Category: Sport

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating Human-Work Evolution (No. 31)

TL;DR: July’s Go Flux Yourself examines why the world is so bad at matching people with jobs they’d love. Fix that, and nurture the skills the future of work demands, and everything else follows: productivity, dignity, even social cohesion.

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“Job creation is the key thing missing from the entire ecosystem of support. The people who regain their dignity are those who can work, use their skills, and give something back. And if I know that isn’t happening, and I know I have the tools to do something about it, I cannot just sit and watch.”

The future

How do we match people with work they would love? Which skills should the children who broke up for summer this month nurture, given they will still be working in the 2080s? And why is an economy that measures everything (clicks, keystrokes, sentiment, the whereabouts of a parcel) still so hopeless at arguably the measurement that matters most: whether the person fits the work?

This month’s opening quotation comes from Oxford-based Washingtonian Giselle Gonzales. Three years ago, she founded EqualReach, a platform that matches displaced people, refugees with real technical and creative skills, with businesses that need digital work done. It builds teams rather than placing individuals, always blending displaced talent with local talent, deliberately, because the point is cohesion as much as employment.

Teamship, not individual brilliance, is the whole idea. It happens to be the same idea that decided the latest FIFA Men’s World Cup.

Spain won it with a substitution on 19 July. Manager Luis de la Fuente sent on forward Ferran Torres, who scored the only goal in the 106th minute, as the lottery of penalties loomed. Argentina brought the greatest individual talent of the age, Lionel Messi. Spain provided a team and system, built over decades, in which every player – including the substitutes – fitted.

Two numbers tell you which philosophy won. Argentina’s goalkeeper, Emi Martínez, made 11 saves in the final alone, a World Cup final record. Meanwhile, Unai Simón, in the opposite goal, made 10 saves in the entire tournament and won the Golden Glove anyway: Spain conceded just once across the whole competition, the first champions in the tournament’s history to manage it. The best goalkeeper of the summer was the one his teammates made nearly redundant.

None of it was luck, either. Spain planted this garden decades ago, in the coaching reforms and academies that produced the 2008 to 2012 golden era, and the same beds are still fruiting: a teenager, Pau Cubarsí, anchored the defence and was named the tournament’s best young player. 

A garden doesn’t die on the day you stop watering it, and it doesn’t win you a World Cup the year you plant it either. Regrowing is always harder than maintaining, and workforces obey the same logic: skip the training now, and the bill doesn’t arrive for years. It shows up the day a manager badly needs someone who can read a room or make a judgement call, and finds nobody was ever taught how. This is why I keep saying from stages that the moment to walk the garden is now, while it still looks reasonably rosy from the office window.

None of this is a criticism of HR and people leaders, most of whom know this perfectly well and are fighting for skills budgets against entirely real cost pressures. The failure lies higher up, with whoever decided that developing people was an overhead rather than an asset on the balance sheet.

This summer, Britain offers a preview of what happens when nobody tends the garden. The latest ONS figures, published in May, show that over a million 16-to-24-year-olds are outside education, employment or training – the first time this has exceeded a million since 2013. This news comes as many business leaders I meet insist they cannot hire the skills the AI era demands.

The talent exists. The demand exists. Yet the introduction never happens. We run the labour market like a lost-property office: everything valuable is in there somewhere, but the filing system is organised by date of arrival rather than by what anyone is looking for.

This situation is more than wasteful. It’s expensive, and economists have started counting the cost. Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson, whom I featured in April’s Go Flux Yourself, calls human capital the most misallocated asset on the planet, around $200 trillion in the United States alone by his estimate, and warns of the Turing trap: building AI to imitate people rather than complement them.

January’s Wharton–Accenture Skills Index named the underlying fault: a “skills mismatch economy”, in which employers, workers and universities still operate in a role-based world of job titles, CVs and safe signals, while the economy has already moved to a skills-based one.

And new research released this week by Hemsley Fraser further sharpens the point (I’ll add the URL when it becomes available). Four in 10 UK business leaders say technology is the skill they most wish they’d developed earlier in their own careers. Yet three-quarters of those same leaders say human or blended capabilities, balancing digital skills with human ones, plain people skills, and adaptability are what they actually prioritise when hiring someone else. Leaders are chasing the wrong gap in themselves while correctly spotting it in everyone else. Nearly three in 10 (28%) admit they don’t even know which capabilities to train their own people in as new technology arrives.

It’s not a hopeless situation, though. Matching can be learned, like anything else, and there are tools that genuinely help now, if leaders use them for the right job. Here’s where I’d start.

  1. Decompose the role before you hire. Break it into its underlying tasks and ask which need a human, which need a machine, and which need a human working at a higher level. (The Wharton index is a decent template here.)
  2. Advertise projects, not just jobs. Internal talent marketplaces, now standard in large firms, use AI to surface skills people never put on a CV, and routinely find the person you need is already on the payroll, filed under the wrong title.
  3. Widen the pool you match from. Match on interests as well as ability (Age UK – this month’s Tech for good story – pairs volunteers and older people by shared hobbies, because conversation flows where curiosity already lives) and test candidates outside your usual channels through structured, task-based trials rather than keyword-filtered CVs, which is exactly how a refugee-led team ends up delivering for a global pharmaceutical company, as you’ll read below.

The same recommendation engines that know what show you’ll want to watch next could just as easily be matching people to work. Almost nobody’s pointed them that way yet.

But better matching creates its own problem. Once machines become smarter at finding the right person for a task, the smaller, entry-level tasks are the first to be automated entirely, which raises the harder question of what happens to the rungs below.

Jason Foster, founder of AI and data consultancy Cynozure, told a compelling story about the history of container ships when we thrashed it out on his Hub & Spoken podcast earlier in the month – link here for the episode titled As AI gets smarter, what makes humans more valuable?

Containerisation destroyed the dockworker’s job as it existed, and raised the level at which humans worked, out of the hold and into crane operation, port planning, logistics design. Jason’s phrase, “raising the level of abstraction”, is his answer to navigating the AI age.

For instance, take a junior coder whose whole job is writing code exactly as instructed. AI can already do that part. But someone still has to decide what to build, why, and how the pieces fit together, and that person has moved up a level, the way the crane operator did. His argument: the coder who only takes orders is finished. The one who architects, who works at a higher level, moves ahead of the problem rather than being replaced by it.

I admire the idea, yet raising the level of abstraction assumes there’s still a bottom rung to climb from. Graduate opportunities have collapsed since ChatGPT arrived: UK grad vacancies fell 42.1% year-on-year to just 8,398 in May, Adzuna’s job market data shows, the steepest annual decline since the series began in 2016. Saw off the first rung to save money and you haven’t made the ladder efficient. You’ve guaranteed that in 10 years you’ll wonder where all the experienced people went.

The container ship destroyed old rungs and built new ones, in roles nobody had imagined. Ask yourself, as a business leader, which one you’re doing: building new rungs, or just removing the old ones and hoping?

And which skills belong on those new rungs? Be suspicious of anyone with a tidy answer. A fixed list of the 10 skills of 2030 is a map of a country that won’t exist by the time you arrive.

What can be said with confidence is that the capabilities that appreciate as machines improve are the human ones. Dame Minouche Shafik’s line remains my compass: “In the past, jobs were about muscles; now they’re about the brain; in the future, they’ll be about the heart,” the economist and currently V&A Chair said in a 2018 interview. Heart skills will be central to success, individually and collectively. The seven Cs I often talk about – collaboration, communication, compassion, courage, creativity, critical thinking, and curiosity – are increasingly valuable because machines can’t supply them. 

One catch, though. These capabilities only grow through use. We already ran the experiment with sat-nav and lost our sense of direction; outsource the effort and the faculty fades. A workforce that hands its judgement to the machines will one day reach for it and find the cupboard bare.

Nobody feels this more sharply than the generation on school holiday. My eldest, Freddie, has just finished primary school. As it stands, he’ll still be working in the 2080s. What kind of work will exist for him, and how will he find the version of it he’d actually enjoy?

Part of the answer is a skill we barely teach, the one that an interview, a pitch and leadership itself all run on: having the communication skills and confidence to make the case for yourself. Kirsten de Bouter Shillam, a communication strategist with 30 years of experience in psychology, coaching, and performance, spent two years in Málaga helping young entrepreneurs pitch to investors. The technical brilliance was never the problem, she found; the founders were gifted, and their pitches “utterly boring”.

Her diagnosis of the school-leavers of 2026 is that they have become “consumers of content, not participants”, unable to recognise their own stories as worth telling. She described asking a room of teenagers for a story and being met with silence. “You’ve been on the planet 18 years,” she replied, “and you’ve got nothing to say?”

From September, she pilots her Human Voice Project in schools, teaching the speaking, debating and storytelling that every curriculum assumes will develop by osmosis. It won’t, and she finds the omission unbelievable: we teach children to read and write for a decade and leave speaking to chance. “We shape the world with the words we choose,” as she puts it.

If you want to see what a well-matched human looks like at full power, though, study Giselle. She calls herself a “justice-seeker”, and means it: her Christian faith and her anger at indignity drive the whole enterprise. “If I just sit and know that’s happening, and I know I have the tools to do something about it, that doesn’t sit well with me,” she told me.

In 2016, as a young freelancer from Seattle, she travelled the refugee route from Lesbos to Germany, documenting displacement for a network of nonprofits. In Serbia, an official-looking Disney jacket from a part-time job carried her past the guards of a repurposed meatpacking facility where busloads of people arrived every 30 minutes. In the family tent, among rows of bunk beds, people had torn strips of fabric into a sign on the ground reading “We are human”. No press were there to read it.

Then, waiting for a train, a man mentioned he had been a designer back in Syria. Giselle’s mind went, briefly, to her own mother, who crochets, and she made the kind of polite noise you make when someone mentions a hobby. He pointed across the crowd. “See that woman’s jacket? I designed that.”

He had lost his country, his home, his clients. He had not lost his talent, only the means to use it. Giselle started noticing it everywhere after that: the accountant serving food in a canteen, the engineer waiting for permission to work, people carrying real skills that nobody around them had thought to ask about.

What she kept coming back to was dignity, and how much of it depends on being seen as a whole person rather than a single story: “displaced”, “vulnerable”, “in need”, rather than designer, engineer, accountant. It’s why, when she built social enterprise EqualReach years later, the whole model is designed around one idea: enable dehumanised people to start working again, being seen for what they can do, and the rest starts to follow.

On 28 July, the 1951 Refugee Convention turned 75. It promised safety and the right to work. Three-quarters of a century later, the second promise remains largely unhonoured, which is the gap EqualReach exists to close.

The matches themselves are the best argument for the model. Alex Pervak ran technology teams as a CTO in Ukraine before the war disrupted his career; through the platform he has built, he has rebuilt his life in Somerset and now consults for Amazon. “People like Alex are not starting from nothing,” Giselle told me. “They are starting from experience.”

Elsewhere, a Palestinian developer built an AI tool for Bayer. A team that includes displaced Gazans delivered an exhibition for One Young World, its design led by an artist working from Gaza itself. A Ukrainian refugee who arrived as talent now works as EqualReach’s own product lead. When Bayer needed an internal video for its 85,000 employees, one of Giselle’s teams made it, cutting the usual production time by an estimated 85%. Even Giselle’s social media is run by one of her teams in Uganda, who chase her when she’s slow to post.

Since launching, EqualReach has created more than 200 jobs and $500,000 in earnings for the people on its platform, and 60% of clients come back for more work once they’ve tried it.

I’d like to set you some homework. For business leaders: audit your organisation the way a football manager picks a team, tasks not titles, capabilities not credentials, and count your rungs before AI removes any more of them. For educators: nurture the heart skills as deliberately as the hard ones, because a generation that can’t tell its own story will lose interviews to machines that can fake one.

The children who broke up this month will work late into this century. Whether those decades feel like a career or a sentence depends on the decisions made now by people who mostly don’t believe matching is their job. Giselle’s standard is the one to aspire to. When you know the mismatch is happening, and you hold the tools to do something about it, sitting and watching is not an option.

The present

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As of July 20, with Andy Burnham taking the keys to Downing Street, Britain has now had seven prime ministers in a little over a decade (thanks, Brexit!). None of them had time to settle in, build a team, or actually learn the job before the talk turned to who’d replace them.

Anthony Seldon, author of The Impossible Office? The History of the British Prime Minister, made the case in the Financial Times in May. His argument is that stable government requires longevity, that relationships and proficiency can’t develop without it, and that Britain’s habit of churning through leaders and the people around them has hollowed out the institutional experience that once made Whitehall work. Hopefully Burnham will fare better, but he is hamstrung by recent history.

It’s the same failure I keep finding in business. A manager parachuted in to hit next quarter’s numbers, with no time to build a team or learn where the bodies are buried, is akin to a football club sacking its manager every August and wondering why it never wins anything. Short-termism is not a technology problem. It is older than any of us, and AI has simply given it a new excuse.

I made this argument twice this month on other people’s podcasts. On The New Gig, Glen Hodgson and I covered a lot of ground: what the platform economy does to the people inside it, and what individuals can actually do about it. (I’ll share a link to that on LinkedIn when it lands … hopefully soon.)

My answer to “how do you future-proof yourself” was that the question itself, and the phrase “future proof”, is the problem. It implies a finish line, and there isn’t one. The better query is: what do you keep doing yourself rather than handing over to technology? We’re strangely relaxed about outsourcing thinking in a way we’d never be about outsourcing a major purchase (would we?).

On the Hub & Spoken episode, Jason and I spent plenty of time on the container-ship argument summarised above. Three additional practical tips came out of that conversation that I’d put in front of any leader reading this. 

  1. Protect the friction that builds judgement rather than automating it away entirely. 
  2. Fund the relationship layer because, as routine work disappears, trust becomes what differentiates you. 
  3. And build the new rungs deliberately, because if AI eats the old entry-level tasks, somebody has to design the ones that grow people towards the “level of abstraction” Jason talks about. None of that is expensive. All of it requires believing the problem is real before it becomes visible, which is the entire argument of this edition.

Also in July, What the Flux Just Happened?, my six-month review video, went out, pulling together the first half of 2026’s newsletters: the future of education, cognitive atrophy, big tech’s big tobacco moment, AI’s failure of women, the 60-year working life, the vanishing first rung. (Check it out on LinkedIn here, and see some nifty edits – I’m learning new skills!)

A screenshot from the opening of What the Flux Just Happened?

The past

I’ve spent parts of my career playing out of position, to borrow a football phrase. Competent enough that nobody drops you from the team, wrong enough that you’re never quite where the game needs you.

This whole edition argues that matching people to work they’re suited for is what separates flourishing from merely coping. It took me the better part of 15 years to turn that argument on myself.

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Twenty years ago, sports journalism looked, on paper, like the obvious fit. I was reasonable at English, studied it at university, and had wanted, more than anything, to play rugby professionally. I wasn’t good enough. Writing about the sport I couldn’t quite play felt like the sensible next best thing, close enough to the thing I loved to count as a version of it.

For a while it looked like I’d called it right. I was accredited, bylined, paid to watch the best in the world do their jobs.

Then I was working an FA Cup final at Wembley, assigned to write a colour piece for a broadsheet newspaper, and I remember standing among the other football journalists as they traded the kind of detail that makes up most matchday punditry: when these two sides had last met, who’d scored in which minute back in the 1970s, the whole encyclopaedic weather system of facts that serious football writers carry around with them. I didn’t know any of it. Worse, I realised I didn’t care.

What I did care about, standing in that same press box, was everything else: the character under pressure, the manager’s face in the tunnel, the story of the substitute who’d spent four years waiting for this exact moment. The scoreline was never really the story for me. The humans playing it out were.

That’s the thread that’s run through everything in my career since. It’s why I coined the phrase “human-work evolution” rather than nod along to “the future of work”: the technology only ever matters in terms of what it does to the people underneath it.

Freddie, my son, changed the course of my career, though not on purpose. Almost 12 years ago, when he was born, weekends stopped being mine to give away. Sports journalism runs on Saturdays and Sundays, the days that were becoming sacrosanct family time, and I found myself resenting a job I’d once considered a dream. I moved into business and technology journalism.

It was a better match: bigger canvas, same underlying subject. The secret I smuggled out of the press box is that I had never really been covering sport at all. I was most interested in telling the human stories behind the results, the people under pressure, and that is the whole story of work now, too.

Then, three and a half years ago, ChatGPT arrived and handed me FOBO, fear of becoming obsolete. A machine could suddenly produce serviceable prose on any subject at a speed no freelancer could live with, and I spent an uncomfortable few months contemplating my own first rung being sawn through in real time.

What I did next, I now realise, was exactly what Jason prescribes: I raised my own level of abstraction. Writing became the foundation rather than the product, and I evolved into speaking, moderating and hosting.

It is the best match of my career, and the tell is simple. I enjoy the work more now than I did at 25, which is not how the standard career script says the graph should run.

I offer this as inspiration and evidence. Every argument in this month’s edition – that matching is solvable, that the heart skills carry you between careers, that new rungs can be built while old ones burn – happened first in my own life, twice over. The designer on the Serbian train platform knew exactly what he was. The system around him simply had no way of finding out. I was luckier. Nobody stopped me from rematching myself, not once but twice, and there was no border in the way either time.

