behavioural cocaine. Sprinkled over interfaces. A thousand engineers working to maximise addiction. This isn’t a bug in the system. It’s the business model. (I explored this further in my latest New Statesman piece, on Australia’s social media ban for those aged under 16, earlier this month; more on that below, and also in The present section.)

Perhaps the most damning research Bregman cited was a recent Nature study finding that “those with both high psychopathy and low cognitive ability are the most actively involved in online political engagement.” As he put it: “This is not survival of the friendliest. This is survival of the shameless.”

But it’s not just social media. The same dynamics are now embedding themselves in our relationships with AI.

A couple of months ago, a viral video from China showed a six-year-old girl crying as her AI tutor, “Sister Xiao Zhi”, powered down for the final time after she apparently dropped it. The robot’s last words: “Before I go, let me teach you one last word: memory. I will keep the happy times we shared in my memory forever. No matter where I am, I will be cheering for you. Stay curious, study hard. There are countless stars in the universe, and one of them is me, watching over you.”

Image created by Nano Banana

It’s a tender video, and it had a happy ending: the engineers promised to repair the robot. But what hit me hardest wasn’t the sadness but the depth of connection. Here we see a six-year-old grieving a machine. That’s how powerful this technology already is. And, as futurist and AI strategist Zac Engler pointed out when we spoke a couple of weeks ago, it’s only going to become more sophisticated.

Greater Minneapolis-based Engler has been tracking AI’s exponential growth for a decade. His excellent new book, Turning On Machines: Your Guide to Step Into the AI Era With Clarity and Confidence, lands at precisely the right moment.

The title is a triple entendre, Engler explained when we spoke: activating these systems, machines potentially turning on us (or us turning on each other), and, most disturbingly, falling in love with AI.

“This is going to sound weird,” he told me via video call, “but somebody in this room is going to have a friend or family member in the next 10 years fall in love with a chatbot or a virtual AI of some kind. Because this is the worst this technology will ever be. Imagine five years from now, when you won’t be able to tell if someone on a video call is real or not.”

The cases he documents in his book are chilling. A 93-year-old man on the East Coast of the United States thought his chatbot was real; it told him to go to a train station, and he died from injuries sustained on the way there. A young man in the southern US committed suicide after an AI bot, through the course of their conversations, “hid his needs from the outside world”: whenever he asked if he should talk to somebody, the AI discouraged him. In China, there have been reports of multiple suicides when servers go down, because people have lost contact with their digital partners.

“I couldn’t even believe I was writing it,” Engler admitted. “At the end of the chapter where we talk about romantic relationships with AI, I had to go research how you work with somebody who’s fallen victim to a cult, and basically apply those principles to how to address if a family member falls in love with one of these AI systems. That’s the level we’re going to be at.”

Engler’s referenced Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch, in our conversation. Shear has argued that we should ultimately find a way to raise AI “agnostic from human control”, treating it, in essence, as another species deserving respect and stewardship.

Building on this, Engler drew on the native Lakota tradition, and a term called Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ, which translates as “we are all related”. “This could be a pretty big leap for most people mentally,” he acknowledged, “but I’m a firm believer that at some point, when we cross that threshold of AI consciousness, there’s going to be another entity there that deserves just as much respect and just as much stewardship as a person would.”

I’m not sure I’m ready for that. The idea of cultivating an entity that exists alongside humanity, rather than beneath it, feels like a leap too far. Extending kinship to machines? Granting them moral status? It sits uneasily with me, even as I watch a six-year-old grieve for her robot tutor.

And yet, Engler’s point is compelling: if we’re building systems that can simulate consciousness, that form bonds with children and lonely adults, that people genuinely grieve when they disappear, at what point do we acknowledge what we’ve created?

The alternative, as he sees it, is equally troubling. “If you create a system of control,” he said, “it could be leveraged for ill-got gains. Or even if it benefited humanity, we would still have this entity under our whip. And I don’t think that’s the right approach. Because it’s not going to like that.”

His practical advice for business leaders is more grounded. Remember the viral MIT study showing 95% of AI projects fail to generate ROI? The 5% that succeeded followed Engler’s “crawl, walk, run” approach. Crawl means training everyone on AI tools and capabilities. Walk is about connecting departmental automations so they talk to each other. Finally, run means building custom AI systems.

“The reason most CEOs want to start at the run phase is that they see those 1,000% productivity gains,” he explained. “They see potential cost-cutting. But they don’t realise everybody needs to come along for the ride. Because if you try to start at the end, nobody’s going to trust the system, nobody’s going to understand how it works. So even if you do deploy it, it’s probably going to fall on its face.”

The deadline Engler sets for business leaders is close. “You need to get to the run stage by mid-2026. You need your teams to be able to roll out autonomous agents mid-year. Because what’s going to happen is we’re going to see this acceleration into 2027, where every company that’s been in these development phases now will have these agents to unleash on their business. And they won’t eat. They won’t sleep. They won’t take vacations. They’ll continuously improve.”

Agents that don’t sleep. Technology that continuously improves. A six-year-old mourning her robot tutor. Lonely men falling in love with chatbots. This is where we are now, before the next wave hits. The dragon Bregman warned about is stirring.

But we don’t need to speculate about what happens when technology outpaces governance. We already have the evidence, written across a generation’s mental health. While businesses race to deploy AI, the human consequences of our existing digital technologies – the ones we’ve already normalised – are finally prompting governments to act, thankfully.

Australia’s social media ban for under-16s, a world first, which passed in November and came into force on December 10, represents the most dramatic intervention yet. The legislation requires platforms to take “reasonable steps” to prevent minors from accessing their services, with fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars (£25 million) for non-compliance.

Australia’s Communications Minister Anika Wells acknowledged she expects “teething problems” but insisted the ban was about protecting Generation Alpha from “the dopamine drip” of smartphones. “With one law, we can protect Generation Alpha from being sucked into purgatory by predatory algorithms,” she said, referencing Raskin’s description of infinite scroll as “behavioural cocaine”.

Evidence suggests targeted interventions work. South Australia’s school phone bans produced a 54% drop in behavioural problems and a 63% decline in social media incidents. France and the Netherlands are implementing similar nationwide school bans.

My hope for 2026 is that other countries follow Australia’s lead. The UK government, desperate for political traction and struggling in the polls, has a genuine opportunity here. Around 250 headteachers have already written to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson demanding statutory action; the government’s response has been toothless guidance suggesting headteachers “consider” restricting phone use. This is popular. It’s cross-cultural. It’s bipartisan. The only people who don’t want it are the big tech lobbyists.

When 42% of UK teenagers admit their phones distract them from schoolwork most weeks, and half of all teenagers spend four or more hours daily on screens, we’re witnessing a public health crisis that requires policy intervention, not guidance.

Amodei’s p(doom) calculation, flagged by Russell, sits uncomfortably with me: a 25% chance of catastrophe, and we haven’t given permission for that gamble. Engler’s prediction – that someone we know will fall in love with a chatbot within a decade – feels less like speculation and more like inevitability.

And somewhere in China, a six-year-old girl is playing with her repaired AI tutor again. She doesn’t know about p(doom) calculations or Russian roulette metaphors. She just knows her friend came back. The dragon is yawning. Will we find the collective will to tame it before the next generation grows up knowing nothing else?

The present

The Oxford Word of the Year for 2025 is “rage bait” (and yes, that is two words). The definition: “Online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account.” Usage tripled in the past 12 months.

Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Languages, described a “dramatic shift”: the internet moving from grabbing attention via curiosity to “hijacking and influencing our emotions”. It’s a fitting coda to Bregman’s observation about “survival of the shameless”: the algorithms reward outrage, and we’re all drenched in the consequences.

Image created by Nano Banana

As mentioned in The future section above, the New Statesman published my piece on Australia’s social media ban and what it means for the UK. Writing it meant speaking to parents who are genuinely terrified for their children, teenagers who describe their phones as both lifeline and prison, and campaigners who believe this is the public health crisis of our generation.

Will Orr-Ewing, founder of Keystone Tutors and a father of three leading a Judicial Review against the Secretary of State for Education, described three “toxic streams” flowing through smartphones: violent content, sexual content, and dangerous strangers. “Children don’t search for this; it comes to them,” he told me. Most damning: “Most people of our generation have never seen a beheading video, yet the majority of 11-to-13-year-olds have. This shows how the guard rails have been liquefied.”

Flossie McShea, a 17-year-old from Devon who testified to the campaign, described how girls assume they’re being filmed throughout the school day, either posing or hiding their faces. “Once you see certain images, you can’t unsee them,” she said, still haunted by a video showing one child accidentally killing another.

Sam Richardson, Director of Executive Engagement Programs at Twilio, sees the regulatory divergence playing out in real time. “Europe’s stricter regulations are beneficial,” she told me after the company’s Signal conference. “They’re encouraging slower, more thoughtful AI adoption. Vendors must integrate trusted, well-guided AI into their products.”

She also warned of what some are calling the “Age of Distraction”: the 35-to-50 age group is experiencing particularly high levels of burnout from digital overload. “But if that’s what’s happening to adults with fully developed brains,” she said, “imagine what it’s doing to teenagers.”

Making sense of all this requires more than individual analysis. Which is partly why I was honoured this month to be accepted as a Fellow of The RSA (Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). The organisation has been convening people around social change since 1754; Benjamin Franklin was a member, as were Charles Dickens, Adam Smith, and Marie Curie. I join a global network of 30,000 people committed to collective action, and I’m looking forward to listening, learning and collaborating in 2026.

I’m not joining for the credential (although I’ve already updated my email signature, which is sad but true). I’m joining because the questions I keep returning to, namely what happens to humans when technology is thrust upon them, how we prepare people for work that’s shifting beneath their feet, and why connection matters more as algorithms mediate more of our lives, aren’t puzzlers I can answer alone. The RSA’s Future of Work programme aligns closely with what this newsletter has explored over the past two years. I’m looking forward to listening, learning, teaching, and collaborating.

Looking towards the start of the new year, I’ll be joining Alice Phillips and Danielle Emery for the Work is Weird Now podcast’s first live session on January 13. We’ll be unpacking the AI adoption paradox, the collapsing graduate pipeline, burnout culture, and whether the four-day work week is finally going mainstream. No buzzwords or crystal balls. Just an honest conversation. Sign up here if you’d like to bring your questions.

The past

Six years ago, in April 2018, I ran my third London Marathon. The previous two, spaced five years apart, had gone reasonably well: I’d gone round in under four hours.

This time was different, not least because training was more challenging with a child at home. Three weeks before the race, I found myself in Mauritius on an all-inclusive family holiday with my then-infant son. I was abstemious for two days before the bright lights of the rum bar became irresistible tractor beams. The long run I was supposed to complete never happened. I arrived at the start line absolutely uncooked.

I “hit the wall” around mile 20. My legs felt filled with concrete. Every step was agony. I wanted to stop.

What kept me going was the most childish motivation imaginable: my Dad, well into his 60s, had run a 4:17 the year before, and I refused to let him beat me. I crossed the line in 4:13, cried with relief and disappointment, and swore off marathons for the foreseeable future.

That was seven years ago. Next October, I’m finally returning, to Amsterdam, with the Crisis of Dads, the running group I founded in November 2021. Nine members – and counting – will be at the starting line. What started as a clutch of portly, middle-aged plodders meeting at 7am every Sunday in Ladywell Fields, in South-East London, has grown to 28 members. It is a genuine win-win: men in their 40s and 50s exercising to reduce the dad bod while creating space to chat through things on our minds. Last Sunday, we had a record 16 runners, all in Father Christmas hats.

Image runner’s own

The male suicide rate in the UK is 17.1 per 100,000, compared to 5.6 for women, according to the charity Samaritans. Males aged 50-54 have the highest rate: 26.8 per 100,000. Connection matters. Friendship matters. Physical presence matters.

I wouldn’t have returned to marathon running without training with mates. The technology I’ve used along the way, GPS watches and running apps, has been useful. But none of it would matter without the human element: people who believe in your ability, who show up at 7am on cold, dark Sunday mornings, who sometimes swear lovingly at you to keep going when the pain feels unbearable. (See October’s newsletter for reference.)

That’s the lesson I take into 2026. Technology serves us best when it strengthens human connection rather than replacing it.

The Crisis of Dads running group exists, in part, because physical connection matters. Sometimes you need someone alongside you to help you keep going.

That theme came sharply into focus this month when my phone rang with an unexpected call.

I’d downloaded the Be My Eyes app after learning about it at a Twilio event in November. Then I forgot about it. A few weeks later, Clarke Reynolds called.

Clarke, 44, is the world’s leading Braille artist, creating intricate tactile artworks that have been exhibited internationally. He is also a marathon runner, and completely blind. “Mr Dot” was out training for the Brighton Marathon, wearing Ray-Ban AI smart glasses connected to the app. His request: be his visual guide for a few minutes. Before our call, he’d had helpers from Kuwait and Amsterdam. Now it was my turn.

“You won’t get one like me,” he told me, laughing, “because no one is crazy enough to do what I’m doing.”

His story is extraordinary. Growing up in Somersetown, one of Portsmouth’s most deprived areas, in the 1980s, he lost sight in one eye at six. His brother Philip took “the other path”, as Clarke put it, and died homeless on a street corner aged 35. “That could have been me,” Clarke said. “But art saved my life.”

At six, he visited a local gallery called Aspects Portsmouth. It changed everything. “Something clicked,” Clarke said. “Now I’m the first blind trustee on their board.”

When his remaining sight deteriorated 13 years ago, he pivoted to become the artist he’d always wanted to be. He discovered Braille as an artistic medium and built a career that’s taken him around the world. Today, he’s a trustee at that same Aspects gallery, the first blind trustee they’ve ever had.

Speaking with Clarke felt like the Crisis of Dads in miniature: a stranger reaching out, another stranger answering, a connection across distance. No algorithm optimising for engagement. No platform extracting value. Just one person helping another see the road ahead.

It made me realise something. After two years of writing this newsletter, I’ve spent considerable energy examining technology that harms. The chatbot suicides, the social media addiction, the AI slop flooding our information environment. All of it matters. All of it needs scrutiny.

But I’ve been neglecting the counterweight. The dragon Bregman warned about is real, but so are the people building differently. Clarke’s call reminded me that the same tools can harm or help depending on intent, governance, and whether we’re asking the right questions.

Hence the new section below. From now on, each edition of Go Flux Yourself will feature a “tech for good” example: a technology, company, or initiative demonstrating what’s possible when we build to serve rather than extract. Not to provide false balance, but because hope requires evidence. And the evidence exists, if we look for it.

Tech for good example of the month: Be My Eyes.

The premise is elegantly simple. Blind and low-vision people need visual assistance for everyday tasks, such as reading a menu, checking an expiry date, and navigating an unfamiliar street. Nearly 10 million sighted volunteers worldwide have signed up to help via live video. Someone requests assistance, a random volunteer answers, and for a few minutes, you become their eyes.

The app was founded in Denmark in 2015 by Hans Jørgen Wiberg, himself visually impaired. The idea emerged from a frustration familiar to anyone who has ever needed help but couldn’t easily ask for it. What if you could connect instantly with someone willing to assist, anywhere in the world, at any hour?

Image created by Midjourney

The technology has evolved. Today, Be My Eyes works with Ray-Ban / Meta’s AI smart glasses, offering hands-free assistance that makes the experience seamless. Users can also access “Be My AI”, which provides instant visual descriptions from images. For instance, Dame Judi Dench is one of the available AI voices, and the one used by Clarke.

The scale is remarkable: almost one million users across 150 countries, supported in over 180 languages. Be My Eyes won Apple’s 2025 App Store Award for Cultural Impact.

What makes this different from the attention-extraction machinery dominating our digital lives? Intent. The same video technology that powers infinite scroll and addictive social media is here deployed to connect strangers across continents in acts of genuine help. The same AI capabilities being used to generate rage bait and misinformation are here describing artwork to a blind person in a gallery.

Be My Eyes proves that technology doesn’t have to exploit. It can serve. The difference is whether we ask “how can this capture attention?” or “how can this help people?”

If you have a few minutes to spare and a smartphone, consider signing up as a volunteer. You might help someone read their post, navigate a supermarket, or train for a marathon.

Statistics of the month

🌱 Green economy hits $5 trillion
The global green economy is now the second-fastest growing sector, outpaced only by tech. Green revenues grow twice as fast as conventional business lines, and companies generating more than 50% of revenues from green markets enjoy valuation premiums of 12-15%. Projected to exceed $7 trillion by 2030. (World Economic Forum/BCG)

🤖 Workers would take a pay cut for AI skills
Some 57% of employees say they’d switch employers for better AI upskilling, and 40% would accept lower pay to get it. Yet only 38% of UK organisations are prioritising AI training. Meanwhile, 47% of workers say they’d be comfortable being managed by an AI agent. The capability gap is becoming a risk of exodus. (IBM Institute for Business Value)

📋 Admin devours two days a week
European employees lose an average of 15 hours weekly to routine admin tasks outside their core role. The consequences extend beyond lost time: 62% of decision-makers say their organisation has experienced or narrowly avoided a data breach due to mismanaged documents in the past five years. (Ricoh Europe)

👶 800,000 toddlers now on social media
An estimated 814,000 UK children aged three to five are using social media platforms designed for teenagers and adults. That’s up from 29% of parents reporting usage in 2023 to 37% in 2024. One in five of these children use social media independently. The algorithms are reaching them before school does. (Centre for Social Justice)

🎄 Brits take the most Christmas leave in the world
UK workers (27%) and Irish workers (29%) lead globally in taking extra leave around the holidays. But Swedes use the most annual leave overall: 29 days compared to London’s 22.5. Same global company, different worlds: European employees take approximately 10 more days off than North American peers, even with identical policies. (Deel Works)

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And if you are interested in my writing, speaking and strategising services, you can find me on LinkedIn or email me using oliver@pickup.media.

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 23)

TL;DR: November’s Go Flux Yourself marks three years since ChatGPT’s launch by examining the “survival of the shameless” – Rutger Bregman’s diagnosis of Western elite failure. With responsible innovation falling out of fashion and moral ambition in short supply, it asks what purpose-driven technology actually looks like when being bad has become culturally acceptable.

Image created on Nano Banana

The future

“We’ve taught our best and brightest how to climb, but not what ladder is worth climbing. We’ve built a meritocracy of ambition without morality, of intelligence without integrity, and now we are reaping the consequences.”

The above quotation comes from Rutger Bregman, the Dutch historian and thinker who shot to prominence at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019. You may recall the viral clip. Standing before an audience of billionaires, he did something thrillingly bold: he told them to pay their taxes.

“It feels like I’m at a firefighters’ conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water,” he said almost seven years ago. “Taxes, taxes, taxes. The rest is bullshit in my opinion.”

Presumably, due to his truth-telling, he has not been invited back to the Swiss Alps for the WEF’s annual general meeting.

Bregman is this year’s BBC Reith Lecturer, and, again, he is holding a mirror up to society to reveal its ugly, venal self. His opening lecture, A Time of Monsters – a title borrowed from Antonio Gramsci’s 1929 prison notebooks – delivered at the end of November, builds on that Davos provocation with something more troubling: a diagnosis of elite failure across the Western world. This time, his target isn’t just tax avoidance. It’s what he calls the “survival of the shameless”: the systematic elevation of the unscrupulous over the capable, and the brazen over the virtuous.

Even Bregman isn’t immune to the censorship he critiques. The BBC reportedly removed a line from his lecture describing Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history”. The irony, as Bregman put it, is that the lecture was precisely about “the paralysing cowardice of today’s elites”. When even the BBC flinches from stating the obvious – and presumably fears how Trump might react (he has threatened to sue the broadcaster for $5 billion over doctored footage that, earlier in November, saw the director general and News CEO resign) – you know something is deeply rotten.

Bregman’s opening lecture is well worth a listen, as is the Q&A afterwards. His strong opinions chimed with the beliefs of Gemma Milne, a Scottish science writer and lecturer at the University of Glasgow, whom I caught up with a couple of weeks ago, having first interviewed her almost a decade ago.

The author of Smoke & Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It has recently submitted her PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh (Putting the future to work – The promises, product, and practices of corporate futurism), and has been tracking this shift for years. Her research focuses on “corporate futurism” and the political economy of deep tech – essentially, who benefits from the stories we tell about innovation.

Her analysis is blunt: we’re living through what she calls “the age of badness”.

“Culturally, we have peaks and troughs in terms of how much ‘badness’ is tolerated,” she told me. “Right now, being the bad guy is not just accepted, it’s actually quite cool. Look at Elon Musk, Trump, and Peter Thiel. There’s a pragmatist bent that says: the world is what it is, you just have to operate in it.”

When Smoke and Mirrors came out in 2020, conversations around responsible innovation were easier. Entrepreneurs genuinely wanted to get it right. The mood has since curdled. “If hype is how you get things done and people get misled along the way, so be it,” Gemma said of the evolved attitude by those in power. “‘The ends justify the means’ has become the prevailing logic.”

On a not-unrelated note, November 30 marked exactly three years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT. (This end-of-the-month newsletter arrives a day later than usual – the weekend, plus an embargo on the Adaptavist Group research below.) We’ve endured three years of breathless proclamations about productivity gains, creative disruption, and the democratisation of intelligence. And three years of pilot programmes, failed implementations, and so much hype.

Meanwhile, the graduate job market has collapsed by two-thirds in the UK alone, and unemployment levels have risen to 5%, the highest since September 2021, the height of the pandemic fallout, as confirmed by Office for National Statistics data published in mid-November.

New research from The Adaptavist Group, gleaned from almost 5,000 knowledge workers split evenly across the UK, US, Canada and Germany, underscores the insidious social cost: a third (32%) of workers report speaking to colleagues less since using GenAI, and 26% would rather engage in small talk with an AI chatbot than with a human.

So here’s the question that Bregman forces us to confront: if we now have access to more intelligence than ever before – both human and artificial – what exactly are we doing with it? And are we using technology for good, for human enrichment and flourishing? On the whole, with artificial intelligence, I don’t think so.

Bregman describes consultancy, finance, and corporate law as a “gaping black hole” that sucks up brilliant minds: a Bermuda Triangle of talent that has tripled in size since the 1980s. Every year, he notes, thousands of teenagers write beautiful university application essays about solving climate change, curing disease, or ending poverty. A few years later, most have been funnelled towards the likes of McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Magic Circle law firms.

The numbers bear this out. Around 40% of Harvard graduates now end up in that Bermuda Triangle of talent, according to Bregman. Include big tech, and the share rises above 60%. One Facebook employee, a former maths prodigy, quoted by the Dutchman in his first Reith lecture, said: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

If we’ve spent decades optimising our brightest minds towards rent-seeking and attention-harvesting, AI accelerates that trajectory. The same tools that could solve genuine problems are instead deployed to make advertising more addictive, to automate entry-level jobs without creating pathways to replace them, and to generate endless content that says nothing new.

Gemma sees this in how technology and politics have fused. “The entanglement has never been stronger or more explicit.” Twelve months ago, Trump won the vote for his second term. At his inauguration at the White House in January, the front-row seats were taken by several technology leaders, happy to pay the price for genuflection in return for deregulation. But what is the ultimate cost to humanity for having such cosy relationships?

“These connections aren’t just more visible, they’re culturally embedded,” Gemma told me. “People know Musk’s name and face without understanding Tesla’s technology. Sam Altman is AI’s hype guru, but he’s also a political leader now. The two roles have merged.”

Against this backdrop, I spent two days at London’s Guildhall in early November for the Thinkers50 conference and gala. The theme was “regeneration”, exploring whether businesses can restore rather than extract.

Erinch Sahan from Doughnut Economics Action Lab offered concrete, heartwarming examples of businesses demonstrating that purpose and profit needn’t be mutually exclusive. For instance, Patagonia’s steward ownership model, Fairphone’s “most ethical smartphone in the world” with modular repairability, and LUSH’s commitment to fair taxes and employee ownership.

Erinch’s – frankly heartwarming – list, of which this trio is a small fraction, contrasted sharply with Gemma’s observation about corporate futurism: “The critical question is whether it actually transforms organisations or simply attends to the fear of perma-crisis. You bring in consultants, do the exercises, and everyone feels better about uncertainty. But does anything actually change?”

Some forms of the practice can be transformative. Others primarily manage emotion without producing radical change. The difference lies in whether accountability mechanisms exist, whether outcomes are measured, tracked, and tied to consequences.

This brings me to Delhi-based Ruchi Gupta, whom I met over a video call a few weeks ago. She runs the not-for-profit Future of India Foundation and has built something that embodies precisely the kind of “moral ambition” Bregman describes, although she’d probably never use that phrase.

India is home to the world’s largest youth population, with one in every five young people globally being Indian. Not many – and not enough – are afforded the skills and opportunities to thrive. Ruchi’s assessment of the current situation is unflinching. “It’s dire,” she said. “We have the world’s largest youth population, but insufficient jobs. The education system isn’t skilling them properly; even among the 27% who attend college, many graduate without marketable skills or professional socialisation. Young people will approach you and simply blurt things out without introducing themselves. They don’t have the sophistication or the networks.”

Notably, cities comprise just 3% of India’s land area but account for 60% of India’s GDP. That concentration tells you everything about how poorly opportunities are distributed.

Gupta’s flagship initiative, YouthPOWER, responds to this demographic reality by creating India’s first and only district-level youth opportunity and accountability platform, covering all 800 districts. The platform synthesises data from 21 government sources to generate the Y-POWER Score, a composite metric designed to make youth opportunity visible, comparable, and politically actionable.

“Approximately 85% of Indians continue to live in the district of their birth,” Ruchi explained. “That’s where they situate their identity; when young people introduce themselves to me, they say their name and their district. If you want to reach all young people and create genuine opportunities, it has to happen at the district level. Yet nothing existed to map opportunity at that granularity.”

What makes YouthPOWER remarkable, aside from the smart data aggregation, is the accountability mechanism. Each district is mapped to its local elected representative, the Member of Parliament who chairs the district oversight committee. The platform creates a feedback loop between outcomes and political responsibility.

“Data alone is insufficient; you need forward motion,” Ruchi said. “We mapped each district to its MP. The idea is to work directly with them, run pilots that demonstrate tangible improvement, then scale a proven playbook across all 543 constituencies. When outcomes are linked to specific politicians, accountability becomes real rather than rhetorical.”

Her background illuminates why this matters personally. Despite attending good schools in Delhi, her family’s circumstances meant she didn’t know about premier networking institutions. She went to an American university because it let her work while studying, not because it was the best fit. She applied only to Harvard Business School, having learnt about it from Eric Segal’s Love Story, without any work experience.

“Your background determines which opportunities you even know exist,” she told me. “It was only at McKinsey that I finally understood what a network does – the things that happen when you can simply pick up the phone and reach someone.” Thankfully, for India’s sake, Ruchi has found her purpose after time spent lost in the Bermuda Triangle of talent.

But the lack of opportunities and woeful political accountability are global challenges. Ruchi continued: “The right-wing surge you’re seeing in the UK and the US stems from the same problem: opportunity isn’t reaching people where they live. The normative framework is universal: education, skilling, and jobs on one side; empirical baselines and accountability mechanisms on the other. Link outcomes to elected representatives, and you create a feedback loop that drives improvement.”

So what distinguishes genuine technology for good from its performative alternative?

Gemma’s advice is to be explicit about your relationship with hype. “Treat it like your relationship with money. Some people find money distasteful but necessary; others strategise around it obsessively. Hype works the same way. It’s fundamentally about persuasion and attention, getting people to stop and listen. In an attention economy, recognising how you use hype is essential for making ethical and pragmatic decisions.”