That’s the whole point of this newsletter’s rather rude-sounding name. Go Flux Yourself isn’t a comment on the world. It’s an instruction. Nobody is coming to rematch you. You have to go and do it, on purpose, before the world does it to you instead.

Tech for good: Age UK

Age UK’s Telephone Friendship Service is built on a simple bet: that the technology behind food delivery apps and customer service bots could be pointed at something else entirely, keeping older people connected rather than keeping them scrolling.

“We really think about technology as empowering humans to have that connection,” Alistair Stewart, Age UK’s Director of National Services, told me. The organisation runs two national phone services, both built on Twilio’s platform: the Silver Line, a 24/7 helpline anyone can ring, and the Telephone Friendship Service, which matches a volunteer with an older person for a weekly call. 

Technology runs through every part of this service, not just the introduction. Age UK built a platform that cross-references thousands of volunteers and older people at once, by availability and by interest, something no small team could manage by memory or instinct. A volunteer free on Tuesday afternoons who likes classical music and tennis is paired with an older person free at the same time who likes the same things, not because a staff member happened to remember they’d get on, but because the system found the overlap.

The same technology, built on Twilio’s platform, then handles the call itself. Neither party ever sees the other’s phone number: both dial into a Twilio number that connects them, so the volunteer’s identity and the older person’s stay protected on both sides. Every call can be recorded, which means if either person raises a concern, or a staff member reviewing calls spots something worth a closer look, there’s a record to act on. None of that would be possible with a phone number handed over in the old-fashioned way.

That shift, from one person holding both sides of a match in their head to a platform doing it automatically, is what let the service grow. It now sustains more than 4,000 active friendships at any one time, alongside the Silver Line, the 24/7 helpline anyone can ring.

The need behind that growth is significant. Age UK’s research finds 360,000 older people go a week without speaking to a friend or family member, and 3.4 million – one in four older people in the UK – won’t tell anyone they’re lonely for fear of being a burden. Twilio’s Age of Distraction research adds further scale: 29% of UK adults say they feel more isolated than ever, 28% have reduced how often they socialise since the coronavirus pandemic, and 22% go between one and seven days without any face-to-face contact.

Alistair is clear-eyed about where technology should and shouldn’t go. Age UK is exploring AI to handle routine queries on its Advice Line, which takes more than 200,000 calls a year (last year the team helped identify more than £30 million in unclaimed benefits for older people), so that human advisers are free for genuine crises. “That reassurance that a human can give, an AI bot can’t,” he said.

The win-win, as he described it, runs both directions. “What I think is lovely is volunteers gain just as much out of it as the older people.” Some 96% of Silver Line volunteers report being fairly or very satisfied.

I speak from the volunteer’s perspective on this, too. For years I was a befriender through a scheme called Linking Lives, matched with a nonagenarian, Terry, who shared my love of jazz, and those weekly calls were genuinely rewarding on both sides.

The constraint now is people, not technology. Age UK’s Silver Line can currently answer about two in three incoming calls, and the charity wants to grow its volunteer base from a little over 200 to 350 to 500, which would allow it to answer thousands more calls a month.

There’s a sharper way to see why this distinction – technology enabling human contact rather than replacing it – matters right now. BBC One’s new sitcom Ann Droid, which started this month, follows a recently widowed woman in 2029 whose son buys her a secondhand eldercare robot to keep her company. It’s a comedy, and a good one by early reviews, but the premise only works because the anxiety underneath it is real: a society increasingly comfortable outsourcing the job of companionship to a machine. 

Age UK’s whole model is built on the opposite bet: that the machinery should handle the matching and logistics, and leave the actual company to a human being. I told Alistair I intend to apply as a volunteer. If any of this moved you, the door’s open.

Statistics of the month

🥀 The garden, unwatered. Employers now report more than a quarter of UK job vacancies (27%) are hard to fill due to skills shortages, even as business investment in training fell 9% overall between 2019 and 2024, and by 13% per employee. The shortage isn’t a lack of people. It’s a lack of tending. (Skills England, Annual Skills Report 2026)

🧭 The heart, priced. PwC’s 2026 AI Jobs Barometer, published in June, finds junior AI-assisted roles are now seven times more likely to demand leadership and face-to-face skills than roles less exposed to AI. Meanwhile, the wage premium for workers with AI skills has tripled in a year, from 11% to 34.2%. The machines are taking the routine work and pricing up everything human that’s left. (PwC UK, 2026 AI Jobs Barometer)

🔌 AI’s electricity bill lands. Data centres now consume 67.7 GW of electricity globally, about 1.9% of all electricity generated on the planet, following 17% growth in a single year. AI-focused data centres increased consumption by 50% during 2025 alone. The US accounts for 43% of global demand. Meanwhile, the UK devotes around 5.8% of its grid to data centres. (IDCA, 2026 Global Energy Report)

📱 We know it, and we scroll anyway. More than one in four UK adults (27%) say the media they consume has a negative effect on their wellbeing, and 51% say they spend more time on it than intended. Among 18 to 24-year-olds, 46% report disrupted sleep and 39% reduced productivity. (YouGov, UK Media Consumption Trends 2026, part 4)

📉 The layoffs and the spending are the same story. US tech companies have cut nearly 140,000 jobs since the start of 2026, a wave that accounts for more than a third of all announced US layoffs this year, even as the same firms pour a projected $725 billion into AI infrastructure. Amazon, Oracle, Meta and Microsoft alone account for almost 50,000 of the cuts. Markets aren’t entirely convinced by the trade: companies citing AI as a reason for job losses have underperformed the Nasdaq by nearly 10% in the following month. (Financial Times, via TechCrunch)

🎤 Over one-third of the U.S. general population considers themselves content creators. How depressing. “These creators are highly active, with a notable 35% directly uploading music audio or video online,” says a new report. Penny for a thought, or song? (Luminate)

If you’re reading this, thank you. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can sign up for Go Flux Yourself (there should be a pop-up). Please feel free to share it with friends and colleagues too. Each edition lands on the last day of the month.

If anything in this edition struck a chord, particularly the heart skills argument, or the question of whether your organisation is building a pipeline for its future leaders or blindly dismantling one, I’d like to hear from you. These are the conversations I’m currently having on stages and in companies, and I’m always keen to help a team or a leader think through their own version of the problem, or simply to tell their story properly. Get in touch: oliver@pickup.media.

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating Human-Work Evolution (No. 30)

TL;DR: June’s Go Flux Yourself asks where you would trust a machine to act for you and where you would not, and finds the same answer everywhere: we protect what matters by keeping the friction in it.

Image created using Nano Banana

“Trust is one of the most precious and valuable human currencies that we have. Technology can enable that; it can augment trust, but it should never be outsourced or automated.”

The future

Would you let an AI agent buy your weekly grocery shop? Probably. Would you let it book a holiday, organise your mother’s care home placement, or email your boss while you sleep? Somewhere in that list you stopped, and the exact point where you halted is the most revealing thing about you as a consumer, an employee and a parent in 2026.

I spent the middle of June at London Tech Week as one of the festival’s official hosts and presenters, shaping and fronting the content: welcome films, roving interviews on the show floor, and longer studio conversations meant to outlast the week. Moderating the future of agentic commerce panel was an additional billing, and it was a joy, because it put me in the AI Arena in front of more than 1,000 people, the largest audience I have addressed. 

The panel for How are Enterprises Preparing for Agentic Commerce & AI-Assisted Purchasing? gathered senior figures from WPP, Skyscanner, Pandora and HubSpot, and the premise was that the engineering is essentially finished. Payment rails now let an agent check out on your behalf; protocols are multiplying, and Visa built its own version after seeing AI-driven traffic to online merchants climb by 4,700%. The machines are ready to spend your money. But when will we be ready to hand over the reins?

To frame the scale before the doubt: last October, McKinsey valued the global agentic commerce prize at between $3 trillion and $5 trillion by 2030. Gartner goes further on the corporate side, expecting that by 2028, some 90% of business buying will pass through AI agents, with roughly $15 trillion of spend flowing through them. The direction is not in dispute. The readiness is. In its latest State of AI in the Enterprise report, Deloitte surveyed more than 3,000 leaders and found that nearly three-quarters intend to deploy agentic AI within two years, while only one in five has a mature way to govern it. Ambition is sprinting; the guardrails are walking.

Image from London Tech Week taken via ASV Photography Ltd

One figure complicates all of it. I put a question to the AI Arena: who would hand an agent the final click, trusting it to run a purchase from start to finish with no review? The lights came up, and the hands up accounted for roughly one in 10. 

That instinct is not a rejection of the technology, and fresh numbers show how far the rest of the behaviour has already travelled. A January 2026 Omnisend survey of 4,000 shoppers across Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia found that 67% of Britons had used generative AI to shop in the previous six months, up from 55% a year earlier, mostly for the sober tasks of researching products, comparing options, hunting deals and summarising reviews. Some 44% of UK shoppers now rate ChatGPT’s recommendations above a search engine’s, a judgement only one in four held a year ago. The assistant has become a habit.

What it has not become is a proxy with a free hand. The same survey found 77% of Britons comfortable letting AI handle transactions in some form, up from 68% the year before, but overwhelmingly on conditions: that their approval be sought before anything is bought, or that the agent be confined to routine reorders. Only 15% would let it reorder without reviewing first. Comfort is climbing quickly, and it halts at the exact point the panel kept circling, the moment of irreversible commitment. Set that against Accenture’s finding that 74% would trust a personal agent more than their best friend to buy on their behalf “within defined boundaries”, and the apparent contradiction resolves. The boundary is the whole point.

Image from London Tech Week taken via ASV Photography Ltd

The person who has helped me make sense of that boundary is Rachel Botsman. She has spent the best part of 20 years studying trust, lectures on it at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, and wrote the book, more or less, that reframed it for the digital age, although Who Can You Trust?: How Technology Brought Us Together – and Why It Could Drive Us Apart is now almost a decade old. In late May, on stage at the Workhuman Forum in London, she made the case that opens this newsletter: that trust is one of the most precious currencies we have, and the one thing we should never hand to a machine to hold. 

Botsman’s definition is deceptively plain: trust is “a confident relationship with the unknown”. She is fond of pointing out that there are more definitions of trust than of love, and that this is the one that has held up over two-plus decades of study. The force of it lies in that last word. Trust is not what you reach for when you know how things will turn out; it is precisely what lets you act when you do not. If you need certainty, surveillance or control, what you have is not trust but its absence.

She uses the example of a friend who monitors her husband’s phone and tracks his location, a marriage that may be transparent but is not, by this measure, a trusting one. Trust, in other words, lives in the realm of possibility, the willingness to step into the unknown, while its impostor, risk, lives in the realm of probability, the measurable and the hedged. Most organisations, she argues, believe they are having a trust conversation when they are, in fact, having a risk conversation, because risk is far easier to set out on a spreadsheet. That distinction does the heavy lifting for everything that follows, because an AI agent at the checkout is the unknown made concrete, and the question of how confident a relationship we are willing to have with it is the whole of agentic commerce in a sentence.

My snap of Rachel Botsman at Workhuman Forum

Her next move is to reject the question almost everyone asks. We want to know whether people trust AI, and her answer is that the question is empty, because trust is never general. The best question worth asking is “trusting it to do what?” You trust Amazon to deliver a parcel and refund it if it arrives broken; you may not trust Amazon an inch on how it treats the people in its warehouses. The trust does not travel between the two. So the 10% in the AI Arena who stuck up their hands were not technophobes. They were drawing a line precisely where the consequences turn irreversible, and reserving that part for themselves.

This is human-work evolution in a single gesture, and the phrase is worth defining, since I coined it to sidestep the usual talk about the future of work, which tends to treat humans as an afterthought. As I said on stage this last month, more than once, “I am interested in what people will do with machines, around machines, and instead of machines. I want us to be carpenters, not the nail at the wrong end of the hammer.” The shopper who lets the agent assemble the shortlist and then pays for the ring herself is doing carpentry. She is using the tool without becoming it. Some things should keep their friction because that’s where the meaning lives.

If trust is a confident relationship with the unknown, every leap into a new technology asks people to extend that confidence before the evidence exists, and one of Botsman’s favourite illustrations is the cash machine. The world’s first Automated Teller Machine (ATM) appeared at Barclays in Enfield, north London, in June 1967, 59 years ago this month, and by her telling, it took the best part of a decade for people to trust it. The history bears her out: a full 10 years on, in 1977, shoppers were still telling reporters they preferred a human teller, because “at least the girl behind the window doesn’t die in the middle of a transaction”. The barrier had almost nothing to do with the technology, according to Botsman. People associated PIN codes with spy films, where typing a secret number into a wall tended to make something explode. Agentic commerce is an ATM-scale leap of the same kind, unfolding now, and the resistance will sit where nobody quite expects it.

Image created using Nano Banana

To show what that resistance feels like, Botsman played the audience a clip of a woman riding in a self-driving car for the first time, her son laughing beside her as the wheel turned on its own. Within seconds she was shouting the line Botsman wanted us to catch: “Put me back in control.” That is the human response to uncertainty in its rawest form. The instinctive corporate answer is to tighten the reins, to add a checkpoint, a sign-off, a policy. Botsman’s counsel runs the other way: the route into the unknown is not to grip harder but to build solid ground, to make plain what will stay the same so people feel safe enough to let the rest change. Trust, she reminds leaders, is permission, and you earn permission by being reliable at the dull, repeatable things long before you ask for the leap.

That permission rests, in the end, on one trait above the others. Botsman divides trustworthiness into capability, which is competence and reliability, and character, which is empathy and integrity, and she is unambiguous about which carries the most weight. Integrity, she said, is “the most important trait, and it is the trait when trust breaks down”, the one that is “the hardest to repair”. She likens it to “a compass”, “a north star in organisations”, and defines its loss as the moment a person’s interests, intentions and motives stop aligning “with the interests of the team, of the customer, of the public”. The capability half, she notes, technology can already replicate; the character half is where human trust forms, and on whether it transfers to machines at all, she is candid enough to say we do not yet know.

This is where the commercial stakes of the whole agentic shift sharpen, and where companies stand to lose the most, fastest. If a brand lets an agent nudge you toward whatever pays it best, and is later found out, the damage is not a poor recommendation but a punctured integrity, and integrity, by Botsman’s own measure, is the hardest thing to rebuild. The aforementioned Omnisend survey marks the trip-wire exactly. Personalised pricing is the clearest red line: 69% of Britons say that if a retailer used AI to charge different customers different prices for the same item, they would cut back, leave, or post a negative review, and only around one in 12 would shrug it off. A third already suspect that AI recommendations are optimised for the platform rather than for them, or sponsored without being labelled as such. The same engine that helpfully steers you can also sell you, and the moment customers suspect that this is happening, trust does not bend; it snaps.

There is a useful parallel in the cockpit. We are relaxed about a plane flying itself at 38,000 feet, through the long, mathematically tractable middle of the journey. We still want a human hand on take-off and landing, the two minutes at each end where the consequences are total. Shoppers are applying aviation logic to retail.

If we are sensibly cautious about outsourcing the act of buying, we have been remarkably casual about outsourcing the act of thinking. At South by Southwest London, at the start of June, I sat in on a fireside conversation with Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, specialising in human-computer interaction, who has measured human attention for two decades using sensors rather than surveys. In 2003, the average attention span on a screen was two-and-a-half minutes. By 2012 it had fallen to 75 seconds. Since 2014 it has hovered around 47 seconds. She likens modern life to a cocktail party where you talk to someone for 47 seconds, then turn to the next person, then the next, and the switching itself, she has measured, raises your blood pressure. 

My image showing Gloria Mark sharing her wisdom at SXSW London

Her sharpest warning concerns what psychologists call “depth of processing”. When you wrestle an article into a summary yourself, the effort is what lodges it in memory; you understand it because you struggled with it. “You’re deferring your cognitive work to AI”, she said of the alternative, and “AI is creating a distance between the user and the information”. The thinking that would have changed you never happens. Her own students, asked to summarise a scientific paper with ChatGPT and then unaided, could not explain the AI version back to her; the one they had laboured over themselves, they retained. The brain, she added, runs on a use-it-or-lose-it logic, and the muscle we stop exercising is the one we most need. 

Three recent studies point the same way, and I caught her as she came off stage to ask for the references: one from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon, one from Michael Gerlich at SBS Swiss Business School, and the MIT Media Lab essay experiment that watched, through EEG, the brains of ChatGPT users show the weakest connectivity of any group. We have run this experiment before, with our sense of direction. Ask anyone under 30 to cross a city without a phone, and you will see what a decade of turn-by-turn instructions does to a faculty we no longer exercise.

Mark is no catastrophist. The evidence that social media causes poor mental health in the young, she insists, remains inconclusive, and may run the other way, with struggling teenagers drawn to the platforms rather than harmed into struggling by them. She is watching Australia’s under-16 ban as the closest thing to a real experiment. She is firm, too, that for a gay teenager in rural Montana, or a neurodivergent young person who finds nobody like them at school, social media can be a lifeline rather than a snare. The instruction is not to discard the good with the bad, but to work out for whom a given tool helps and for whom it harms. That nuance is the whole job. Loneliness, meanwhile, is rising worldwide while emotional intelligence falls, and she is unconvinced by the synthetic companions the industry sells as the cure. Apps such as Replika greet you each morning by telling you that you look beautiful today. Real relationships are difficult by design: we learn to read a face, to repair a rupture, to sit with someone else’s disagreement, and a bot that only flatters teaches none of it.

The same worry follows children, and it ran through a roundtable I joined at SXSW London, co-hosted by the futurist and economist Athena Peppes and the parenting psychologist Anita Cleare. Peppes laid out the paradox at the centre of all this. The leaders authorising vast AI budgets, asked which skills they will prize most as the technology spreads, name the human ones every time: judgement, creativity, empathy, resilience. The irony, in her words, is that they invest in “AI tools that remove the friction through which these skills are built”. We are buying machinery that erodes the thing we claim to value, and cutting the entry-level rung where graduates once learned their craft. Sawing the bottom rung off a ladder to economise on rungs is a poor way to lift anyone to the top.

Image created using Nano Banana

Cleare offered an image that hit home. You can buy a child an AI teddy bear that generates a personalised bedtime story about dinosaurs, on demand, for ever. It sounds delightful, yet it is impoverishing, because it removes the productive discomfort of a tired parent reading a book that happens to be about fish, with all the eye contact, negotiation and shared boredom that real reading involves. The drift shows up in the data. The OnSide youth charity’s “Generation Isolation” study, which had YouGov survey more than 5,000 young people across England aged 11 to 18, found that almost four in 10 have already turned to AI for advice, support or company, and that nearly one in five do so because they find it easier than talking to a real person. More than three-quarters said they spend their free time mostly on screens. The children who thrive in an age of AI will not be the ones who used it earliest.

I made two arguments of my own in that room. The first was for a third path between the two exhausting framings of AI, the doom of “it will take your job” and the credulity of leaning on it for everything until your own faculties soften. I call it AI agnosticism: treat the tool as neither saviour nor threat; use it without surrendering to it; be the carpenter, not the nail. 

The second built on a point from Ben Whur, who runs a legal campaigning charity and grew up in Lambeth when the borough had 27 youth clubs and now has three. We debate AI as though everyone stands on a level field, when many families cannot afford the device, the data, or the subscription that the apps require. The enrichment that better-off parents buy in place of those lost youth clubs, the tutors and clubs and stimulating screens, is itself an advantage the poorest cannot reach. So the gap opens at both ends at once: among the children priced out of the tools, and among those handed too many of them too soon. None of the seven human capabilities I return to in my work – collaboration, communication, compassion, courage, critical thinking, creativity and curiosity – can be acquired without friction, because friction is the sensation of a skill being built. A gym works because the weights are heavy. Remove the resistance, and you are left with an expensive chair and atrophied muscles.

So the real choice is not whether to use AI but what we are optimising it for. One participant, who used to run learning programmes at the LEGO Foundation, framed it as the difference between an engagement model and a utility model, between technology built to capture us and technology built to serve us, and pointed to a recent Brookings report making the same case. That distinction decides whether all this prediction and personalisation subtracts from human life or adds to it. The clearest proof I came across in June that the utility path is real I have saved for the end.

The present

It was a month of stages, and then a courtroom.

As mentioned above, I was an official host at London Tech Week; I spent three packed days at London Olympia catching speakers as they came off stage for the 90-second clips that feed the show’s social channels, and recording longer studio conversations built to outlast the week.

Taking the stage at Ericsson Imagine UK

Then, on 11 June, I opened Ericsson’s Imagine UK conference with a keynote on a problem that looks technical and is not. British telecoms has built remarkable infrastructure, the VodafoneThree merger alone committing £11 billion over a decade, yet the UK has slipped to the 10th percentile globally on mobile download speeds, only 9% of traffic uses the 5G Standalone capability already sitting in 42% of handsets, and close to 90% of operators worldwide still have no effective way to price 5G for business. The pipes are bigger than the revenue flowing through them. 

My argument was that this gap is not a technology problem but a collaboration problem, and that the cure is the least fundable thing on any balance sheet: trust between competitors willing to share a network none of them owns. The networks are the muscle and the brain. The part that decides whether they ever pay off is the heart, the relationships and the trust, and it is the part the industry has been underfunding. Elevating 5G, I told the room, is not a network upgrade but a people upgrade. The same holds for almost every organisation now pouring money into AI while starving the human investment that would make it worth anything.

And then jury service, two and a half weeks of it, which finished this morning, with me as foreman. I will say little, and I will name nobody. We found a man guilty on all 19 counts, a list that took in the sexual abuse of a child under 13, rape, and cruelty to children, committed against his two daughters, whom he had groomed over years, and one of whom he had made pregnant. He will be sentenced in September and may not see the outside of a prison for a long time. 

After a fortnight of confident talk about frictionless futures in early June, there is clarity in sitting in a courtroom and watching the slowest, most human machinery we have do the one thing no algorithm should be trusted to do: weigh a life. It is fragile and exhausting work. It was stop-start; delays were constant; at one point the judge worked through what should have been her holiday to keep the case moving.

What made it hard in this case was the lack of a “smoking gun”. No single piece of physical proof settled it. It came down, in the end, to the defendant’s word against his daughters’, and to 12 of us deciding whom was telling the truth. The judge gave us careful direction on how to weigh that: what a truthful account tends to look like, what can be performed, and what is very hard to fake. A memory that surfaces unbidden, fractured and specific, is a different thing from a story built to persuade, and if you listen closely for long enough, the difference declares itself.

That is a profoundly human act, and I don’t believe it can be outsourced. There is now a whole industry selling AI lie detection and emotion recognition tools that claim to read a face and score its honesty. In that jury box, I became certain that what we were doing, weighing a person’s credibility against the entire texture of what they said and how they said it, is not something I would hand to a machine, nor something I think a machine can do. The eldest daughter’s courage in coming forward, and in reliving what she did so that we could reach a verdict, is not a data point. It was the case.

There is a sharp irony in what convicted him. Alongside that human judgement, it was technology that helped: phone records, messages, the digital exhaust we all leave behind, turned to the service of two children failed by every softer safeguard. The machine could preserve the evidence. It could not weigh the truth. That line, between what technology can hold and what only a person can judge, is the whole of this newsletter in a single fortnight. The machinery is never the question. The use we put it to is.

Having been wholly consumed by the trial for over a fortnight (the average jury duty is two weeks), I feel such deep relief that 12 strangers were able to work together to change the course of two young girls’ lives for the better. I also feel quite emotionally spent this evening. We jurors can sleep well tonight. (Thank you!)

The past

After a fortnight like that, my mind reached for gentler ground, and – given the men’s football World Cup is in full swing – found a muddy pitch.

Twenty-five years ago, in the autumn of 2001, I arrived at the University of St Andrews, and the following year I founded a football club called The Strokers, named with all the gravity you would expect of a student side. It endures: there is still a Strokers team turning out in St Andrews, and an offshoot I later brought south is still playing Sunday league in London. 

My first university tutorial held me, a fellow student named Will, and seven female students, and it took place four years before Facebook, five before Twitter and six before the first iPhone. We arranged to meet by knocking on doors. We fell out and made up in person, because there was no other way to do it.

Will, as it turned out, went on to rather more than Sunday league. I will only say that, in my occasional and ill-advised capacity as team selector, I once kept the future King of the United Kingdom on the bench for a full 90 minutes, a decision I have had a quarter of a century to regret. (For the literal-minded and the legally cautious: the anecdote is offered in the spirit of fond exaggeration, and no future monarch’s centre-half career was harmed in the making of this newsletter.)

Spot the future human-work-evolution storyteller, and the future monarch

Sunday league is one of the last reliably friction-rich rituals we have left. You turn up in the cold, you talk to people you would otherwise never meet, you lose, and you repair to the pub. It is the opposite of the digital cocoon Gloria Mark describes, in which we venture out less, walk faster, and wear headphones to ward off the chance encounter. With the World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico now filling every screen, the point feels timely. The tournament is a vast act of shared, in-person congregation, and even its great modern grievance, the video assistant referee, is at heart a quarrel about how much human judgement we will hand to a machine for the sake of a technically correct decision. 

Ask any supporter whether VAR improved the game and you will discover that people forgive a human error far sooner than a correct ruling that took four minutes and strangled the celebration. We do not merely tolerate friction. Now and then we love it. And if England are to end 60 years of hurt on 19 July, it will be down to the three things no algorithm can supply for them: collaboration, communication and the nerve to take a chance.

Tech for good: Homewards

Which returns me to the William who really was at London Tech Week, and the most hopeful thing I saw there, from a tech-for-good perspective. His Homewards charity programme has launched a Homelessness Data Lab, built with Salesforce and the property charity LandAid, in partnership with more than 25 organisations, including Accenture, NatWest and Bloomberg. 

The idea is to take the predictive techniques businesses already use, the same machinery that powers the engagement economy, and aim them at prevention instead, reading the warning signs that tend to cluster before someone loses their home: a missed bill, a phone cut off, a child suddenly absent from school. As the Prince told the room, “so many of your customers, your clients, will be using data through banks, through the phones, that I’m not sure you realise how much of that data can be used to predict and see problems with potential homelessness before the action arrives”. His case for it was disarmingly plain: “The earlier upstream you deal with the problem, the better. As we all know, in life, prevention is better than the cure.”

More than 430,000 people face homelessness in the UK, half of them children, and as Salesforce UK and Ireland’s chief executive Zahra Bahrololoumi put it, homelessness is rarely random. It is often predictable, and what is predictable can be prevented. One of the lab’s first tools, an Economic Wellbeing Explorer built on anonymised banking data, is being trialled in Lambeth, the same borough whose vanished youth clubs Ben Whur described earlier, which is a neat illustration of the two faces of the same data: it can map where a community is fraying, or it can be left to do nothing while the clubs close.

This is the utility model the rest of this newsletter has been circling, and the consoling other face of what I saw in court. The same prediction that can be tuned to keep us scrolling or steer an agent toward a paid placement can instead read the warning signs in the data and reach a family before the crisis arrives. Identical technology, opposite intent. We spend a great deal of effort asking what AI will do to us. The better question, the one Homewards answers and the one the whole of this edition keeps returning to, is what we will choose to do with it.

Statistics of the month

🧠 The white-collar exodus. One in three knowledge workers say they are looking to change industry because of AI, rising to 41% among Gen Z, with a quarter eyeing more “AI-proof” manual work. (Adaptavist)

🦻 Low-tech, high-return longevity. Three cheap measures, home-safety improvements, exercise programmes and wider access to hearing aids, could prevent 400 million falls and 2.4 million dementia cases, and unlock $5.8 trillion in healthcare savings by 2040. (World Economic Forum, The Longevity Dividend)

⚽ Sport as an economy. The World Economic Forum ranks sport among the top 10 industries driving growth to 2030 and projects the global sports economy could reach $8.8 trillion by 2050. (World Economic Forum)

🧩 The neurodivergent jobs gap. Neurodivergent jobseekers spend roughly five times longer searching than the national norm, 23.4% of them for more than two years, while only 9.1% feel consistently valued once in work. (Mentra)

🏳️‍🌈 A good place to live. A global median of 40% of adults across 120 countries say their area is a good place for gay and lesbian people to live, against 44% who say it is not. (Gallup)

If you’re reading this – thank you – and haven’t yet subscribed, you can sign up for Go Flux Yourself (there should be a pop-up). Please feel free to share it with friends and colleagues, too. Each edition lands on the last day of the month.

Get in touch: oliver@pickup.media. I write, speak, and strategise on the future of work, AI, and human capability. For speaking enquiries, contact Pomona Partners.

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating Human-Work Evolution (No. 26)

TL;DR: February’s Go Flux Yourself examines AI’s failure of women and girls, from deepfakes and biased recruitment tools to the structural exclusion of female voices from the systems being built. It asks why the human skills the AI age demands most are the ones we’ve spent decades undervaluing.

Image created by Midjourney

The future

“There are billions of dollars being invested globally in the belief that AI represents a brilliant new future, which must be pursued at all costs. At present, for women and girls, that promise is a lie.”

These words come from Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and author of The New Age of Sexism, writing in the Financial Times. I read her essay last Saturday morning over a cup of fresh-cut lemon and ginger tea, and the superb piece soured my weekend. It landed, by chance or perhaps editorial design, a fortnight before International Women’s Day (Sunday 8 March), whose 2026 theme is “Give To Gain“, the idea being that when people, organisations, and communities invest in women, the returns are shared. When women thrive, we all rise.

That sounds hopeful. But it rings hollow without confronting what artificial intelligence is actually doing to women and girls right now. And this month’s Go Flux Yourself is written squarely with them in mind.

The details, listed in Bates’s article, are grim. In late December, xAI’s Grok tool was used to generate millions of non-consensual intimate images of women over just nine days. Requests to add bruises, blood, and bullet holes to women’s photos were instantly granted. So-called “nudify” apps have been downloaded more than 700 million times worldwide, generating $117 million in revenue, with Apple and Google taking a cut. When Elon Musk’s company was confronted with the outcry, it didn’t disable the feature. It restricted it to paying subscribers, monetising the abuse instead of stopping it.

But Bates’s argument goes deeper than deepfakes. Research published last August by the London School of Economics found that AI tools already used by more than half of England’s councils were downplaying women’s medical conditions. Meanwhile, a 2025 German study found that ChatGPT consistently advised women to ask for lower salaries than men, even when both had identical qualifications – in one case, a disparity of more than $100,000. And a University of Melbourne study found that 42% of global companies are already using predictive AI systems in recruitment, despite repeated expert warnings that such tools may actively discriminate against female applicants, as well as candidates wearing headscarves and those with “Black-sounding names”.

According to UNESCO, women globally make up just 12% of AI researchers and 6% of software developers. Additionally, female founders receive only 2.3% of venture capital funding. As Bates puts it: “We are not the ones building this new world. But we will have no choice about living in it”.

These are not edge cases or teething problems. They are the architecture of a system designed largely without women’s input, now being deployed at scale. It’s as though someone built a city, forgot to consult half the population, and is now surprised that the buildings don’t have doors the right size.

At the precise moment AI is amplifying old patterns of gendered power, the skills the AI age demands most – curiosity, empathy, critical thinking, collaboration – are the ones that women have been practising in leadership for decades, usually without much credit. The evidence shows they produce results. And yet inclusion programmes are being scaled back, entry-level roles are vanishing, and the old metrics still reward the loudest voice in the room. We’ve discovered the antidote to the disease, and we’re pouring it down the drain.

For these reasons, it’s worth listening carefully to the people building the technology itself. Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, one of the most powerful AI systems in the world, put it smartly in an interview with ABC News earlier this month. Amodei studied literature at university. Not computer science. Not mathematics. Literature. She now runs a company at the frontier of a technology that could reshape every industry on the planet. And her message to young people entering the workforce? Learn to communicate. Develop emotional intelligence. Be curious and compassionate.

“I actually think studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever,” she said. “The things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important”.

Even JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, not a man known for sentimentality, told an audience in December that young people should focus on communication and critical thinking. Get those right, he said, and “you’ll have plenty of jobs”. When the head of the world’s largest bank starts sounding like a humanities professor, something significant is happening.

The message from the top of the technology industry is clear: human skills are the future. So why aren’t we investing in the people who’ve been practising them longest?

Helen Wada spent 12 years at KPMG, rising to Global Client Leader. She’s a chartered accountant, an executive coach, and the founder of The Human Advantage. Her book, HUMAN-WISE: How to lead from within and sell with confidence, is published next week, on 3 March, just a handful of days before International Women’s Day. The timing is not coincidental.

When I spoke to her, she told me about a client meeting she’d coached recently. A team had spent months cultivating a business relationship, carefully building trust and rapport. They were close to converting. Then a senior leader who hadn’t been involved was brought in. His approach? “We’ve done two pre-sales meetings. Let’s go in for the kill.” He destroyed what they’d built. Because his metrics rewarded speed and aggression, not the patient work that had created the opportunity in the first place.

That anecdote, Helen says, is the problem in miniature. Performance is still measured through individual targets and personal visibility, with little recognition for collaboration or shared success. Women face a persistent double bind. Lead with empathy, and you’re seen as lacking commercial edge. Step into more direct territory and the language shifts: “too assertive”, “too challenging”, “not quite the right fit”.

“The behaviours are rarely the issue,” she said. “It’s the interpretation that holds people back”.

Helen’s argument – and it’s a compelling one – is that the familiar question should be flipped entirely. Instead of asking how women can lead more like men, we should ask how men can lead more like women: by bringing curiosity, collaboration, and coaching to every conversation. The companies that do this outperform. The ones that don’t keep wondering why their culture feels like it’s running on fumes.

McKinsey’s 2023 research found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are around 27% more likely to outperform their peers financially – a statistic so well-worn it’s practically wallpaper. Yet, the gap between knowing and doing remains vast.

The talent pipeline, meanwhile, is cracking. Graduate jobs in the UK have fallen by roughly two-thirds in the past three years. If you remove the first rung of a ladder, it doesn’t matter how progressive the penthouse is: nobody can reach it.