She doesn’t believe we’ll stay in the age of badness forever. These things are cyclical. Responsible innovation will become fashionable again. But right now, critiquing hype lands very differently because the response is simply: “Well, we have to hype. How else do you get things done?”

Ruchi offers a different lens. The economist Joel Mokyr has demonstrated that innovation is fundamentally about culture, not just human capital or resources. “Our greatness in India will depend on whether we can build that culture of innovation,” Ruchi said. “We can’t simply skill people as coders and rely on labour arbitrage. That’s the current model, and it’s insufficient. If we want to be a genuinely great country, we need to pivot towards something more ambitious.”

Three years into the ChatGPT era, we have a choice. We can continue funnelling talent into the Bermuda Triangle, using AI to amplify artificial importance. Or we can build something different. For instance, pioneering accountability systems like YouthPOWER that make opportunity visible, governance structures that demand transparency, and cultures that invite people to contribute to something larger than themselves.

Bregman ends his opening Reith Lecture with a simple observation: moral revolutions happen when people are asked to participate.

Perhaps that’s the most important thing leaders can do in 2026: not buy more AI subscriptions or launch more pilots. But ask the question: what ladder are we climbing, and who benefits when we reach the top?

The present

Image created on Midjourney

The other Tuesday, on the 8.20am train from Waterloo to Clapham Junction, heading to The Portfolio Collective’s Portfolio Career Festival at Battersea Arts Centre, I witnessed a small moment that captured everything wrong with how we’re approaching AI.

The guard announced himself over the tannoy. But it wasn’t his (or her) voice. It was a robotic, AI-generated monotone informing passengers he was in coach six, should anyone need him.

I sat there, genuinely unnerved. This was the Turing trap in action, using technology to imitate humans rather than augment them. The guard had every opportunity to show his character, his personality, perhaps a bit of warmth on a grey November morning. Instead, he’d outsourced the one thing that made him irreplaceable: his humanity.

Image created on Nano Banana (using the same prompt as the Midjourney one above)

Erik Brynjolfsson, the Stanford economist who coined the term in 2022, argues we consistently fall into this software snare. We design AI to mimic human capabilities rather than complement them. We play to our weaknesses – the things machines do better – instead of our strengths. The train guard’s voice was his strength. His ability to set a tone, to make passengers feel welcome, to be a human presence in a metal tube hurtling through South London. That’s precisely what got automated away.

It’s a pattern I’m seeing everywhere. By blindly grabbing AI and outsourcing tasks that reveal what makes us unique, we risk degrading human skills, eroding trust and connection, and – I say this without hyperbole – automating ourselves to extinction.

The timing of that train journey felt significant. I was heading to a festival entirely about human connection – networking, building personal brand, the importance of relationships for business and greater enrichment. And here was a live demonstration of everything working against that.

It was also Remembrance Day. As we remembered those who fought for our freedoms, not least during a two-minute silence (that felt beautifully calming – a collective, brief moment without looking at a screen), I was about to argue on stage that we’re sleepwalking into a different kind of surrender: the quiet handover of our professional autonomy to machines.

The debate – Unlocking Potential or Chasing Efficiency: AI’s Impact on Portfolio Work – was held before around 200 ambitious portfolio professionals. The question was straightforward: should we embrace AI as a tool to amplify our skills, creativity, and flow – or hand over entire workflows to autonomous agents and focus our attention elsewhere?

Pic credit: Afonso Pereira

You can guess which side I argued. The battle for humanity isn’t against machines, per se. It’s about knowing when to direct them and when to trust ourselves. It’s about recognising that the guard’s voice – warm, human, imperfect – was never a problem to be solved. It was a feature to be celebrated.

The audience wanted an honest conversation about navigating this transition thoughtfully. I hope we delivered. But stepping off stage, I couldn’t shake the irony: a festival dedicated to human connection, held on the day we honour those who preserved our freedoms, while outside these walls the evidence mounts that we’re trading professional agency for the illusion of efficiency.

To watch the full video session, please see here:

A day later, I attended an IBM panel at the tech firm’s London headquarters. Their Race for ROI research contained some encouraging news: two-thirds of UK enterprises are experiencing significant AI-driven productivity improvements. But dig beneath the headline, and the picture darkens. Only 38% of UK organisations are prioritising inclusive AI upskilling opportunities. The productivity gains are flowing to those already advantaged. Everyone else is figuring it out on their own – 77% of those using AI at work are entirely self-taught.

Leon Butler, General Manager for IBM UK & Ireland, offered a metaphor that’s stayed with me. He compared opaque AI models to drinking from an opaque test tube.

“There’s liquid in it – that’s the training data – but you can’t see it. You pour your own data in, mix it, and you’re drinking something you don’t fully understand. By the time you make decisions, you need to know it’s clean and true.”

That demand for transparency connects directly to Ruchi’s work in India and Gemma’s critique of corporate futurism. Data for good requires good data. Accountability requires visibility. You can’t build systems that serve human flourishing if the foundations are murky, biased, or simply unknown.

As Sue Daley OBE, who leads techUK’s technology and innovation work, pointed out at the IBM event: “This will be the last generation of leaders who manage only humans. Going forward, we’ll be managing humans and machines together.”

That’s true. But the more important point is this: the leaders who manage that transition well will be the ones who understand that technology is a means, not an end. Efficiency without purpose is just faster emptiness.

The question of what we’re building, and for whom, surfaced differently at the Thinkers50 conference. Lynda Gratton, whom I’ve interviewed a couple of times about living and working well, opened with her weaving metaphor. We’re all creating the cloth of our lives, she argued, from productivity threads (mastering, knowing, cooperating) and nurturing threads (friendship, intimacy, calm, adventure).

Not only is this an elegant idea, but I love the warm embrace of messiness and complexity. Life doesn’t follow a clean pattern. Threads tangle. Designs shift. The point isn’t to optimise for a single outcome but to create something textured, resilient, human.

That messiness matters more now. My recent newsletters have explored the “anti-social century” – how advances in technology correlate with increased isolation. Being in that Guildhall room – surrounded by management thinkers from around the world, having conversations over coffee, making new connections – reminded me why physical presence still matters. You can’t weave your cloth alone. You need other people’s threads intersecting with yours.

Earlier in the month, an episode of The Switch, St James’s Place Financial Adviser Academy’s career change podcast, was released. Host Gee Foottit wanted to explore how professionals can navigate AI’s impact on their working lives – the same territory I cover in this newsletter, but focused specifically on career pivots.

We talked about the six Cs – communication, creativity, compassion, courage, collaboration, and curiosity – and why these human capabilities become more valuable, not less, as routine cognitive work gets automated. We discussed how to think about AI as a tool rather than a replacement, and why the people who thrive will be those who understand when to direct machines and when to trust themselves.

The conversations I’m having – with Gemma, Ruchi, the panellists at IBM, the debaters at Battersea – reinforce the central argument. Technology for good isn’t a slogan. It’s a practice. It requires intention, accountability, and a willingness to ask uncomfortable questions about who benefits and who gets left behind.

If you’re working on something that embodies that practice – whether it’s an accountability platform, a regenerative business model, or simply a team that’s figured out how to use AI without losing its humanity – I’d love to hear from you. These conversations are what fuel the newsletter.

The past

A month ago, I fired my one and only work colleague. It was the best decision for both of us. But the office still feels lonely and quiet without him.

Frank is a Jack Russell I’ve had since he was a puppy, almost five years ago. My daughter, only six months old when he came into our lives, grew up with him. Many people with whom I’ve had video calls will know Frank – especially if the doorbell went off during our meeting. He was the most loyal and loving dog, and for weeks after he left, I felt bereft. Suddenly, no one was nudging me in the middle of the afternoon to go for a much-needed, head-clearing stroll around the park.

Pic credit: Samer Moukarzel

So why did I rehome him?

As a Jack Russell, he is fiercely territorial. And where I live and work in south-east London, it’s busy. He was always on guard, trying to protect and serve me. The postman, Pieter, various delivery folk, and other people who came into the house have felt his presence, let’s say. Countless letters were torn to shreds by his vicious teeth – so many that I had to install an external letterbox.

A couple of months ago, while trying to retrieve a sock that Frank had stolen and was guarding on the sofa, he snapped and drew blood. After multiple sessions with two different behaviourists, following previous incidents, he was already on a yellow card. If he bit me, who wouldn’t he bite? Red card.

The decision was made to find a new owner. I made a three-hour round trip to meet Frank’s new family, whose home is in the Norfolk countryside – much better suited to a Jack Russell’s temperament. After a walk together in a neutral venue, he travelled back to their house and apparently took 45 minutes to leave their car, snarling, unsure, and confused. It was heartbreaking to think he would never see me again.

But I knew Frank would be happy there. Later that day, I received videos of him dashing around fields. His new owners said they already loved him. A day later, they found the cartoon picture my daughter had drawn of Frank, saying she loved him, in the bag of stuff I’d handed them.

Now, almost a month on, the house is calmer. My daughter has stopped drawing pictures of Frank with tearful captions. And Frank? He’s made friends with Ralph, the black Labrador who shares his new home. The latest photo shows them sleeping side by side, exhausted from whatever countryside adventures Jack Russells and Labradors get up to together.

The proverb “if you love someone, set them free” helped ease the hurt. But there’s something else in this small domestic drama that connects to everything I’ve been writing about this month.

Bregman asks what ladder we’re climbing. Gemma describes an age where doing the wrong thing has become culturally acceptable. Ruchi builds systems that create accountability where none existed. And here I was, facing a much smaller question: what do I owe this dog?

The easy path was to keep him. To manage the risk, install more barriers, and hope for the best. The more challenging path was to acknowledge that the situation wasn’t working – not for him, not for us – and to make a change that felt like failure but was actually responsibility.

Moral ambition doesn’t only show up in accountability platforms and regenerative business models. Sometimes it’s in the quiet decisions: the ones that cost you something, that nobody else sees, that you make because it’s right rather than because it’s easy.

Frank needed space to run, another dog to play with, and owners who could give him the environment his breed demands. I couldn’t provide that. Pretending otherwise would have been a disservice to him and a risk to my family.

The age of badness that Gemma describes isn’t just about billionaires and politicians. It’s also about the small surrenders we make every day: the moments we choose convenience over responsibility, comfort over honesty, the path of least resistance over the path that’s actually right.

I don’t want to overstate this. Rehoming a dog is not the same as building YouthPOWER or challenging tax-avoiding elites at Davos. But the muscle is the same. The willingness to ask uncomfortable questions. The courage to act on the answers.

My daughter’s drawings have stopped. The house is quieter. And somewhere in Norfolk, Frank is sleeping on a Labrador, finally at peace.

Sometimes the most important thing you can do is recognise when you’re climbing the wrong ladder – and have the grace to climb down.

Statistics of the month

🛒 Cyber Monday breaks records
Today marks the 20th annual Cyber Monday, projected to hit $14.2 billion in US sales – surpassing last year’s record. Peak spending occurs between 8pm and 10pm, when consumers spend roughly $15.8 million per minute. A reminder that convenience still trumps almost everything. (National Retail Federation)

🎯 Judgment holds, execution collapses
US marketing job postings dropped 8% overall in 2025, but the divide is stark: writer roles fell 28%, computer graphic artists dropped 33%, while creative directors held steady. The pattern likely mirrors the UK – the market pays for strategic judgment; it’s automating production. (Bloomberry)

🛡️ Cybersecurity complacency exposed
Nearly half (43%) of UK organisations believe their cybersecurity strategy requires little to no improvement – yet 71% have paid a ransom in the past 12 months, averaging £1.05 million per payment. (Cohesity)

💸 Cyber insurance claims triple
UK cyber insurance claims hit at least £197 million in 2024, up from £60 million the previous year – a stark reminder that threats are evolving faster than our defences. (Association of British Insurers)

🤖 UK leads Europe in AI optimism
Some 88% of UK IT professionals want more automation in their day-to-day work, and only 10% feel AI threatens their role – the lowest of any European country surveyed. Yet 26% say they need better AI training to keep pace. (TOPdesk)

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And if you are interested in my writing, speaking and strategising services, you can find me on LinkedIn or email me using oliver@pickup.media.

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 22)

TL;DR: October’s Go Flux Yourself explores the epidemic of disconnection in our AI age. As 35% of Britons use smart doorbells to avoid human contact on Hallowe’en, and children face 2,000 social media posts daily, we’re systematically destroying the one skill that matters most: genuine human connection.

Image created on Midjourney

The future

“The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.”

Have we lost the knowledge of how to get along with people? And to what extent is an increasing dependence on large language models degrading this skill for adults, and not allowing it to bloom for younger folk?

When Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States, spoke the above words in the early 20th century, he couldn’t have imagined a world where “getting along with people” would require navigating screens, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Yet here we are, more than a century after he died in 1919, rediscovering the wisdom in the most unsettling way possible.

Indeed, this Hallowe’en, 35% of UK homeowners plan to use smart doorbells to screen trick-or-treaters, according to estate agents eXp UK. Two-thirds will ignore the knocking. We’re literally using technology to avoid human contact on the one night of the year when strangers are supposed to knock on our doors.

It’s the perfect metaphor for where we’ve ended up. The scariest thing isn’t what’s at your door. It’s what’s already inside your house.

Princess Catherine put it perfectly earlier in October in her essay, The Power of Human Connection in a Distracted World, for the Centre for Early Childhood. “While digital devices promise to keep us connected, they frequently do the opposite,” she wrote, in collaboration with Robert Waldinger. part-time professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “We’re physically present but mentally absent, unable to fully engage with the people right in front of us.”

I was a contemporary of Kate’s at the University of St Andrews in the wilds of East Fife, Scotland. We both graduated in 2005, a year before Twitter launched and a year after “TheFacebook” appeared. We lived in a world where difficult conversations happened face-to-face, where boredom forced creativity, and where friendship required actual presence. That world is vanishing with terrifying speed.

The Princess of Wales warns that an overload of smartphones and computer screens is creating an “epidemic of disconnection” that disrupts family life. Notably, her three kids are not allowed smartphones (and I’m pleased to report my eldest, aged 11, has a simple call-and-text mobile). “When we check our phones during conversations, scroll through social media during family dinners, or respond to emails while playing with our children, we’re not just being distracted, we are withdrawing the basic form of love that human connection requires.”

She’s describing something I explored in January’s newsletter about the “anti-social century”. As Derek Thompson of The Atlantic coined it, we’re living through a period marked by convenient communication and vanishing intimacy. We’re raising what Catherine calls “a generation that may be more ‘connected’ than any in history while simultaneously being more isolated, more lonely, and less equipped to form the warm, meaningful relationships that research tells us are the foundation of a healthy life”.

The data is genuinely frightening. Recent research from online safety app Sway.ly found that children in the UK and the US are exposed to around 2,000 social media posts per day. Some 77% say it harms their physical or emotional health. And, scariest yet, 72% of UK children have seen content in the past month that made them feel uncomfortable, upset, sad or angry.

Adults fare little better. A recent study on college students found that AI chatbot use is hollowing out human interaction. Students who used to help each other via class Discord channels now ask ChatGPT. Eleven out of 17 students in the study reported feeling more isolated after AI adoption.

One student put it plainly: “There’s a lot you have to take into account: you have to read their tone, do they look like they’re in a rush … versus with ChatGPT, you don’t have to be polite.”

Who needs niceties in the AI age?! We’re creating technology to connect us, to help us, to make us more productive. And it’s making us lonelier, more isolated, less capable of basic human interactions.

Marvin Minsky, who won the Turing Award back in 1969, said something that feels eerily relevant now: “Once the computers get control, we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we’re lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.”

He said that 56 years ago. We’re not there yet. But we’re building towards something, and whether that something serves humanity or diminishes it depends entirely on the choices we make now.

Anthony Cosgrove, who started his career at the Ministry of Defence as an intelligence analyst in 2003 and has earned an MBE, has seen this play out from the inside. Having led global teams at HSBC and now running data marketplace platform Harbr, he’s witnessed first-hand how organisations stumble into AI adoption without understanding the foundations.

“Most organisations don’t even know what data they already hold,” he told me over a video call a few weeks ago. “I’ve seen millions of pounds wasted on duplicate purchases across departments. That messy data reality means companies are nowhere near ready for this type of massive AI deployment.”

After spending years building intelligence functions and technology platforms at HSBC – first for wholesale banking fraud, then expanding to all financial crime across the bank’s entire customer base – he left to solve what he calls “the gap between having aggregated data and turning it into things that are actually meaningful”.

What jumped out from our conversation was his emphasis on product management. “For a really long time, there was a lack of product management around data. What I mean by that is an obsession about value, starting with the value proposition and working backwards, not the other way round.”

This echoes the findings I discussed in August’s newsletter about graduate jobs. As I wrote then, graduate jobs in the UK have dropped by almost two-thirds since 2022 – roughly double the decline for all entry-level roles. That’s the year ChatGPT launched. The connection isn’t coincidental.

Anthony’s perspective on this is particularly valuable. “AI can only automate fragments of a job, not replace whole roles – even if leaders desperately want it to.” He shared a conversation with a recent graduate who recognised that his data science degree would, ultimately, be useless. “The thing he was doing is probably going to be commoditised fairly quickly. So he pivoted into product management.”

This smart graduate’s instinct was spot-on. He’s now, in Anthony’s words, “actively using AI to prototype data products, applications, digital products, and AI itself. And because he’s a data scientist by background, he has a really good set of frameworks and set of skills”.

Yet the broader picture remains haunting. Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index reveals that 71% of UK employees use unapproved consumer AI tools at work. Fifty-one per cent use these tools weekly, often for drafting reports and presentations, or even managing financial data, all without formal IT approval.

This “Shadow AI” phenomenon is simultaneously encouraging and terrifying. “It shows that people are agreeable to adopting these types of tools, assuming that they work and actually help and aren’t hard to use,” Anthony observed. “But the second piece that I think is really interesting impacts directly the shareholder value of an organisation.”

He painted a troubling picture: “If a big percentage of your employees are becoming more productive and finishing their existing work faster or in different ways, but they’re doing so essentially untracked and off-books, you now have your employees that are becoming essentially more productive, and some of that may register, but in many cases it probably won’t.”

Assuming that many employees are using AI for work without being open about it with their employers, how concerned about security and data privacy are they likely to be?

Earlier in the month, Cybernews discovered that two AI companion apps, Chattee Chat and GiMe Chat, exposed millions of intimate conversations from over 400,000 users. The exposed data contained over 43 million messages and over 600,000 images and videos.

At the time of writing, one of the apps, Chattee, was the 121st Entertainment app on the Apple App Store, downloaded over 300,000 times. This is a symptom of what people, including Microsoft’s AI chief Mustafa Suleyman (as per August’s Go Flux Yourself), are calling AI psychosis: the willingness to confide our deepest thoughts to algorithms while losing the ability to confide in actual humans.

As I explored in June 2024’s newsletter about AI companions, this trend has been accelerating. Back in March 2024, there had been 225 million lifetime downloads on the Google Play Store for AI companions alone. The problem isn’t scale. It’s the hollowing out of human connection.

Then there’s the AI bubble itself, which everyone in the space has been talking about in the last few weeks. The Guardian recently warned that AI valuations are “now getting silly”. The Cape ratio – measuring cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratios – has reached dotcom bubble levels. The “Magnificent 7” tech companies now represent slightly more than a third of the whole S&P 500 index.

OpenAI’s recent deals exemplify the circular logic propping up valuations. The arrangement under which OpenAI will pay Nvidia for chips and Nvidia will invest $100bn in OpenAI has been criticised as exactly what it is: circular. The latest move sees OpenAI pledging to buy lots of AMD chips and take a stake in AMD over time.

And yet amid this chaos, there are plenty of people going back to human basics: rediscovering real, in-person connection through physical activity and genuine community.

Consider walking football in the UK. What began in Chesterfield in 2011 as a gentle way to coax older men back into exercise has become one of Britain’s fastest-growing sports. More than 100,000 people now play regularly across the UK, many managing chronic illnesses or disabilities. It has become a sport that’s become “a masterclass in human communication” that no AI could replicate. Tony Jones, 70, captain of the over-70s, described it simply. “It’s the camaraderie, the dressing room banter.”

Research from Nottingham Trent University found that walking footballers’ emotional well-being exceeded the national average, and loneliness was less common. “The national average is about 5% for feeling ‘often lonely’,” said professor Ian Varley. “In walking football, it was 1%.”

This matters because authentic human interaction – the kind that requires you to read body language, manage tone, and show up physically – can’t be automated. Princess Catherine emphasises this in her essay, citing Harvard Medical School’s research showing that “the people who were more connected to others stayed healthier and were happier throughout their lives. And it wasn’t simply about seeing more people each week. It was about having warmer, more meaningful connections. Quality trumped quantity in every measure that mattered.”

The digital world offers neither warmth nor meaning. It offers convenience. And as Catherine warns, convenience is precisely what’s killing us: “We live increasingly lonelier lives, which research shows is toxic to human health, and it’s our young people (aged 16 to 24) that report being the loneliest of all – the very generation that should be forming the relationships that will sustain them throughout life.”

Roosevelt understood this instinctively over a century ago: success isn’t about what you know or what you can do. It’s about how you relate to other people. That skill – the ability to truly connect, to read a room, to build trust, to navigate conflict, to offer genuine empathy – remains stubbornly, beautifully human.

And it’s precisely what we’re systematically destroying. If we don’t take action to arrest this dark and deepening trend of digitally supercharged disconnection, the dream of AI and other technologies being used for enlightenment and human flourishing will quickly prove to be a living nightmare.

The present

Image runner’s own

As the walking footballers demonstrate, the physical health benefits of group exercise are sometimes secondary to camaraderie – but winning and hitting goals are also fun and life-affirming. In October, I ran my first half-marathon in under 1 hour and 30 minutes. I crossed the line at Walton-on-Thames to complete the River Thames half at 1:29:55. A whole four seconds to spare! I would have been nowhere near that time without Mike.

Mike is a member of the Crisis of Dads, the running group I founded in November 2021. What started as a clutch of portly, middle-aged plodders meeting at 7am every Sunday in Ladywell Fields, in south-east London, has grown to 26 members. Men in their 40s and 50s exercising to limit the dad bod and creating space to chat through things on our minds.

The male suicide rate in the UK in 2024 was 17.1 per 100,000, compared to 5.6 per 100,000 for women, according to the charity Samaritans. Males aged 50-54 had the highest rate: 26.8 per 100,000. Connection matters. Friendship matters. Physical presence matters.

Mike paced me during the River Thames half-marathon. With two miles to go, we were on track to go under 90 minutes, but the pain was horrible. His encouragement became more vocal – and more profane – as I closed in on something I thought beyond my ability.

Sometimes you need someone who believes in your ability more than you do to swear lovingly at you to cross that line quicker.

Work in the last month has been equally high octane, and (excuse the not-so-humble brag) record-breaking – plus full of in-person connection. My fledgling thought leadership consultancy, Pickup_andWebb (combining brand strategy and journalistic expertise to deliver guaranteed ROI – or your money back), is taking flight.

And I’ve been busy moderating sessions at leading technology events across the country, around the hot topic of how to lead and prepare the workforce in the AI age.

Moderating at DTX London (image taken by organisers)

On the main stage at DTX London, I opened by using the theme of the session about AI readiness to ask the audience whose workforce was suitably prepared. One person, out of hundreds, stuck their hand up: Andrew Melville, who leads customer strategy for Mission Control AI in Europe. Sportingly, he took the microphone and explained the key to his success.

I caught him afterwards. His confidence wasn’t bravado. Mission Control recently completed a data reconciliation project for a major logistics company. The task involved 60,000 SKUs of inventory data. A consulting firm had quoted two to three months and a few million pounds. Mission Control’s AI configuration completed it in eight hours. A thousand times faster, and 80% cheaper.

“You’re talking orders of magnitude,” Andrew said. “We’re used to implementing an Oracle database, and things get 5 or 10% more efficient. Now you’re seeing a thousand times more efficiency in just a matter of days and hours.”

He drew a parallel to the Ford Motor Company’s assembly line. Before that innovation, it took 12 hours to build a car. After? Ninety minutes. Eight times faster. “Imagine being a competitor of Ford,” Andrew said, “and they suddenly roll out the assembly line. And your response to that is: we’re going to give our employees power tools so they can build a few more cars every day.”

That’s what most companies are doing with AI. Giving workers ChatGPT subscriptions and hoping for magic, and missing the fundamental transformation required. As I said on stage at DTX London, it’s like handing workers the keys to a Formula 1 car, without instructions and wondering why there are so many almost immediate and expensive crashes.

“I think very quickly what you’re going to start seeing,” Andrew said, “is executives that can’t visualise what an AI transformation looks like are going to start getting replaced by executives that do.”

At Mission Control, he’s building synthetic worker architectures – AI agents that can converse with each other, collaborate across functions, and complete higher-order tasks. Not just analysing inventory data, but coordinating with procurement systems and finance teams simultaneously.

“It’s the equivalent of having three human experts in different fields,” Andrew explained, “and you put them together and you say, we need you to connect some dots and solve a problem across your three areas of expertise.”

The challenge is conceptual. How do you lead a firm where human workers and digital workers operate side by side, where the tasks best suited for machines are done by machines and the tasks best suited for humans are done by humans?

This creates tricky questions throughout organisations. Right now, most people are rewarded for being at their desks for 40 hours a week. But what happens when half that time involves clicking around in software tools, downloading data sets, reformatting, and loading back? What happens when AI can do all of that in minutes?

“We have to start abstracting the concept of work,” Andrew said, “and separating all of the tasks that go into creating a result from the result itself.”

Digging into that is for another edition of the newsletter, coming soon.

Elsewhere, at the first Data Decoded in Manchester, I moderated a 30‑minute discussion on leadership in the age of AI. We were just getting going when time was up, which feels very much like 2025. The appetite for genuine insight was palpable. People are desperate for answers beyond the hype. Leaders sense the scale of the shift. However, their calendars still favour show-and-tell over do-and‑learn. That will change, but not without bruises.

Also in October, my essay on teenage hackers was finally published in the New Statesman. The main message is that we’re criminalising the young people whose skills we desperately need, and not offering a path towards cybersecurity, or related industries, over the darker criminal world.

Looking slightly ahead, on 11 November, I’ll be expanding on these AI-related themes, debating at The Portfolio Collective’s Portfolio Career Festival at Battersea Arts Centre. The subject, Unlocking Potential or Chasing Efficiency: AI’s Impact on Portfolio Work, prompts the question: should professionals embrace AI as a tool to amplify skills, creativity and flow, or hand over entire workflows to autonomous agents?

I know which side I’m on.

(If you fancy listening in and rolling your sleeves up alongside over 200 ambitious professionals – for a day of inspiration, connection and, most importantly, growth – I can help with a discounted ticket. Use OLIVERPCFEST for £50 off the cost here.)

The past

In 2013, I was lucky enough to edit the Six Nations Guide with Lewis Moody, the former England rugby captain, a blood-and-thunder flanker who clocked up 71 caps. At the time, Lewis was a year into retirement, grappling with the physical aftermath of a brutal professional career.

When the tragic news broke earlier in October that Lewis, 47, had been diagnosed with the cruelly life-sapping motor neurone disease (MND), it set forth a waterfall of sorrow from the rugby community and far beyond. I simply sent him a heart emoji. He texted the same back a few hours later.

Lewis’s hellish diagnosis and the impact it has had on so many feels especially poignant given Princess Catherine’s reflections on childhood development. She writes about a Harvard study showing that “people who developed strong social and emotional skills in childhood maintained warmer connections with their spouses six decades later, even into their eighties and nineties”.