Heather Delaney, the American-born founder of London-based tech communications firm Gallium Ventures, where the majority of staff are women, has been watching this trend closely. She built and scaled Dynamo from a three-person team to a global agency before leaving what she describes as a toxic environment. Now she hires deliberately from non-traditional backgrounds, including through apprenticeship schemes.

“Some of the best employees I’ve hired lack degrees but are hungry and curious,” she told me. “Those traits can’t be taught. What I look for is the ability to ask questions.”

What worries Heather most is that AI threatens the junior roles that produce future leaders. “If AI handles research and entry-level tasks, those roles may disappear entirely. That denies future leaders their start.” The industry, she predicts, will swing hard into AI and then correct back towards the human. “Ideas, personal contacts, and relationships are indispensable.” But the correction won’t help if a generation of talent has already been lost. You can’t replant a forest that’s been clear-cut and expect shade by lunchtime.

Anna Vignoles, director of the Leverhulme Trust and a leading education researcher, sees the challenge from the other end of the telescope. I spoke to her shortly after her first visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos in mid-January, where she’d appeared on a panel chaired by William Hague called “Defying Cognitive Atrophy“, exploring how AI could strengthen or erode human thinking. The session examined the overarching paradox that sits at the heart of this newsletter: cognitive skills are becoming more economically valuable, yet humans are outsourcing more of those functions than ever.

“We’re up against evolutionary biology,” Anna told the Davos audience. “All species like to conserve energy. Humans are no different. Learning takes effort. When you’re an adult, outsourcing your cognitive thinking might be fine. But as a child, if you don’t get the chance to develop those cognitive skills, to develop those neural pathways, we’re in trouble.”

On the global picture, she was sobering. “There are still 120 million girls not in education. Predominantly in low-income countries. That remains one of the most significant problems we face.”

In developed countries, the picture is more nuanced. While women’s participation and achievement in higher education have increased substantially, a reverse trend has emerged: boys, particularly from low-income backgrounds, are underachieving across multiple stages of the education system.

AI, Anna argues, risks widening both gaps. “The impact depends entirely on the user’s experience level,” she told me. “For experienced professionals, it’s a useful tool. For new entrants, reliance on AI could prevent them from mastering foundational job skills. You need clever, informed, experienced humans in the loop, and if AI cuts off the pipeline that produces them, we have a serious problem.”

She’s particularly worried about equity. AI tutors will be commercialised. Access will depend on the ability to pay. Large corporations will build bespoke systems. SMEs will be stuck with whatever comes out of the box. That gap will compound everything else. And as she pointed out at Davos: “You only get one shot at being five-years old. What we might do in business about a difficult transition can’t necessarily apply to the school system.”

Her advice for parents, though, was reassuringly old-fashioned: read widely, develop critical thinking, and understand data and statistics. The challenge is convincing children that these foundations matter when AI seems to offer them a shortcut. Trying to persuade a teenager to build their own sandcastle when a machine can produce a replica palace in seconds is, to put it mildly, a hard sell.

The pattern across these conversations matters for International Women’s Day. The AI age demands human skills. Human skills have been systematically undervalued. The people who’ve been developing them – often women, often in roles that don’t attract the flashiest titles – are exactly the people organisations need most. And yet the technology itself actively encodes the biases that held women back in the first place.

But smart women are already making smart decisions. Amodei, a literature graduate, runs one of the most consequential AI companies on the planet – not despite her humanities background, but because of it. Helen is reframing what leadership looks like, arguing that the qualities dismissed as “soft” produce hard commercial results. Heather and Anna, from opposite ends of the talent pipeline, are both insisting that curiosity and access matter more than credentials and postcode. These are not women waiting for permission.

The 2026 IWD theme is Give To Gain, as mentioned at the top of this piece. The premise is that when we invest in women – through mentoring, education, resources, and visibility – the returns are shared. Giving isn’t subtraction. It’s multiplication.

The challenge for the rest of us, and for every organisation claiming to take AI seriously, is whether we’re prepared to give generously enough to gain what genuinely matters. Or whether we’ll keep measuring what’s easy to count and ignoring what keeps the whole thing standing.

The present

Last weekend, the Baftas took place at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The headlines were dominated by John Davidson, the Tourette syndrome campaigner whose life inspired the film I Swear, involuntarily shouting a racial slur while Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presenting onstage. The BBC, broadcasting on a two-hour delay, failed to edit it out. That story will run and run, probably until more people at the BBC are forced to resign.

But it overshadowed something I think is more significant, which I picked up from the FT’s coverage ahead of the event. Bafta chair Sara Putt told the paper that her organisation has introduced “human creativity” as an explicit criterion for its awards. AI-generated performances are now banned from acting categories. The London-based Mise En Scène Company has gone further, labelling all its film titles “No AI Used” and calling for a certification system comparable to fair trade or organic labelling.

Image created by Nano Banana

When one of the most established institutions in British culture feels the need to specify that its awards celebrate human achievement, something fundamental has shifted. (And the person making that bold call is a woman.) Putt looked at the encroachment of generative AI into creative industries and drew a line. That takes judgment and nerve. It also raises a question worth asking across every sector: should other industries introduce their own version of a “human creativity” standard? What would it look like in consulting, in journalism, in education? The smartest decisions being made about AI right now – where to draw boundaries, what to protect – are disproportionately being made by women. Not exclusively. But the pattern across this edition is hard to ignore.

Meanwhile, Hull-hewn Robert Aramayo’s best actor win for I Swear, beating Hollywood stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Timothée Chalamet, was itself a quiet triumph of human storytelling over star power. Sometimes the most powerful films are the ones that make you uncomfortable.

Away from cinematic glitz, every Friday morning for the past month, I’ve been filming myself talking unscripted, for around three minutes, about whatever I’ve seen, heard, and thought about that week regarding human-work evolution. I call it Thank Flux it’s Friday, and it’s making the most of an “AI slopportunity”. Certainly, in a world where an estimated 90% of online content is now AI-generated, there’s a premium on content that is visibly, unmistakably human. And TFIF is a work in progress, for sure. (You can see the (slow) progression of rawness and production values here, on my new Go Flux Yourself YouTube channel.)

Earlier this month, I was at The RSA for The Observer‘s event on AI, hosted by James Harding and featuring its new Global AI Index. Only 35% of people in the UK use AI, the index found, ranking the country 15th (despite being fourth overall) in implementation “due to lower public acceptance”. Is that reluctance, or discernment? Maybe both.

Next week I’ll be in Paris for a pharmaceutical company, recording stories and moderating a podcast with their scientists. Every person I’m speaking to could have taken a more lucrative position at a big tech firm. They chose instead to focus on saving lives. It harks back to what Rutger Bregman described in November’s Go Flux Yourself as the “Bermuda Triangle of Talent”: the way consultancy, finance, and law firms hoover up brilliant minds who entered university wanting to cure diseases, and redirect them towards helping people click ads. The scientists in Paris climbed the ladder that was worth climbing. They have the “moral ambition” that the Dutch historian says we should all strive for.

Looking ahead, I’m in discussions to speak at both SXSW London and London Tech Week in June. I’ve also been invited to deliver a keynote for a major telecoms company during London Tech Week, examining why faster networks don’t seem to foster deeper human connections.

If the IWD theme is Give To Gain, consider this an open invitation. I’m always looking for interviews, case studies, and examples of organisations genuinely investing in human capability alongside AI adoption. Send them my way: oliver@pickup.media.

The past

Four years ago, on 24 February, Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. Vladimir Putin expected Kyiv to fall within days. Soldiers reportedly packed parade uniforms. They didn’t need them. There’s no sign they’ll need them anytime soon.

What has happened since constitutes the most significant real-world laboratory for AI that has ever existed. And it tells us something profoundly uncomfortable about where AI is headed, in the workplace and beyond.

When we talk about AI at work, we tend to discuss chatbots and productivity tools, quarterly earnings calls and Big Four reports. But the starkest test of AI’s capabilities isn’t happening in a Silicon Valley campus or a London boardroom. It’s happening in the mud and rubble of eastern Ukraine, where drones now account for roughly 70-80% of all of Russia’s battlefield casualties.

Image created by Nano Banana

The numbers are staggering. Ukraine produced around 800,000 drones in 2023. By 2024, that figure hit two million. In 2025, production reached at least four million. Russia established its own Unmanned Systems Forces in November 2025, mirroring Ukraine’s earlier move to create the world’s first dedicated military drone unit.

But the truly unsettling part isn’t the volume. It’s the intelligence. Ukrainian forces have taken publicly available AI models, retrained them on classified real-world battlefield data, and deployed them on drones that can autonomously fly the final 100 to 1,000 metres to their targets. According to research by Kateryna Bondar at CSIS, this AI-enabled autonomous navigation raises strike success rates from around 10-20% with manual control to 70-80%. That isn’t an incremental improvement. It’s a transformation. 

Bondar, a Ukrainian-American scholar, former adviser to Kyiv’s government, and a fellow at CSIS’s Wadhwani AI Center, told Breaking Defense that while fewer than 0.5% of Ukraine’s drones had AI guidance in 2024, the military aimed for 50% in 2025. If realised, that would mean roughly a million AI-assisted drones, each three or four times more likely to hit their target.

The innovation cycle is another thing altogether. In 2022, new battlefield technologies lasted about seven months before being superseded. By early 2025, that cycle had collapsed to just four to six weeks. Samuel Bendett, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, observed that three years of war had generated “centuries’ worth of data” from air, space, ground, and cyber sources. That data is now training the next generation of autonomous systems.

As Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg warned at a Vienna conference on autonomous weapons, this is the “Oppenheimer moment of our generation”.

In 2017, the Future of Life Institute and Berkeley professor Stuart Russell released a short film called Slaughterbots. It depicted a near future in which palm-sized autonomous drones used facial recognition to shape explosives and assassinate targets. A tech executive pitches that nuclear weapons are now “obsolete”: a $25-million order of drones can kill half a city. The film was screened at a United Nations convention on autonomous weapons in Geneva that same month. I remember watching it nine years ago and finding it alarming. But it feels like we are already reaching the “futuristic” capabilities warned about via this dark eight-minute video less than a decade ago.

Earlier this month, CNN reported that Russia has begun deploying drones with motion sensors that fly into the battlefield, wait for infantry to pass, and then detonate. Imagine that: a machine, hovering silently in a trench or a ruined building, making a decision to kill based on movement. No human finger on the trigger. The technology Russia is deploying in Ukraine is uncomfortably close to the scenario Russell warned us about. The open question is not whether this technology exists. It’s whether it’s in the right hands, on and away from the battlefield. And on current evidence, the answer to that should keep all of us awake at night.

With it being International Women’s Day next Sunday, consider this: some of the most consequential figures in this AI revolution are women. Bondar’s research at CSIS has become essential reading for Western defence strategists.

Kateryna Chernohorenko, a lawyer by training, became Ukraine’s Deputy Defence Minister for Digital Development and initiated the “Army of Drones” project that fundamentally changed how the country fights. She led the Drone Coalition – attracting 18 partner nations and raising €2.2 billion – and integrated the Avengers AI platform into battlefield surveillance, enabling automated detection of enemy equipment from drone footage in roughly two seconds.

Lyuba Shipovich runs Dignitas Ukraine, a volunteer-driven nonprofit that provides technology support to the Ukrainian army. Kateryna Bezsudna leads a defence tech startup accelerator where products must be operational within six months, the average window before Russia introduces a new weapon.

And on the front lines, technology has opened doors that were firmly shut. More than 70,000 women served in Ukraine’s military in 2025, a 20% increase since 2022. Drone piloting has become one of the most popular combat roles for women. A soldier known as Yaha joined the army in 2023 and was told by commanders to replace the cook when she asked about drone training. She spent her kitchen shifts studying manuals and practising on a simulator she bought herself. She’s now a bomber-drone pilot in the 9th Brigade. As she told the Associated Press: “I liked that you could strike the enemy remotely. So I thought this was our future”.

She’s right, it is. But are we prepared for it? Nobody’s life depends on whether your marketing team adopts AI properly. But the underlying dynamics are identical: the speed of technological change outpacing human adaptation, the ethical questions we’re failing to answer, the gap between those building the tools and those creating the governance, and the stubborn institutional resistance to letting talented people do what they’re capable of, regardless of who they are.

Ukraine is producing a generation of technologists battle-tested in ways no corporate innovation lab could replicate. When this war eventually ends, tens of thousands of people – men and women – will carry expertise in AI, robotics, electronic warfare, and rapid-cycle innovation into civilian life. The countries and companies smart enough to learn from them will have an extraordinary advantage. As Oleksandra Ustinova, a Ukrainian member of parliament, put it bluntly: “If your drone hasn’t been tested in Ukraine, it’s still just a toy”.

We owe it to the people fighting – and dying – in this conflict to take the implications seriously. Not just for defence policy, but for how we govern AI, how we invest in human capability alongside technological capability, and how we ensure that the people driving these transformations aren’t sidelined because they happen to be women, or young, or from a country that doesn’t make the front pages any longer.

Four years on, Ukraine hasn’t fallen. But the world it’s fighting in has changed beyond recognition. And so has ours.

Tech for good: Luca Health and saving rugby from itself

The Six Nations rugby tournament is back, and with it the annual ritual of grown adults screaming at a television as though tactical advice delivered at volume might somehow reach the coaching staff. England’s men head to Rome and then Paris in March. The Women’s Six Nations kicks off in April, with the Red Roses defending a crown that now includes both the Six Nations title and last summer’s Rugby World Cup. That World Cup triumph capped a remarkable summer period for English women’s sport: Sarina Wiegman’s Lionesses won the 2022 and 2025 European Championships and reached the 2023 World Cup final, making them arguably the most successful English team – male or female – in sporting history. 

Rugby is very much in our household right now. My son Freddie, who is 11 and rugby mad, has just been offered a place at a secondary school with a strong rugby programme and links to several London clubs. His current ambition is to become a professional rugby player. The school may have other ideas – it seems rather keen on well-rounding its students – but for now, weekends revolve around matches, bruises, and the kind of post-game mud that no washing machine was designed to handle.

But being the parent of a young rugby player means you live with a low-level hum of anxiety that never entirely switches off: concussion. It’s the word that hangs over the sport like a weather front. More than a thousand former professional players are suing the RFU and World Rugby. Former internationals – heroes to children like Freddie – are being diagnosed with early-onset dementia in their forties and fifties. World Cup winners can’t recall details of the biggest game of their lives. Some have publicly said they love the game but wouldn’t let their own children play it.

Which is why this month’s tech for good story matters. Nick Greenhalgh came through the academy at Northampton Saints alongside Courtney Lawes, now an investor in his business. Nick gained a professional contract, but injuries ended his playing career early. He walked away, completed an MBA, and spent six years in tech before founding Luca Health, a concussion management platform for grassroots sport.

Nick of Luca Health

The problem Luca solves is deceptively simple and alarmingly widespread. When a child takes a knock to the head at a school match or a Sunday morning club game, what happens next? The school nurse isn’t qualified to diagnose a concussion. The local GP probably isn’t familiar with the latest protocols either. A&E will filter for traumatic brain injury (bleeds, swelling) and send a concussed child home with a leaflet. In most grassroots settings, there is no specialist in the loop. No system. No follow-up.

Luca fills that gap. Schools and clubs get a dashboard showing every player: who’s on a return-to-play protocol, who isn’t, and what stage they’re at. Within each child’s profile, you can see incident history, clinical notes from telehealth consultations, symptom reports, and objective test data from the Luca app. Players complete a baseline battery on their phones: memory exercises, reaction-time games, spatial reasoning, plus eye-tracking and pupil-constriction tests that use the smartphone camera and AI to measure what was previously possible only with specialist hardware. After an incident, follow-up tests are compared against that baseline.

There’s no single test that definitively confirms a concussion; it remains an inherently subjective diagnosis. But Luca is making it as data-driven and objective as the science currently allows. Teachers are notified about classroom allowances. Parents can log in and see where their child is on the protocol. Coaches can log incidents in real time. It’s the kind of infrastructure that should exist everywhere but simply doesn’t.

Nick was put on to me by the journalist Sam Peters, author of Concussion, who has done more than almost anyone to drag this issue into the light. Courtney Lawes and Alex Waller – holder of the Premiership appearance record – are both investors. Luca is currently working with 10 schools and clubs and plans to reach 25 by September. Nick’s two-year ambition? To work with governing bodies so that anyone playing community rugby or hockey in this country has access to specialist concussion support. State schools remain the challenge: the economics of volunteer-led clubs and underfunded state sport make scaling difficult, and corporate sponsorship may be the answer.

I asked Nick what keeps him going. His answer was simple: confidence. Not for himself, but for parents. “We want parents to feel confident that if their kid takes a knock, there’s a proper system in place. Because without that confidence, they’ll pull their kids out. And then the sport dies.”

Here we have technology supporting human judgment rather than replacing it, and protecting young heads rather than optimising for profit. With Freddie lacing up his boots every weekend, it couldn’t feel more personal.

Statistics of the month

🎭 Pretending to be fine
Nearly seven in ten UK employees now admit to pretending to be well at work when they’re not – up from 51% in 2021. Money worries (49%), a lack of understanding from management (26%), and health stigma (19%) are the main reasons. The cost of this “pleasanteeism”? An estimated £21 billion in lost output annually. (Lime Health / Censuswide)

💰 Finance stress is costing us
Some 83% of UK workers say they’ve taken time off in the past year due to stress, anxiety, or illness linked to personal finance concerns. Employees spend an average of 2.24 hours per month handling personal finances while on the clock. (Stream)

🤖 The scam ad epidemic
Nearly one in three Meta ads running in the EU and UK over a 23-day analysis period were scams, based on a study of 14.5 million ads and 10.7 billion impressions. More than half of those scam ads were driven by just 10 advertisers, pointing to coordinated, industrial-scale operations. (Gen / Norton)

🧒 Banning won’t fix it
While 78% of UK adults support banning under-16s from social media, most expect young users to bypass restrictions: 75% say children would lie about their age or use fake accounts, and 67% believe a ban could push young people towards more dangerous, less moderated online spaces. (Harris Poll UK)

📉 Youth unemployment bites
UK unemployment hit 5.2% in February, the highest in almost five years. Among 16 to 24-year-olds, 16.1% don’t have a job, the weakest figure in over a decade. For a generation told that education was the route to opportunity, the landing zone looks increasingly barren. (ONS)

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, you can sign up for Go Flux Yourself (there should be a pop-up). Each edition lands on the last day of the month.

Get in touch: oliver@pickup.media. I write, speak, and strategise on the future of work, AI, and human capability. For speaking enquiries, contact Pomona Partners.

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)

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. 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. 7)

TL;DR: July’s cheery (!) Go Flux Yourself considers the end of knowledge and culture as we know it thanks to artificial general intelligence, technology-induced ‘relationship decay’, HR dissonance, and the breathtaking beauty of human skill …

Image created on Midjourney with the prompt “a massive meteor with an evil AI face about to crash down on Earth while ignorant people look at their smartphones in the style of an Edvard Munch painting”

The future

“The realisation of artificial general intelligence would be like a meteor coming down from above, stopping culture and knowledge as we know it.”

These are the words of warning from Gerd Leonhard, the German futurist with whom I have collaborated a few times, fortunately. Back in 2018, Gerd – a former musician who studied at Boston’s Berklee College of Music (he has a brilliant story about how jazz trumpeting great Miles Davis visited and played just one note that had all the students spellbound) – invited me over to the south of France to shape and sharpen his messaging around the brawl, as he saw it, between humans and tech. 

Gerd published Technology vs. Humanity a couple of years earlier, but with things moving quickly, he engaged me to keep things fresh. He is always worth listening to and learning from, and I’m grateful that we have continued the conversation over the years – before, during, and now after the coronavirus pandemic. We caught up again recently, earlier in July, after Gerd delivered a hard-hitting webinar from which the above line comes. (I recommend you to watch the 41-minute talk here.)

As an aside, I had a good cackle at this dark cartoon Gerd used in his talk, too.

Back to the meteor idea, which is a twist on the 2021 apocalyptic political satire and black comedy Don’t Look Up, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Last year Gerd produced a short film called Look Up Now.

Imagine a meteor hurtling towards Earth, not of rock and ice, but of silicon and code. This celestial body doesn’t threaten our physical existence but rather our monopoly on knowledge and intellect. This is Gerd’s stark vision of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

“We thought the idea of the asteroid hitting the earth would be good for the idea of AGI,” he tells me. “Because AI – and intelligent assistants (IA) – by itself is a big change, but it’s not existential in the sense of fundamentally changing everything. But a machine that would be generally intelligent that could surpass us in every possible cognitive job would be like an asteroid hitting us because it would basically be complete unemployment afterwards except for physical jobs.”

This looming “knowledge meteor” isn’t just a hypothetical scenario for the distant future. It’s a reality actively pursued by some of the world’s most powerful tech companies. As Gerd notes: “The biggest business ever is to replace humans with machines.”

The race towards AGI – or the singularity, or superintelligence, depending on your preferred phraseology – represents a seismic shift in human history that could redefine our role in the world. Yet, as with the fictional comet in Don’t Look Up, there’s an alarming lack of urgency in addressing this existential challenge. 

While governments and regulatory bodies are beginning to grapple with the implications of AI, their efforts often fall short of the mark. For instance, the UK’s recent pledge to “get a handle” on AI lacks clear definitions and concrete action plans. 

Meanwhile, the drive to dominate AI development continues unabated in the United States, with Donald Trump’s team planning a “Manhattan Project on AI”, according to a Washington Post report in mid-July. This plan includes creating industry-led agencies to study AI models and protect them from foreign powers, with a section ominously titled “Make America First in AI”.

The original Manhattan Project, started during World War II, led to the production of the world’s first nuclear weapons. “If we started a Manhattan Project for AI, we’re essentially saying you have unlimited resources, unlimited freedom, and no moral constraints,” says Gerd. “It’s inviting all the mad scientists who just want to build whatever they can without any consideration for ethical and moral issues.”

Certainly, the historical parallel is chilling, reminding us of the unforeseen consequences that can arise from unbridled technological advancement. Who, Gerd asks, will serve as humanity’s “mission control” in this high-stakes environment? There’s no clear answer. 

Unlike previous existential threats like nuclear weapons or climate change, AGI development is largely driven by private companies motivated by profit rather than public interest. Indeed, arguably the most influential person in this space, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, has the motto “No one knows what happens next” above his desk – as I pointed out in January’s inaugural Go Flux Yourself.

The financial incentives driving AI development are enormous, creating what Gerd describes as “a huge temptation to rush ahead without considering the consequences of building something larger than us”. This sprint towards AGI is particularly concerning, given the potential implications. An entity that “knows everything about everybody at any given time and combines that in a digital brain of an IQ of one billion,” Gerd argues, “cannot possibly end well for us.”

It’s important to stress that my Swiss-based friend is not arguing against all AI development. He distinguishes between narrow AI or “intelligent assistants” and AGI. The former, he believes, can be “extremely useful for businesses like better software, offering us powerful solutions, more efficiency”. The latter – a general intelligence surpassing human capabilities across the board – poses existential risks.

This nuanced view is crucial as we navigate the future of AI. It’s not about halting progress but about directing it responsibly. Hence why the Manhattan Project on AI, which would likely trigger an arms race, is bad news for humanity.

“The wolf you feed is the wolf that wins,” points out Gerd. We have to feed the right wolf, and must prioritise human values alongside technological progress. It’s incredibly challenging, of course, and requires meaningful collaboration between policymakers, AI researchers, ethicists, and business leaders. But by developing a shared understanding of AI’s potential and pitfalls, we can craft regulations that foster innovation while protecting society’s interests – before it’s too late.

The present

While the aforementioned meteor is not yet in our orbit, thankfully, there are plenty of examples of how technology other than AGI is negatively impacting our lives. Last month, I wrote about the rising “loneliness epidemic”. 

Shortly afterwards, I interviewed Eric Mosley, CEO of WorkHuman, who offers a stark image of the current business landscape, where the fabric of workplace relationships is fraying badly.

“What is obvious to everyone is that the less you interact with people physically, the more destructive that is to the relationship capital and the relationship infrastructure in companies,” the Boston-based Irishman says. This decay in social connections isn’t just a fleeting trend – it’s a fundamental shift that threatens the foundations of corporate culture.

The pandemic-induced shift to remote work initially rode on the coattails of pre-existing relationships. However, as Eric continues: “Now we’re years into this and have a much more prevalent work-from-home culture. Relationship decay is real, and culture is affected by that.”

That phrase, relationship decay, is perfect for revealing how rotten things are – at work, and elsewhere. Yet the erosion of workplace bonds manifests in subtle yet profound ways. The casual conversations before and after meetings, the impromptu chats by the coffee machine – these seemingly insignificant interactions are the lifeblood of a vibrant business culture. 

In their absence, we’re left with what Eric describes as a sterile, transactional work environment. “You join a Zoom call, conduct your business, then disconnect and retreat to your pathetic little kitchen for tea. There’s no genuine interaction – it’s a cycle of isolation.”

The cumulative effect of these missed connections is staggering. “You have to understand the compounding effect of that difference across thousands of company interactions over years,” Eric warns. “It adds up to a profound difference.”

This relationship decay has given rise to a new breed of employee – the “mentally transient” worker. These individuals, lacking strong ties to their colleagues or a sense of community, are merely going through the motions.

Yet, herein lies a paradox that HR professionals must grapple with. Despite the obvious detrimental effects of reduced physical interaction, employees continue to push for more remote work options. Eric describes this as a “complete dissonance and disconnect between the reality of what that results in and the desire of companies to counteract it”.

This dissonance presents a significant challenge for HR leaders. How do you balance the desire for flexibility with the need for meaningful workplace connections? The solution lies in reimagining the office as a hub for collaboration and community-building rather than a mandatory daily destination.

As businesses grapple with these shifts in workplace dynamics, we must also be mindful of unintended consequences in other areas. This last week, I interviewed Nicola Millard, Principal Innovation Partner at BT Group, for a piece previewing the London version of Digital Transformation EXPO (where I’ll be on stage again in October). She highlights an emerging trend that parallels the workplace disconnect, “shadow customers” – people who lack the confidence or ability to navigate digital platforms. 

She exemplifies this through her personal experience, acting as a digital proxy for her 86-year-old Mother. While her Mum can make telephone calls, Nicola handles all online interactions, from shopping to managing accounts, effectively becoming the “customer behind the customer” in an increasingly digital world. 

As businesses increasingly shift towards digital channels, they risk alienating a segment of their customer base that needs more confidence or ability to navigate these platforms.

This trend reminds us that we must not lose sight of the human element in our rush to embrace digital transformation. Just as some employees struggle with a fully remote work environment, some customers may feel left behind by purely digital interactions.

The parallel between these two trends is striking. In both cases, there’s a risk of losing vital connections – whether it’s between colleagues or between businesses and their customers. And in both cases, the solution lies in finding a balance between digital efficiency and human touch.

The past

In the recent past – i.e. in July – I’ve written or spoken for a variety of clients about the future of insurance, the future of education, and the future of the workplace. It’s been a fun, productive month. I even began a new column for Low No Drinker Magazine, called Upper Bottom – the same as the weekly sobriety podcast I began almost exactly six months ago.

But I’ve also found time to enrich myself with art and culture. I took my family to the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, which I hope will inspire them. I also snook off solo on a Monday afternoon to catch the Beyond the Bassline exhibition at the British Library before it closed. 

The latter chronicled 500 years of black British music, and writing about it now makes me think again about Gerd’s story of Miles Davis playing one note with such haunting quality that it made it so memorable. 

I’m optimistic that human skills will always be valued more than technological achievements. The Paris Olympic Games, which are in full flow now, are an important reminder that there is breathtaking and life-affirming beauty to be found in people going faster, higher, and stronger – as per the Olympic motto, Citius, Altius, Fortius.

Three years ago, the organisers added another Latin word for the Tokyo Games: Communiter. It translates as “together”. In this mad and increasingly often bad world, we need that togetherness more than ever.

Statistics of the month

  • While executives push for return-to-office mandates, 48% of managers admit that their teams are more productive when they adopt hybrid work (Owl Labs’ annual State of Hybrid Work study).
  • Remember the Great Resignation? This is worse. Over a quarter (28%) of the 56,000 workers surveyed said they were “very or extremely likely” to move on from their current companies. In 2023 that figure stood at 26%, and at 19% in 2022 (PwC).
  • Two-thirds (66%) of the UK workforce do not feel their work environment allows them to partake in self-care and look after their well-being (People Management).

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. 5)

TL;DR: May’s – slightly delayed – Go Flux Yourself includes being selfless to find happiness, building tech for good, virtual work experience, the importance of messy stories, and a tribute to rugby league legend Rob Burrow … 

Image created on Midjourney with the prompt “Leeds Rhinos rugby league legend Rob Burrow smiling with the ball and happy people gathering around him – with tech robots looming behind them – in the style of a David Hockney painting”

The future

“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.”

These words, attributed to Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, were quoted on stage by Britain’s leading “psychological illusionist” Derren Brown, the big draw at DTX Manchester in late May when discussing the pursuit of happiness. 

This wisdom hit me hard as the father of two small but quickly growing children. (And this newsletter didn’t arrive on May 31st – apologies – because I was holidaying in the Netherlands for half-term.) It smacked me harder, though, as someone passionate about human-work evolution and the world we are building. 

Is the combination of technology and social media making us overly self-interested? Is too much screen time, for adults and kids alike, making us more susceptible to jealousy while eroding common decency and looking out for those around us? We need to look up, look out, and that starts with, well, looking inward.

Related to this, I recently saw a brilliant and quite emotional post on LinkedIn that distilled the problem of human selfishness. In a thought-provoking classroom experiment, a university professor challenged his students to a unique test of teamwork and empathy. 

Each student was assigned a balloon bearing their name, which was then released from the ceiling. The challenge was to locate their own balloon within a five-minute time limit. If everyone succeeded, they would collectively win; if even one student failed, they would all lose. 

Despite their earnest efforts, not a single student managed to find their individual balloon amid the chaos. Undeterred, the professor gathered the wayward balloons and gave the class a new directive: “When you catch a balloon, give it to its rightful owner.” With this simple shift in perspective, the students all completed the task before three minutes were up.

The professor concluded the lesson with a poignant observation: “Happiness is like these balloons. If each of us single-mindedly pursues our own, we will inevitably come up short. But if we prioritise the wellbeing of others, we will find that our own happiness follows suit.” 

This principle holds true not only in the classroom, but also in the corporate – and specifically the technology – world as well. By actively supporting our colleagues in achieving their objectives, we foster an environment of reciprocity and shared success.

At DTX Manchester, where I moderated a session on AI in the workplace, Brown, who I once shared a seance table with – a story not for here – talked about our materialistic, consumerist tendencies. Most of us, he said, are on the “hedonic treadmill”, chasing and attaining new things to feel happier. But that immediate dopamine spike soon drops, and then we look for the next shiny thing. Essentially, he argued – convincingly – that this doesn’t make us happy.

Building on this point, he offered the audience a thought experiment suggested by Stoic philosopher William B. Irvine. In On Desire: Why We Want What We Want, Irvine wrote: “Suppose you woke up one morning to discover that you were the last person on earth … In the situation described, you could satisfy many material desires that you can’t satisfy in our actual world. You could have the car of your dreams. You could even have a showroom full of expensive cars. You could have the house of your dreams – or live in a palace. You could wear very expensive clothes. You could acquire not just a big diamond ring but the Hope Diamond itself. The interesting question is this: without people around, would you still want these things?”

The answer is obvious when framed in this way. But do enough of us realise this truth?

Brown also challenged leaders to prioritise authentic storytelling over superficial narratives. He argued that businesses often present overly simplistic and tidy stories, failing to capture the messiness and complexity of reality. To cultivate genuine resilience, Brown urged leaders to embrace the journey and resist the temptation to fixate on definitive endings.

However, Brown’s most urgent plea was directed at technologists, calling upon them to use their talents for good. He revealed a startling statistic, attributed to Tristan Harris, Co-Founder of the Center for Humane Technology: over 50% of AI engineers believe there is at least a 10% chance that mishandling AI could lead to the destruction of humanity. 

This sobering reality underscores the critical need for a mindset shift in the tech industry, ensuring that innovation uplifts humanity rather than accelerates its demise.

As AI advances at an unprecedented pace, there is an immense business opportunity and an ethical imperative to create technology that genuinely addresses human needs, not just superficial desires. 

The cautionary tale of social media platforms like Facebook is a stark reminder of the unintended consequences that can arise when innovation is disconnected from human welfare. With the stakes exponentially higher in the era of recursive, self-improving AI systems, the risks of rushing ahead without careful consideration are grave, ranging from automated cyber weapons to blackmail and disinformation campaigns.

Those who seize this opportunity to create technology that genuinely benefits humanity will build thriving businesses and contribute to writing a new, more enlightened chapter in the human story. Brown concluded that this endeavour is worth far more than any fleeting dopamine rush from a dazzling new toy. It served as a much-needed call to action for leaders and innovators to shape a future in which technology and humanity can flourish together.

I’ve been asked to deliver an opening keynote on the future of work to a group of lawyers in London later in the year, and with the 25 minutes I have been afforded, I’ll be focusing on these messages, I reckon.

The present

Certainly, the themes of collaborating for good and being intentional and considered are current when looking through the lens of remote working – mainly because no company has perfected its strategy. Moreover, it requires careful iteration, with humans – not technology – in the driving seat and the most business-critical element. 

A couple of weeks ago, I was delighted to moderate an in-person roundtable near the “Silicon Roundabout” of London’s Old Street, which delved into the challenges and opportunities of creating a remote-ready workforce.

I set the scene by referencing recent research from Stanford professor Nick Bloom, which indicated that 29% of the global workforce were hybrid workers, 59% were fully on-site, and only 12% were fully remote workers.

Predictably, during the discussion, trust emerged as a cornerstone of successful remote work. The roundtable participants concurred that businesses must foster a culture of trust, and the unanimous verdict was that monitoring staff is creepy and demotivating. 

O.C. Tanner’s 2024 Global Culture Report was published a few days after the roundtable session. It showed that 41% of UK employees have their working time strictly monitored, and just 53% are granted freedom in how they accomplish their work. How backward. For employees, it’s time to put the mouse-jigglers away, and employers need to conduct adult-to-adult relationships with their staff. 