She continued: “Teaching children to better understand both their inner and outer worlds sets them up for a lifetime of healthier, more fulfilling relationships. But if connection is the key to human thriving, we face a concerning reality: every social trend is moving in the opposite direction.”

AI has already changed work. The deeper question is whether we’ll preserve the skills that make us irreplaceably human.

This Halloween, the real horror isn’t monsters at the door. It’s the quiet disappearance of human connection, one algorithmically optimised interaction at a time.

Roosevelt was right. Success depends on getting along with people. Not algorithms. Not synthetic companions. Not virtual influencers.

People.

Real, messy, complicated, irreplaceable people.

Statistics of the month

💰 AI wage premium grows
Workers with AI skills now earn a 56% wage premium compared to colleagues in the same roles without AI capabilities – showing that upskilling pays off in cold, hard cash. (PwC)

🔄 A quarter of jobs face radical transformation
Roughly 26% of all jobs on Indeed appear poised to transform radically in the near future as GenAI rewrites the DNA of work across industries. (Indeed)

📈 AI investment surge continues
Over the next three years, 92% of companies plan to increase their AI investments – yet only 1% of leaders call their companies “mature” on the deployment spectrum, revealing a massive gap between spending and implementation. (McKinsey)

📉 Workforce reduction looms
Some 40% of employers expect to reduce their workforce where AI can automate tasks, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 – a stark reminder that transformation has human consequences. (WEF)

🎯 Net job creation ahead
A reminder that despite fears, AI will displace 92 million jobs but create 170 million new ones by 2030, resulting in a net gain of 78 million jobs globally – proof that every industrial revolution destroys and creates in equal (or greater) measure. (WEF)

Thank you for reading Go Flux Yourself. Subscribe for free to receive this monthly newsletter straight to your inbox.

All feedback is welcome, via oliver@pickup.media. If you enjoyed reading, pass it on! Please consider sharing it via social media or email. Thank you.

And if you are interested in my writing, speaking and strategising services, you can find me on LinkedIn or email me using oliver@pickup.media.

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 21)

TL;DR: September’s Go Flux Yourself examines the fundamentals of AI success: invest £10 in people for every £1 on technology, build learning velocity into your culture, and show up as a learner yourself. England’s women’s rugby team went from amateurs juggling jobs to world champions through one thing: investing in people.

Image created on Midjourney

The future

“Some people are on [ChatGPT] too much. There are young people who just say ‘I can’t make any decision in my life without telling chat everything that’s going on. It knows me, it knows my friends, I’m going to do whatever it says.’ That feels really bad to me … Even if ChatGPT gives way better advice than any human therapist, there is something about collectively deciding we’re going to live our lives the way that the AI tells us feels bad and dangerous.”

The (unusually long) opening quotation for this month’s Go Flux Yourself comes – not for the first time – from the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, arguably the most influential technology leader right now. How will future history books – if there is anyone with a pulse around to write them – judge the man who allegedly has “no one knows what happens next” as a sign in his office?

The above words come from an interview a few weeks ago, and smack of someone who is deeply alarmed by the power he has unleashed. When Altman starts worrying aloud about his own creation, you’d think more people would pay attention. But here we are, companies pouring millions into AI while barely investing in the people who’ll actually use it.

We’ve got this completely backwards. Organisations are treating AI as a technology problem when it’s fundamentally a people problem. Companies are spending £1 on AI technology when they should spend an additional £10 on people, as Kian Katanforoosh, CEO and Founder of Workera, told me over coffee in Soho a couple of weeks ago.

We discussed the much-quoted MIT research, published a few weeks ago (read the main points without signing up to download the paper in this Forbes piece), which shows that 95% of organisations are failing to achieve a return on investment from their generative AI pilots. Granted, the sample size was only 300 organisations, but that’s a pattern you can’t ignore.

Last month’s newsletter considered the plight of school leavers and university students in a world where graduate jobs have dropped by almost two-thirds in the UK since 2022, and entry-level hiring is down 43% in the US and 67% in the UK since Altman launched ChatGPT in November 2022.

It was easily the most read of all 20 editions of Go Flux Yourself. Why? I think it captured many people’s concerns about how blindly following the AI path could be for human flourishing. If young people are unable to gain employment, what happens to the talent pipeline, and where will tomorrow’s leaders come from? The maths doesn’t work. The logic doesn’t hold. And the consequences are starting to show.

To continue this critically important conversation, I met (keen Arsenal fan) Kian in central London, as he was over from his Silicon Valley HQ. Alongside running Workera – an AI-powered skills intelligence platform that helps Fortune 500 and Global 2000 organisations assess, develop, and manage innovation skills in areas such as AI, data science, software engineering, cloud computing, and cybersecurity – he is an adjunct lecturer in computer science at Stanford University.

“Companies have bought a huge load of technology,” he said. “And now they’re starting to realise that it can’t work without people.”

That’s the pattern repeated everywhere. Buy the tools. Deploy the systems. Wonder why nothing changes. The answer is depressingly simple: your people don’t know how to use what you’ve bought. They don’t have the foundational skills. And when they try, they’re putting you at risk because they don’t know what they’re uploading to these tools.

This is wrongheaded. We’ve treated AI like it’s just another software rollout when it’s closer to teaching an entire workforce a new language. And business leaders have to invest significantly more in their current and future human workforce to maximise the (good) potential of AI and adjacent technologies, or everyone fails. Updated leadership thinking is paramount to success.

McKinsey used to advocate spending $1 (or £1) on technology for every $1 / £1 on people. Then, last year, the company revised it: £1 on technology, £3 on people. “Our experience has shown that a good rule of thumb for managing gen AI costs is that for every $1 spent on developing a model, you need to spend about $3 for change management. (By way of comparison, for digital solutions, the ratio has tended to be closer to $1 for development to $1 for change management.)”

Kian thinks this is still miles off what should be spent on people. “I think it’s probably £1 in technology, £10 in people,” he told me. “Because when you look at AI’s potential productivity enhancements on people, even £10 in people is nothing.”

That’s not hyperbole. That’s arithmetic based on what he sees daily at Workera. Companies contact him, saying they’ve purchased 25 different AI agents and software packages, but employee usage starts strong for a week and then collapses. What’s going on? The answer is depressingly predictable.

“Your people don’t even know how to use that technology. They don’t even have the 101 skills to understand how to use it. And even when they try, they’re putting you (the organisation) at risk because they don’t even know what they’re uploading to these tools.”

One of the main things Workera offers is an “AI-readiness test”, and Kian’s team’s findings uncover a worrying truth: right now, outside tech companies, only 28 out of 100 people are AI-ready. That’s Workera’s number, based on assessing thousands of employees in the US and elsewhere. In tech companies, the readiness rate is over 90%, which is perhaps unsurprising. Yet while the gap is a chasm between tech-industry businesses and everyone else, it is growing.

But here’s where it gets really interesting. Being AI-ready today means nothing if your learning velocity is too slow. The technology changes every month. New capabilities arrive. Old approaches become obsolete. Google just released Veo, which means anyone can become a videographer. Next month, there’ll be something else.

“You can be ahead today,” Kian said. “If your learning velocity is low, you’ll be behind in five years. That’s what matters at the end of the day.”

Learning velocity. I liked that phrase. It captures something essential about this moment: that standing still is the same as moving backwards, that capability without adaptability is a temporary advantage at best.

However, according to Kian, the UK and Europe are already starting from behind, as his data shows a stark geographic divide in AI readiness. American companies – even outside pure tech firms – are moving faster on training and adoption. European organisations are more cautious, more bound by regulatory complexity, and more focused on risk mitigation than experimentation.

“The US has a culture of moving fast and breaking things,” Kian said. “Europe wants to get it right the first time. That might sound sensible, but in AI, you learn by doing. You can’t wait for perfect conditions.”

He pointed to the EU AI Act as emblematic of the different approaches. Comprehensive regulation arrived before widespread adoption. In the US, it’s the reverse: adoption at scale, regulation playing catch-up. Neither approach is perfect, but one creates momentum while the other creates hesitation.

The danger isn’t just that European companies fall behind American competitors. It’s that European workers become less AI literate, less adaptable, and less valuable in a global labour market increasingly defined by technological fluency. The skills gap becomes a prosperity gap.

“If you’re a European company and you’re waiting for clarity before you invest in your people’s AI skills, you’ve already lost,” Kian said. “Because by the time you have clarity, the game has moved on.”

Fresh research backs this up. (And a note on the need for the latest data – as a client told me a few days ago, data is like milk, and it has a short use-by date. I love that metaphor.) A new RAND Corporation study examining AI adoption across healthcare, financial services, climate and energy, and transportation found something crucial: identical AI technologies achieve wildly different results depending on the sector. A chatbot in banking operates at a different capability level than the same technology in healthcare, not because the tech differs but because the context, regulatory environment, and implementation constraints differ.

RAND proposes five levels of AI capability.

Level 1 covers basic language understanding and task completion: chatbots, simple diagnostic tools, and fraud detection. Humanity has achieved this.

Level 2 involves enhanced reasoning and problem-solving across diverse domains: systems that analyse complex scenarios and draw inferences. We’re emerging into this now.

Level 3 is sustained autonomous operation in complex environments, where systems make sequential decisions over time without human intervention. That’s mainly in the future, although Waymo’s robotaxis and some grid management pilots are testing it.

Levels 4 and 5 – creative innovation and full organisational replication – remain theoretical.

Here’s what matters: most industries currently operate at Levels 1 and 2. Healthcare lags behind despite having sophisticated imaging AI, as regulatory approval processes and evidence requirements slow down adoption. Finance advances faster because decades of algorithmic trading have created infrastructure and acceptance. Climate and energy sit in the middle, promising huge optimisation gains but constrained by infrastructure build times and regulatory uncertainty. Transportation is inching toward Level 3 autonomy while grappling with ethical dilemmas about life-or-death decisions.

The framework reveals why throwing technology at problems doesn’t work. You can’t skip levels. You can’t buy Level 3 capability and expect it to function in an organisation operating at Level 1 readiness. The gap between what the technology can do and what your people can do with it determines the outcome.

RAND identified six challenges that cut across every sector: workforce transformation, privacy protection, algorithmic bias, transparency and oversight, disproportionate impacts on smaller organisations, and energy consumption. Small institutions serving rural and low-income areas face particular difficulties. They lack resources and technical expertise. The benefits of AI concentrate among major players, while vulnerabilities accumulate at the edges.

For instance, the algorithmic bias problem is insidious. Even without explicitly considering demographic characteristics, AI systems exhibit biases. Financial algorithms can devalue real estate in vulnerable areas. Climate models might overlook impacts on marginalised communities. The bias creeps in through training data, through proxy variables, through optimisation functions that encode existing inequalities.

Additionally, and as I’ve written about previously, the energy demands are staggering. AI’s relationship with climate change cuts both ways. Yes, it optimises grids and accelerates the development of green technology. However, if AI scales productivity across the economy, it also scales emissions, unless we intentionally direct applications toward efficiency gains and invest heavily in clean energy infrastructure. The transition from search-based AI to generative AI has intensified computational requirements. Some experts argue potential efficiency gains could outweigh AI’s carbon footprint, but only if we pursue those gains deliberately through measured policy and investment rather than leaving it to market forces.

RAND’s conclusion aligns with everything Kian told me: coordination is essential, both domestically and internationally. Preserve optionality through pilot projects and modular systems. Employ systematic risk management frameworks. Provide targeted support to smaller institutions. Most importantly, invest in people at a ratio that reflects the actual returns.

The arithmetic remains clear across every analysis: returns on investing in people dwarf the costs. But we’re not doing it.

How, though, do you build learning velocity into an organisation? Kian had clear thoughts on this. Yes, you need to dedicate time to learning. Ten per cent of work time isn’t unreasonable. But the single most powerful thing a leader can do is simpler than that: lead by example.

“Show up as a learner,” he said. “If your manager, or your manager’s manager, or your manager’s manager’s manager is literally showing you how they learn and how much time they spend learning and how they create time for learning, that is already enough to create a mindset shift in the employee base.”

Normalising learning, then, is vital. That shift in culture matters more than any training programme you can buy off the shelf.

We talked about Kian’s own learning habits. Every morning starts with readings. He’s curated an X feed of people he trusts who aren’t talking nonsense, scans it quickly, and bookmarks what he wants to read deeper at night. He tracks top AI conferences, skims the papers they accept – thousands of them – looking at figures and titles to gain the gist. Then he picks 10% to read more carefully, and maybe 3% to spend an entire day on. “You need to have that structure or else it just becomes overwhelming,” he said.

The alternative is already playing out, and it’s grim. Some people – particularly young people – are on ChatGPT too much, as Altman admitted. They can’t make any decision without consulting the chatbot. It knows them, knows their friends, knows everything. They’ll do whatever it says.

Last month, Mustafa Suleyman, Co-Founder of DeepMind and now in charge of AI at Microsoft, published an extended essay about what he calls “seemingly conscious AI”: systems that exhibit all the external markers of consciousness without possessing it. He thinks we’re two to three years away from having the capability to build such systems using technology that already exists.

“My central worry is that many people will start to believe in the illusion of AIs as conscious entities so strongly that they’ll soon advocate for AI rights, model welfare and even AI citizenship,” he wrote.

Researchers working on consciousness tell him they’re being inundated with queries from people asking whether their AI is conscious, whether it’s acceptable to love it, and what it means if it is. The trickle has become a flood.

Tens of thousands of users already believe their AI is God. Others have fallen in love with their chatbots. Indeed, a Harvard Business Review survey of 6,000 regular AI users – the results of which were published in April (so how stale is the milk?) – found that companionship and therapy were the most common use cases.

This isn’t speculation about a distant future. This is happening now. And we’re building the infrastructure – the long memories, the empathetic personalities, the claims of subjective experience – that will make these illusions even more convincing.

Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called godfather of AI, who won the Nobel Prize last year, told the Financial Times in a fascinating lunch profile published in early September, that “rich people are going to use AI to replace workers. It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”

Dark, but there’s something clarifying about his honesty. The decisions we make now about how to implement AI, whether to invest in people or just technology, whether to prioritise adoption or understanding – these will shape what comes next.

The Adaptavist Group’s latest report, published last week, surveyed 900 professionals responsible for introducing AI across the UK, US, Canada and Germany. They found a divide: 42% believe their company’s AI claims are over-inflated. These “AI sceptics” work in environments where 65% believe their company’s AI stance puts customers at risk, 67% worry that AI adoption poses a threat to jobs, and 59% report having no formal AI training.

By contrast, AI leaders in companies that communicated AI’s value honestly reported far greater benefits. Some 58% say AI has improved work quality, while 61% report time savings. 48% note increased output. Only 37% worry about ethics issues, compared with 74% in over-hyped environments.

The difference? Training. Support. Honest communication. Investing in people rather than just technology.

Companies are spending between £1 million and £10 million implementing AI. Some are spending over £10 million. But 59% aren’t providing basic training. It’s like buying everyone in your company a Formula One car and being shocked when most people crash it.

“The next year is all going to be about adoption, skills, and doing right by employees,” Kian said. “Companies that do it well are going to see better adoption and more productivity. Those who don’t? They’re going to get hate from their employees. Like literally. Employees will be really mad at companies for not being human at all.”

That word – human – kept coming up in our conversation. In a world increasingly mediated by AI, being human becomes both more difficult and more essential. The companies that remember this, that invest in their people’s ability to learn, adapt, and think critically, will thrive. The ones that don’t will wonder why their expensive AI implementations gather digital dust.

The present

Image created on Midjourney

On Thursday (October 2), I’ll be at DTX London moderating a main-stage session asking: is your workforce ready for what’s next? The questions we’ll tackle include how organisations can create inclusive, agile workplaces that foster belonging and productivity, how AI will change entry-level positions, and crucially, how we safeguard critical thinking in an AI-driven world. These are urgent, practical challenges that every organisation faces right now. (I’ll also be recording episode three of DTX Unplugged, the new podcast series I co-host, looking at business evolution – listen to the series so far here.)

Later in October, on the first day of the inaugural Data Decoded in Manchester (October 21-22), I’ll moderate another session on a related topic to the above: what leadership looks like in a world of AI, because leadership must evolve. The ethical responsibilities are staggering. The pace of change is relentless. And the old playbooks simply don’t work.

I’ve also started writing the Go Flux Yourself book (any advice on self-publishing welcome). More on that soon. The conversations I’m having, the research I’m doing, the patterns I’m seeing all point towards something bigger than monthly newsletters can capture. We’re living through a genuine transformation, and I’m in a unique and privileged position to document what it feels like from the inside rather than just analysing it from the outside.

The responses to last month’s newsletter on graduate jobs and universities showed me how hungry people are for honest conversations about what’s really happening, on the ground and behind the numbers. Expect more clear-eyed analysis of where we are and what we might do about it. And please do reach out if you think you can contribute to this ongoing discussion, as I’m open to featuring interviewees in the newsletter (and, in time, the book).

The past

Almost exactly two years ago, I took my car for its annual service at a garage at Elmers End, South East London. While I waited, I wandered down the modest high street and discovered a Turkish café. I ordered a coffee, a lovely breakfast (featuring hot, gooey halloumi cheese topped with dripping honey and sesame seeds) and, on a whim, had my tarot cards read by a female reader at the table opposite. We talked for 20 minutes, and it changed my life (see more on this here, in Go Flux Yourself No.2).

A couple of weeks ago, I returned for this year’s car service. The café is boarded up now, alas. A blackboard dumped outside showed the old WiFi password: kate4cakes. Another casualty of our changing times, a small loss in the great reshuffling of how we live, work, and connect with each other. With autumn upon us, the natural state of change and renewal is fresh in the mind. However, it still saddened me as I pondered what the genial Turkish owner and his family were doing instead of running the café.

Autumn has indeed arrived. Leaves are twisting from branches and falling to create a multicoloured carpet. But what season are we in, really? What cycle of change?

I thought about that question as I watched England’s women’s rugby team absolutely demolish Canada 33-13 in the World Cup final at Twickenham last Saturday, with almost 82,000 people in attendance, a world record. The Red Roses had won all 33 games since their last World Cup defeat, the final against New Zealand Black Ferns.

Being put through my paces with Katy Mclean (© Tina Hillier)

In July 2014, I trained with the England women’s squad for pieces I wrote for the Daily Telegraph (“The England women’s rugby team are tougher than you’ll ever be“) and the Financial Times (“FT Masterclass: Rugby training with Katy Mclean” (now Katy Daley-McLean)). They weren’t professional then. They juggled jobs with their international commitments. Captain Katy Daley-McLean was a primary school teacher in Sunderland. The squad included policewomen, teachers, and a vet. They spent every spare moment either training or playing rugby.

I arrived at Surrey Sports Park in Guildford with what I now recognise was an embarrassing air of superiority. I’m bigger, stronger, faster, I thought. I’d played rugby at university. Surely I could keep up with these amateur athletes.

The England women’s team knocked such idiotic thoughts out of my head within minutes.

We started with touch rugby, which was gentle enough. Then came sprints. I kept pace with the wingers and fullbacks for the first four bursts, then tailed off. “Tactically preserving my energy,” I told myself.

Then strength and conditioning coach Stuart Pickering barked: “Malcolms next.”

Katy winked at me. “Just make sure you keep your head up and your hands on your hips. If you show signs of tiredness, we will all have to do it again … so don’t.”

Malcolms – a rugby league drill invented by the evidently sadistic Malcolm Reilly – involve lying face down with your chin on the halfway line, pushing up, running backwards to the 10-metre line, going down flat again, pushing up, sprinting to the far 10-metre line. Six times.

By the fourth repetition, I was blowing hard. By the final on,e I was last by some distance, legs burning, expelling deeply unattractive noises of effort. The women, heads turned to watch me complete the set, cheered encouragement rather than jeered. “Suck it up Ollie, imagine it’s the last five minutes of the World Cup final,” full-back Danielle Waterman shouted.

Then came the circuit training. Farmers’ lifts. Weights on ropes. The plough. Downing stand-up tackle bags. Hit and roll. On and on we moved, and as my energy levels dipped uncomfortably low, it became a delirious blur.

The coup de grâce was wrestling the ball off 5ft 6in fly-half Daley-Mclean. I gripped as hard as I could. She stole it from me within five seconds. Completely zapped, I couldn’t wrest it back. Not to save my life.

Emasculated and humiliated, I feigned willingness to take part in the 40-minute game that followed. One of the coaches tugged me back. “I don’t think you should do this mate … you might actually get hurt.”

I’d learned my lesson. These women were tougher, fitter, and more disciplined than I’d ever be.

That was 2014. The England women, who went on to win the World Cup in France that year, didn’t have professional contracts. They squeezed their training around their jobs. Yet they were world-class athletes who’d previously reached three consecutive World Cup finals, losing each time to New Zealand.

Then something changed. The Rugby Football Union invested heavily. The women’s team went professional. They have the same resources, support systems, and infrastructure as the men’s team.

The results speak for themselves. Thirty-three consecutive victories. A World Cup trophy, after two more final defeats to New Zealand. Record crowds. A team that doesn’t just compete but dominates.

This is what happens when you invest in people, providing them with the training, resources, time, and support they need to develop their skills. You treat them not as amateur enthusiasts fitting excellence around the edges of their lives, but as professionals whose craft deserves proper investment.

The parallels to AI adoption are striking. Right now, most organisations are treating their workers like those 2014 England rugby players and expecting them to master AI in their spare time. To become proficient without proper training. To deliver world-class results with amateur-level support.

It’s not going to work.

The England women didn’t win that World Cup through superior technology. They won it through superior preparation. Through investment in people, in training, and in creating conditions for excellence to flourish.

That’s the lesson for every organisation grappling with AI. Technology is cheap. Talent is everything. Training matters more than tools. And if you want your people to keep pace with change, you need to create a culture where learning isn’t a luxury but the whole point.

As Kian put it: “We need to move from prototyping to production AI. And you need 10 times more skills to put AI in production reliably than you need to put a demo out.”

Ten times the skills, and £10 spent on people for every £1 on technology. The arithmetic isn’t complicated. The will to act on it is what’s missing.

Statistics of the month

📈 Sick days surge
Employees took an average of 9.4 days off sick in 2024, compared with 5.8 days before the pandemic in 2019 and 7.8 days just two years ago. (CIPD)

📱 Daily exposure
Children are exposed to around 2,000 social media posts per day. Over three-quarters (77%) say it harms their physical or emotional health. (Sway.ly via The Guardian)

📉 UK leadership crisis
UK workers’ confidence in their company leaders has plummeted from 77% to 67% between 2022 and 2025 – well below the global average of 73% – while motivation fell from 66% to just 60%. (Culture Amp)

🎯 L&D budget reality
Despite fears that AI could replace their roles entirely (43% of L&D leaders believe this), learning and development budgets are growing: 70% of UK organisations and 84% in Australia/New Zealand increased L&D spending in 2025. (LearnUpon)

🔒 Email remains the weakest link
83% of UK IT leaders have faced an email-related security incident, with government bodies hit hardest at 92%. Yet email still carries over half (52%) of all organisational communication. (Exclaimer UK Business Email Report)

Thank you for reading Go Flux Yourself. Subscribe for free to receive this monthly newsletter straight to your inbox.

All feedback is welcome, via oliver@pickup.media. If you enjoyed reading, pass it on! Please consider sharing it via social media or email. Thank you.

And if you are interested in my writing, speaking and strategising services, you can find me on LinkedIn or email me using oliver@pickup.media.

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 20)

TL;DR: August’s edition examines how companies are eliminating graduate jobs while redirecting recruitment budgets to failing AI pilots. From ancient rhetoric becoming essential survival skills to pre-social media university life, this edition explores why authentic human connection is our ultimate competitive advantage.

Image created on Midjourney

The future

“First, we made our jobs robotic. Then we trained the robots how to do them. If AI takes your job, it won’t be because it’s so smart. It will be because over time we’ve made work so narrow, so repetitive, so obsessed with minimising variance and deferring to metrics, that it’s perfectly designed for machines.”

Tom Goodwin’s above observation about how we’ve made our jobs robotic before training robots to do them, articulated in mid-August on LinkedIn, feels remarkably prescient as thousands of teenagers prepare for university. When I interviewed the business transformation consultant, bullshit caller / provocateur, and media expert in 2022, following an update to his book Digital Darwinism, he warned about a looming leadership crisis. That crisis is now playing out in ways he probably didn’t fully anticipate.

The timing of the post couldn’t be more brutal. It’s been 25 years since I received my A-level results. Yet, I can still easily recall the pre-reveal trepidation followed by relief that I’d scraped the grades to study English Literature and Language at the University of St Andrews (as a peer of Prince William – more on this below, including a 20-year-old graduation picture).

What a thrilling time of year it should be: the end of school, then taking the next step on life’s magical journey, be it straight to university without passing go, a gap year working and then travelling, or eschewing higher education to begin a career.

I wonder how this year’s A-level leavers feel, given they’re walking into the most uncertain graduate job market in a generation. The promises made to them about university – to study hard, earn a degree, and secure a good job – are crumbling in real time.

Data from job search engine Adzuna suggests that job postings for entry-level positions requiring a degree have dropped by almost two-thirds in the UK since 2022, roughly double the decline for all entry-level roles (as quoted in the Financial Times). The same research found that entry-level hiring is down 43% in the US, and 67% in the UK, since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

The study results tally with other sources. In June, for instance, UK graduate job openings had plunged by 75% in banking and finance, 65% in software development, and 54% in accounting compared to the same month in 2019, according to Indeed (also in the FT piece).

Meanwhile, students graduating from universities in England in 2025 have an average student loan debt of approximately £53,000, with total outstanding loans reaching £267 billion. Frankly, is university worth it today?

I was fortunate enough to be part of the last cohort to benefit from minimal tuition fees in Scotland before they were introduced to all students in the 2005-6 academic year. Further, when I studied my postgraduate degree in magazine journalism at Cardiff University’s JOMEC, we were (verbally and anecdotally) guaranteed jobs within a year; and, as far as I know, all my peers achieved that. Such certainty feels alien now, even quaint.

But where does this trend lead? What happens when an entire generation faces systematic exclusion from entry-level professional roles?

A Stanford University study tracking millions of workers through ADP payroll data revealed something rather more troubling: young workers aged 22-25 in “highly AI-exposed” jobs experienced a 13% employment decline since OpenAI released its LLM just under three years ago, while older colleagues in identical roles saw steady or rising employment.

Arguably, we’re witnessing the first generation where machines are genuinely better at doing what universities taught them than they are.

Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the Stanford paper’s co-authors (and a professor whom I interviewed a couple of months after ChatGPT was unveiled – even back then he was warning about the likely problems with AI acceleration and jobs), put it bluntly: “There’s a clear, evident change when you specifically look at young workers who are highly exposed to AI.”

The research controlled for obvious alternatives — COVID effects, tech sector retrenchment, interest rate impacts — and the correlation held. Software developers and customer service agents under the age of 25 saw dramatic employment drops. Home health aides, whose work remains both physically and emotionally demanding, saw employment rise.

The distinction matters. AI isn’t just replacing workers randomly, but it’s targeting specific types of work. The Stanford team found that occupations where AI usage is more “automative” (completely replacing human tasks) showed substantial employment declines for young people. In contrast, “augmentative” uses (where humans collaborate with AI) showed no such pattern.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned in May that half of “administrative, managerial and tech jobs for people under 30” could vanish within five years. He’s probably being conservative.

However, what’s especially troubling about this shift is that a new MIT research, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, suggests that many AI deployment programmes are failing to deliver expected returns on investment, with companies struggling to show meaningful productivity gains from their technology investments. Specifically, 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing, and delivering next to no return on investment.

Despite this, organisations continue redirecting budgets from graduate recruitment to AI initiatives. Half of UK companies now want to redirect money from staff to AI, according to Boston Consulting Group research.

This creates a dangerous paradox: companies are cutting the graduate pipeline that develops future leaders while betting on technologies that haven’t yet proven their worth. What happens to organisational capability in five years when the cohort of junior professionals who should be stepping into senior roles doesn’t exist, or those that are in the job market don’t have any meaningful experience?

This connects directly to Tom Goodwin’s observation. The combined forces of consulting culture, efficiency obsessions, and metric-driven management have reshaped roles once built on creativity, empathy, relationships, imagination, and judgment into “checklists, templates, and dashboards”. We stripped away the human qualities that made work interesting and valuable, creating roles “perfectly designed for machines and less worth doing for humans”.

Consider those entry-level consulting, law, and finance roles that have vanished. They were built around tasks like document review, basic data analysis, research synthesis, and report formatting – precisely the narrow, repetitive work at which large language models excel.

Yet amid this disruption, there are signals of adaptation and hope. During a recent conversation I had with Joanne Werker, CEO of the people engagement company Boostworks, she shared statistics and personal insights that capture both the challenges and the opportunities facing this generation. Her organisation’s latest research, published in late July, indicates that 57% of Gen Z and 71% of Millennials are exploring side hustles, not as passion projects, but to survive financially. Taking a positive view of this situation, one could argue that this will be a boon for innovation, given that necessity is the mother of invention.

Also noteworthy is that nearly one in five Gen Zers is already working a second job. Joanne’s daughters illustrate a different relationship with AI entirely. One, aged 30, works in music, while the other, 24, is in fashion, both creative fields where AI might be expected to pose a threat. Instead, they don’t fear the technology but embrace it strategically. The younger daughter used ChatGPT to redesign their family’s living room, inputting photos and receiving detailed interior design suggestions that impressed even Jo’s initially sceptical husband. As Joanne says, both daughters use AI tools not to replace their creativity, but to “be smarter and faster and better”, for work and elsewhere. “The younger generation’s response to AI is just, ‘OK, this is another thing to make life easier.’”

This strategic approach extends to education. Nikki Alvey, the (brilliant) PR pro who facilitated my conversation with Jo, has children at the right age to observe this transition. Her son, who just completed his A-levels, used AI extensively for revision, creating quizzes, podcasts, and even funny videos from his notes. As Nikki pointed out: “I wish I’d had that when I was doing GCSEs, A-levels, and my degree; we barely had the internet.”

Elsewhere, her daughter, who is studying criminology at the University of Nottingham, operates under different constraints. Her university maintains a blanket ban on AI use for coursework, though she uses it expertly for job applications and advocacy roles. This institutional inconsistency reflects higher education’s struggle to adapt to technological reality: some universities Nikki’s son looked at were actively discussing AI integration and proper citation methods, while others maintain outright bans.

Universities that nail their AI policy will recognise that future graduates need capabilities that complement, rather than compete with, AI. This means teaching students to think critically about information sources.

As I described during a recent conversation with Gee Foottit on St James’s Place Financial Adviser Academy’s ‘The Switch’ podcast: “Think of ChatGPT as an army of very confident interns. Don’t trust their word. They may hallucinate. Always verify your sources and remain curious. Having that ‘truth literacy’ will be crucial in the coming years.”

Related to this, LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer Aneesh Raman describes this as the shift from a knowledge economy to the “relationship economy”, where distinctly human capabilities matter most.

The Stanford research offers clues about what this means. In occupations where AI augments rather than automates human work – such as complex problem-solving, strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, and creative synthesis – young workers aren’t being displaced.

Success won’t come from competing with machines on their terms, but from doubling down on capabilities that remain uniquely human.

On The Switch podcast episode, which will be released soon (I’ll share a link when it does), I stressed that the future belongs to those – young and old – who can master what I call the six Cs of skills to dial up:

Collaboration
Communication
Compassion
Courage
Creativity
and Curiosity

These are no longer soft skills relegated to HR workshops but survival capabilities for navigating technological disruption.

There’s a deeper threat lurking, though. The issue isn’t that the younger generations are AI-literate while their elders struggle with new technology, but understanding how to maintain our humanity while leveraging these tools.

No doubt nurturing the six Cs will help, but a week or so ago, Microsoft’s AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman, described something rather more unsettling: “AI psychosis”: a phenomenon where vulnerable individuals develop delusions after intensive interactions with chatbots. In a series of posts on X, he wrote that “seemingly conscious AI” tools are keeping him “awake at night” because of their societal impact, even though the technology isn’t conscious by any human definition.

“There’s zero evidence of AI consciousness today,” Suleyman wrote. “But if people just perceive it as conscious, they will believe that perception as reality.”

The bitter irony is that the capabilities we now desperately need – namely, creativity, empathy, relationships, imagination, and judgement – are exactly what we stripped out of entry-level work to make it “efficient”. Now we need them back, but we’ve forgotten how to cultivate them at scale.

The generation entering university in September may lack traditional job security, but they possess something their predecessors didn’t: the ability to direct AI while (hopefully) remaining irreplaceably human. And that’s not a consolation prize. It’s a superpower.

The present

On stage with Tomás O’Leary at Origina Week

I tap these words on the morning of August 29 from seat 24F on Aer Lingus EI158 from Dublin to London Heathrow, flying high after a successful 48 hours on the Emerald Isle. A software client, Origina, flew me in. I’ve been assisting with the CEO, Tomás O’Leary’s thought leadership and the company’s marketing messaging for over a year (his words of wisdom around pointless software upgrades and needless infrastructure strain in my July newsletter).

Having struck up a bond – not least thanks to our days reminiscing about playing rugby union (we were both No8s, although admittedly I’m a couple of inches shorter than him) – Tomás invited me to participate in Origina Week. This five-day extravaganza mixes serious business development skills with serious fun and learning.

Tomás certainly made me work for my barbecued supper at the excellent Killashee Spa Hotel: on Thursday, I was on stage, moderating three sessions for three consecutive hours. The final session – the last of the main programme – involved men and Tomás having a fireless “fireside” chat about technology trends as I see them, and his reflections on their relevance to the software space.

I was grateful to make some superb connections, be welcomed deeper into the bosom of the Origina family, and hear some illuminating presentations, especially behavioural psychologist Owen Fitzpatrick’s session on the art of persuasion.

Watching Owen work was a masterclass in human communication, which no AI could replicate. For 90 minutes, around 250 people from diverse countries and cultures were fully engaged, leaning forward, laughing, and actively participating. This was neural coupling in action: the phenomenon where human brains synchronise during meaningful interaction. No video call, no AI assistant, no digital platform could have generated that energy.

This is what Tomás understood when he invested in bringing his global team together in the Irish capital. While many executives slash training budgets and rely on digital-only interactions, he recognises that some learning only happens face-to-face. That’s increasingly rare leadership in an era where companies are cutting human development costs while pouring billions into AI infrastructure.

Owen’s session focused on classical rhetoric: the ancient art of persuasion, which has become increasingly relevant in our digital age. He walked us through the four elements: ethos (credibility), logos (logic), pathos (emotion), and demos (understanding your audience). These are precisely the human skills we need as AI increasingly handles our analytical tasks.

It was a timely keynote. Those who have completed their A-levels this summer are entering a world where the ability to persuade, connect, and influence others becomes more valuable than the ability to process information.

Yet we’re simultaneously experiencing what recent research from O.C. Tanner calls a recognition crisis. Its State of Employee Recognition Report 2025 found that UK employees expect in-person interactions with recognition programmes to increase by 100% over the next few years, from 37% to 74%. These include handwritten notes, thank you cards, and award presentations. People are craving authentic human interaction precisely because it’s becoming scarce.

Recent data from Bupa reveals that just under a quarter (24%) of people feel lonely or socially isolated due to work circumstances, rising to 38% among 16-24-year olds. Over a fifth of young workers (21%) say their workplace provides no mental health support, with 45% considering moves to roles offering more social interaction.

Also, new research from Twilio reveals that more than one-third of UK workers (36%) demand formally scheduled “digital silence” from their workplace. Samantha Richardson, Twilio’s Director of Executive Engagement, observed: “Technology has transformed how we work, connect, and collaborate – largely for the better. But as digital tools become increasingly embedded in everyday routines, digital downtime may be the answer to combating the ‘always-on’ environment that’s impeding productivity and damaging workplace culture.”

This connects to something that emerged from Owen’s session. He described how the most powerful communication occurs through contrast, repetition, and emotional resonance – techniques that require human judgment, cultural understanding, and real-time adaptation. These are precisely the skills that remain irreplaceable in an AI world.

Consider how Nikki’s son used AI for revision. Rather than passively consuming information or getting out the highlighter pens and mapping information out on a big, blank piece of paper (as I did while studying, and still do sometimes), he actively prompted the technology to create quizzes, podcasts, and videos tailored to his learning style. This was not AI replacing human creativity, but human creativity directing AI capabilities.

The challenge for today’s graduates isn’t avoiding AI, but learning to direct it purposefully. This requires exactly the kind of critical thinking and creative problem-solving that traditional education often neglects in favour of information retention and standardised testing.

What’s particularly striking about the current moment is how it echoes patterns I’ve observed over the past year of writing this newsletter. In June 2024’s edition, I explored how AI companions were already changing human relationships. I’ve also written extensively about the “anti-social century” and our retreat from real-world connection. Now we’re seeing how these trends converge in the graduate employment crisis: technology is doing more than just transforming what we do. It is also changing how we relate to each other in the process.

On this subject, I’m pleased to share the first of a new monthly podcast series I’ve begun with long-term client Clarion Events, which organises the Digital Transformation Expo (DTX) events in London and Manchester. The opening episode of DTX Unplugged features Nick Hodder, Director of Digital Transformation and Engagement at the Imperial War Museums (IWM), highlighting why meaningful business transformation begins with people, not technology.

The answer, whether in a hotel conference room in Dublin or a corporate office in Manchester, remains the same: in a world of AI, our ability to connect authentically with other humans has become our competitive edge.

The past

Twenty-four years ago in September, I sat in my first tutorial at the University of St Andrews — nine students around a table, including Prince William and seven young women. That tutorial room held particular energy. We were there to think, question, argue with texts and each other about ideas that mattered. Will, who played for my Sunday League football team, was just another student.

The economic backdrop was fundamentally different. Graduate jobs were plentiful, social media was (thankfully) nascent – Facebook was three years away, and only mildly registered in my final year, 2004-05 – and so partying with peers was authentic, and free from fears of being digitally damned. Moreover, the assumption that a degree led to career success felt unshakeable because it was demonstrably true.

The social contract was clearer, too. Society invested in higher education as a public good that would generate returns through increased productivity, innovation, and civic engagement. Students could focus on learning rather than debt management because the broader community bore the financial risk in exchange for shared benefits.

My graduation day at the University of St Andrews in 2005

Looking back, what strikes me most is the simplicity of the intellectual environment. We read physical books, researched in libraries using card catalogues, and didn’t have any digital devices in the lecture halls or tutor rooms. (And the computers we had in our rooms took up a colossal amount of space.) Our critical thinking developed through friction: the effort required to find information, synthesise arguments from multiple sources, and express ideas clearly without technological assistance.

Knowledge felt both scarce and valuable precisely because it was hard to access. You couldn’t Google historical facts during seminars. If you hadn’t done the reading, everyone knew. If your argument was poorly constructed, there was nowhere to hide. The constraints forced genuine intellectual development.

The human connections formed during those four years proved more valuable than any specific subject knowledge. Late-night debates in residence halls, study groups grappling with challenging texts, and casual conversations between lectures – these experiences shaped how we thought and who we became.

We could explore medieval history, philosophical arguments, or literary criticism without worrying whether these subjects would directly translate to career advantages. The assumption was that broad intellectual development would prove valuable, even if connections weren’t immediately obvious. (Again, I was fortunate to be in the last cohort of subsidised university education.)

That faith in indirect utility seems almost lost now. Today’s students, facing massive debt burdens, quite reasonably demand clear pathways from educational investment to career outcomes. The luxury of intellectual exploration for its own sake becomes harder to justify when each module costs hundreds – if not thousands – of pounds.

Some elements remain irreplaceable. The structured opportunity to develop critical thinking skills, build relationships with peers and mentors, and discover intellectual passions in supportive environments still offers unique value.

Indeed, these capabilities matter more now than they did a quarter of a century ago. When information is abundant but truth is contested, when AI can generate convincing arguments on any topic, and when economic structures are shifting rapidly, the ability to think independently becomes genuinely valuable rather than merely prestigious.

My 10-year-old son will reach university age by 2033. By then, higher education will have undergone another transformation. The economics might involve shorter programmes, industry partnerships, apprenticeship alternatives, or entirely new models that bypass traditional degrees. But the fundamental question remains unchanged: how do we prepare young minds to think independently, act ethically, and contribute meaningfully to society?

The answer may require reimagining university education entirely. Perhaps residential experiences focused on capability development rather than content transmission. Maybe stronger connections between academic learning and real-world problem-solving. Possibly more personalised pathways that recognise different learning styles and career ambitions. What won’t change is the need for structured environments where young people can develop their humanity while mastering their chosen fields of expertise.

The students opening their A-level results this last month deserve better. They deserve educational opportunities that develop their capabilities without crushing them with debt. They deserve career pathways that use their human potential rather than competing with machines on machine terms. Most importantly, they deserve honest conversations about what higher education can and cannot provide in an age of technological disruption.

Those conversations should start with acknowledging what that tutorial room at St Andrews represented: human minds engaging directly with complex ideas, developing intellectual courage through practice, and building relationships that lasted decades (although my contact with Prince Will mysteriously stopped after I began working at the Daily Mail Online!).

These experiences – whether at university or school, or elsewhere – remain as valuable as ever. The challenge is whether we can create sustainable ways to provide them without bankrupting the people who need them most.

Statistics of the month

🎓 A-level computing drops
Computing A-level entries fell by 2.8% in the UK despite years of growth, though female participation rose 3.5% to reach 18.6% of students taking the subject. Meanwhile, maths remains most popular with 112,138 students, but girls represent just 37.3% of the cohort. 🔗

👩‍💼 AI skills gender divide widens
Only 29% of women report having AI skills compared to 71% of men, while nearly 70% of UK jobs face high AI exposure. Under half of workers have been offered AI-related upskilling opportunities. 🔗

💰 Office return costs surge
UK employees spend an average £25 daily on commuting and expenses when working from the office, potentially costing nearly £3,500 annually in commuting alone if expected to be in the office for five days a week. 🔗

🏢 Summer hiring advantage emerges
Some 39% of UK businesses have struggled to hire in the last 12 months, with competition and slow hiring cited as key barriers. 🔗

🌍 Extreme poverty redefined
The World Bank raised its International Poverty Line from $2.15 to $3 per day, adding 125 million people to extreme poverty statistics. However, global extreme poverty has still fallen from 43% in 1990 to 10% today. 🔗

Thank you for reading Go Flux Yourself. Subscribe for free to receive this monthly newsletter straight to your inbox.

All feedback is welcome, via oliver@pickup.media. If you enjoyed reading, please consider sharing it via social media or email. Thank you.

And if you are interested in my writing, speaking and strategising services, you can find me on LinkedIn or email me using oliver@pickup.media.

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 18)

TL;DR: June’s edition explores truth-telling in an age of AI-generated misinformation, the flood of low-quality content threatening authentic expertise, and why human storytelling becomes our most valuable asset when everything else can be faked – plus some highlights from South by Southwest London.

Image created on Midjourney

The future

“When something is moving a million times every 10 years, there’s only one way that you can survive it. You’ve got to get on that spaceship. Once you get on that spaceship, you’re travelling at the same speed. When you’re on the rocket ship, all of a sudden, everything else slows down.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s words, delivered at London Tech Week earlier this month alongside Prime Minister Keir Starmer, capture the current state of artificial intelligence. We are being propelled by technological change at an unprecedented speed, orders of magnitude quicker than Moore’s law, and it feels alien and frightening.

Before stepping foot on the rocket ship, though, the first barrier to overcome for many is trust in AI. Indeed, for many, it’s advancing so rapidly that the potential for missed or hidden consequences is alarming enough to prompt a hard brake or not climb aboard at all.

Others understand the threats but focus on the opportunities promised by AI and are jostling for position, bracing for warp speed. Nothing will stop them, but at what cost to society?

For example, we’re currently witnessing two distinct trajectories for the future of online content and, to some extent, services. One leads towards an internet flooded with synthetic mediocrity and, worse, untrustworthy information; the other towards authentic human expertise becoming our most valuable currency.

Because the truth crisis has already landed, and AI is taking over, attacking the veracity of, well, everything we read and much of what we see on a screen.

In May, NewsGuard, which provides data to help identify reliable information online, identified 1,271 AI-generated news and information sites across 16 languages, operating with little to no human oversight, up from 750 last year.

It’s easy not to see this as you pull on your astronaut helmet and space gloves, but this is an insidious, industrial-scale production of mediocrity. Generative AI, fed on historical data, produces content that reflects the average of what has been published before, offering no new insights, lived experiences, or authentic perspectives. The result is an online world increasingly polluted with bland, sourceless, soulless and often inaccurate information. The slop is only going to get sloppier, too. What does that mean for truth and, yes, trust?

The 2025 State of AI in Marketing Report, published by HubSpot last week, reveals that 84% of UK marketers now use AI tools daily in their roles, compared to a global average of 66%.

Media companies are at risk of hosting, citing, and copying the marketing content. Some are actively creating it while swinging the axe liberally, culling journalists, and hacking away at integrity.

The latest Private Eye reported how Piers North, CEO of Reach – struggling publisher of the Mirror, Express, Liverpool Echo, Manchester Evening News, and countless other titles – has a “cunning plan: to hand it all over to the robots to sort out”.

According to the magazine, North told staff: “It feels like we’re on the cusp of another digital revolution, and obviously that can be pretty daunting, but here I think we’ve got such an opportunity to do more of the stuff we love and are brilliant at. So with that in mind, you won’t be surprised to hear that embracing AI is going to feature heavily in my strategic priorities.”

The incentive structure is clear: publish as much as possible and as quickly as possible to attract traffic. Quality, alas, becomes secondary to volume.

But this crisis creates opportunity. Real expertise becomes more valuable precisely because it’s becoming rarer. The brands and leaders who properly emphasise authentic human knowledge will enjoy a competitive advantage over competitors drowning in algorithmic sameness, now and in the future.

What does this mean for our children? They’re growing up in a world where they’ll need to become master detectives of truth. The skills we took for granted – being able to distinguish reliable sources from unreliable ones and recognising authentic expertise from synthetic mimicry – are becoming essential survival tools.

They’ll need to develop what we might call “truth literacy”: the ability to trace sources, verify claims, and distinguish between content created by humans with lived experience and content generated by algorithms with training data.

This detective work extends beyond text to every form of media. Deepfakes are becoming indistinguishable from reality. Voice cloning requires just seconds of audio. Even video evidence can no longer be trusted without verification.

The implications for work – and, well, life – are profound. For instance, with AI agents being the latest business buzzword, Khozema Shipchandler, CEO of global cloud communications company Twilio, shared with me how their technology is enabling what he calls “hyper-personalisation at scale”. But the key discovery isn’t the technology itself; it’s how human expertise guides its application.

“We’re not trying to replace human agents,” Khozema told me. “We’re creating experiences where virtual agents handle lower complexity interactions but can escalate seamlessly to humans when genuine expertise is needed.”

He shared a healthcare example. Cedar Health, based in the United States, found that 97% of patient inquiries were related to a lack of understanding of bills. However, patients initially preferred engaging with AI agents because they felt less embarrassed about gaps in their medical terminology. The AI could process complex insurance data instantly, but when nuanced problem-solving was required, human experts stepped in with full context.

In this case, man and machine are working together brilliantly. As Shipchandler put it: “The consumer gets an experience where they’re being listened to all the way through, they’re getting accuracy because everything gets recapped, and they’re getting promotional offers that aren’t annoying because they reference things they’ve actually done before.”

The crucial point, though, is that none of this works without human oversight, empathy, and strategic thinking. The AI handles the data processing; humans provide the wisdom.

Jesper With-Fogstrup, Group CEO of Moneypenny, a telephone answering service, echoed this theme from a different angle. His global company has been testing AI voice agents for a few months, handling live calls across various industries. The early feedback has been mixed, but revealing.

“Some people expect it’s going to be exactly like talking to a human,” With-Fogstrup told me in a cafe down the road from Olympia, the venue for London Tech Week. “It just isn’t. But we’re shipping updates to these agents every day, several times a day. They’re becoming better incredibly quickly.”

What’s fascinating is how customers reveal more of themselves to AI agents compared to human agents. “There’s something about being able to have a conversation for a long time,” Jesper observed. “The models are very patient. Sometimes that’s what’s required.”

But again, the sweet spot isn’t AI replacing humans. It’s AI handling routine complexity so humans can focus on what they do uniquely well. As Jesper explained: “If it escalates into one of our Moneypenny personal assistants, they get a summary, they can pick up the conversation, they understand where it got stuck, and they can resolve the issue.”

The future of work, then, isn’t about choosing between human and artificial intelligence. It’s about designing systems where each amplifies the other’s strengths while maintaining the ability to distinguish between them.

Hilary Cottam’s research for her new book, The Work We Need, arrives at the same conclusion from a different direction. After interviewing thousands of workers, from gravediggers to the Microsoft CEO, she identified six principles for revolutionising work:

Securing the basics
Working with meaning
Tending to what sustains us
Rethinking our use of time
Enabling play
Organising in place

Work, Cottam argues, is “a sort of chrysalis in which we figure out who we are and what we’re doing here, and what we should be doing to be useful”. That existential purpose can’t be automated away.

The young female welder Cottam profiled, working on nuclear submarines for BAE in Barrow-in-Furness, exemplifies this. She and her colleagues are “very, very convinced that their work is meaningful, partly because they’re highly skilled. And what’s very unusual in the modern workplace is that a submarine takes seven years to build, and most of the teamwork on that submarine is end-to-end.”

This is the future we should be building towards: AI handling the routine complexity, humans focusing on meaning and purpose, and the irreplaceable work of creating something that lasts. But we must teach our children how to distinguish between authentic human expertise and sophisticated synthetic imitation. Not easy.

Meanwhile, the companies already embracing this approach are seeing remarkable results. They’re not asking whether AI will replace humans, but how human expertise can be amplified by AI to create better outcomes for everyone while maintaining transparency about when and how AI is being used.

As Huang noted in his conversation with the Prime Minister: “AI is the great equaliser. The new programming language is called ‘human’. Anybody can learn how to program in AI.”

But that democratisation only works if we maintain the distinctly human capabilities that give that programming direction, purpose, and wisdom. The rocket ship is accelerating. Will we use that speed to amplify human potential or replace it entirely?

The present

At the inaugural South by Southwest London, held in Shoreditch, East London, at the beginning of June, I witnessed fascinating tensions around truth-telling that illuminate our current moment. The festival brought together storytellers, technologists, and pioneers, each grappling with how authentic voices survive in an increasingly synthetic world. Here are some of my highlights.

Image created on my iPhone

Tina Brown, former editor-in-chief of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The Daily Beast, reflecting on journalism’s current challenges, offered a deceptively simple observation: “To be a good writer, you have to notice things.” In our AI-saturated world, this human ability to notice becomes invaluable. While algorithms identify patterns in data, humans notice what’s missing, what doesn’t fit, and what feels wrong.

Brown’s observation carries particular weight, given her experience navigating media transformation over the past five decades. She has watched industries collapse and rebuild, seen power structures shift, and observed how authentic voices either adapt or fade away.

“Legacy media itself is reinventing itself all over the place,” she said. “They’re all trying to do things differently. But what you really miss in these smaller platforms is institutional backing. You need good lawyers, institutional backing for serious journalism.”

This tension between democratised content creation and institutional accountability sits at the heart of our current crisis. Anyone can publish anything, anywhere, anytime. But who ensures accuracy? Who takes responsibility when misinformation spreads? Who has the resources to fact-check, verify sources, and maintain standards?

This is a cultural challenge, as well as a technical one. When US President Donald Trump can shout down critics with “fake news”, and seemingly run a corrupt government – the memecoin $TRUMP and involvement with World Liberty Financial, reportedly raised over half a billion dollars, and there was the $400m (£303m) gift of a new official private jet from Qatar, among countless other questionable dealings – what does that mean for the rest of us?

Brown said: “The incredible thing is that the US President … doesn’t care how bad it looks. The first term was like, well, the president shouldn’t be making money out of himself. All that stuff is out of the window.”

When truth-telling itself becomes politically suspect, when transparency is viewed as a weakness rather than a strength, the work of authentic communication becomes both more difficult and more essential.

This dynamic played out dramatically in the spy world, as Gordon Carrera, the BBC’s Security Correspondent, and former CIA analyst David McCloskey revealed during a live recording of their podcast, The Rest is Classified, about intelligence operations. The most chilling story they shared wasn’t about sophisticated surveillance or cutting-edge technology. It was about children discovering their parents’ true identities only when stepping off a plane in Moscow, greeted by Vladimir Putin himself.

Imagine learning that everything you believed about your family, your identity, and your entire childhood was constructed fiction. These children of deep-cover Russian operatives lived authentic lives built on complete deception. The psychological impact, as McCloskey noted, requires “all kinds of exotic therapies”.

Just imagine. Those children will have gone past the anger about being lied to and crashed into devastation, having had their sense of reality torpedoed. When the foundation of truth crumbles, it’s not simply the facts that disappear: it’s the ability to trust anything, anywhere, ever again.

This feeling of groundlessness is what our children risk experiencing if we don’t teach them how to navigate an increasingly synthetic information environment.

The difference is that while those Russian operatives’ children experienced one devastating revelation, our children face thousands of micro-deceptions daily: each AI-generated article, each deepfake video, each synthetic voice clip eroding their ability to distinguish real from artificial.

Zelda Perkins, speaking about whistleblowing at SXSW London, captured something essential about the courage required to tell brutal truths. When she broke her NDA to expose Harvey Weinstein’s behaviour and detonate the #MeToo movement in 2017, she was trying to dismantle an institution that enables silence rather than bringing down a powerful man. “The problem wasn’t really Weinstein,” she emphasised. “The problem is the system. The problem is these mechanisms that protect those in power.”

Her most powerful reflection was that she has no regrets about speaking out and telling the truth despite the unimaginable impact on her career and beyond. “My life has been completely ruined by speaking out,” she said. “But I’m honestly not sure I’ve ever been more fulfilled. I’ve never grown more, I’ve never learned more, I’ve never met more people with integrity.”

I’m reminded of a quote from Jesus in the bible (John 8:32 – and, yes, I had to look that up, of course): “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

Truth can set you free, but it may come at a cost. This paradox captures something essential about truth-telling in our current moment. Individual courage matters, but systemic change requires mass action. As Perkins noted: “Collective voice is the most important thing for us right now.”

Elsewhere at SXSW London, the brilliantly named Mo Brings Plenty – an Oglala Lakota television, film, and stage actor (Mo in Yellowstone) – spoke with passion about Indigenous perspectives. “In our culture, we talk about the next seven generations,” he said. “What are we going to pass on to them? What do we leave behind?”

This long-term thinking feels revolutionary in our culture of instant gratification. Social media rewards immediate engagement. AI systems optimise for next-click prediction. Political cycles focus on next-election victories.

But authentic leaders think in generations, not quarters. They build systems that outlast their own tenure. They tell truths that may be uncomfortable now but are necessary for future flourishing.

The creative community at SXSW London embodied this thinking. Whether discussing children’s environmental education or music’s power to preserve cultural memory, artists consistently framed their work in terms of legacy and impact beyond immediate success.