Someone needs to tell Manchester United co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the UK’s richest person. In mid-May, he found a new excuse for ordering employees back to the office. In a message to the club’s employees, he complained about the “disgraceful” messiness in the office. He called an end to the flexible work-from-home policy that has been in place since the coronavirus crisis.

As a kicker, Ratcliffe – who resides in Monaco, presumably in part for tax avoidance purposes – justified a full-time return to the office because one of his other businesses experienced a 20% drop in email traffic when it experimented with home-working Fridays. It’s daft reasoning, for sure. Do more emails mean more productivity? Not in 2024, where the most enlightened business leaders are familiar with Cal Newport’s concept of deep work – the need for focused periods of concentration without the pings, bings and other notifications that have become an irritating part of work life.

As businesses strive to future-proof their workforce, the concept of “virtual work experience” has gained popularity – although one suspects Sir Jim would not approve. And if so, I’m 100% with him on this one.

Leaders must understand that while these online placements can provide valuable exposure and skills, they should not be considered a complete substitute for in-person experience. 

Companies like Heathrow Airport and Pret A Manger have partnered with Springpod to offer virtual work experience programmes, aiming to impart relevant knowledge to aspiring professionals in various fields. These initiatives include engaging activities such as – ahem – quizzes and immersive product development journeys designed to educate and inspire the next generation of talent. 

The hands-on experience, face-to-face interactions, and real-world problem-solving opportunities that come with traditional work placements are essential for developing a well-rounded skill set and understanding the nuances of a profession. 

Ultimately, by offering a balanced approach that combines online learning with practical, on-site experience, leaders can ensure that their future workforce is adequately prepared to tackle the challenges of their chosen careers. 

Further, investing in a comprehensive training and development programme that includes virtual and in-person elements demonstrates a commitment to nurturing top talent. By providing a well-rounded learning experience, organisations will attract ambitious candidates, foster a culture of continuous improvement, and be well-positioned for long-term success.

The past

At first glance, the passing of a rugby league player might seem inappropriate for a technology and business newsletter. But the death of former Leeds Rhinos scrum-half Rob Burrow yesterday (June 2), at the age of 41 – a year younger than me, chillingly – transcended sport and was mourned across the nation. 

Sadly, Rob’s demise was no surprise. Four-and-a-half years ago, and only two years after he hung up his boots, he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND) and given 18 months to live. Bravely, Rob chose to take his fight public to raise awareness of the horrific disease – and the lack of support for sufferers – and, along with the considerable help of his former teammate Kevin Sinfield, attracted around £15 million for MND charities.

I started my career as a sports journalist and covered rugby league, partly because of my upbringing in North West England, the game’s heartland. I watched and met Rob, who played for Leeds almost 500 times and won 18 international caps, numerous times. I always marvelled at how the smallest player on the pitch – at 5’5” or 156cm, he was only a dozen centimetres taller than my nine-year-old boy – was so often the bravest and most influential. Indeed, today’s obituaries will laud a “giant among men”, rightly. 

How fitting that, by coincidence, the ground will be broken on the Rob Burrow Centre for MND in Leeds the day after his death. Excelling at a game in which he was always a foot shorter than other players, he was a groundbreaker on and off the pitch.

The Prince of Wales – a mate of mine at the University of St Andrews (but that’s another story) – presented CBEs to Rob and Kevin in January, and when the news broke on Sunday, he saluted “a legend of rugby league” on social media. He added: “Rob Burrow had a huge heart. He taught us ‘in a world full of adversity, we must dare to dream’.”

Rob’s life story holds valuable lessons for the world of technology and business. Every entrepreneur and innovator should aspire to emulate his unwavering determination and ability to excel despite the odds stacked against him. In the face of adversity, Rob persevered and used his platform to drive change and raise awareness for a cause that desperately needed attention. 

His legacy reminds us that true success is measured not just by personal achievements but by the positive impact one leaves on the world, no matter the industry. As we navigate the ever-evolving landscape of technology and business, let us draw inspiration from Rob’s courage, resilience, and dedication to making a difference. In doing so, we, too, can dare to dream, innovate, and create a better future for all.

Statistics of the month

  • 41% of UK employees have their working time strictly monitored, and a mere 53% are granted freedom in how they accomplish their work, according to O.C. Tanner’s 2024 Global Culture Report.
  • The CIPD’s latest Labour Market Outlook showed that 55% of employers in the UK are seeking to maintain their current staffing levels – the highest figure since 2016-17. With fewer organisations looking to recruit, employers must invest in learning and development to fill skills gaps and future-proof their workforce – but is that happening?
  • Generative AI tools should save UK workers 19 million hours a week by 2026, calculates Pearson. Teaching and healthcare “could be transformed”, is the conclusion of the research. I’m not so sure.

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. 4)

TL;DR: April’s Go Flux Yourself considers the value of values, the importance of physical and mental health, and expresses concern that 90% of the internet’s content will be created by AI in 2025 …

Image created on Midjourney with the prompt “a painting in the style of Matisse that shows the benefits of running”

The future

“There is so much power in understanding what your values are — they can help you make decisions, guide your career, and even live a happier life.”

This wisdom comes from Irina Cozma, a career and executive coach. She wrote these words in a piece titled “How to Find, Define, and Use Your Values” that appeared in Harvard Business Review just over a year ago.

This month, I’ve been reflecting on my personal values and those of Pickup Media Limited. This introspection led me to Cozma’s guidance. Her approach is simple yet profound: start by listing 10 things that are important to you, then narrow it down to three. Once you have your top trio, rank and define them. Try it.

I found it an enlightening exercise. It helped me firm up five values for Pickup Media Limited, which needed refining after almost a decade of a hotchpotch approach to the company’s services and no considered thought about SEO or social selling. (Watch this space!) 

The (work-in-progress) tagline is: “Understanding human-work evolution in an increasingly digital world.” And the business values, which build on my personal values, are (currently) listed as follows:

  1. Seeking and sharing true understanding
  2. Connecting for good
  3. Human-focused
  4. Improving – physical and mental – health
  5. Community-spirited

These might need sharpening up, granted, but you get the idea. Already these are helping to frame how I look at my products and services. More than that, these values allow me to recalibrate, and kind of re-tune my antenna to what’s important to and interests me and, by extension, the business. 

With this in mind, I was pleased to see that the upcoming Mental Health Awareness Week 2024, which takes place from May 13 to 19 in the UK, focuses on body and mind fitness. Indeed, the theme is: “Movement: Moving more for our mental health.”

In the last 13 months, I’ve run more than ever before, clocking over 800 miles. This has coincided with my sobriety. The extra time and focus gained from not drinking have evolved me as a person, and made me much more self-content, confident, and – according to my children – “less moody”. Cheers!

April was an incredible month for runners in the UK. Not only did the London Marathon exceed previous years – 44 Guinness World Records were broken, £67 million was raised for charity (at the time of writing), and over 53,000 people finished the 26.2-mile course – but a couple of weeks earlier, Russ Cook (aka “Hardest geezer”) completed his almost 10,000-mile, 352-day odyssey running the length of Africa. 

The 27-year old from Worthing took up running as an escape from drinking and gambling vices. Four years ago, he broke the record for the quickest marathon while pulling a car. It took him four minutes under 10 hours. Hardest geezer has certainly earned his sobriquet.

Elsewhere, reality TV celebrity Spencer Matthews announced this last week that he will run 30 marathons in 30 days across the Jordanian desert in a bid to break another record. He has spoken about using exercise for good and closing the drinks cabinet. “I’m interested in understanding how far I can push myself,” he told Lorraine Kelly on her eponymous show. “It’s not too long ago that doing any running of any kind would have been difficult.” (For more on this please listen to the latest episode of Upper Bottom.)

It’s incredible what people can do with a little physical movement. Starting is often the most challenging part, which is why initiatives like Couch to 5K are so brilliant.

Perhaps it’s too simplistic to say people are more health-conscious than before the coronavirus crisis. Yet one can’t ignore that over 840,000 applications have been received for the London Marathon 2025 ballot, bettering last year’s record of 578,000. (I’ve thrown my lycra running hat into the ring.)

During the pandemic, I interviewed Andrew Scott, professor of economics at London Business School and author of The 100 Year Life and – this year – The Longevity Imperative. His core message, which has propelled me, is: “Invest in your future self by eating and drinking less, and moving more.” It’s simple, when you put it like that. I suppose it’s like the value of good values. 

From now on, I’ll be approaching my work using these business values. And in May, I’ll be busy speaking, hosting roundtables and panels across the UK. First, in London, I’ll be discussing hot human-work evolution topics at a business school. 

Also in the capital, I’m moderating a closed session for a new client that explores the future of remote work by discussing the strategic transformations necessary for organisations to drive long-term success. This is a subject I’m passionate about – I wrote about my fears around the entrenchment of a two-tier workforce due to the Flexible Working Bill in my April column for UKTN (and I use the same argument in a debate piece in tomorrow’s City AM).

Later in the month, I’ll be at DTX Manchester, leading a session exploring the value of artificial intelligence in the modern workplace. If you will be at Manchester Central on May 22 please come and say hello. With some 90% of all online content likely to be generated by AI next year, according to some experts, being more human in the digital age has never been more critical.

The present

Investing in a Garmin watch has helped my running – I set a personal best in the London Landmarks half-marathon in early April, no small thanks to Garmin coach. The gadget provides a welter of data – including one’s “body battery”. This morning, I began the day on 87% battery. I must catch up on my sleep this evening. But others might not be so lucky.

What to make of the news emanating from South Korea about Samsung? The electronics giant has recently announced that it will make executives work six-day weeks following its worst financial results in a decade. As more progressive companies push ahead with four- or even three-day working weeks and have found productivity improving, this diktat is wrongheaded and, I suspect, will be counterproductive. How will Samsung attract and retain top talent?

Meanwhile, 82% of employees globally are at risk of burnout this year, according to the HR consulting firm Mercer, and only half of employers design work with wellbeing in mind. How can people move more, and improve their mental and physical health, if they are chained to their desks? This isn’t even standing still; it’s going backwards.

Worryingly, different research indicates that people are suffering in silence. In the United States, 43% of workers say they are experiencing burnout, but almost half (47%) are hesitant to discuss burnout issues with their bosses, finds the latest Workforce Monitor survey from the American Staffing Association and Harris Poll. (Notably, 29% of respondents said their ideal schedule was a full return to the office, while 39% wanted a hybrid work model.)

The past

Two years ago, I interviewed Brian Kropp, then group vice president and chief of research for Gartner’s HR practice, about burnout. He argued that overworking can have hazardous consequences. The combination of sloppiness and anxiety triggered by tiredness will likely cause problems at work. “When you feel stressed and worried, the surface area of your brain literally shrinks,” he said. “It is a natural defence mechanism to absorb less information and pain.”

Employers must be mindful and look after their staff, including leaders, Kropp continued. “When we are drowsy, we tell people to use caution when operating a vehicle or dangerous machinery. So when employees are tired, we should not ask them to operate the heavy machinery of our business.”

After extensive research, Kropp concluded that organisations that “show a sense of caring” will triumph. Ultimately, it’s what humans have always done. He cited late American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead’s theory that we have, as a species, worked together to accomplish something bigger for thousands of years. 

The skeletal remains of an early human that showed a healed femur – upper leg – bone highlighted to Mead the inherent compassion we humans possess. The person in this example was allowed to rest and recover from a painful injury and not left for dead.

“The best caring, human organisations have realised employees can’t run at 100% for 100% of the time,” Kropp added. “We have to create time for breaks, moments of rest and recovery. The best organisations are increasingly thinking about ‘pre-covery’, which enables your employees to build up a wealth of reserve before you reach a challenging moment.”

In an increasingly digital and demanding world, employers must remember the fundamental human need for rest, recovery and movement – because when we take care of employees’ physical and mental well-being, we enable them to bring their best selves to work and, collectively, achieve something greater.

Statistics of the month

  • Of the 82% of global employees who are at risk of burnout this year, according to Mercer, factors cited included financial strain (43%), exhaustion (40%), and excessive workload (37%).
  • There were 672,631 UK applications for 2025 London Marathon, with 50.33% from men, 49.03% from women and 0.64% from non-binary applicants.
  • Gartner predicts that “independent workers” will make up around 40% of the global workforce by 2025.

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. 

Organizations are reskilling retired elite professional athletes

At the pinnacle of his rugby sevens career, Philip Burgess won an Olympic silver medal representing Great Britain at Rio 2016. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience — I felt so lucky to be there, and it was an unreal sense of achievement,” he said.

However, when he hung up his boots seven years later, at age 32, Burgess struggled. Despite captaining England of the sport and being a prominent leader, he found it initially hard to catch a break in his second career. “The transition from sports to business was hard,” he admitted. “I had spent over a decade building skills and working tirelessly, and had gone from being one of the best players in the rugby sevens [a form of rugby that uses seven players] world to feeling like an overqualified graduate.”

A LinkedIn post, in which Burgess wrote that he was actively looking for opportunities, was spotted by a fellow ex-sportsman working at Salesforce. He contacted Burgess, who in time became an account executive for the software firm. “He and a group of fellow ex-athletes at Salesforce supported me to transition — we have become a community, and it has helped to build the foundation for Athleteforce,” said Burgess.

The full version of this article was first published on DigiDay’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in November 2022 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

Team GB football preparation: ‘We trialled six pillows and bought every player one with a cooling cover’

Physical performance manager Dawn Scott explains the surprising ways National Lottery players have helped Team GB’s meticulous preparation for success

When guessing how National Lottery funding has helped Team GB’s women’s football players in their quest for glory, personalised cooling pillows, equipment that determines how much sodium players sweat, and dozens of bottles of ginger shots might not be the first things that come to mind.

But these are some of the more surprising examples of how Hege Riise’s squad has been supported. It is in these tiny details, and tailoring preparation and nutrition to individual players, where the all-important marginal gains are achieved, according to Dawn Scott, the FA’s physical performance manager for England Women who is operating in the same role for Team GB this summer.

“When you go into a major tournament, it’s those little bits and being prepared for every single outcome that can make the difference,” she says. “The National Lottery’s support is a game-changer. It has enabled the work the High Performance team have done around the physical and medical preparation, buying extra bits of equipment, shipping out additional nutrition, and more.

“If you add all those things together, when you have to play six matches in 17 days if you do reach the final, it gives you a better chance of success. So it’s amazing to have that support, and we all owe huge thanks to The National Lottery and the players who, through buying tickets, have helped us.”

The South Shields-born sports scientist, who jumped at the chance to be involved with Team GB, knows what it takes to reign supreme. She moved from US Soccer to the English FA shortly after playing a pivotal role in the USA’s World Cup win in 2019, four years after she had a hand in the country’s previous triumph.

Scott has experienced eight major tournaments but considering that this summer Team GB players were gathered from across the Home Nations and met at Loughborough University for two intense, 10-day camps, with just three days in between, before flying out to Japan – plus the fact that the one pre-competition match against Zambia was cancelled because of coronavirus worries – it is fair to say that preparation has not been typical.

It is why she is incredibly grateful for The National Lottery’s support, which helped buy the squad a customised gym – “with brand-new equipment” – in a Covid-secure marquee, replete with “individual plastic greenhouses” at the Loughborough camp. And, away from the weights and machines, an acclimatisation zone was installed at the other end of the marquee. 

With temperatures at the Games expected to reach 35°C and humidity hitting 95%, Scott says the heat chamber was essential for the players. “It was the first thing I asked for,” she grins. “The players had one hour in there a day and, by using a Wattbike, we raised and then maintained their core temperature above 38°C. 

“Again thanks to The National Lottery’s support, we were able to do sweat analysis and use precision hydration. We identified players who were more comfortable in the heat, and could refine their hydration strategies. For example, those who are salty sweaters, with high sodium levels, need more electrolyte drinks, plus a more detailed cooling strategy.”

Coronavirus restrictions have added a sweat-inducing layer of complication for Scott and her team. For instance, where an ice bath might have been sufficient as a cooling strategy, now every player has a “cooling vest” that is kept chilled between practices and matches thanks to “an army of small igloos” – all made possible by The National Lottery. “The logistics and planning are harder than implementing the training,” she jokes.

Cuisine also plays a vital role for the team, and has to cater for the players’ menstrual cycles. “The players need antioxidant, anti-inflammatory foods – oily fish, berries, smoothies – at certain times,” says Scott, who reveals she travelled to Japan with 70 bottles of ginger shots so the players can have their daily doses. 

Disrupted sleep caused by discomfort and inflammation around the joints can impact performance, making “sleep hygiene” important. Hence, the need for blackout blinds, a cool bedroom environment, and National Lottery-funded pillows.

“We trialled six pillows in Loughborough and bought every player one with a cooling cover,” explains Scott. “They have wearables so we can track their sleep and core temperature.”

Team GB’s women’s football has seemingly left no pillow unturned in their pursuit of glory in Japan. Scott is very much focused on taking one game at a time, but admits winning would “equal everything” in her glittering career. Win, lose or draw, National Lottery players will have provided the squad with the best preparation, down to the very smallest detail.