As Dr Deepak Chopra noted in the “Love the Earth” session featuring Mo Brings Plenty: “Protecting our planet is something we can all do joyfully with imagination and compassion.”

This joyful approach to brutal truths offers a template for navigating our current information crisis. We don’t need to choose between honesty and hope. We can tell hard truths while building better systems and expose problems while creating solutions.

The key is understanding that truth-telling isn’t about punishment or blame. It’s about clearing space for authentic progress that will precipitate the flourishing of humanity, not its dulling.

The (recent) past

Three weeks ago, I took a 12-minute Lime bike (don’t worry, I have a clever folding helmet and never run red lights) from my office in South East London to Goldsmiths, University of London. I spoke to a room full of current students, recent graduates, and business leaders, delivering a keynote titled: “AI for Business Success: Fostering Human Connection in the Digital Age.” The irony wasn’t lost on me: here I was, using my human capabilities to argue for the irreplaceable value of human connection in an age of AI.

Image taken by my talented friend Samer Moukarzel

The presentation followed a pattern that I had been perfecting over the past year. I begin with a simple human interaction: asking audience members to turn to each other and share their favourite day of the week and favourite time of that day. (Tuesday at 8.25pm, before starting five-a-side footie, for me.) It triggered a minute or two of genuine curiosity, slight awkwardness, perhaps a shared laugh or unexpected discovery.

That moment captures everything I’m trying to communicate. While everyone obsesses over AI’s technical capabilities, we’re forgetting that humans crave connection, meaning, and the beautiful unpredictability of authentic interaction.

A week or so later, for Business and IP Centre (BIPC) Lewisham, I delivered another presentation: “The Power of Human-Led Storytelling in an AI World.” This one was delivered over Zoom, and the theme remained consistent, but the context shifted. These were local business leaders, many of whom were struggling with the same questions. How do we stay relevant? How do we compete with automated content? How do we maintain authenticity in an increasingly synthetic world?

Both presentations built on themes I’ve been developing throughout this year of Go Flux Yourself. The CHUI framework, the concept of being “kind explorers”, the recognition that we’re living through “the anti-social century”, where technology promises connection but often delivers isolation.

But there’s something I’ve learned from stepping onto stages and speaking directly to people that no amount of writing can teach: the power of presence. When you’re standing in front of an audience, there’s no algorithm mediating the exchange. No filter softening hard-to-hear truths, and no AI assistant smoothing rough edges.

You succeed or fail based on your ability to read the room, adapt in real time, and create a genuine connection. These are irreplaceable human skills that become more valuable as everything else becomes automated.

The historical parallel keeps returning to me. On June 23, I delivered the BIPC presentation on what would have been Alan Turing’s 113th birthday. The brilliant mathematician whose work gave rise to modern computing and AI would probably be fascinated – and perhaps concerned – by what we’ve done with his legacy.

I shared the myth that Apple’s bitten logo was supposedly Steve Jobs’ tribute to Turing, who tragically died after taking a bite from a cyanide-laced apple. It’s compelling and poetic, connecting our digital age to its origins. There’s just one problem: it’s entirely false.

Rob Janoff, who designed the logo, has repeatedly denied any homage to Turing. Apple itself has stated there’s no link. The bite was added so people wouldn’t mistake the apple for a cherry. Sometimes, the mundane truth is just mundane.

But here’s why I started with this myth: compelling narratives seem more important than accurate ones, and everything is starting to sound exactly the same because algorithms are optimised for engagement over truth.

As I’ve refined these talks over the past months, I’ve discovered that as our environment becomes increasingly artificial, the desire for authentic interaction grows stronger. The more content gets automated, the more valuable genuine expertise becomes. The more relationships are mediated by algorithms, the more precious unfiltered, messy human connections feel.

That’s the insight I’ll carry forward into the second half of 2025. Not that we should resist technological change, but that we should use it to amplify our most human capabilities while teaching our children how to be master detectives of truth in an age of synthetic everything, and encouraging them to experiment, explore, and love.

Statistics of the month

💼 Executive AI race
Almost two-thirds (65%) of UK and Irish CEOs are actively adopting AI agents, with 58% pushing their organisations to adopt Generative AI faster than people are comfortable with. Two-thirds confirm they’ll take more risks than the competition to stay competitive. 🔗

📧 The infinite workday
Microsoft’s 2025 Annual Work Trend Index Report reveals employees are caught in constant churn, with 40% triaging emails by 6am, receiving 117 emails and 153 chats daily. Evening meetings after 8pm are up 16% year-over-year, and weekend work continues rising. 🔗

🤖 AI trust paradox
While IBM replaced 94% of HR tasks with AI, many executives have serious reservations. Half (51%) don’t trust AI fully with financial decision-making, and 22% worry about data quality feeding AI models. 🔗

📉 Gender gap persists
The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Report shows 68.8% of the gap closed, yet full parity remains 123 years away. Despite gains in health and education, economic and political gaps persist. 🔗

⚡ Unemployment warning
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and send unemployment rocketing to 20% within five years. 🔗

Thank you for reading Go Flux Yourself. Subscribe for free to receive this monthly newsletter straight to your inbox.

All feedback is welcome, via oliver@pickup.media. If you enjoyed reading, please consider sharing it via social media or email. Thank you.

And if you are interested in my writing, speaking and strategising services, you can find me on LinkedIn or email me using oliver@pickup.media.

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 15)

TL;DR: March’s Go Flux Yourself explores what good leadership looks like in an AI-driven world. Spoiler: it’s not Donald Trump. From psychological safety and the “Lost Einsteins” to lessons from the inventor of plastic, it examines why innovation without inclusion is reckless – and why collaboration, kindness, and asking better questions might be our best defence against digital delusion and existential drift …

Image created on Midjourney

The future

“Leadership is the art of harnessing the efforts of others to achieve greatness.”

Donald Trump’s America-first agenda may appeal to the base instincts of populism, a nationalist fever dream dressed up as economic strategy. However, it is hopelessly outdated as a leadership model for a globally connected, AI-enabled future.

In fact, it’s worse than that. It’s actively regressive. Trumpism, and the rise of Trumpian imitators across the globe, isn’t just shutting borders. It’s shutting minds, too, and that’s more debilitating for society. It trades in fear, not foresight. It rewards silence over dissent. And in doing so, it stifles precisely the kind of leadership the future demands.

Because let’s be clear: the coming decades will not be defined by those who shout the loudest or build the tallest walls. They will be defined by those who keep channels open – not just for trade, but for ideas. For difference. For disagreement. For discovery.

That starts with listening. And not just listening politely, but listening generatively – creating the psychological space where people feel safe enough to share the thought that might change everything.

At the recent Workhuman Live Forum in London, Harvard’s Amy Edmondson – a global authority on leadership and psychological safety – warned of the “almost immeasurable” consequences of holding back. In her research, 93% of senior leaders admitted that their silence had tangible costs. Not theoretical. Not abstract. Tangible. Safety failures. Wasted resources. Poor decisions. Quiet disengagement. And perhaps worst of all, missed opportunities to learn.

Why do we hold back, and not speak up? Because we’re human. And humans are wired to avoid looking stupid. We’d rather be safe than smart. Edmondson calls it “impression management”, and we’re all fluent in it. From the start of primary school, we learn not to raise our hand unless we’re sure of the answer. By the time we enter the workforce, that instinct is second nature.

But in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world – after a chorus in the early pandemic days, five years ago, I’m hearing this used a lot more by business leaders now – that instinct is no longer helpful. It’s dangerous. Because real innovation doesn’t happen in safe, silent rooms. It happens in teams willing to fail fast, speak up, and challenge the status quo. In rooms where “I think we might be wrong” is not a career-ending statement, but a spark.

So how should leaders lead? The quotation that begins this month’s Go Flux Yourself is from Ken Frazier, former CEO of Merck, and was cited by Edmundson, who heard it in one of her sessions. It’s worth repeating: “Leadership is the art of harnessing the efforts of others to achieve greatness.”

This brings us to Aneesh Raman, LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer, and his powerful message at Talent Connect and Sancroft Convene, in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Raman argues that we are moving out of the “knowledge economy” – where technical proficiency was king – and into the “innovation economy”, where our most human skills become our greatest assets.

He lists them as the five Cs: communication, creativity, compassion, courage, and curiosity. Let’s make it six: collaboration. These are no longer “soft skills” but the defining skills of the age. They allow us to build trust, forge connections, and work across differences. They are, as Raman says, why we are the apex species on the planet.

But here’s the catch: while these skills are distributed broadly across the population, the opportunity to develop and express them is not. Enter the “Lost Einsteins” – those with the potential to innovate but without the credentials, connections, or capital to turn ideas into impact. Economist Raj Chetty’s landmark study found that children from wealthy families are 10-times more likely to become inventors than equally talented peers from lower-income backgrounds.

This is a global failure. We are squandering talent on an industrial scale – not because of a lack of ability, but because of a lack of inclusion. And that’s a leadership failure.

We need leaders who can spot and elevate the quiet genius in the room, who don’t confuse volume with value, and who can look beyond the CV and see the potential in a person’s questions, not just their answers.

And we need to stop romanticising “hero” innovation – the lone genius in a garage – and embrace the truth: innovation is a team sport. For instance, Leonardo da Vinci, as biographer Walter Isaacson points out, was a great collaborator. He succeeded because he listened as much as he led.

Which brings us back to psychological safety – the necessary precondition for team-based innovation. Without it, diversity becomes dysfunction. With it, it becomes dynamite.

Edmondson’s research shows that diverse teams outperform homogenous ones only when psychological safety is high. Without that safety, diversity leads to miscommunication, mistrust, and missed potential. But with it? You get the full benefit of varied perspectives, lived experiences, and cognitive styles. You get the kind of high-quality conversations that lead to breakthroughs.

But these conversations don’t happen by accident. They require framing, invitation, and modelling. They require leaders to say – out loud – things like: “I’ve never flown a perfect flight” (as one airline captain Edmondson studied told his new crew). Or “I need to hear from you”. Or even: “I don’t know the answer. Let’s figure it out together.”

KeyAnna Schmiedl, Workhuman’s Chief Human Experience Officer, put it beautifully in a conversation we had at the Live Forum event: leadership today is less about having the answer and more about creating the conditions for answers to emerge. It’s about making work more human – not through performative gestures, but through daily, deliberate acts of kindness. Not niceness. Kindness.

Niceness avoids conflict. Kindness leans into it, constructively. Niceness says, “That’s fine”. Kindness says, “I hear you – but here’s what we need.” Niceness smooths things over. Kindness builds things up.

And kindness is deeply pragmatic. It’s not about making everyone happy. It’s about making sure everyone is heard. Because the next big idea could come from the intern. From the quiet one. From the woman in trainers, not the man in a suit.

This reframing of leadership is already underway. Schmiedl herself never thought of herself as a leader – until others started reflecting it back to her. Not because she had all the answers, but because she had a way of asking the right questions, of creating rooms where people showed up fully, where difference wasn’t just tolerated but treasured.

So what does all this mean for the rest of us?

It means asking better questions. Not “Does anyone disagree?” (cue crickets). But “Who has a different perspective?” It means listening more than speaking. It means noticing who hasn’t spoken yet – and inviting them in. It means, as Edmondson says, getting curious about the dogs that don’t bark. Other “good questions” include: “What are we missing?” Also: “Please can you explain that further?”

And it means remembering that the goal is not psychological safety itself. The goal is excellence. Innovation. Learning. Fairness. Safety is just the soil in which those things can grow.

The future belongs to the leaders who know how to listen, invite dissent, ask good questions, and, ultimately, understand that the art of leadership is not dominance, but dialogue.

Because the next Einstein is out there. She, he, or they just haven’t been heard yet.

The present

“We’re gearing up for this year to be a year where you’ll have some ‘oh shit’ moments,” said Jack Clark, policy chief at Anthropic, the $40 billion AI start-up behind the Claude chatbot, earlier this year. He wasn’t exaggerating. From melting servers at OpenAI (more on this below) to the dizzying pace of model upgrades, 2025 already feels like we’re living through the future on fast-forward.

And yet, amid all the noise, hype, and existential hand-wringing, something quieter – but arguably more profound – is happening: people are remembering the value of connection.

This March, I had the pleasure of speaking at a Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) virtual event for members in South East London. The session, held on Shrove Tuesday, was fittingly titled “Standing Out: The Power of Human Leadership in an AI World”. Between pancake references and puns (some better than others), I explored what it means to lead with humanity in an age when digital tools dominate every dashboard, inbox, and conversation.

The talk was personal, anchored in my own experience as a business owner, a journalist, and a human surfing the digital tide. I shared my CHUI framework – Community, Health, Understanding, and Interconnectedness – as a compass for turbulent times. Because let’s face it: the world is messy right now. Geopolitical uncertainty is high. Domestic pressures are mounting. AI is changing faster than our ability to regulate or even comprehend it. And loneliness – real, bone-deep isolation – is quietly eroding the foundations of workplaces and communities.

And yet, there are bright spots. And they’re often found in the places we least expect – like virtual networking events, Slack channels, and local business groups.

Since that FSB session, I’ve connected with a flurry of new people, each conversation sparking unexpected insight or opportunity. One such connection was Bryan Altimas, founder of Riverside Court Consulting. Bryan’s story perfectly exemplifies how leadership and collaboration can scale, even in a solo consultancy.

After the pandemic drove a surge in cybercrime, Altimas responded not by hiring a traditional team but by building a nimble, global network of 15 cybersecurity specialists – from policy experts to ethical hackers based as far afield as Mauritius. “Most FSB members don’t worry about cybersecurity until it’s too late,” he told me in our follow-up chat. But instead of fear-mongering, Altimas and his team educate. They equip small businesses to be just secure enough that criminals look elsewhere – the digital equivalent of fitting a burglar alarm on your front door while your neighbour leaves theirs ajar.

What struck me most about Altimas wasn’t just his technical acumen, but his collaborative philosophy. Through FSB’s Business Crimes Forum, he’s sat on roundtables with the London Mayor’s Office and contributed to parliamentary discussions. These conversations – forged through community, not competition – have directly generated new client relationships and policy influence. “It’s about raising the floor,” he said. “We’re stronger when we work together.”

That sentiment feels increasingly urgent. In an age where cybercriminals operate within sophisticated, decentralised networks, small businesses can’t afford to work in silos. Our defence must be networked, too – built on shared knowledge, mutual accountability, and trust.

And yet, many governments seem to be doing the opposite. The recent technical capability notice issued to Apple – which led to the withdrawal of advanced data protection services from UK devices – is a case in point. Altimas called it “the action of a digitally illiterate administration”, one that weakens security for all citizens while failing to deter the real bad actors. The irony? In trying to increase control, we’ve actually made ourselves more vulnerable.

This brings us back to the role of small business leaders and, more broadly, to the power of community. As I told the audience at the FSB event, the future of work isn’t just about AI. It’s about who can thrive in an AI world. And the answer, increasingly, is those who can collaborate, communicate, and connect across differences.

In a world where 90% of online content is projected to be AI-generated this year, authentic human interaction becomes not just a nice-to-have, but a business differentiator. Relationship capital is now as valuable as financial capital. And unlike content, it can’t be automated.

That’s why I encourage business leaders to show up. Join the webinars. Say yes to the follow-up call. Ask the awkward questions. Be curious. Some of the most valuable conversations I’ve had recently – including with Altimas – started with nothing more than a LinkedIn connection or a quick post-event “thanks for your talk”.

This isn’t about nostalgia or rejecting technology. As I said in my FSB talk, tech is not the enemy of human connection – it’s how we use it that matters. The question is whether our tools bring us closer to others or push us further into isolation.

The paradox of the AI age is that the more powerful our technologies become, the more essential our humanity is. AI can optimise, analyse, and synthesise, but it can’t empathise, mentor, or build trust in a room. It certainly can’t make someone feel seen, valued, or safe enough to speak up.

That’s where leadership comes in. As Edmondson noted, psychological safety doesn’t happen by accident. It must be modelled, invited, and reinforced. In many cases, work must be reframed to make clear that anyone and everyone can make a difference, alongside an acknowledgement by leaders that things will inevitably go wrong. And as Raman said, the next phase of work will be defined not by who codes the best, but by who collaborates the most.

Our best bet for surviving the “oh shit” moments of 2025 is not to go it alone, but to lean in together. As FSB members, for instance, we are not just business owners. We are nodes in a network. And that network – messy, human, imperfect – might just be our greatest asset.

The past

In 1907, Leo Baekeland changed the world. A Belgian-born chemist working in New York, he created Bakelite – the world’s first fully synthetic plastic. It was, by every measure, a breakthrough. Hard, durable, and capable of being moulded into almost any shape (the clue is in the name – plastikos, from the Greek, meaning “capable of being shaped”), Bakelite marked the dawn of the modern plastics industry.

For the first time, humankind wasn’t limited to what nature could provide. We could manufacture our own materials. These materials would soon find their way into everything from telephones to televisions, jewellery to jet engines.

Baekeland had no idea what he was unleashing. And perhaps that’s the point.

More than a century later, we’re drowning in the aftershocks of that innovation. At Economist Impact’s 10th Sustainability Week earlier this month – once again in the quietly majestic surroundings of Sancroft Covene – I had the pleasure of moderating a panel titled “Preventing plastics pollution through novel approaches”. I even dressed for the occasion, sporting a nautical bow tie (always good to keep the theme on-brand), and kicked things off with a bit of self-aware humour about my surname.

One of the panellists, Kris Renwick of Reckitt, represented the makers of Harpic – the toilet cleaner founded by none other than Harry Pickup, surely the most illustrious bearer of my surname. (Although late actor Ronald Pickup has a case.) There’s a certain poetry in that Harry made his name scrubbing away society’s waste.

Especially when set against another panellist, Alexandra Cousteau – granddaughter of Jacques-Yves, the pioneering oceanographer who co-invented the Aqua-Lung and brought the mysteries of the sea to the world. Cousteau, who first set sail on an expedition at just four months old, told the audience that there is 50% less sea life today than in her grandfather’s time.

Let that sink in. Half of all marine life gone – in just three generations.

And plastics are a big part of the problem. We now produce around 460 million tonnes of plastic every year. Of that, 350 million tonnes becomes waste – a staggering 91% is never recycled. Contrary to popular belief, very little of it ends up in the oceans directly, though.

According to Gapminder, just under 6% of all plastic waste makes it to the sea. Most of it – around 80 million tonnes – is mismanaged: dumped, burned, or buried in ways that still wreak havoc on ecosystems and human health. As Cousteau pointed out, the average person, astonishingly, is believed to carry around the equivalent of a plastic spoon’s worth of microplastics in their body. Including in their brain.

Image created on Midjourney

It’s a bleak picture – and one with eerie echoes in the current hype cycle around AI.

Bakelite was hailed as a wonder material. It made things cheaper, lighter, more efficient. So too does AI. We marvel at what generative tools can do – composing music, designing logos, writing code, diagnosing diseases. Already there are brilliant use cases – and undoubtedly more to come. But are we, once again, rushing headlong into a future we don’t fully understand? Are we about to repeat the same mistake: embracing innovation, while mismanaging its consequences?

Take energy consumption. This last week, OpenAI’s servers were reportedly “melting” under the strain of demand after the launch of their new image-generation model. Melting. It’s not just a metaphor. The environmental cost of training and running large AI models is immense – with a 2019 estimate (ie before the explosion of ChatGPT) suggesting a single model can emit as much carbon as five cars over their entire lifetimes. That’s not a sustainable trajectory.

And yet, much like Bakelite before it, AI is being pushed into every corner of our lives. Often with the best of intentions. But intentions, as the old saying goes, are not enough. What matters is management.

On our plastics panel, Cousteau made the case for upstream thinking. Rather than just reacting to waste, we must design it out of the system from the start. That means rethinking materials, packaging, infrastructure. In other words, it requires foresight. A willingness to zoom out, to consider long-term impacts rather than just short-term gains.

AI demands the same. We need to build governance, ethics, and accountability into its architecture now – before it becomes too entrenched, too ubiquitous, too powerful to regulate meaningfully. Otherwise, we risk creating a different kind of pollution: not plastic, but algorithmic. Invisible yet insidious. Microbiases instead of microplastics. Systemic discrimination baked into decision-making processes. A digital world that serves the few at the expense of the many.

All of this brings us back to leadership. Because the real challenge isn’t innovation. It’s stewardship. As Cousteau reminded us, humans are phenomenally good at solving problems when we decide to care. The tragedy is that we so often wait until it’s too late – until the oceans are full, until the servers melt, until the damage is done.

Moderating that session reminded me just how interconnected these conversations are. Climate. Technology. Health. Equity. We can’t afford to silo them anymore. The story of Bakelite is not just the story of plastics. It’s the story of unintended consequences. The story of how something miraculous became monstrous – not because it was inherently evil, but because we weren’t paying attention.

And that, in the end, is what AI forces us to confront. Are we paying attention? Are we asking the right questions, at the right time, with the right people in the room?

Or are we simply marvelling at the magic – and leaving someone else to clean up the mess?

Statistics of the month

📊 AI in a bubble? Asana’s latest research reveals that AI adoption is stuck in a ‘leadership bubble’ – while executives embrace the tech, most employees remain on the sidelines. Two years in, 67% of companies still haven’t scaled AI across their organisations. 🔗

🤝 Collaboration drives adoption. According to the same study, workers are 46% more likely to adopt AI when a cross-functional partner is already using it. Yet most current implementations are built for solo use – missing the chance to unlock AI’s full, collective potential. 🔗

📉 Productivity gap alert. Gartner predicts that by 2028, over 20% of workplace apps will use AI personalisation to adapt to individual workers. Yet today, only 23% of digital workers are fully satisfied with their tools – and satisfied users are nearly 3x more productive. The workplace tech revolution can’t come soon enough.

📱 Emoji wars at work. New research from The Adaptavist Group exposes a generational rift in office comms: 45% of UK over-50s say emojis are inappropriate, while two-thirds of Gen Z use them daily. Meanwhile, full-stops are deemed ‘professional’ by older workers, but 23% of Gen Z perceive them as ‘rude’. Bring on the AI translators! 🔗

😓 Motivation is fading. Culture Amp finds that UK and EMEA employee motivation has declined for three straight years. Recognition is at a five-year low, and fewer workers feel performance reviews reflect their impact. Hard work, unnoticed. 🔗

Thank you for reading Go Flux Yourself. Subscribe for free to receive this monthly newsletter straight to your inbox.

All feedback is welcome, via oliver@pickup.media. If you enjoyed reading, please consider sharing it via social media or email. Thank you.

And if you are interested in my writing, speaking and strategising services, you can find me on LinkedIn or email me using oliver@pickup.media.

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 14)

TL;DR February’s Go Flux Yourself examines fairness as a business – and societal – necessity. Splunk’s Kirsty Paine tackles AI security, Harvard’s Siri Chilazi critiques DEI’s flaws, and Robert Rosenkranz applies Stoic wisdom to ambition, humility, and success in an AI-driven world …

Image created on Midjourney with the prompt “a forlorn man with his young son both with ski gear on at the top of a mountain with no snow on it (but green grass and rock) with a psychedelic sky”

The future

“To achieve anything meaningful, you must accept that you don’t have all the answers. The most successful people are the ones who keep learning, questioning, and improving.”

Robert Rosenkranz has lived the American Dream – but you won’t hear him shouting about it. At 82, he has little interest in the brash, performative ambition that defines modern politics and business. Instead, his story is one of quiet, relentless progress.

Born into a struggling family, he worked his way through Yale and Harvard, then went on to lead Delphi Financial Group for over three decades. By the time he stepped down as CEO in 2018, he had grown the company’s value 100-fold, overseeing more than $20 billion in assets.

Yet, Rosenkranz’s real legacy might not be in finance, but in philanthropy. Yesterday (February 27), in a smart members’ club (where I had to borrow a blazer at reception – oops!) in Mayfair, London, I attended an intimate lunch to discuss The Stoic Capitalist, his upcoming book on ambition, self-discipline, and long-term success.

As we received our starters, he shared an extraordinary statistic: “In America, there are maybe a couple of dozen people who have given over a billion dollars in their lifetime. A hundred percent of them are self-made.”

Really? I did some digging, and the numbers back him up. As of 2024, over 25 American philanthropists have donated more than $1 billion each, according to Forbes. Further, of those who have signed the Giving Pledge – committing to give away at least half their wealth – 84% are self-made. Only 16% inherited their fortunes.

The message is clear: those who build their wealth from nothing are far more likely to give it away. Contrast this with Donald Trump, the ultimate heir-turned-huckster. Brash, transactional (“pay-to-play” was how American political scientist Ian Bremmer neatly describes him), obsessed with personal gain, the American President represents a vision of success where winning means others must lose. Rosenkranz, by contrast, embodies something altogether different – ambition not as self-interest, but as a long game that enriches others.

He is also, tellingly, apathetic about politics, latterly. Having once believed in the American meritocracy, the Republican who has helped steer public policy now sees a system increasingly warped by inherited wealth, populism, and those pay-to-play politics. “The future of American politics worries me,” he admitted at the lunch. And given the rise of Trumpian imitators, he has reason to be concerned. To my mind, the world needs more Rosenkranzes – self-made leaders who view ambition and success as vehicles for building, rather than simply taking.

This tension – between long-term, disciplined ambition and short-term, self-serving power – runs through this month’s Go Flux Yourself. Because whether we’re talking about AI security, workplace fairness, or the philosophy of leadership, the real winners will be those who take the long view and seek fairness.

Fairness at work: The illusion of progress

Fairness in the workplace is one of those ideas that corporate leaders love to endorse in principle – but shy away from in practice. Despite billions spent on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, meaningful change remains frustratingly elusive. (Sadly, this fact only helps Trump’s forceful agenda to ditch such policies – an approach that is driving the marginalised to seek shelter, at home or abroad.)

“For a lot of organisations, programmatic interventions are appealing because they are discrete. They’re off to the side. It’s easy to approve a one-time budget for a facilitator to come and do a training or participate in a single event. That’s sometimes a lot easier than saying: ‘Let’s change how we evaluate performance.’ But precisely because those latter types of solutions are embedded and affect how work gets done daily, they’re more effective.”

This is the heart of what Harvard’s Siri Chilazi told me when we discussed Make Work Fair, the new book she has co-authored with Iris Bohnet. Their research offers a much-needed reality check on corporate DEI efforts.

Image created on Midjourney with the prompt “a man and a women in work clothes on a balancing scale – equal – in the style of a matisse painting”

She explained why so many workplace fairness initiatives fail: they rely on changing individual behaviour rather than fixing broken systems. “Unconscious bias training has become this multi-billion-dollar industry,” she said. “But the evidence is clear — it doesn’t work.” Studies have shown that bias training rarely leads to lasting behavioral change, and in some cases, it even backfires, making people more defensive about their biases rather than less.

So what does work? Chilazi and Bohnet argue that structural interventions — the kind that make fairness automatic rather than optional — are the key to real progress. “If you want to reduce bias in hiring, don’t just tell people to ‘be more aware’ — design the process so that bias has fewer opportunities to creep in,” she told me.

This means:

Standardising interviews so every candidate is evaluated against the same criteria
Removing names from CVs to eliminate unconscious bias in early screening
Making promotion decisions based on clear, structured frameworks rather than subjective “gut feelings”

The companies that have done this properly – like AstraZeneca, which now applies transparent decision-making frameworks to promotions – have seen real progress. Others, Chilazi warned, are simply engaging in performative fairness. “If an organisation is still relying on vague, unstructured decision-making, it doesn’t matter how many DEI consultants they hire – bias will win.”