This article, sponsored by Camelot, operators of the National Lottery, was first published on http://www.Telegraph.co.uk in July 2021

Dame Katherine Grainger: ‘We’ve always been blessed with brilliance – but National Lottery players changed everything overnight’

Dame Katherine Grainger, Great Britain’s joint most decorated female Olympian and now Chair of UK Sport, tells the story of seismic change for all athletes over the past 20 years

Hand on heart, it is difficult to put into words how genuinely grateful countless British athletes are for National Lottery support, which began in 1997 – the year I first made the rowing team, coincidentally. It has made such a striking and transformational difference to the country’s sporting fortunes.

I was lucky to be funded by the National Lottery throughout my 20 years as an athlete. But when I joined the team, ahead of Sydney 2000, every other member was either holding down a job or had an overdraft or loan.

If you wanted to be the best in the world back then and even have a chance against the more prominent, well-funded nations, you had to beg, borrow, or steal to train and compete properly. Because there wasn’t access to top facilities, coaching and medical support. It’s unrecognisable to the standard of support we have today, thankfully.

Indeed, on the eve of Sydney, we all felt as though we were in great shape but wouldn’t be doing this were it not for help from the National Lottery, thanks to John Major’s instigation. It was an absolute game-changer.

Britain has always been blessed with brilliant athletes who have a burning desire to succeed. But without a structure and enough support, we were at a disadvantage – until National Lottery support improved everything almost overnight.

What is especially important to athletes, and makes us try even harder, is that the money comes via members of the public who have played the National Lottery. So there is a lovely link – a collaboration between top sportspeople and National Lottery players – and you want to do them proud.

Anyone who buys tickets – as I do – wants to win a life-changing amount of money, primarily, but in a way, even if your numbers don’t come up, you are helping to fulfil someone else’s dream.

It’s incredible to consider how much evolution Team GB’s athletes have undergone in just over two decades, thanks to National Lottery support. It is easy to take it for granted now, with every athlete surrounded by coaches, medical teams, nutritionists and so on, but we have taken tremendous strides.

Amazingly, the women’s rowing team first had a full-time coach in the run-up to Sydney, and before then, there had not been a centralised programme. I recall how teammates would tell me that, before I joined, because there was not a physiotherapist to see, they would be advised to lie down for a fortnight if they suffered a back injury.

However, by the time I was training, if you felt your back going on the river, you would be seen by a physio within 30 minutes and referred to an on-site doctor, if necessary. Suddenly, injuries were manageable and didn’t set athletes back. It was wholly reassuring to know you were in good hands, and that bred confidence when you were training and competing.

The coaching and the central base were part of the obvious initial upgrade. Other elements have been added over the years, building on those early gains. Before Athens 2004, for instance, many institutes of sports were established. And while great investment was first made in the physical preparation of the athletes, now there is also a focus on the mental side.

As Chair of UK Sport, I don’t know what we would do without National Lottery support, which has provided 60 per cent (£204 million) of the £340 million we have allocated for the Tokyo cycle. It has been critical to supporting the athletes and the institutes of sport in these uncertain times; I doubt many of the latter would have survived if not for the National Lottery.

Athletes have been delayed by a year, of course, and the coronavirus restrictions have added another significant cost to training and competition. Thanks again to National Lottery support, though, the Team GB athletes can be assured that they will have had the best preparation, so I’m quietly confident and have high hopes that we will perform well.

If the support suddenly stopped, it would be a massive loss and I fear it would transform sport in Britain, in a hugely debilitating way. So the thought of it continuing, and having the wonderful public support and backing, is fantastic. While it propelled our success in 2012 and 2016, every new wave of athletes is keen to make their mark. I firmly believe there are still so many memorable moments to come, and that’s essentially thanks to National Lottery support.

Dame Katherine Grainger is Great Britain’s joint most decorated female Olympian – the former rower has one gold and four silver medals – and is now Chair of UK Sport, the government agency responsible for investing in Olympic and Paralympic sport. 

This ghostwritten article, sponsored by Camelot, operators of the National Lottery, was first published on http://www.Telegraph.co.uk in July 2021

How The National Lottery has inspired nearly three million women and girls to be more active

Oliver Pickup hears how The National Lottery has helped This Girl Can get almost three million women and girls in the UK more active already, and what’s next for the inspirational campaign

A faceless lady with a proudly untoned, unfiltered body strides towards a swimming pool. Nearing the water, she confidently twangs her bikini bottoms, springing to life Missy Elliot’s hit Get Ur Freak On. A few seconds later – during a montage depicting happy, sweaty, unknown women and girls boxing, running, playing football, among other sports – an on-screen caption reads: “I jiggle; therefore I am.” And so begins the first, iconic This Girl Can video from 2015, when Sport England’s National Lottery-funded, award-winning campaign designed to encourage more females to exercise was established. 

Since launching seven years ago, This Girl Can has persuaded almost three million women and girls in the UK (2.9m at the last count) to get more active, according to campaign lead Kate Dale. None of it would have been possible without the support of The National Lottery. 

“I’m hugely proud of what This Girl Can has achieved, in terms of celebrating active women who are doing their thing no matter how they do it, how they look, or how sweaty they get,” she says. 

“The original vision for This Girl Can was, having identified the gender gap, to help women get active – and not to use the word ‘sport’ in the title, because it carries negative memories from school days for some people. Maybe the shutters came down in their minds because they felt they weren’t good at sport, and didn’t feel invited to an exclusive club.

“We wanted to build something that women could be part of, and they could define what it meant for them. It’s not caring about how they look, how good they are – or aren’t – or understanding that it’s important to fit activity into their days no matter how many other priorities they have in the day. We found women with young children felt guilty spending time away from their little ones, but a) their lives are just as important as their children’s, and b) this activity helps them to be better parents as it makes them role models and recharges their batteries.”

Praising The National Lottery’s ongoing commitment, Dale continues: “I am often approached by women telling me how seeing that advert changed their lives, and it has encouraged them to go running or set up a football team, and so on. And it is all down to The National Lottery funding – it has been critical, especially for long-term planning and infrastructure investment. It has enabled us to make decisions for the next few years and not around shorter funding cycles.”

Dale joined Sport England in January 2004, the same year the Active Lives surveys began. The latest figures, published in April 2021, indicate that 61.5% of women in the UK did at least 150 minutes of exercise a week in November 2019 compared with 65.3% of men on the eve of the coronavirus crisis. 

She says confirmation in 2005 that London would host the Olympic Games in 2012 helped inspire women – and men – to be more active, and The National Lottery-funded campaigns like This Girl Can serve to build on that momentum. Indeed, the increased visibility of female pundits at the recent Euro 2020 serves as an example of how the gender gap has been narrowed in other ways, and it can be traced back to This Girl Can.

“Before the pandemic, the participation numbers for both genders had increased steadily over the last decade and more,” says Dale. “It is so important for people to be active for all sorts of reasons – and you don’t have to be sporty to be active. Team sport isn’t for everyone, and the funding has enabled Sport England to invest right across and understand, support and develop all sorts of physical activities. But our work is far from over.”

Looking at the post-pandemic world, she adds: “As we build back as a society, the role of The National Lottery in helping us recover from the last 18 months is going to be vital. Everyone’s lives have changed, but there is so much to do now to help women and girls get back into physical activity. We have a crucial couple of years coming up, and having The National Lottery’s support and investment is just what we need.”

This article, sponsored by Camelot, operators of the National Lottery, was first published on http://www.Telegraph.co.uk in July 2021

How National Lottery players helped prepare Hege Riise’s football team for Tokyo

GB women’s football team leader David Faulkner explains how funds from The National Lottery paid for acclimatisation equipment to help Team GB cope with Japan’s 35° heat

Team GB women’s football team will make history on Wednesday July 21 by playing its first competitive overseas match, against Chile in Sapporo. The only other occasion a British women’s team has played at the Games was at London 2012, when Hope Powell’s side suffered a 2-0 defeat to Canada at the quarter-final stage. 

David Faulkner, Team Leader of GB women’s football, says that Hege Riise’s squad is primed and feeling optimistic about a medal-winning run. But he stresses that adequate preparation would have been impossible without National Lottery support. 

“Bringing together a GB women’s football team for the first time has been a long time in the making,” says Faulkner from the Yokohama camp. He was awarded an MBE for services to sport in the Queen’s Birthday Honours earlier this year, and says National Lottery support means “the team is in the best place possible to compete against the world’s best as Great Britain, which is in itself unique”.

“The team arrived in Japan with a high level of confidence after completing a demanding schedule at Loughborough University, while evolving the team culture as part of ‘One Team GB’ – much like the British and Irish Lions.”

Before flying to the Japanese capital on July 7, the women underwent a gruelling three-week training camp. With temperatures in Japan expected to reach 35°C and humidity hitting 95%, the team used an acclimatisation chamber at Loughborough University, thanks to Lottery funding.

The chamber is a cross between a sauna and steam room, and the players were forced to exercise daily on Wattbikes with the temperature turned up, replicating the hot and humid environment expected. The physical and mental demands of the acclimatisation sessions should pay off when the competition kicks off, says Faulkner.

“There is no question that without The National Lottery’s support we would not be in a position to have the dedicated accommodation, food, gym, and an acclimation area and training pitch,” Faulkner says. “We cannot thank those that play The National Lottery enough for the funds that have provided the team with the best preparation possible for the Tokyo Games.

“Not only did it provide a high-performance environment for such intense preparation, we were also able to make it Covid-safe with our protocols and testing. We are extremely grateful for the support that has enabled us to set up such a unique performance environment where every additional percentage gained will have such an impact with delivery in Japan.”

On the extra costs required due to coronavirus precautions, the 58-year old continues: “Covid places many more demands on players and staff, such as testing every day in game time, wearing masks and social distancing at all times. However, the funding has ensured there remains a performance focus across the elements of technical, tactical, physical and psychologically.”

Nigel Railton, Chief Executive of The National Lottery operator, acknowledges the role of those who play The National Lottery in helping Team GB’s Olympians and Paralympians this summer. “Every day, National Lottery players make a huge difference to communities across the UK. Their support has a real impact on a sport and in boosting the chances in Tokyo.”

Former hockey full-back Faulkner, who earned 225 international caps, captaining both England and Great Britain, knows what it takes to achieve, having won at Seoul 1988. “To win a medal you must ensure you reach the semi-finals,” he says. 

Following the first Group E match against Chile, Riise’s side takes on hosts Japan on Saturday July 24 and Canada next Tuesday July 27.

“The players and staff are highly motivated, relishing the challenge ahead and ensuring every element of performance that can make a difference to delivery on match day is covered,” says Faulkner. “A podium finish would be a fantastic achievement for this group – but they have the energy, depth and talent to finish at the peak.”

Whatever happens, Faulkner is thankful for The National Lottery funding, which has been supporting Team GB since 1998 – two years after the Atlanta Games when Great Britain won only one big prize.

“Quite simply, the funding has provided the opportunity for more athletes across more sports to be the best they possibly can be at the pinnacle level of sport,” adds Faulkner. “At the same time, the investment has helped develop a performance system that is the envy of other sporting nations, which has resulted in consistent medal-winning performances at every Games since 1996. This, in turn, continues to inspire the next generation of Olympians, which is the true legacy of the funding.”

This article, sponsored by Camelot, first appeared in The Telegraph in July 2021

Sport’s biggest cheats: 10 instances of notorious unsporting behaviour

When 9.79*, a film about the ill-fated men’s 100-metre final at the 1988 Olympics, sprinted into cinemas, Oliver Pickup selected his 10 most dastardly cheats

Ben Johnson 

In August 2013, the British Board of Film Classification certified that the film 9.79* – a 83-minute documentary about the infamous men’s 100-metres final at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, featuring interviews with all eight runners – would be classified as PG, meaning it would require parental guidance, as it “contains mild language and references to performance-enhancing drugs”. 

Ironically, the BBFC added that “this work was passed uncut”, which is more than can be said for the chief protagonist, a Jamaican-born sprinter who moved to Ontario as a teenager, and his colleagues when they took to the starting blocks in South Korea in what would be dubbed “the dirtiest race in history”.

With his yellow, bulging eyes and increasingly bizarre behaviour leading up to the showdown it was – in hindsight – no surprise that the adopted Canadian was wired and, three days after breaking his own world record (reaching a peak speed of 27mph), was disqualified after his urine samples contained stanozolol, an anabolic steroid. Canada were forced to hand back their first-ever gold medal.

But it seems that Johnson was not alone, and Carl Lewis – the 26-year-old’s biggest rival then, and the man named ‘Olympian of the Century’ by Sports Illustrated – was later found to be one of 10 men in the 20-strong list of quickest-ever 100-metre runners to be scratched off through gobbling performance enhancers. Some 25 years ago the outing of Johnson’s betrayal shook the sporting world – it would be the equivalent of Usain Bolt being busted now – and subsequently the event has been tainted with suspicion ever since.

Fred Lorz 

The marathon at the 1904 St Louis Olympic Games was held on a sweltering afternoon – the mercury on thermometers rose to 90 degrees Fahrenheit – and followed a challenging, mountainous course; the combination meant that just 14 of the 32 starters completed the race. 

First back was New Yorker Lorz, who staggered home in three hours and 13 minutes. Having been congratulated by – and photographed with – Alice Roosevelt, the President’s daughter, Lorz was just about to receive the gold medal when it became apparent that he had covered 11 of the 26.2 miles as a car passenger. The crowd’s acclaim immediately turned to anger and abuse, and Lorz was handed a lifetime ban which was later lifted. 

The controversy was not to stop there, however. British-born Thomas Hicks, the American who was subsequently handed the gold medal, was aided by a heady mix of strychnine sulfate (a common rat poison) and brandy – a fusion which would not have been allowed in later years. Even though he was supported by his trainers, who had administered the potion to help him complete the course, when he crossed the finish, he was still considered the victor. Rather ingloriously Hicks needed to be carried off the track, and might have died there in the St Louis stadium, had he not been immediately treated by several doctors.

Andy Haden 

On Nov 11, 1978, the mighty New Zealand All Black rugby team faced Wales at Cardiff Arms Park and, trailing 12-10 with seconds ticking down on what would have been their first defeat of the tour, resorted to dirty tactics. 

The All Blacks won a lineout deep in the opposition half and as the ball was thrown in, lock Haden – hardly the most flimsy character at at 6ft 6in and 250lbs – fell away from the set-piece as though illegally shoved. The conned referee awarded a penalty to the visitors, which full-back Brian McKechnie duly converted (although the dual international would get his comeuppance – see below). 

Although the All Blacks went on to win the game and the grand slam that year, the incident became known as “the great dive to victory”, and followed Haden, winner of 117 international caps, throughout his career. 

Neil Back 

In the closing minutes of the 2002 Heineken Cup final at the Millennium Stadium, Leicester Tigers, up 15-9, were looking to hold on to their slender lead against a powerful Munster team. Facing an opposition scrum on their own five-metre line and under tumultuous pressure, the England back-row forward, on the blindside of the referee, illegally nudged the ball out of Munster scrum-half, Peter Stringer’s hands, and back into the scrum on Leicester’s side. 

The official missed the incident and Leicester gleefully punted the ball clear and won the game, leaving the Irish club fuming. In ironic reference to Diego Maradona’s own misdeeds against England’s football team in 1986 the moment became known as ‘Hand of Back’.

Michel Pollentier 

Forget the recent revelations about Lance Armstrong and his rivals, when it came to cheating in the Tour de France this Belgian rider literally took the piss. After scaling Alpe d’Huez and gaining the famous yellow jersey in the 1978 Tour, the race leader failed his post-stage drug test – not because anything illegal had been found in his urine sample, but because the urine sample wasn’t his. 

Officials organising the post-stage test became suspicious when he “began pumping his elbow in and out as if playing a set of bagpipes”, conjuring up a scene from Withnail and I which remained on the cutting floor. 

When ordered to lift his top, Pollentier did so to uncover a complex plumbing system running from a rubber, urine-filled bulb under his arm to the test tube. 

David Robertson 

In the 1985 qualifying round for the Open at Deal, Kent, the former Scottish boys champion took advantage of golf’s culture of honesty and self-regulation. After 14 holes Robertson’s playing companions called an official who disqualified him for repeatedly replacing his ball incorrectly on the greens. 

By arriving on the green first Robertson would appear to mark his ball before surreptitiously moving it closer to the hole. The shamed golfer was fined £20,000 and banned from the PGA European Tour for 20 years. 

Sylvester Carmouche 

On a very foggy day in January 1990, at Louisiana’s Delta Downs track, Carmouche aroused the suspicions of the stewards by riding home 23-1 outsider Landing Officer by 24 lengths in just a second over the course record. 

It transpired that Carmouche, who initially protested his innocence, had dropped out of the one-mile race as soon as he was out of view, only to rejoin it just before the rest of the field came round on the second lap. He finally admitted what he had done and served a ban for eight years. 

Michelle Smith de Bruin 

She was the darling of Ireland after winning three swimming gold medals at Atlanta 1996 – the only gold medals Ireland had ever been awarded* – and one bronze. Suspicions of foul play were voiced by rivals, however, and the fact that her husband and coach – the former Dutch discus-thrower Erik de Bruin – had served a four-year ban for testing positive for illegal levels of testosterone, only elevated those rumours. 

Two years after the success at Atlanta the swimmer was banned for four years, not for testing positive, but for switching her urine sample. After laboratory analysis the sample, which had “a very strong whiskey odour” was found to contain traces of the golden nectar. 

Although Smith de Bruin was not stripped of her medals – as only samples subsequent to her Olympic involvement tested positive – she became a hate figure among Irish people and, at 28, realised that her time in the pool was over, so now practices law as a barrister.

*Ireland did also win a gold medal at Athens 2004 in show jumping, only for the horse to fail a drugs test, therefore the medal was lost. 

Boris Onischenko 

Representing Ukraine in the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the respected pentathlete was looking to improve on the silver medal he had been awarded four years previously in Munich. 

In his desire to win, Onischenko bent the rules by using a crooked sword. Having wired a switch into the handle of his épée he was able him to claim an electronic ‘hit’ even when he missed. When Great Britain’s Adrian Parker and then countryman Jim Fox reported their doubts over the authenticity of Onischenko’s victories, his weapon was replaced, and he was eventually disqualified. Fencing rules were subsequently changed so that grips that could hide wires or switches were banned. 

Trevor Chappell 

The Australian did not cheat as such, but his actions simply weren’t cricket, in gentlemanly terms; his unsporting behaviour caused the rules of the game to change.

On Feb 1, 1981, New Zealand were chasing Australia’s 235 in the third final of the 1980-81 Benson & Hedges World Cup Series. With one over left to bowl New Zealand required 15 runs to seal an unlikely victory. Aussie captain Greg Chappell called his youngest brother, Trevor, on to bowl. 

Off the first five balls nine runs were scored and two wickets fell, leaving the new batsman Brian McKechnie (see above) with one ball to score a six to win the game. Chappell senior ordered his brother to bowl the remaining ball underarm, crown green bowling style. 

Trevor executed his captain and brother’s plan, to the disgust of McKechnie, who threw his bat to the ground after defending the ball, and the dismay of his Australian team-mates. 

Due to the ensuing uproar, which almost caused an international incident, underarm bowling was promptly banned and Chappell has never been forgiven by New Zealand or Australian cricket fans alike.

This article first appeared in The Telegraph in August 2013

Introducing Rufus the hawk: the official bird scarer of the Wimbledon Championships

There was a time when ‘birds stopped play’ was a legitimate reason for downing rackets at Wimbledon. That was before Rufus the hawk, official bird scarer, was drafted in to ensure avian invasions are kept to a minimum.

The sky’s the limit for young players at Wimbledon, where a good performance can see their careers take off. But one star of the show will be flying higher than most at the prestigious venue with a vital job to do: Rufus the Harris Hawk.

Rufus is the tournament’s official bird scarer, tasked with frightening pigeons away from the courts. ‘‘Bird stops play’’ used to be a regular problem at Wimbledon, but since 2000 Avian Environmental Consultants Ltd, based in Northamptonshire, has provided hawks to eliminate the problem.

Rufus, who has been working at Wimbledon since 2007, is a celebrity in the tennis world. He regularly poses for pictures during the tournament, has earned a Blue Peter badge and has more than 9,000 followers on Twitter.

Imogen Davis, his handler (and social media manager) since 2012 and director of Avian Environmental Consultants, says: “Pigeons don’t know the difference between eating grass seed when the tennis is on and when there is no play, and that can cause big interruptions. As a player concentration is crucial, so we do our bit to limit that disruption.

“There is an intensive training process, and it is all food-motivated. Harris hawks are not quite like a pet – they don’t just follow you around because they love you – and are one of the few birds in the world that hunt socially; they associate the handlers with food and consider us part of their pack.

“When a pigeon or another bird spots Rufus it’s all about fight or flight, and when a huge Harris hawk with sizeable talons is flying at them they would be daft to choose the first option. The most important part of my job is to monitor his weight.

“His optimum flying weight is 1lb 6oz, so if he is at that weight I know that he is going to be keen enough to chase any birds away but not so keen that he is going to grab it and fill himself up on a pigeon.”

In preparation for The Championships, Rufus, whose kidnapping in June 2012 triggered global interest (he was found three days after being stolen from the back of Ms Davis’s car), visits the venue most weeks of the year to encourage local birds to roost away from the grounds.

During the competition he is flown from 5am, before the gates open. Ms Davis says that the Wimbledon fortnight is “incredibly tiring” and adds: “I am up from 4am and we are working at The Championships until about 10am every morning. There are some benefits – we get to see some incredible sunrises and meet celebrities, including Andy Murray and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall – but by the time most of the public have entered we have gone, because it’s our job to make sure all the birds are out of the way before the matches start.

“Rufus will not be flying that whole time; he knows all of the pigeons’ favourite spots to hang out, and he checks them to see there is nothing that might cause any trouble. As we bought Rufus when he was 16 weeks he trained at Wimbledon – it’s basically his playground, and he loves it here.”

This article, sponsored by Jaguar, was first published by The Telegraph in July 2017

Colin Jackson: ‘When things open up again, I’ll be in the front row’

Athlete Colin Jackson is desperate to attend live sporting events, hear the roar of the crowd, and also get his skates back on following his star turn on Dancing on Ice

As someone whose life has centred around sport – and athletics in particular – for more than half a century, I am utterly desperate to attend live sporting events again, once lockdown restrictions finally ease.

The pandemic has tested everyone, but has been especially tough on elite sportspeople, who have had to perform in empty stadia, if at all. Perhaps I am biased, given my passion, but I believe athletes have suffered more than most. Top-tier athletics is truly global, and without being able to travel, meaningful competition is pretty much impossible.

That’s why I’m looking forward to heading to Switzerland in September and watching Weltklasse Zürich – as a fan rather than a commentator, crucially. The annual invitation-only world-class track-and-field meeting was established in 1928, and in 2021 it will serve as the sole final of the Diamond League competition. The audience members are always so knowledgeable, and it will be a joy to mingle and learn without work pressures.

It’s hard to put into words the critical role spectators play for top sportspeople, as is also the case with actors, musicians and dancers. If you’re underperforming, a roar from the home crowd has the magical ability to lift your game by an extra percentage point, and gives you the oomph needed to push you across the line. Without a live, in-person audience, I can imagine it just feels like glorified practice.

I want the real deal, the whole package of live, atmospheric sport. I crave the moments of silence – before the starting pistol is fired, for example, or the hushed seconds ahead of a vital penalty kick in rugby union – and the spine-tingling bellows as glory is secured.

Cheering on the Six Nations champions from the sofa

I’ve watched plenty of sport from my sofa throughout lockdown, including tennis, golf, cricket, and – being a proud Welshman – rugby union. I always tune in for the Six Nations, and I was delighted when the unfancied Wales team was crowned champion this spring. I loved that most people wrote the Welsh off, but the players stayed cool and took the title again.

While the Six Nations was on, I performed in Dancing on Ice, and would dash back from training to catch the games, wearing the red of my country – and I’m glad I did. Before the coronavirus crisis, I would never have predicted in a million years that I would learn how to ice skate.

It was one of the most unique and enjoyable experiences of my life, genuinely. Finishing third in the competition was beyond my wildest dreams. I had so much fun, and when the ice rinks open again, I’ll be getting my skates on once more.

I’ve also tried to keep abreast of all the athletics news during lockdown, and tuned into events all over the world. Thanks to technology, I’ve been able to catch most meetings of interest, no matter how small. On one occasion, I contacted some Italian athletes on social media to ask them about an event, and they live-streamed it, basically just for me. I don’t know how we would have coped without the advanced tech we take for granted.

Sport has been forced to innovate – and that’s good for the future

In a way, the situation caused by the pandemic has been good because it has forced all elite sports to reflect on what benefits they provide for spectators. It has sparked innovations – though not always successfully, as the many people who rallied angrily against football’s proposed European Super League can testify.

However, having to think outside the box has been a useful exercise for all sports. For instance, I was proud of athletics when, last July, the Weltklasse Zürich was transformed into the inaugural Inspiration Games: a live, 90-minute virtual competition. Thirty top track-and-field athletes started their races simultaneously, from their tracks all over the world, and fans enjoyed the live event despite the coronavirus restrictions.

Ultimately, every single sport has had to look at reinventing itself, to an extent. It has been essential to sustaining interest in sport as a vehicle for entertainment, and I firmly believe that most sports will come out of the pandemic stronger. One thing is for sure: when things do open up again, I’ll be in the front row, roaring on the action.

This article, sponsored by American Express, was first published by The Telegraph in June 2021

Catalans Dragons supporters warmed by blaze of glory at Wembley

In August 2007, the French rugby league club tackled St Helens in the Challenge Cup final – and although they didn’t win, their loyal fans didn’t mind too much

At midday yesterday, under the gaze of Big Ben in Westminster, a throng festooned with red-and-yellow flags met to begin their pilgrimage to Wembley. Against the backdrop of the Houses of Parliament, these proud supporters of the Catalan Dragons, in their traditional colours of sang et or (blood and gold), were something of an incongruity, but it was hard not to be taken in by their good humour.

Trumpets sounded, Catalan songs were sung and alcohol consumed as they snaked their merry way to North-West London. For them, as the first French team in the final, and with this being the first time in eight years that Wembley has hosted the final, this was a dream – the score would not matter.

“I don’t care if it’s 50-50,” beamed Robert Pelissier, a season-ticket holder at Stade Gilbert Brutus back in Perpignan. Despite the great expense, he flew his family to London for the weekend for the match against St Helens, the current Super League, World Club Cup and Challenge Cup champions.

“We’ve been to Cardiff, and last year Twickenham, but never to Wembley, the temple of league,” Robert’s wife, Magali, covered in the Catalans’ uniform, offered.

In only their second Super League season, the French team had surpassed their wildest expectations by making the final. To the purists, however, wiping ale from their silvered whiskers, a final between the two rugby league super powers – Wigan and St Helens – would have been fitting for the occasion. Wigan’s 37-24 defeat to the Dragons in the semi-final caused many of the former’s fans to hand back their Wembley tickets.

Craig Spence, the RFL’s communications manager, was pleased that the 73,000 tickets allocated to them were all sold, and conceded that demand for final tickets was insatiable. “It has been the most in-demand cup final in recent memory,” he said. The 17,000 Club Wembley seats were one problem, but a marketing campaign, enlightening these supposed mostly football fans on the delights of rugby league in order that they would attend, seemed to have worked, as the crowd reached 84,241.

The estimated 5,000 Catalan supporters, who made the trip, by plane, train and car, were outnumbered five to one by St Helens’ fans. The Dragons laid on coaches and chartered three planes in an attempt to transport as many Catalans across the channel, however, at a cost. A VIP ticket cost €1,000 – “The equivalent of one month’s wages,” suggested Magali – prompting many to seek alternative routes.

As the underdogs, the Dragons gained the support of the neutral. As it was, the final score of 30-8 was fair, but far from the mauling that many expected. The chairman of St Helens, Eamonn McManus, claimed that after their third Challenge Cup victory in four years, St Helens have “to be up there as one of the greatest sides in history”.

In the press box, it was clear how important Les Catalans’ appearance in the Challenge Cup final was to the French. As well as being covered by national channels Canal+, France 2 and Stade 2, and regional stations TV 3, France 3, and Televisió de Catalunya, Australian and New Zealand stations were also in attendance.

Further, the mayor of Perpignan, the regional president and the minister for sport, Roselyne Bachelot, were present. “Having The Catalans in the final was fantastic for the development of rugby league in Europe,” suggested Spence. “We have been able to market the game to a much wider audience.”

The Catalans’ owner Bernard Guasch – a handy scrum-half for XIII Catalan in his prime – was certain his team’s appearance will help develop rugby league in France. “This is the rebirth of rugby league in France,” he said. “Today is a fantastic day for French rugby league. Today we learned a lot and we will come back stronger and better.”

Guasch’s money has afforded the skills of many Australasian backs, with the idea being that these experienced internationals will nurture the French through their teething troubles in the professional era, until such time native youngsters will replace them.

Robert Pelissier summed matters up: “The fact we played the best team in the game, and at Wembley, must be an inspiration and motivation to French youngsters.”

This article was first published in The Observer in August 2007

FT Masterclass: Commando course with Brian Adcock

A former Royal Marine shows how to make it through an obstacle course

I’m waist-deep in thick, malodorous sludge. But right now the pong is the very least of my worries: a 6ft 4in former Royal Marine is bellowing at me from the riverbank.

“Spread out your body so there’s more surface area,” Brian Adcock orders, “then I can haul you in when you’re within range.” This sluggish, squelchy wading towards safety is the result of a failed, and deeply inelegant, attempt at a suspended commando crawl on an obstacle rather menacingly named The Chasm.

After losing balance, I had flipped off a horizontal rope two metres above the swamp-like waters. Following what seems an age, I manage to heave my body — heavier due to the now-sodden combat uniform I’ve been issued with — back on terra firma.

The dreaded sheep dip (Tom Jamieson)

“Well done, good effort,” says Adcock, clapping my back with his spade-like hand. “You can take a chuck up for that.” Seeing my confused expression — even between the streaks of camouflage paint daubed on my face — the 45-year-old explains: “In Royal Marine parlance, that means give yourself a round of applause.”

Even though I am soaked through and stinky, the 6km obstacle course, studded with 15 challenges, is proving fun. Adcock explains that to master the commando crawl, my vertically pointed left leg should be more relaxed, “acting as a keel” while I shuffle along the rope with my hooked right leg pumping, piston-like, in unison with my arms.

Our lesson is taking place in the grounds of Hever Castle in Kent, where Adcock is holding an obstacle course event called Commando Series. It is a picturesque setting — the estate was the childhood home of Anne Boleyn — but with the dreaded Sheep Dip and a 12ft wall still to overcome, this is no time to lose my head.

Obstacle course racing (OCR) is a fast-growing sport. While there are no official figures for the UK, there were 1,370 events in the US last year, with about five million participants — up from 354 events in 2012. The second annual world championships took place in Ohio last month, encompassing eight miles of hellish competition for the most hardy.

Adcock, who is used to organising mass participation events after being event director for the Millennium Youth Games and establishing the popular Castle Triathlon Series in 2009, says the UK can add something unique to the sport. “It may sound a bit arrogant but Royal Marines generally do it better than most. After all, assault courses were — and still are — used to prepare elite soldiers for battle.”

The obstacles are based on those that the original British commandos used at Spean Bridge, a godforsaken place in the Highlands near Fort William, during the second world war. Winston Churchill had seen Boer commandos using guerrilla warfare against British troops when he was a young war correspondent. After Dunkirk, he copied those tactics and mobilised an elite group of soldiers to boost morale by creating little pockets of chaos in occupied Europe.

“Ultimately, from a commando perspective, obstacle courses make sure that your bloke is in good shape when it comes to pulling the trigger, so he can best take aim and kill somebody,” explains Adcock. “That’s the root of OCR. Of course, we are not going around with a weapon and a 30kg pack on our backs but it’s fun and brings out the kid in a lot of people.”

Adcock himself endured 14 months of gruelling training at the Royal Marines’ commando training centre in Lympstone, Devon, in what he calls a “seminal” period of his life. He then served in the marines for seven years, latterly as a helicopter pilot, though he isn’t allowed to divulge any details. For two years he held the record for the notorious Tarzan assault course at Lympstone. (It starts with a death slide, concludes with a rope climb up a 30ft near-vertical wall, and should be completed in “full fighting order” — ie, all the kit.)

As we approach the monkey bars, I eye the horizontal ladder above our heads with trepidation. Adcock barks instructions as I clumsily swing across the bars with more sludge below. “Keep your lower body as still as possible,” he suggests. I obey, and find it quicker to power from pole to pole.

I’m relieved at getting this far, having prevailed over another commando favourite, the Smarty Tubes, by pulling myself along with my thrusting elbows. I’ve survived the Catacombs of Doom, and conquered Peter’s Pool — a 30m-wide clay pit — neck deep in chilly, murky water.

I have slid, slipped and sloshed my way round the course. Occasionally we have come “under fire”, with smoke bombs, explosions and replica gun shots. Ultimately, obstacle courses make sure your bloke is in good shape when it comes to pulling the trigger Nonetheless, I still feel daunted as I face the last two obstacles.

The Sheep Dip is a liquid filled, trough-like structure similar to the ones used to remove sheep’s parasites and contains a two-metre long, submerged drainage pipe. As I tentatively enter the water, Adcock tells me to put my hands, thumbs up, at the top of tunnel I’m about to dive through. That, and not to kick when horizontal in the water so that the commando to my rear can shove me to the other side. I dive on the count of three, whizzing along the narrow pipe. At the other end an instructor yanks me to the surface and orientates me.

The final obstacle is a 12ft wall. “It’s actually 13½ft,” says Adcock looking ahead. “Use the vertical rope, and the netting, leaning your body close to the face.” A 20-second, temple‑bulging clamber later, I’m on top of the wall, and feeling on top of the world. Gleeful yet weary, I can’t help but exhale a loud cheer.

As a reward for completing the route, Adcock hands me a cap comforter, an item worn by those second world war commandos. Not quite a green beret, but still symbolic of my achievement. Grinning, he adds: “You can take a chuck up.”

This article was first published in the Financial Times Weekend in November 2015