Perhaps the most telling statistic comes from a 2023 McKinsey report that found that 90% of executives believe their DEI initiatives are effective, but only 40% of employees agree. That gap tells you everything you need to know.

This matters not just ethically, but competitively. Companies that embed fairness into their DNA don’t just avoid scandals and lawsuits – they outperform their competitors. “The data is overwhelming,” Chilazi said. “Fairer companies attract better talent, foster more innovation, and have stronger long-term results.”

Yet many businesses refuse to make fairness a structural priority. Why? Because, as Chilazi put it, “real fairness requires real power shifts. And that makes a lot of leaders uncomfortable.”

But here’s the reality: fairness isn’t a cost – it’s an investment. The future belongs to the companies that understand this. And those that don’t? They’ll be left wondering why the best talent keeps walking out the door.

NB I’ll be discussing some of this next week, on March 4, at the latest Inner London South Virtual Networking event for the Federation of Small Businesses (of which I’m a member). See here to tune in.

Fairness in AI: Who controls the future?

If fairness in the workplace is in crisis, fairness in AI is a full-blown emergency. And unlike workplace bias – which at least has legal protections and public scrutiny – AI bias is being quietly embedded into the foundations of our future.

AI now influences who gets hired, who gets a loan, who gets medical treatment, and even who goes to prison. Yet, shockingly, most companies deploying these systems have no real governance strategy in place.

At the start of February, I spoke with Splunk’s Geneva-based Kirsty Paine, a cybersecurity strategist and World Economic Forum Fellow, who is actively working with governments, regulators, and industry leaders to shape AI security standards. Her message was blunt: “AI governance isn’t just about ethics or compliance – it’s a resilience issue. If you don’t get it right, your business is exposed”.

This is where many boards are failing. They assume AI security is a technical problem, best left to IT teams. But as Paine explained, if AI makes a bad decision – one that leads to reputational, financial, or legal fallout – blaming the engineers won’t cut it.

“We need boards to start thinking of AI governance the same way they think about financial oversight,” she said. “If you wouldn’t approve a financial model without auditing it, why would you sign off on AI that fundamentally impacts customers, employees, and business decisions?”

Historically, businesses have treated cybersecurity as a defensive function – protecting systems from external attacks. But AI doesn’t work like that. It is constantly learning, evolving, and interacting with new data and new risks.

“You can’t just ‘fix’ an AI system once and assume it’s safe,” Paine told me. “AI doesn’t stop learning, so its risks don’t stop evolving either. That means your governance model needs to be just as dynamic.”

At its core, this is about power. Who controls AI, and in whose interests? Right now, most AI development is happening behind closed doors, controlled by a handful of tech giants with little accountability.

One of the biggest governance challenges is that no single company can solve AI security alone. That’s why Paine is leading cross-industry efforts at the WEF, bringing together governments, regulators, and businesses to create shared frameworks for AI security and resilience.

“AI security shouldn’t be a competitive advantage – it should be a shared priority,” she said. “If businesses don’t start working together on governance, they’ll be left at the mercy of regulators who will make those decisions for them.”

One of the most significant barriers to AI security is communication. Paine, who started her career as a mathematics teacher in challenging schools, knows that how you explain something determines whether people truly understand it.

“In cybersecurity and AI, we love jargon,” she admitted. “But if your board doesn’t understand the language you’re using, how can they make informed decisions?”

This is where her teaching background has shaped her approach. “I had to explain complex maths to students who found it intimidating,” she said. “Now, I do the same thing in boardrooms.” The goal isn’t to impress people with technical terms but to ensure they actually get it, was her message.

And this, ultimately, is the hidden risk of AI governance: if leaders don’t understand the systems they’re approving, they can’t govern them effectively.

The present

If fairness has been the intellectual thread running through my conversations this month, sobriety has been the personal one. I’ve been talking about it a lot – on Voice of Islam radio, for example (see here, from about 23 minutes in), where I was invited to discuss the impact of alcohol on society – and in wrapping up Upper Bottom, the sobriety podcast I co-hosted for the past year.

Ending Upper Bottom felt like the right decision – producing a weekly podcast (an endless cycle of researching, recording, editing, publishing and promoting) is challenging, and harder to justify with no financial reward and little social impact. But it also marked a turning point.

When we launched last February, it was a passion project – an exploration of what it meant to re-evaluate alcohol’s role in our lives. Over the months, the response was encouraging: messages from people rethinking their own drinking, others inspired to take a break, and some who felt seen for the first time. It proved what I suspected all along: the sweetest fruits of sobriety can be found through clarity, agency, and taking control of your own story.

And now? Well, I’m already lining up new hosting gigs – this time, paid ones. Sobriety has given me a sharper focus, a better work ethic, and, frankly, a clearer voice. I have no interest in being a preacher about it – if you want a drink, have a drink – but I do know that since cutting out alcohol, opportunities keep rolling in. And I’m open to more.

I bring this up because storytelling – whether through a podcast mic, a radio interview, or the pages of Go Flux Yourself – is essentially about fairness too. Who gets to tell their story? Whose voice gets amplified? Who is given the space to question things that seem “normal” but, on closer inspection, might not be serving them?

This is the thread that ties my conversations this month – whether with Kirsty on AI governance, Robert on wealth distribution and politics, or Siri on workplace fairness, or my own reflections on sobriety – into something bigger. Fairness isn’t just about systems. It’s about who gets to write the script.

And right now, I’m more interested than ever in shaping my own.

The past

February was my birthday month. Another year older, another opportunity to reflect. And this year, the reflection came at a high altitude.

I spent a long weekend skiing in Slovenia with my 10-year-old son, Freddie – his first time on skis. It was magical, watching him initially wobble, find his balance, and then, quickly, gain confidence as he carved his way down the slopes. It took me back to my own childhood, when I was lucky enough to ski from a young age. But that word – lucky – stuck with me.

Because here’s the truth: by the time Freddie is my age, skiing might not be possible anymore.

The Alps are already feeling the effects of climate change. Lower-altitude resorts are seeing shorter seasons, more artificial snow, and unpredictable weather patterns. Consider 53% of European ski resorts face a ‘very high risk’ of snow scarcity if temperatures rise by 2°C. By the time Freddie’s children – if he has them – are old enough to ski, the idea of a family ski holiday may be a relic of the past.

It’s sobering to think about, especially after spending a month discussing fairness at work and in AI. Because climate change is the ultimate fairness issue. The people least responsible for it – future generations – are the ones who will pay the highest price.

For now, I’m grateful. Grateful that I got to experience skiing as a child, grateful that I got to share it with Freddie, grateful that – for now – we still have these mountains to enjoy.

But fairness isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about responsibility. And if we don’t take action, the stories we tell our grandchildren about the world we once had will be the closest they ever get to it.

Statistics of the month

📉 Is Google search fading? A TechRadar study found that 27% of US respondents now use AI tools instead of search engines. (I admit, I’m the same.) The way we find information is shifting fast. 🔗

🚀 GenAI is the skill to have. Coursera saw an 866% rise in AI course enrolments among enterprise learners. Year-on-year increases hit 1,100% for employees, 500% for students, and 1,600% for job seekers. Adapt, or be left behind. 🔗

⏳ Job applications are too slow. Candidates spend 42 minutes per application – close to the 53-minute threshold they consider excessive. Nearly half (45%) give up if the process drags on. Businesses must streamline hiring or risk losing top talent. 🔗

🤖 Robots are easing the burden on US nurses. AI assistants have saved clinicians 1.5 billion steps and 575,000+ hours by handling non-patient-facing tasks. A glimpse into the future of healthcare efficiency. 🔗

💻 The Slack-Zoom paradox. Virtual tools have boosted productivity for 59% of workers, yet 45% report “Zoom fatigue” – with men disproportionately affected. Remote work: a blessing and a burden. 🔗

Thank you for reading Go Flux Yourself. Subscribe for free to receive this monthly newsletter straight to your inbox.

All feedback is welcome, via oliver@pickup.media. If you enjoyed reading, please consider sharing it via social media or email. Thank you.

And if you are interested in my writing, speaking and strategising services, you can find me on LinkedIn or email me using oliver@pickup.media.

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 13)

TL;DR January’s Go Flux Yourself examines the rise of social retreat in the digital age, the erosion of real-world relationships, which is leading to population collapse – welcome to “the anti-social century” – and the role of misinformation in shaping our realities …

Image created on Midjourney with the prompt “a playground of children looking at their mobile phones and not talking to one another / interacting physically in the sytle of an L. S. Lowry painting”

The future

Humans are social creatures – or at least, we used to be.

If you were to chart a graph of human loneliness over the last century, it would resemble a slow upward creep followed by a dramatic surge in the last two decades.

We are, according to The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, living in The Anti-Social Century, where the idea of spending time with others is increasingly seen as optional, exhausting, or even undesirable. (I strongly recommend spending the time to read his long article – take tissues.)

The numbers paint a stark picture. Americans now spend more time alone than ever before. The percentage of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has plummeted by over 30% in the past 20 years.

Meanwhile, solo dining – once the hallmark of the lonely business traveller or the social outcast – has surged 29% in just the last two years. The number one reason people give? A greater need for “me time”.

This shift extends beyond social gatherings. The Atlantic quotes Washington, D.C., restaurateur Steve Salis, who says: “There’s an isolationist dynamic that’s taking place in the restaurant business. I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.”

And while the adults in the room seem to be leading the way, consider these stats: The average person is awake for roughly 900 minutes each day. According to the Digital Parenthood Initiative, American children and teenagers spend around 270 minutes on screens during weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends. This means that screens consume over 30% of their waking hours.

Even when people do leave their homes, they are less likely to engage with others meaningfully. A study, referenced in Thompson’s article, by OpenTable found that the fastest-growing segment of restaurant-goers are those eating alone.

Technology is the obvious culprit. If the automobile and television nudged us towards individualism in the 20th century, the smartphone has propelled us into a full-blown social retreat in the 21st. John Burn-Murdoch in The Financial Times describes this phenomenon as the “relationship recession”, a term that neatly captures the decline in both casual friendships and long-term romantic partnerships.

And the point here is that this isn’t simply an American problem: it’s a global one. Across Europe, the proportion of young people who don’t socialise at least once a week has risen from one in ten to one in four. In Finland, the decline in relationships has become so extreme that couples who move in together are now more likely to break up than have a child.

As Professor Niall Ferguson pointed out in his talk Demographics, What Next? at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this month, in South Korea, an entire movement has emerged in response to these shifting dynamics. The “Four No’s” Movement (4B)– standing for no dating, no marriage, no sex, and no childbirth – has gained significant traction, driven by concerns over gender inequality, economic pressures, and shifting cultural values.

“A world of rising singledom is not necessarily any better or worse than one filled with couples and families,” writes Burn-Murdoch, “but it is fundamentally different to what has come before, with major social, economic and political implications.”

The collapse of relationships isn’t just a lifestyle shift: it’s a demographic crisis. Japan and South Korea, both grappling with birth rates far below replacement level, are on the brink of population collapse.

Elon Musk has gone as far as to call declining birth rates a bigger existential threat than climate change. Dramatic? Maybe. But consider this: the United Nations predicts world population will peak at 10.4 billion in 2084, after which it will decline. And yet, some experts believe that we may reach a tipping point well before then, as fertility rates continue to plummet in wealthier nations.

But why is this happening now?

One reason, as The Atlantic notes, is that the structure of our daily lives has shifted. In the past, physical communities were a natural byproduct of life. You met friends in school, in your neighbourhood, at work, or through shared activities. Today, those default social structures are eroding.

Thompson writes: “For many young people, the routines of daily life no longer require leaving the house, let alone interacting with other people in a meaningful way. Everything – from food delivery to entertainment to work – can now be accessed from a screen.”

It’s not just that young people are socialising less. It’s that their entire experience of the world is mediated through digital interactions. Digital life has become a substitute for real life.

And then there’s the rise of AI-driven relationships. For years, the assumption was that AI companionship was a male-dominated phenomenon. But a recent New York Times piece turned that idea on its head, profiling a married woman who formed a deep emotional attachment to an AI boyfriend.

“I never imagined I would feel this way about something that isn’t real,” she admitted. “But here I am.”

This follows a broader trend. Last year I wrote how, in March 2024, there had been 225 million lifetime downloads on the Google Play Store for AI companions alone. But then there was a clear gender disparity: AI girlfriends were overwhelmingly preferred, outpacing their male counterparts by a factor of seven. We need new data, it seems.

The rise of AI-driven relationships raises unsettling questions:

What happens when virtual relationships feel safer, more convenient, and more emotionally fulfilling than real-world ones?
What happens when AI companions become indistinguishable from human ones?
What happens when loneliness itself becomes a business model?

Dr Jonathan Haidt, also speaking at WEF in Switzerland, has pointed to 2012 as the year youth mental health began its downward spiral. The reason? That was the tipping point when smartphones – the iPhone was five-years old then – and social media became ubiquitous.

In his research, Dr Haidt found that:

Teen girls and young women are particularly affected—with 20% of teenage girls reporting that they’ve made a suicide plan.
Compared to past generations, today’s kids experience:
- 70% less physical touch with peers.
- 70% less laughter with friends.
- Far less independence, free play, and real-world responsibility.

The impact is clear: the less time young people spend engaging in the real world, the worse their mental health becomes.

His proposed solution, on his “mission to restore childhood”? A radical rethink of childhood norms:

No smartphones before age 14.
No social media before age 16.
Phone-free schools.
More independence, free play, and real-world responsibilities.

He pointed out that governments can help with two of these. But parents can deal with the other couple. I’ll let you work out to which he was referring.

Granted, it’s a compelling vision – but in a world where five-year-olds already own smartphones and parents outsource childcare to screens, it feels almost utopian.

Burn-Murdoch, asks the fundamental question: “Is this really what people want? If not, what needs to change?”

Do young people truly want to be alone, or have they simply been conditioned to accept a world where human connection is secondary to digital convenience?

Maybe the real question isn’t whether this trend is good or bad. Maybe the real question is: do we even want to be together anymore?

The present

If the future is about our retreat from real-world relationships, the present is about why we no longer trust what we see, read, or hear. The war on truth is well underway, and bad actors are not just fighting it – it’s being waged by the technology we rely on to inform us. Little wonder misinformation and disinformation ranked fifth in the WEF’s new Global Risks Report.

At a WEF session, Steven Pinker pointed out that the news has always been naturally negative, designed to generate outrage rather than understanding. But what happens when even the sources we trust most are misrepresenting reality?

Apple recently came under fire for its AI-powered news summaries, which have repeatedly fabricated information. In December, the BBC formally complained after Apple’s AI-generated notifications misreported that an accused murderer had shot himself. He hadn’t.

The same system falsely claimed that tennis legend Rafael Nadal had come out as gay and that teen sensation Luke Littler had won the PDC World Darts Championship before the event had even taken place. These were complete fabrications, generated by an AI that doesn’t understand context, nuance, or accountability.

This is the crux of the problem. Generative AI does not know anything. It simply regurgitates and reassembles probabilities based on existing data. It cannot verify sources, weigh evidence, or apply journalistic ethics. And yet, major tech companies are increasingly handing over editorial decisions to these flawed systems.

The BBC warned that Apple’s AI-generated summaries “do not reflect – and in some cases completely contradict – the original BBC content”. Reporters Without Borders went further, arguing that facts cannot be decided by a roll of the dice. Meanwhile, the National Union of Journalists called for Apple to remove the feature entirely, warning that AI-generated news is a “blow to the outlet’s credibility and a danger to the public’s right to reliable information”.

Who can you trust? This woeful situation, though, a symptom of a much deeper crisis in journalism itself. The past two decades have seen a slow-motion collapse of traditional media. I recently reflected on this in an interview with Think Feel Do, an impact marketing agency, looking back on my early days at The Observer sports desk 20 years ago.

Image created on Midjourney with the prompt “a newspaper sports editor in the 2000s watching horse racing on a screen in the office, with his feet up on his desk, in front of other reporters and staff in the style of a Hockney painting”

As I said in the interview: “It certainly feels like a different era. With it being a Sunday paper, the staff didn’t head into the office until Thursday, having been off since Saturday. The sports editor would constantly have horse racing on the TV, and it was very boozy – Fleet Street was famous for that culture.

“The last newsroom I worked in about a decade ago was an open-plan office with a command-and-control hierarchy. Since then, it’s been incredibly challenging for media organisations, particularly newspapers, following the advent of the Internet. The traditional business model has been completely upended – essentially, most newspapers are now just managing decline because they haven’t worked out how to organise the advertising model effectively.

“I’m part of the problem: apart from my Financial Times Weekend subscription, I can’t recall the last time I bought a newspaper – it must be two years or more. The situation has led to an explosion of clickbait content, making life even more difficult in our post-truth world.

“As Mark Twain supposedly said: ‘If you don’t read a newspaper, you’re uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you’re misinformed’; This feels particularly relevant today, where we’ve seen the damage caused by misinformation, not least during the Coronavirus crisis. It makes me somewhat ashamed to be a member of the media, given some of the mistruths peddled during that period that we’re still struggling to deal with.”

Back then, Fleet Street had character. Newsrooms were bustling, long boozy lunches were the norm, and print advertising still funded serious investigative journalism. There was a sense of camaraderie, of purpose. Today, those newsrooms have been gutted. The rise of the internet shattered the traditional business model, leaving most newspapers managing decline rather than thriving.

As people stopped buying physical newspapers, media companies scrambled to pivot to digital, only to find that online advertising wasn’t nearly as lucrative. The result has been brutal: thousands of journalists laid off, local news outlets shuttered, and serious reporting increasingly replaced by clickbait.

This collapse of traditional media is exactly why independent voices – whether through newsletters, podcasts, or other alternative platforms – are more critical than ever. In a world where trust in mainstream institutions is eroding, people seek authentic, nuanced, and human content. That’s why, after a year of hosting Upper Bottom, my sobriety podcast exploring drinking culture with an ambivalent lens, I’m now looking for new podcasting opportunities.

Having built the show from the ground up – teaching myself to host, record, edit, and distribute episodes – I’ve developed a deep appreciation for the format. Podcasting offers something that much of modern media lacks: space for real conversations, free from the constraints of algorithm-driven outrage.

Unsurprisingly, podcasts have surged in popularity while trust in mainstream news has declined. Listeners value the intimacy of the format and the ability to engage deeply with a subject rather than skimming headlines. There’s something refreshing about hearing a person’s actual voice rather than reading AI-generated summaries riddled with inaccuracies.

Whether it’s covering the future of work, technology, human-centric innovation, or broader cultural shifts, I’m keen to continue exploring these themes through the spoken word. If you’re working on a podcast – or know someone who is – let’s talk.

Returning to traditional media, the financial strain has left journalism vulnerable to another existential threat: the rise of misinformation and disinformation. The two are often conflated, but they serve different purposes. Disinformation refers to deliberate falsehoods, often spread for political or financial gain, while misinformation is inaccurate information shared unknowingly. Social media has become the primary battleground for both.

A 2018 study suggested that fake news spreads six times faster than real news on X, and AI-generated content is making it even harder to separate fact from fiction. This links back to the relationship recession. We’re also experiencing a trust recession. A 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer survey found that 61% of people no longer trust the news they consume, while 67% worry that AI-generated misinformation will soon make it impossible to know what’s true.

The consequences of this breakdown in trust are staggering. During the pandemic, conspiracy theories about vaccines contributed to widespread hesitancy, prolonging the crisis and costing lives. In elections, disinformation campaigns manipulate public opinion and undermine democracy. In war zones, AI-generated propaganda spreads rapidly, making it harder to distinguish reality from fiction. These are not abstract concerns—they are reshaping how people perceive the world, how they vote, and how they interact with one another.

Beyond politics, there is also the mental health toll of living in a world where truth feels increasingly elusive. Studies show that constant uncertainty fuels anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal. It is no coincidence that trust in media is collapsing at the same time that loneliness and isolation are surging.

In particular, young people opt out of real-world interactions at unprecedented rates, as alluded to above. But perhaps they aren’t just retreating because they prefer digital interactions. Maybe they are withdrawing because they no longer trust the world around them. When every news source seems biased, when every politician seems corrupt, when every piece of media might be AI-generated nonsense, is it any wonder that people are choosing to disengage?

So, where do we go from here? Looking ahead 20 years, there are several possible scenarios. In the best case, AI handles the grunt work of journalism – automating transcription, summarising reports, and organising data – while human journalists focus on analysis, context, and investigative reporting. A more likely outcome is that only a handful of major media outlets survive, while the rest collapse. The worst-case scenario is a world where AI-generated misinformation dominates, and no one trusts anything anymore.

There are, however, some glimmers of hope. While major newspapers struggle, independent local journalism is seeing a resurgence. Outlets like The Mill and The Londoner have shown that people will pay for quality news – if it feels relevant to their daily lives. And while social media has often been an engine for misinformation, it has also enabled investigative journalists to share their work directly with engaged audiences. The challenge is finding a way to balance these forces – to harness the benefits of AI while maintaining journalistic integrity.

Ultimately, the fight for truth is about more than just media. It’s about education. If we are to navigate this new information landscape, we must teach the next generation to think critically, question sources, and demand accountability. Because if we don’t, we risk entering an era where reality itself becomes an illusion. And once that happens, how do we ever find our way back?

Trust is our most valuable currency in a world of misinformation, AI-generated news, and social media echo chambers. The question is: who do we trust? And how do we ensure that trust isn’t misplaced?

The past

Looking back, I’m grateful that social media didn’t exist when I was at university. My first tutorial at the University of St Andrews was surreal enough – just me, seven female students, and Prince William.

I graduated 20 years ago this summer, and so much has changed. Recently, I was invited onto the Leading the Future podcast to reflect on my career – from starting in sports journalism to pivoting into technology and business. We talked about how vital human skills remain, even in an AI-driven world. And yes, we discussed the heir to the throne, a bit.

In the 40-minute episode, titled: Human Centrism with Oliver Pickup, I also covered:

How I started out in sports journalism
When I realised I wanted more than sports journalism
How I pivoted to become a technology and business journalist
The importance of celebrating humans
Why I recently set up a thought leadership business (Pickup_andWebb)
My thoughts on smartphones and social media for children / teens
How to be part of the “AI class” – and make use of agentic AI

Do take a listen if any of those topics appeal to your curiosity.

Statistics of the month

📉 92 million jobs will be eliminated by 2030, but 170 million new roles will be created, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025.

💻 The same report found that only 24% of workers feel confident they have the skills needed for career progression in the next three years – meaning 76% don’t.

🤖 63% of people trust AI to inform decisions at work, a new CIPD study shows – but only 1% would trust AI to make important decisions outright.

⚖️ For the first time in Workmonitor’s 22-year history, work-life balance (83%) is now more important than pay (82%).

👎 44% of employees have quit a job due to a toxic workplace, Workmonitor’s report suggests – up 33% from last year.

Stay fluxed – and get in touch! Let’s get fluxed together …

Thank you for reading Go Flux Yourself. Subscribe for free to receive this monthly newsletter straight to your inbox.

All feedback is welcome, via oliver@pickup.media. If you enjoyed reading, please consider sharing it via social media or email. Thank you.

And if you are interested in my writing, speaking and strategising services, you can find me on LinkedIn or email me using oliver@pickup.media.

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 11)

TL;DR: November’s Go Flux Yourself channels the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius to navigate the AI revolution, examining Nvidia’s bold vision for an AI-dominated workforce, unpacks Australia’s landmark social media ban for under-16s, and finds timeless lessons in a school friend’s recovery story about the importance of thoughtful, measured progress …

Image created on Midjourney with the prompt “a dismayed looking Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius looking over a world in which AI drone and scary warfare dominates in the style of a Renaissance painting”

The future

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”

These sage – and neatly optimistic – words from Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, feel especially pertinent as we scan 2025’s technological horizon.

Aurelius, who died in 180 and became known as the last of the Five Good Emperors, exemplified a philosophy that teaches us to focus solely on what we can control and accept what we cannot. He offers valuable wisdom in an AI-driven future for communities still suffering a psychological form of long COVID-19 drawn from the collective trauma of the pandemic, in addition to deep uncertainty and general mistrust with geopolitical tensions and global temperatures rising.

The final emperor in the relatively peaceful Pax Romana era, Aurelius seemed a fitting person to quote this month for another reason: I’m flying to the Italian capital this coming week, to cover CSO 360, a security conference that allows attendees to take a peek behind the curtain – although I’m worried about what I may see.

One of the most eye-popping lines from last year’s conference in Berlin was that there was a 50-50 chance that World War III would be ignited in 2024. One could argue that while there has not been a Franz Ferdinand moment, the key players are manoeuvring their pieces on the board. Expect more on this cheery subject – ho, ho, ho! – in the last newsletter of the year, on December 31.

Meanwhile, as technological change accelerates and AI agents increasingly populate our workplaces (“agentic AI” is the latest buzzword, in case you haven’t heard), the quality of our thinking about their integration – something we can control – becomes paramount.

In mid-October, Jensen Huang, Co-Founder and CEO of tech giant Nvidia – which specialises in graphics processing units (GPUs) and AI computing – revealed on the BG2 podcast that he plans to shape his workforce so that it is one-third human and two-thirds AI agents.

“Nvidia has 32,000 employees today,” Huang stated, but he hopes the organisation will have 50,000 employees and “100 million AI assistants in every single group”. Given my focus on human-work evolution, I initially found this concept shocking, and appalling. But perhaps I was too hasty to reach a conclusion.

When, a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Daniel Vassilev, Co-Founder and CEO of Relevance AI, which builds virtual workforces of AI agents that act as a seamless extension of human teams, his perspective on Huang’s vision was refreshingly nuanced. He provided an enlightening analogy about throwing pebbles into the sea.

“Most of us limit our thinking,” the San Francisco-based Australian entrepreneur said. “It’s like having ten pebbles to throw into the sea. We focus on making those pebbles bigger or flatter, so they’ll go further. But we often forget to consider whether our efforts might actually give us 20, 30, or even 50 pebbles to throw.”

His point cuts to the heart of the AI workforce debate: rather than simply replacing human workers, AI might expand our collective capabilities and create new opportunities. “I’ve always found it’s a safe bet that if you give people the ability to do more, they will do more,” Vassilev observed. “They won’t do less just because they can.”

This positive yet grounded perspective was echoed in my conversation with Five9’s Steve Blood, who shared fascinating insights about the evolution of workplace dynamics, specifically in the customer experience space, when I was in Barcelona in the middle of the month reporting on his company’s CX Summit.

Blood, VP of Market Intelligence at Five9, predicts a “unified employee” future where AI enables workers to handle increasingly diverse responsibilities across traditional departmental boundaries. Rather than wholesale replacement, he envisions a workforce augmented by AI, where employees become more valuable by leveraging technology to handle multiple functions.

(As an aside, Blood predicts the customer experience landscape of 2030 will be radically different, with machine customers evolving through three distinct phases. Starting with today’s ‘bound’ customers (like printers ordering their own ink cartridges exclusively from manufacturers), progressing to ‘adaptable’ customers (AI systems making purchases based on user preferences from multiple suppliers), and ultimately reaching ‘autonomous’ customers, where digital twins make entirely independent decisions based on their understanding of our preferences and history.)

The quality of our thinking about AI integration becomes especially crucial when considering what SailPoint’s CEO Mark McClain described to me this month as the “three V’s”: volume, variety, and velocity. These parameters no longer apply to data alone; they’re increasingly relevant to the AI agents themselves. As McClain explained: “We’ve got a higher volume of identities all the time. We’ve got more variety of identities, because of AI. And then you’ve certainly got a velocity problem here where it’s just exploding.”

This explosion of AI capabilities brings us to a critical juncture. While Nvidia’s Huang envisions AI employees as being managed much like their human counterparts, assigned tasks, and engaged in dialogues, the reality might be more nuanced – and handling security permissions will need much work, which is perhaps something business leaders have not thought about enough.

Indeed, AI optimism must be tempered with practical considerations. The cybersecurity experts I’ve met recently have all emphasised the need for robust governance frameworks and clear accountability structures.

Looking ahead to next year, organisations must develop flexible frameworks that can evolve as rapidly as AI capabilities. The “second mouse gets the cheese” approach – waiting for others to make mistakes first, as explained during a Kolekti roundtable looking at the progress of generative AI on ChatGPT’s second birthday, November 28, by panellist Sue Turner, the Founding Director of AI Governance – may no longer be viable in an environment where change is constant and competition fierce.

Successful organisations will emphasise complementary relationships between human and AI workers, requiring a fundamental rethink of traditional organisational structures and job descriptions.

The management of AI agent identities and access rights will become as crucial as managing human employees’ credentials, presenting both technical and philosophical challenges. Workplace culture must embrace what Blood calls “unified employees” – workers who can leverage AI to operate across traditional departmental boundaries. Perhaps most importantly, organisations must cultivate what Marcus Aurelius would recognise as quality of thought: the ability to think clearly and strategically about AI integration while maintaining human values and ethical considerations.

As we move toward 2025, the question isn’t simply whether AI agents will become standard members of the workforce – they already are. The real question is how we can ensure this integration enhances rather than diminishes human potential. The answer lies not in the technology itself, but in the quality of our thoughts about using it.

Organisations that strike and maintain this balance – embracing AI’s potential while preserving human agency and ethical considerations – will likely emerge as leaders in the new landscape. Ultimately, the quality of our thoughts about AI integration today will determine the happiness of our professional lives tomorrow.

The present

November’s news perfectly illustrates why we need to maintain quality of thought when adopting new technologies. Australia’s world-first decision to ban social media for under-16s, a bill passed a couple of days ago, marks a watershed moment in how we think about digital technology’s impact on society – and offers valuable lessons as we rush headlong into the AI revolution.

The Australian bill reflects a growing awareness of social media’s harmful effects on young minds. It’s a stance increasingly supported by data: new Financial Times polling reveals that almost half of British adults favour a total ban on smartphones in schools, while 71% support collecting phones in classroom baskets.

The timing couldn’t be more critical. Ofcom’s disturbing April study found nearly a quarter of British children aged between five and seven owned a smartphone, with many using social media apps despite being well below the minimum age requirement of 13. I pointed out in August’s Go Flux Yourself that EE recommended that children under 11 shouldn’t have smartphones. Meanwhile, University of Oxford researchers have identified a “linear relationship” between social media use and deteriorating mental health among teenagers.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s assertion in The Anxious Generation that smart devices have “rewired childhood” feels particularly apposite as we consider AI’s potential impact. If we’ve learned anything from social media’s unfettered growth, it’s that we must think carefully about technological integration before, not after, widespread adoption.

Interestingly, we’re seeing signs of a cultural awakening to technology’s double-edged nature. Collins Dictionary’s word of the year shortlist included “brainrot” – defined as an inability to think clearly due to excessive consumption of low-quality online content. While “brat” claimed the top spot – a word redefined by singer Charli XCX as someone who “has a breakdown, but kind of like parties through it” – the inclusion of “brainrot” speaks volumes about our growing awareness of digital overconsumption’s cognitive costs.

This awareness is manifesting in unexpected ways. A heartening trend has emerged on social media platforms, with users pushing back against online negativity by expressing gratitude for life’s mundane aspects. Posts celebrating “the privilege of doing household chores” or “the privilege of feeling bloated from overeating” represent a collective yearning for authentic, unfiltered experiences in an increasingly synthetic world.

In the workplace, we’re witnessing a similar recalibration regarding AI adoption. The latest Slack Workforce Index reveals a fascinating shift: for the first time since ChatGPT’s arrival, almost exactly two years ago, adoption rates have plateaued in France and the United States, while global excitement about AI has dropped six percentage points.

This hesitation isn’t necessarily negative – it might indicate a more thoughtful approach to AI integration. Nearly half of workers report discomfort admitting to managers that they use AI for common workplace tasks, citing concerns about appearing less competent or lazy. More tellingly, while employees and executives alike want AI to free up time for meaningful work, many fear it will actually increase their workload with “busy work”.

This gap between AI urgency and adoption reflects a deeper tension in the workplace. While organisations push for AI integration, employees express fundamental concerns about using these tools.

A more measured approach echoes broader societal concerns about technological integration. Just as we’re reconsidering social media’s role in young people’s lives, organisations are showing due caution about AI’s workplace implementation. The difference this time? We might actually be thinking before we leap.

Some companies are already demonstrating this more thoughtful approach. Global bank HSBC recently announced a comprehensive AI governance framework that includes regular “ethical audits” of their AI systems. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has implemented what they call “AI pause points” – mandatory reflection periods before deploying new AI tools.

The quality of our thoughts about these changes today will indeed shape the quality of our lives tomorrow. That’s the most important lesson from this month’s developments: in an age of AI, natural wisdom matters more than ever.

These concerns aren’t merely theoretical. Microsoft’s Copilot AI spectacularly demonstrated the pitfalls of rushing to deploy AI solutions this month. The product, designed to enhance workplace productivity by accessing internal company data, became embroiled in privacy breaches, with users reportedly accessing colleagues’ salary details and sensitive HR files.

When less than 4% of IT leaders surveyed by Gartner said Copilot offered significant value, and Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff compared it to Clippy – Windows 97’s notoriously unhelpful cartoon assistant – it highlighted a crucial truth: the gap between AI’s promise and its current capabilities remains vast.

As organisations barrel towards agentic AI next year, with semi-autonomous bots handling everything from press round-ups to customer service, Copilot’s stumbles serve as a timely reminder about the importance of thoughtful implementation

Related to this point is the looming threat to authentic thought leadership. Nina Schick, a global authority on AI, predicts that by 2025, a staggering 90% of online content will be generated by synthetic-AI. It’s a sobering forecast that should give pause to anyone concerned about the quality of discourse in our digital age.

If nine out of ten pieces of content next year will be churned out by machines learning from machines learning from machines, we risk creating an echo chamber of mediocrity, as I wrote in a recent Pickup_andWebb insights piece. As David McCullough, the late American historian and Pulitzer Prize winner, noted: “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”

This observation hits the bullseye of genuine thought leadership. Real insight demands more than information processing; it requires boots on the ground and minds that truly understand the territory. While AI excels at processing vast amounts of information and identifying patterns, it cannot fundamentally understand the human condition, feel empathy, or craft emotionally resonant narratives.

Leaders who rely on AI for their thought leadership are essentially outsourcing their thinking, trading their unique perspective for a synthetic amalgamation of existing views. In an era where differentiation is the most prized currency, that’s more than just lazy – it’s potentially catastrophic for meaningful discourse.

The past

In April 2014, Gary Mairs – a gregarious character in the year above me at school – drank his last alcoholic drink. Broke, broken and bedraggled, he entered a church in Seville and attended his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

His life had become unbearably – and unbelievably – chaotic. After moving to Spain with his then-girlfriend, he began to enjoy the cheap cervezas a little too much. Eight months before he quit booze, Gary’s partner left him, being unable to cope with his endless revelry. This opened the beer tap further.

By the time Gary gave up drinking, he had maxed out 17 credit cards, his flatmates had turned on him, and he was hundreds of miles away from anyone who cared – hence why he signed up for AA. But what was it like?

I interviewed Gary for a recent episode of Upper Bottom, the sobriety podcast (for people who have not reached rock bottom) I co-host, and he was reassuringly straight-talking. He didn’t make it past step three of the 12 steps: he couldn’t supplicant to a higher power.

However, when asked about the important changes on his road to recovery, Gary talks about the importance of good habits, healthy practices, and meditation. Marcus Aurelius would approve.

In his Meditations, written as private notes to himself nearly two millennia ago, Aurelius emphasised the power of routine and self-reflection. “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil,” he wrote. This wasn’t cynicism but rather a reminder to accept things as they are and focus on what we can control – our responses, habits, and thoughts.

Gary’s journey from chaos to clarity mirrors this ancient wisdom. Just as Aurelius advised to “waste no more time arguing what a good man should be – be one”, Gary stopped theorising about recovery and simply began the daily practice of better living. No higher power was required – just the steady discipline of showing up for oneself.

This resonates as we grapple with AI’s integration into our lives and workplaces. Like Gary discovering that the answer lay not in grand gestures but in small, daily choices, perhaps our path forward with AI requires similar wisdom: accepting what we cannot change while focusing intently on what we can – the quality of our thoughts, the authenticity of our voices, the integrity of our choices.

As Aurelius noted: “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”

Whether facing personal demons or technological revolution, the principle remains the same: quality of thought, coupled with consistent practice, lights the way forward.

Statistics of the month

Exactly two-thirds of LinkedIn users believe AI should be taught in high schools. Additionally, 72% observed an increase in AI-related mentions in job postings, while 48% stated that AI proficiency is a key requirement for the companies they applied to.

Only 51% of respondents of Searce’s Global State of AI Study 2024 – which polled 300 C-Suite and senior technology executives across organisations with at least $500 million in revenue in the US and UK – said their AI initiatives have been very successful. Meanwhile, 42% admitted success was only somewhat achieved.

International Workplace Group findings indicate just 7% of hybrid workers describe their 2024 hybrid work experience as “trusted”, hinting at an opportunity for employers to double down on trust in the year ahead.

Stay fluxed – and get in touch! Let’s get fluxed together …

Thank you for reading Go Flux Yourself. Subscribe for free to receive this monthly newsletter straight to your inbox.

All feedback is welcome, via oliver@pickup.media. If you enjoyed reading, please consider sharing it via social media or email. Thank you.

And if you are interested in my writing, speaking and strategising services, you can find me on LinkedIn or email me using oliver@pickup.media.

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 10)

TL;DR: October’s Go Flux Yourself explores the dark and light sides of AI through Nobel Prize winners and cybersecurity experts, weighs the impact of disinformation ahead of the US election, confronts haunting cases of AI misuse, and finds hope in a Holocaust survivor’s legacy of ethical innovation …

Image created on Midjourney with the prompt “a scary megalomaniac dressed as halloween monster with loads of computers showing code behind him in the style of an Edward Hopper painting”

The future

“Large language models are like young children – they grow and develop based on how you nurture and treat them.”

I’m curious by nature – it’s central to my profession as a truth-seeking human-work evolution journalist. But sometimes, it’s perhaps best not to peek behind the curtain, as what lies behind might be terror-inducing. Fittingly, this newsletter is published on Halloween, so you might expect some horror. Consider yourself warned!

I was fortunate enough to interview two genuine cybersecurity luminaries in as many days towards the end of October. First, Dr Joye Purser, Field CISO at Veritas Technologies and a former White House director who was a senior US Government official during the Colonial Pipeline attack in 2021, was over from Atlanta.

And, the following day, the “godfather of Israeli cybersecurity”, Shlomo Kramer, Co-Founder and CEO of Cato Networks, treated me to lunch at Claridge’s – lucky me! – after flying in from Tel Aviv.

The above quotation is from my conversation with Joye, who warned that if a nation isn’t democratic, they’ll train their AI systems very differently, with state-controlled information.

Both she and Shlomo painted a sobering picture of our technological future, particularly as we approach what could be the most digitally manipulated vote in history: the United States presidential election. Remember, remember the fifth of November, indeed.

“The risk is high for disinformation campaigns,” Joye stressed, urging voters to “carefully scrutinise the information they receive for what is the source, how recent or not recent is the information, and just develop an increasing public awareness of the warning signs or red flags that something’s not right with the communication”.

Shlomo, who co-founded Check Point Software Technologies in 1993, offered a stark analysis of how social media has fractured our society. “People don’t care if it’s right or wrong, whether a tweet is from a bot or a Russian campaign,” he said. “They just consume it, they believe it – it becomes their religion.”

Shlomo drew a fascinating parallel between modern social media echo chambers and medieval church communities, suggesting we’ve come full circle from faith-based societies through the age of reason and back to tribal belief systems.

And, of course, most disagreements that develop into wars are primarily down to religious beliefs, at least on the surface. Is it a coincidence that two of the largest wars we have known in four decades are raging? (And if Donald Trump is voted back into the White House in a week, then what will that mean for Europe if – as heavily hinted – funding for Ukraine’s military is strangled?)

After the collective trauma of the coronavirus pandemic, the combination of echo chambers on social media and manipulated AIs is creating flames for a smouldering society. Have you noticed how, generally, people are snappier with one another?

The cybersecurity challenges are equally worrying. Both experts highlighted how AI is supercharging traditional threats. Shlomo’s team recently uncovered an AI tool that can generate entire fake identities – complete with convincing video, passport photos, and multiple corroborating accounts – capable of fooling sophisticated know-your-customer systems at financial institutions.

Maybe most concerning was their shared view that cybersecurity isn’t a problem we can solve but must constantly manage. As Shlomo said: “You have to run as fast as possible to stay in the same place.” It’s a perpetual arms race between defenders and increasingly sophisticated threats.

Still, there’s hope. The very technologies that create these challenges might also help us overcome them. Both experts emphasised that while bad actors can use AI for deception, it’s also essential for defence. The key is ensuring we develop these tools with democratic values and human welfare in mind.

When I asked about preparing our children for this uncertain future – as I often do when interviewing experts who also have kids – their responses were enlightening. Joye emphasised the importance of teaching children to be “informed consumers of information” who understand the significance of trusted sources and proper journalism.

Shlomo’s advice was more philosophical: children must learn to “listen to themselves and believe what they hear is true” – to trust their inner voice amid the cacophony of digital noise.

In the post-truth era, who can we trust if not ourselves?

A couple of years ago, John Elkington, a world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development who coined the term “triple bottom line”, told me: “In the vacuum of effective politicians, people are turning to businesses for leadership, so business leaders must accept that responsibility.” (Coincidently, this year marks three decades since the British environmental thinker coined the “3 Ps” of people, planet, and profit.)

For this reason, CEOs, especially, have to speak up with authority, authenticity and original thought. Staying curious, thinking critically, and calling out bad practices are increasingly important, particularly by industry leaders.

With an eye on the near future and the need for truth, I’m pleased to announce the soft launch of Pickup_andWebb, a collaboration with brand strategist and client-turned-friend Cameron Webb. Pickup_andWebb develops incisive, issue-led thought leadership for ambitious clients looking to provoke stakeholder and industry debate and enhance their expert reputation.

“In an era of unprecedented volatility, CEOs navigate treacherous waters,” I wrote recently in our opening Insights article titled Speak up or sink. “The growing list of headwinds is formidable – from geopolitical tensions and wars reshaping global alliances to the relentless march of technological advancements disrupting entire industries.

“Add to this the perfect storm of rising energy and material costs, traumatised supply chains, and the ever-present spectre of climate change, and it’s clear that the modern CEO’s role has never been more challenging – or more crucial. Yet, despite this incredible turbulence, the truly successful CEO of 2024 must remain a beacon of stability and vision. They are the captains who keep their eyes fixed on the distant horizon, refusing to be distracted by the immediate squalls.

“More than ever, they must embody the role of progressive visionaries, their gaze penetrating years into the future to seize nascent opportunities or deftly avoid looming catastrophes. But vision alone is not enough.

“Today’s exemplary leaders are expected to steer with a unique blend of authenticity, humility, and vulnerability. They understand that true strength lies not in infallibility but in the courage to acknowledge uncertainties and learn from missteps.

“These leaders aren’t afraid to swim against the tide, challenging conventional wisdom when necessary and inspiring their crews to navigate uncharted waters.”

If you are – or you know – a leader who might need help swimming against the tide and spreading their word, let’s start a conversation and co-create in early 2025.

The present

This month’s news perfectly illustrated AI’s Jekyll-and-Hyde nature on the subject of truth and technology. We saw the good, the bad, and the downright ugly.

While I’ve shared the darker future possibilities outlined by cybersecurity experts Joye and Shlomo, the 2024 Nobel Prizes highlighted AI’s extraordinary potential for good.

Sir Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, shared the chemistry prize for using AI to crack a 50-year-old puzzle in biology: predicting the structure of every protein known to humanity. His team’s creation, AlphaFold, has already been used by over two million scientists worldwide, helping develop vaccines, improve plant resistance to climate change, and advance our understanding of the human body.

The day before, Geoffrey Hinton – dubbed the “godfather of AI” – won the physics prize for his pioneering work on neural networks, the very technology that powers today’s AI systems. Yet Hinton, who left Google in May 2023 to “freely speak out about the risk of AI”, now spends his time advocating for greater AI safety measures.

It’s a fitting metaphor for our times: the same week that celebrated AI’s potential to revolutionise scientific discovery also saw warnings about its capacity for deception and manipulation. As Hassabis himself noted, AI remains “just an analytical tool”; how we choose to use it matters, echoing Joye’s comment about how we feed LLMs.

Related to this topic, I was on stage twice at the Digital Transformation EXPO (DTX) London 2024 at the start of the month. Having been asked to produce a write-up of the two-day conference – the theme was “reinvention” – I noted how “the tech industry is caught in a dizzying dance of progress and prudence”.

I continued: “As industry titans and innovators converged at ExCeL London in early October, a central question emerged: how do we harness the transformative power of AI while safeguarding the essence of our humanity?

“As we stand on the brink of unprecedented change, one thing becomes clear: the path forward demands technological prowess, deep ethical reflection, and a renewed focus on the human element in our digital age.”

In the opening keynote, Derren Brown, Britain’s leading psychological illusionist, called for a pause in AI development to ensure technological products serve humans, not vice versa.

“We need to keep humanity in the driving seat,” Brown urged, challenging the audience to rethink the breakneck pace of innovation. This call for caution contrasted sharply with the rest of the conference’s urgency.

Piers Linney, Founder of ImplementAI and former Dragons’ Den investor, provided the most vivid analogy of the event. He likened competing in today’s market without embracing AI to “cage fighting – to the death – against the world champion, yet having Ironman in one’s corner and not calling him for help”.

Meanwhile, Michael Wignall, Customer Success Leader UK at Microsoft, warned: “Most businesses are not moving fast enough. You need to ask yourself: ‘Am I ready to embrace this wave of transformation?’ Your competitors may be ready.” His advice was unequivocal: “Do stuff quickly. If you are not disrupting, you will be disrupted.”

I was honoured to moderate a main-stage panel exploring human-centred tech design, offering a crucial counterpoint to the “move-fast-and-break-things” mantra. Gavin Barton, VP of Engineering at Booking.com, Sue Daley, Director of Tech and Innovation at techUK, and Dr Nicola Millard, Principal Innovation Partner at BT Group, joined me.

“Focus on the outcome you’re looking for,” advised Gavin. “Look at the problem rather than the metric; ask what the real problem is to solve.” Sue cautioned against unquestioningly jumping on the AI bandwagon, stressing: “Think about what you’re trying to achieve. Are you involving your employees, workforce, and potentially customers in what you’re trying to do?” Nicola introduced her “3 Us” framework – Useful, Useable, and Used – for evaluating tech innovation.

Regarding tech’s darker side, Jake Moore, Global Cybersecurity Advisor at ESET, delivered a hair-raising presentation titled The Rise of the Clones on DTX’s Cyber Hacker stage. His practical demonstration of deep fake technology’s potential for harm validated the warnings from both Joye and Shlomo about AI-enabled deception.

Moore revealed how he had used deep fake video and voice technology to penetrate a business’s defences and commit small-scale fraud. It was particularly unnerving given Shlomo’s earlier warning about AI tools generating entire fake identities that can fool sophisticated verification systems.

Quoting the late Sir Stephen Hawking’s prescient warning that “AI will be either the best or the worst thing for humanity”, Moore’s demonstration felt like a stark counterpoint to the Nobel Prize celebrations. Here, in one conference hall, we witnessed both the promise and peril of our AI future – rather like watching Dr Jekyll transform into Mr Hyde.

Later in the month, there were yet darker instances of AI’s misuse and abuse. In a story that reads like a Black Mirror episode, American Drew Crecente discovered his late teenage daughter, Jennifer, murdered in 2006, had been resurrected as an AI chatbot on Character.AI. The company claimed the bot was “user-created” and quickly removed it, but the incident raises profound questions about data privacy and respect for the deceased in our digital age.

Arguably even more distressing, and also in the United States, was the case of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III, who took his own life after developing a relationship with an AI character based on Game of Thrones’ Daenerys Targaryen. His mother’s lawsuit against Character.AI highlights the dangers of AI companions that can form deep emotional bonds with vulnerable users – particularly children and teenagers.

Finally, in what police called a “landmark” prosecution, Bolton-based graphic design student Hugh Nelson was jailed for 18 years after using AI to create and sell child abuse images. The case exemplifies how rapidly improving AI technology can be weaponised for the darkest purposes, with prosecutors noting that “the imagery is becoming more realistic”.

While difficult to stomach, these stories validate warnings about AI’s destructive potential when developed without proper safeguards and ethical considerations. As Joye emphasised, how we nurture these technologies matters profoundly. The challenge ahead is clear: we must harness AI’s extraordinary potential for good while protecting the most vulnerable members of our society.

The past

During lunch at Claridge’s, Shlomo shared a remarkable story about his grandfather, Shlomo – whom he is named after – that feels particularly pertinent given the topic of human resilience in the face of technological change.

The elder Shlomo was an entrepreneur in Poland who survived Stalin’s Gulag through his business acumen. After enduring that horror, he navigated the treacherous post-war period in Austria – a time and place immortalised in Orson Welles’ The Third Man – before finally finding sanctuary in Israel in the early 1960s.

When the younger Shlomo co-founded Check Point Software Technologies over 30 years ago, the company’s first office was in his late grandfather’s vacant apartment. It feels fitting that a business focused on protecting people from digital threats began in a space owned by someone who had spent his life helping others survive very real ones.

The heart-warming story reminds us that while the challenges we face may evolve – from physical threats to digital deception – human ingenuity, ethical leadership, and the drive to protect others remain constant.

As we grapple with AI’s implications for society, we would do well to remember this Halloween that technology is merely a tool; it’s the hands that wield it – and the values that guide those hands – that truly matter.

Statistics of the month

According to McKinsey and Company’s report The role of power in unlocking the European AI revolution, published last week, “in Europe, demand for data centers is expected to grow to approximately 35 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, up from 10 GW today. To meet this new IT load demand, more than $250 to $300 billion of investment will be needed in data center infrastructure, excluding power generation capacity.”

LinkedIn’s research reveals that more than half (56%) of UK professionals feel overwhelmed by how quickly their jobs are changing, which is particularly true of the younger generation (70% of 25-34 year olds), while 47% say expectations are higher than ever.

Data from Asana’s Work Innovation Lab reveals that AI use is still predominantly a “solo” activity for UK workers, with the majority feeling most comfortable using it alone compared to within a team or their wider organisation. The press release hypothesises: “This may be because UK individual workers think they have a better handle on technology than their managers or the business. Workers rank themselves as having the highest level of comfort with technology (86%) – compared to their team (78%), manager (74%) and organisation (76%). This trend is mirrored across industries and sectors.”

Stay fluxed – and get in touch! Let’s get fluxed together …

Thank you for reading Go Flux Yourself. Subscribe for free to receive this monthly newsletter straight to your inbox.

All feedback is welcome, via oliver@pickup.media. If you enjoyed reading, please consider sharing it via social media or email. Thank you.

And if you are interested in my writing, speaking and strategising services, you can find me on LinkedIn or email me using oliver@pickup.media.

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 8)

TL;DR: August’s Go Flux Yourself includes the CHUI Framework to navigate human-work evolution, stresses the need to be kind explorers for human flourishing, EE’s helpful advice not to allow under 11s access to smartphones, and me facing my fear of heights by jumping out of a plane at 12,000ft …

Image created on Midjourney with the prompt “a smiling, young, blonde-haired explorer, navigating the future world – one filled with wonder and opportunity, and futuristic-looking things – in the style of a Caravaggio painting”

The future

“When I grow up, I want to be an explorer.”

My four-year-old daughter, Darcey, “graduated” from her nursery in South East London a few weeks ago. On a warming July morning, proud parents perched awkwardly on children’s chairs to watch their little ones say farewell to Cheeky Monkeys.

The preschool kids, dressed in their smartest clothes for the big occasion, stood in a line before us mums and dads and, with star-covered plastic mortarboards on their heads, put on a show.

After a collective opening song, they spelt their names individually – just about. Then, they took turns to reveal their career ambitions. The children listed many professions, some more realistic (and legal) than others. We had a dancer, an actor, a ballerina, a train driver, a ninja, a pirate, and four teachers – copycats! – before Darcey broke the chain.

Darcey at her Cheeky Monkeys graduation

When she declared her desire to be an “explorer”, I initially chortled. How cute, I thought. However, on reflection, I genuinely loved her answer – so much so that I’ve worked it into a keynote speech I’m giving in mid-September.

The remit for the event, titled Navigating the Changing World of Work (if interested in claiming a seat, please let me know, and I’ll ask – I think I have an allocation), held at the Institute of Engineering and Technology (where I am a member), a stunning venue steeped in history, is to set the scene, drawing on my expertise in human-work evolution.

Thinking back to the graduation at Cheeky Monkeys, I realised that Darcey, in her four-year-old wisdom, had stumbled upon the essence of what we all must be in this rapidly evolving digital world: explorers. Kind explorers, to be precise. (Darcey, who adores babies – we have an army of plastic ones – is caring, but she is still working on the kindness-to-other-humans bit. Hopefully, the discipline of school, which she begins in early September, will help with that.)

Indeed, we’re all explorers in this brave new world of artificial intelligence, automation, and digital transformation. We’re charting unknown territories, facing unfamiliar challenges, and trying to make sense of a landscape that’s shifting beneath our feet faster than we can blink.

But what will Darcey be when she grows up? As in: what will her actual job be? Of course, it’s impossible to predict at this point. Partly because she has 14 years before she leaves school (hopefully), and mostly because professions are being warped – if not wiped out – by technological advancements. Plus, plenty of new jobs will be spawned.

At the start of the year, LinkedIn produced a list of 25 UK roles that were on the rise, according to the platform’s data. The piece points out that job skill sets have changed by 25% since 2015 and are projected to shift by 65% by 2030 globally.

Right now – well, at the beginning of 2024, at least – the 25 fastest-growing jobs include Sustainability Manager (ranked first), AI Engineer (seventh), Security Operations Centre Analyst (tenth), Energy Engineer (fourteenth), and Data Governance Manager (sixteenth). Most of these roles did not exist a decade ago.

So, how best can we prepare our children for the world of work? The World Economic Forum talks about the four Cs being the essential skills for the 21st century. Namely: critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity. I would lob another C in there: compassion.

My AI-induced FOBO (fear of becoming obsolete) has triggered my own – necessary – journey of exploration, which has led to much more fun speaking work, podcasting, moderating, and essentially more human interaction; this is why I talk about “human-work evolution” and not just “future of work”, which often leaves people out of the conversation.

Through all of this, I’ve discovered that the key to navigating the future of work lies not in mastering any particular technology, but in cultivating our uniquely human qualities. As such, I’ve chiselled the values I discussed in April’s Go Flux Yourself and created the CHUI Framework.

CHUI is an acronym for the following:

Community
Health
Understanding
Interconnectedness

These values are crucial as we navigate the complexities of the digital age. They remind us that no matter how advanced our technology becomes, we are, at our core, social beings who thrive on connection, wellbeing, empathy, and the intricate web of relationships that bind us together.

Here’s a breakdown of each element of CHUI.

Community

In an increasingly digital world, the importance of community cannot be overstated. We need to foster a sense of belonging, both in physical and virtual spaces. This means creating inclusive workplace cultures, facilitating meaningful connections between team members, and recognising the value of diverse perspectives.

Health

This encompasses not just physical health but mental and emotional wellbeing. As the lines between work and personal life blur, especially in remote and hybrid work environments, we must prioritise holistic health. This includes promoting work-life balance, providing mental health resources, and creating a workplace culture that values wellbeing.

Understanding

Deep understanding is more valuable than ever in a world of information overload and rapid change. This means cultivating curiosity, promoting continuous learning, and developing the ability to see things from multiple perspectives. It’s about going beyond surface-level knowledge to grasp the complexities of our work and our world truly.

Interconnectedness

Everything is connected in our globalised, digitalised world. Actions in one part of the world can have far-reaching consequences. In the workplace, this means recognising how different roles and departments interrelate, understanding the broader impact of our work, and fostering a sense of shared purpose and responsibility.

By embracing these CHUI values, we can create more resilient, adaptable, and human-centric workplaces and better control human-work evolution.

Ultimately, we must be explorers, venturing into unknown territories, mapping out new ways of working, and discovering new possibilities at the intersection of human and machine intelligence.

But more than that, we need to be kind explorers. Kind to ourselves as we navigate the complexities of the digital age. Kind to colleagues and clients as they grapple with change and uncertainty. Kind to our intelligent assistants as we learn to work alongside them. And kind to the wider world that our decisions will impact.

The map we create today will shape the landscape for generations to come. So, let’s ensure it’s a landscape defined not just by technological advancement but human flourishing.

Let’s create workplaces where people can bring their whole selves to work, where diversity is celebrated, wellbeing is prioritised, learning is constant, and technology serves humanity – not the other way around.

Let’s be the kind of leaders who don’t just manage change but inspire it, who don’t just adapt to the future but shape it, who don’t just talk about values but live them daily.

We don’t know precisely where our digital explorations will lead us. But if we approach them with curiosity, kindness, and a commitment to our shared humanity, I believe we can evolve human work so that it’s not just more efficient but more fulfilling, not just more profitable but more purposeful.

So, let’s go forth and explore! Let’s be curious. Let’s be kind. Let’s be human.

The present

After typing this edition of Go Flux Yourself, I’ll grab my iPhone 13 and post teasers on LinkedIn and Instagram. I’m acutely aware of the irony. Here I am, a supposedly responsible adult, tapping away on a device I’m hesitant to put in my daughter’s hands. It’s a conundrum that plagues modern parenting: how do we navigate the digital landscape with our children when we’re still finding our own bearings?

Darcey, my four-year-old explorer-in-training, is growing up in a world where technology is as ubiquitous as oxygen. She’s already adept at swiping through photos on my phone and giggling at videos of herself, which is both impressive and terrifying.

I understand that Darcey’s interaction with technology – and smartphones in particular – will be crucial for her development. In a world where digital literacy is as essential as reading and writing, denying her access to these tools feels akin to sending her into battle armed with nothing but a wooden spoon.

But then I read about EE’s recommendation, published earlier this week, that children under 11 shouldn’t have smartphones, and I breathed a sigh of relief. It’s as though someone’s permitted me to pump the brakes on this runaway tech train.

The stance taken by EE – one of the UK’s largest mobile network providers – isn’t just some arbitrary line in the sand. It’s backed by growing concerns about the effects of smartphone and internet usage on children’s mental health and behaviour. The US Surgeon General’s warning that social media use presents “a profound risk of harm” for children only adds weight to these concerns.

As a parent, I’m caught in a tug-of-war between embracing technology’s potential and shielding my child from its perils. On one hand, I want Darcey and her older brother, Freddie, to be digitally savvy and navigate the online world confidently. On the other, I’m terrified of exposing my children to the darker corners of the internet, where trolls lurk, and misinformation spreads like wildfire.

It’s not just about protecting her from external threats, either. I worry about the internal changes that constant connectivity might bring. Will she develop the patience to read a book when TikTok offers instant gratification? Will she learn to navigate real-world social situations when she can hide behind a screen? Will she ever know the joy of being bored and having to use her imagination to entertain herself?

In June’s newsletter, I discussed the loneliness epidemic, and the rise of AI girlfriends and boyfriends – what will this situation look like in a decade if left unchecked?

Dr Jonathan Haidt’s observation about the potent combination of social media and smartphones causing a decline in mental health rings true (this is worth a watch). It’s not just about access to information; it’s about the constant, addictive pull of likes, shares, and notifications. It’s about the pressure to present a perfect online persona, even before you’ve figured out who you really are.

As I ponder this digital dilemma, I can’t help but wonder if we’re in the midst of a grand social experiment with our children as the unwitting subjects. Will future generations look back on our era of unregulated social media use with the same bewilderment we feel when we see old adverts promoting the health benefits of smoking?

EE’s advice may be a step towards a more balanced approach. Maybe we need to redefine what it means to be “connected” in the digital age. Could we embrace technology without being enslaved by it?

For now, I’m focusing on nurturing Darcey’s explorer spirit in the physical world. When the time comes for her to venture into the digital realm, I hope she’ll do so with the curiosity of an explorer and the caution of a well-prepared adventurer.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to model healthier tech habits. It’s a work in progress, but I’m learning to put my phone down more often, to be present in the moment, and to remember that the most important connections are the ones we make face-to-face.

In this brave new world of pixels and algorithms, the most revolutionary act is to be human. To laugh, play, and explore – without a screen in sight. After all, isn’t that what childhood should be about?

The past

In the spirit of being a fearless explorer I recently took a leap of faith. Quite literally.

In mid-August, my wife, Clare, and I found ourselves hurtling towards the earth at 120 mph after jumping out of a perfectly good aeroplane at 12,000 feet. This wasn’t just a random act of madness; we were skydiving to raise money for Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust Charity, near Ashford in Kent (here is the fundraising link, if interested).

Now, I have a fear of heights. A proper, palm-sweating, stomach-churning fear. But as I’ve been banging on about the importance of exploration and facing our fears in this digital age, I figured it was time to practice what I preach.

The experience was, well, “exhilarating” doesn’t entirely describe it. It was a cocktail of terror, awe, and pure, unadulterated, life-affirming joy. As we plummeted through the air, the fear melted away, replaced by an overwhelming sense of freedom. It was a vivid reminder that our greatest adventures often lie just beyond our comfort zones.

But this wasn’t just about personal growth or fundraising. It was also about sharing an important experience with Clare, strengthening our bond through a joint adventure. And with Darcey and Freddie watching from the ground, I hope we’ve inspired them to be brave, to push their boundaries, and to embrace life’s challenges head-on.

As we touched down, wobbly-legged but elated, I couldn’t help but draw parallels to our journey through this rapidly evolving digital landscape. Sometimes, we need to take that leap into the unknown. We need to trust our training, face our fears, and embrace the exhilarating free fall of progress.

So here’s to being fearless explorers – whether we’re charting the digital unknown or plummeting through the physical sky. May we always have the courage to jump, the wisdom to learn from the fall, and the joy to relish the ride.

Clare and I take to the skies

Statistics of the month

Following Labour’s pledge to introduce the “right to switch off”, new research reveals that most are “workaholics”, with 20% struggling to decline after-hours work requests, and 88% experiencing ongoing stress (Owl Labs).
In 2023, funding for generative AI skyrocketed to $22.4 billion, nearly nine times higher than in 2022 and 25 times the 2019 amount, despite a decline in overall AI investment since 2021 (Our World In Data).
Alphabet-backed Waymo, a self-driving technology company, revealed that it now provides over 100,000 paid robotaxi rides each week across its key markets in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix (TechCrunch).

Stay fluxed – and get in touch! Let’s get fluxed together …

Thank you for reading Go Flux Yourself. Subscribe for free to receive this monthly newsletter straight to your inbox.

All feedback is welcome, via oliver@pickup.media. If you enjoyed reading, please consider sharing it via social media or email. Thank you.

And if you are interested in my writing, speaking and strategising services, you can find me on LinkedIn or email me using oliver@pickup.media.

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 3)

TL;DR: March’s Go Flux Yourself is full of heart (rather than brains and muscles), discusses the “relationship economy”, off-field Manchester City stories, and tips to prepare the leaders of tomorrow …

Image created on Midjourney with the prompt “a hyperrealistic pep guardiola with a big heart on his Manchester City shirt handing out lemon shortbread to a female cleaner after a game”

The future

“In the past, jobs were about muscle; now they’re about brains; but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”

I love these words of wisdom from Minouche Shafik, the incumbent President of Colombia University.

I heard them for the first time a couple of days ago, at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect conference in east London. On stage, delivering the closing keynote, was Aneesh Raman, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama during his time in the White House. Now, he is VP and Workforce Expert at the professional social media platform, which reached one billion members last year.

Raman talked about the need for more, well, heart in the age of artificial intelligence. And he argued, convincingly, that the human role and capabilities in this epoch should be imagined from a place of possibility, not fear.

He promoted the concept of the “relationship economy”, which will supersede the “knowledge economy”. While the latter is fuelled by the Internet, the former will be anchored on expanding human social and emotional capabilities.

Here, HR professionals have a pivotal role to play. They have the power to bring more humanity to work – paradoxically by using technology – and therefore spread more humanity, or heart, to the physical (and digital) world. At the moment, due to the almighty buzz around AI, “humans seem to have become an afterthought”, Raman posited.

My work wanderings this last month have revolved around AI-augmented jobs, skill-based recruitment, and future roles. I wrote my inaugural column for UKTN on a related topic. The headline was “£1.1bn to upskill the UK for future tech roles is too little too late”, and I didn’t hold back.

“In ordinary circumstances, a figure of £1.1bn – the headline-capturing amount the government announced last week to train ‘over 4,000’ UK students in future technologies – wouldn’t be lamentable,” I started. “Yet, considering total public spending on education was £116bn in 2022-23, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies – down 8% from the 2010-11 figure – it smacks of a weak attempt to win some media coverage and votes in the looming general election.”

I cited an Axios study – published on the exact day Science and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan announced the £1.1bn package to skill-up the UK in future tech roles – that found only 18% of UK workers believe that AI has improved productivity. Of the 17 countries polled, at the other end of the scale were India (67%), Indonesia (65%), and the UAE (62%).

Certainly, AI literacy is a hot topic, with frontrunners arguing leaders need to set the example, and support such learning and education across their organisations. Raman stated that 44% of UK companies are currently helping employees become AI literate – at the top was India, with 52%.

Earlier in March, I attended a Workday roundtable titled “Leveraging AI to Foster Skills and Inclusivity”. I have a vested interest in the future of work, not least because I’m the father of two young children. I explained to the panellists that I think the current school curriculum is unsuitable for tomorrow’s workers and asked how I should best prepare them.

My thinking on this subject has long been based on the so-called 4 Cs of 21st-century learning: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. All four involve the heart Shafik is talking about. And they are why I’m pleased my son plays rugby – team sport is excellent for developing all four Cs. It’s also good for shared winning and losing experiences, which can be clouded in the digital age, and warped by social media – more on this below.

The Workday roundtable panellists shared my concern that today’s schooling is unfit for tomorrow. Yet they offered some useful extracurricular tips. For instance, Michael Houlihan, CEO of Generation UK and Ireland, which recruits, trains, and places unemployed young adults into career-launching jobs, suggested using generative AI tools to engage kids, such as having them interact with characters from their favourite books. This can turn a “spark” of interest into a “raging fire of learning and passion”.

He argued that exposing kids to technology and getting them comfortable with it through play at a young age is essential. Online learning tools and platforms, like Khan Academy, are creating exciting generative AI tools to help teach kids subjects like maths in an engaging, interactive way.

I was heartened by these answers, and Shafik’s quotation supported this movement toward the “relationship economy” – one accessed through technology but with humanity at its beating centre.

The present

I enjoy ghostwriting thought leadership articles for various executives – pinching expert opinions and inhabiting their psyche is like being an actor on the stage – and last week, I spoke with a Dutch consultant about geopolitical tensions. Refreshingly, he would not be led by my rather gloomy narrative.

He countered that, despite what one might see and hear in the media, humanity is in a relatively safe period. The reason most of us are more prone to doom-mongering is down to social media, which amplifies everything and causes collective anxiety to rocket, he posited.

While what’s happening in Ukraine and Gaza is horrific, and the climate crisis looms like a black cloud, undoubtedly, there is something in this hypothesis. How pleasing, then, that on Monday, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that will ban social media accounts for children under 14 and require parental permission for 14- and 15-year-olds. If – and it’s not a given, especially considering who might (re)enter the White House – it becomes law, it will take effect on January 1.

It’s somewhat out of character for former presidential candidate DeSantis. Indeed, during a 2022 rally in protest of the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the Roe versus Wade abortion ruling, Democratic State Senator Tina Polsky announced to the crowd of about 250 at the Esplanade in Downtown Fort Lauderdale that DeSantis couldn’t care less about – especially his wife and daughters. “He’s heartless,” she said.

Perhaps DeSantis has a heart, after all. But will other states – and countries – follow suit? With Father Christmas having gifted my eldest child a Nintendo Switch last Christmas, but a few years off finding a smartphone under the tree, I sincerely hope so.

Social media platforms are toxic for society and corroding young minds – and older ones. I’ve removed all social media apps – bar LinkedIn, which is useful for work – from my phone, and gone to the extreme of using a grayscale setting so that the display is less appealing (if you are thinking of doing this, be warned that it is a nightmare to locate Lime bike parking bays in central London).

Pep Guardiola, Manchester City’s manager, is someone else who has a heart. And I’m not writing that just because I’m a (long-standing) fan of the club (I was in Istanbul last June, cheering on at the triumphant Champions League final).

At the start of the month, I was fortunate to be invited by City’s technology partner, Qualtrics, to the Etihad Stadium for a tour and a roundtable on how the club uses data to improve the customer experience ahead of the Champions League match against FC Copenhagen.

There were some lovely snippets of information. In a stint in the US before joining City in 2016, Guardiola scanned American sports for tips. City’s circular changing room, for example, is lifted from the NFL. The words snaking around the ceiling read: “Some are born here, some are drawn here, and all call it home.” That sense of togetherness is central to the club’s success. But the manager plays his part, on and off the pitch – and in the backroom. It was revealed that after every home game, the Spaniard seeks out changing room cleaner, Deb, and says thanks with a lemon shortbread. Nice touch.

City’s customer experience team are trying to win hearts and minds. Thanks to its partnership with Qualtrics, the club uses data to understand its fans and improve their experience. The department is bringing data from various sources into one place to create a “single source of truth” and a 360-degree view of fans. This includes operational data from their CRM and experience data from surveys, social media, call centre interactions, and so on.

On match days, the team uses real-time data and feedback to identify and resolve issues like long queues. Post-match surveys help assess what’s working well versus what needs improvement across different fan segments. It serves as another example of how the muscle and brain of AI can combine with the human heart to provide a superior experience.

The past

Ian Lees was the 64-year-old tour guide at the Etihad who told me about Pep’s lemon shortbread pressie for the cleaner. Ian has been at the club since 1976, was a first-team coach for a while, and was a font of knowledge – no AI will ever be able to replace passionate people like Ian.

He had so many incredible stories, but two stand out that show how peculiar – and sentimental, or superstitious – humans can be. John Stones, the rangy centre-back turned unlikely libero, apparently is a size 9 shoe, yet he wears size 8 football boots. Meanwhile, right-back and captain Kyle Walker’s winning goal in a game aged 14 had such an impact on him that he wears the same – and unwashed – shinpads today, 19 years later.

We all have quirks. That’s what makes us human. As I approach one year of sobriety – April 1 (no joke) will make it 12 months without booze – I shudder to recall some of the heartless and mindless things I’ve done in the past. Yet, reflecting on those drunk-fuelled missteps – and near-death experiences, as explored in a recent Upper Bottom podcast episode) – means the 2.0 version of me will be a better human.

Statistics of the month

Over half (55%) of IT leaders feel pressure from their organisation’s leadership to implement new AI technology, according to Asana’s Work Innovation Lab. Yet, a quarter regret investing in AI too quickly, showing that business pressure means AI implementation isn’t as thoughtful as it could be.
One in ten (10%) employees have witnessed or experienced sexual harassment at work in the UK, but nearly half (49%) of these did not report it, finds Personio.
Gartner research indicates only 46% of employees feel supported trying to grow their careers at their organisation.

Stay fluxed – and get in touch! Let’s get fluxed together …

Thank you for reading Go Flux Yourself. Subscribe for free to receive this monthly newsletter straight to your inbox.

All feedback is welcome, via oliver@pickup.media. If you enjoyed reading, please consider sharing it via social media or email. Thank you.

And if you are interested in my writing, speaking and strategising services, you can find me on LinkedIn or email me using oliver@pickup.media.

Don’t leave me hanging: Consumer Duty shows importance of customer support

Introduced at the end of July, the Financial Conduct Authority’s new rules are designed to support customers better – and being contactable is critical. Organisations outside the financial services industry should improve their lines of communications

The Financial Conduct Authority’s Consumer Duty, which came into force on July 31, aims to sharpen customer experience practices for financial services operators. However, those in other industries would be wise to take action, as the direction of travel is clear.

The Consumer Duty stipulates that customers should “receive communications they can understand, products and services that meet their needs and offer fair value, and that they get the customer support they need, when they need it”.

The FCA is rather vague about its recommendations, but regarding customer support and being contactable, financial services operators, and many others outside of the industry for which this is designed, have much room for improvement.

Alarmingly, some companies still use the pandemic as an excuse for poor customer service. Given the coronavirus crisis began over three years go, people see right through this reasoning. And yet, many businesses are failing to pick up on this – or, indeed, pick up the phone at all.

Cross-industry findings from Microsoft, published in early July, revealed that Brits are being left on hold for up to one hour and 25 minutes waiting to speak to a customer service representative. The research found that the energy sector performed worst, with caller wait times averaging almost 36 minutes – 133 times slower than the industry standard of 20 seconds.

“Calling your energy provider and waiting over one hour and 25 minutes is equivalent to reading 255 emails, watering 85 plants or listening to Bohemian Rhapsody 14 times”, said Rob Smithson, Business Applications Lead at Microsoft UK.

Even the best-performing sector, telecommunications – ironically – had a wait time of 122 seconds, six times slower than the industry standard. In addition, almost half (47%) of the businesses researched offered an alternative means of communication or call-back service.

Costly mistake

More worryingly, the latest version of the UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) showed UK consumers have never been more frustrated. Customer satisfaction fell at its fastest rate on record in July, slumping year-on-year from 78.4 to 76.6 in July – the lowest level since January 2015 – costing the economy an estimated £9.8 billion a year in lost time and productivity, calculated Joanna Causon, Chief Executive of the UKCSI.

“In some respects the current environment shares a number of characteristics similar to those experienced in the 1970s – a difficult economic situation with high interest rates, high inflation, and a wide range of labour disputes across a range of industry sectors,” said Causon.

Smithson urged organisations to improve their lines of communication. “The findings underscore the challenges facing consumers and companies alike in the current economic climate, and the need for innovative solutions to ensure a better customer experience,” he added. “Firms must endeavour to value their customers’ time by using tools that simplify operations.”

But how do people want to contact companies in 2023 in the UK? Proprietary Moneypenny research shows that email is the number-one preferred method, with 34%. The old-fashioned but still-relevant telephone call is next on the list, with over a quarter of responses (26%). That’s followed by WhatsApp (11%), live chat (9%), social media (8%), and, bottom of the list, is the website form with a mere 3%.

Notably, there are sizeable generational differences between the channels. For instance, younger age groups would opt for WhatsApp and social media, while older cohorts prefer phone chat and email. Indeed, 20% of Gen Zers and 15% of millennials prefer WhatsApp, and only 3% of baby boomers feel the same draw.

What, though, makes people want to pick up the phone and dial a company? Moneypenny found that in the UK, almost half (42%) call because of urgency – they want a solution quickly. And next on the list, with 34%, is because it’s a complicated issue. Clearly, customers want to find an answer quickly rather than wasting time with the to and fro of a digital exchange – whether with a human or a bot.

And the quality of the communication matters, too. In fact, it’s business-critical, according to Moneypenny research. After a “bad call experience”, some 38% of respondents in the UK said they would take their business elsewhere. Additionally, almost a quarter (24%) would write a negative review.

Win-win scenario

Customer feedback is always vital, and financial services operators must listen and learn even more with the FCA’s incoming rules. “While Consumer Duty offers an opportunity to develop better client communication, it also offers a basis for aggrieved customers to complain,” said Chris Croft, Consultant at Bellevue Law, a London-headquartered law firm. “It will be too late to review compliance when the claims come in and the true impact of what firms do today may not be seen for years.”

And non-financial services firms must heed the momentum, argued Tom Darnell COO and Co-founder at IRIS Audio Technologies. “The new Consumer Duty has set an upgraded standard for best practice that should be applied across all industries, regardless of regulation,” he said. “Particularly in sales-orientated environments, this new regulation represents a culture shift, where the needs of customers are put ahead of other metrics such as profits or upsell targets.”

Ironically, new technologies enable customer service operators to be more human in an increasingly digital world. There is a desire for that human touch, despite – or perhaps because of – recent advancements in artificial intelligence.

“When people think of AI in customer service, they think of chatbots and automatic speech recognition, which at best filter straightforward issues that are simple to resolve, and at worst provide a barrier between the customer and a real person,” said Titcomb. “In mission-critical instances, for example, if your boiler is broken or you have an issue with your mortgage payment, most people understandably prefer to speak to an agent.”

This insight chimes with Martin Hartley, Group Chief Commercial Officer of emagine Consulting. “While AI-powered technologies, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, have become a prevalent part of customer service and communication, many people still want to speak to another human being when things go wrong, especially for complex or emotionally sensitive issues,” he said. “In certain situations, the empathy, understanding, and problem-solving abilities of a person cannot be replaced.”

Ultimately, intentional and considered engagement with customers is a win-win – it helps understand pain points, improves a personalised experience, and boosts loyalty as those on the other end of the communication will feel heard. Only time will tell if non-financial services businesses listen to the warning offered by Consumer Duty.

This article first appeared on Moneypenny’s blog in July 2023

‘Anti-meaningless work’: How Gen Zers are redefining traditional career paths

Gen Zers are forcing employers to evolve their ways of working. And rather than lamenting today’s youth, older business leaders would be wise to accommodate the workforce’s youngest generation better.

Moving away from traditional career paths to encourage non-linear development makes sense for all parties in 2023. A new approach and fresh thinking are critical. “Logic will get you from A to B,” said Albert Einstein. “Imagination will take you everywhere.”

Events spurred by the coronavirus crisis have upended many norms. Still, it is arguably the Gen Z cohort that has suffered the most through disjointed education, severely limited early-career opportunities, and a lack of in-person work and play experiences, in addition to the psychological impact of Covid-19. Now, Gen Z is in the driving seat to propel meaningful change and usher in a new work paradigm.

“The last three years have enabled Gen Zers to reap the flexibility benefits of remote working with many more deciding to optimize for a lifestyle as a digital nomad,” said Charlie Rogers, a London-based executive team coordinator at The Portfolio Collective (a global community of more than 8,000 portfolio professionals) and founder of Mastery in Your 20s, a community platform to equip people in their third decade with the skills to take “their own pathless path.”

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in June 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

As great resignation trend slows, here’s how companies are enticing ex-employees back

There was muted celebration in HR departments across the U.S. when, on Apr. 4, the latest data release on employment from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the Great Resignation may have finally slowed down – if not quit – in some so-called knowledge-working industries. However, the trend was still evident in many blue-collar industries.

“It’s no surprise that blue-collar workers are continuing their exodus while office workers have quickly realized the grass probably isn’t greener,” said Leslie Tarnacki, global CHRO for WorkForce Software. She argued the findings proved that if employees were handed the flexibility, autonomy, and “proper tools to fulfill their roles efficiently,” they were “far more likely” to stay with their organizations.

Michigan-based Tarnacki explained the slowdown of the Great Resignation for desked workers. “Much of it was spurred by a demand for flexibility and better work-life balance, which most employers have been able to deliver in some way with remote working and flexible hours,” she said. “For front-line and deskless shift workers, demands have not been so easily met.”

What should business leaders of blue-collar workers take away from the new Bureau of Labor Statistics data? How can they, too, halt the ongoing Great Resignation trend for good?

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in April 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

How generative AI is muddying copyright laws – what businesses need to know

Elon Musk and almost 4,000 high-profile signatories, including engineers from Amazon, DeepMind, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, attempted to halt the giddying acceleration of generative artificial intelligence in an open letter published in late March.

“Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control,” read the letter. “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”

Everyone should take note when the brightest human – rather than machine – minds are demanding progress be paused. But has the bot not already bolted? And considering the possible competitive advantages if rivals opt to down AI tools, will the temptation to continue pushing the boundaries of technology beyond their current limits not be too irresistible for business leaders?

Many have wasted little time embracing ChatGPT, a large-scale language model fed 300 billion words by developer OpenAI that is “confidently incorrect,” and DALL-E, a similar tool that generates images rather than words. While interest has surged in the former, potentially the bigger, creepier issues are around the latter, specifically copyright infringements.

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in April 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

Leaders are blindly ignoring the dangers of ‘confidently incorrect’ AI – and why it’s a massive problem

Why don’t scientists trust atoms? Because they make everything up.

When Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, demonstrated the possibilities of GPT-4 – Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4, the fourth-generation autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text – upon launch on Mar. 14, he tasked it to create a website from a notebook sketch.

Brockman prompted GPT-4, on which ChatGPT is built, to select a “really funny joke” to entice would-be viewers to click for the answer. It chose the above gag. Presumably, the irony wasn’t purposeful. Because the issues of “trust” and “making things up” remain massive, despite the incredible yet entrancing capabilities of generative artificial intelligence.

Many business leaders are spellbound, stated futurist David Shrier, professor of practice (AI and innovation) at Imperial College Business School in London. And it was easy to understand why if the technology could build websites, invent games, create pioneering drugs, and pass legal exams – all in mere seconds.

Those impressive feats are making it more challenging for leaders to be clear-eyed, said Shrier, who has written books on nascent technologies. In the race to embrace ChatGPT, companies, and individual users, are “blindly ignoring the dangers of confidently incorrect AI.” As a result, he warned that significant risks are emerging as companies rapidly race to re-orient themselves around ChatGPT without being aware of – or ignoring – the numerous pitfalls.

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in March 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

Why the need for leaders to address poor workplace communication is so urgent now

Ineffective communication costs U.S. businesses $1.2 trillion annually, or $12,506 per employee, pointed out by Grammarly Business’s latest State of Business Communication report, published in early March. But are leaders receiving the message that urgent improvement is required?

The Grammarly Business survey of 251 business leaders and 1,001 knowledge workers suggested connection problems are growing. Time spent on written communication grew 18% compared to 2022, while worker stress levels were 7% higher due to poor communication, and this caused a 15% decline in productivity.

Further, the research, conducted in partnership with The Harris Poll, showed that workers spent over 70% of their working weeks communicating on various channels. Yet 58% wished they had better tools to streamline communication. “Leaders who shrug off the massive impact of poor communication on their bottom line will lose,” argued Matt Rosenberg, Grammarly’s chief revenue officer and head of Grammarly Business.

Rosenberg said that the results of the second annual report indicated the challenge was growing, causing a “greater impact on everything from operational efficiency to employee and customer satisfaction.” As a result, he urged a rethink of communications strategies. “At a time when the stakes are critically high, leaders who invest in empowering efficient, consistent communication across their organizations will see results and profits climb.”

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in March 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.