business – Oliver Pickup

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. 15)

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

Image created on Midjourney

The future

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

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 However, it is hopelessly outdated as a leadership model for a globally connected, AI-enabled future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The present

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The past

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image created on Midjourney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statistics of the month

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fairness at work: The illusion of progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

This means:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fairness in AI: Who controls the future?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The present

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The past

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statistics of the month

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From darkness to light – unlocking the potential of technology-enabled supply chains

As businesses grapple with volatile demand and rising customer expectations, emerging technologies are helping operators see – and shape – their logistics networks like never before, according to experts

For centuries, supply chains have mainly operated in the dark. Even in our hyper-connected era, supply chain visibility and sustainability remain critical challenges, with the latest Proxima Supply Chain Barometer revealing that 86% of chief executives see significant hurdles with supply chain resiliency.

This is driving a growing sense of urgency, with 55% of CEOs planning to dedicate more time to supply chain topics than in the last year. Meanwhile, 99% of respondents identify barriers to supply chain carbonisation, according to the Proxima research published in September and based on a survey of 3,000 CEOs across the UK, US, DACH, and Benelux-based companies.

However, a convergence of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, and innovative delivery models is shining light on these blind spots, promising a future where goods flow with next-level efficiency and sustainability.

“We’ve been running supply chains largely in the dark,” says Steve Statler, chief marketing officer at Wiliot, an ambient IoT company. “The opportunity now is to see everything everywhere all at once – like getting the cheat code in a computer game where suddenly the entire battlefield map is illuminated.”

This newfound visibility is already transforming operations. Royal Mail is deploying Wiliot’s Bluetooth readers across 6,500 vehicles to track 850,000 rolling cages that transport parcels nationwide using 2.5 million of Wiliot’s battery-free Bluetooth tags. The system helps right-size trucks, orchestrate labour, and prevent asset losses. More significantly, it lays the groundwork for real-time parcel tracking with temperature and carbon monitoring – enabling ambient delivery services for temperature-sensitive items like medicine and food without requiring refrigerated transport.

Last-mile upgrade – drones and driverless cars

The pressure to innovate comes as consumer expectations reach new heights. Mia Yamaguchi, retail development lead at Uber Direct, says her company’s recent study shows 96% of Gen Z consumers now expect retailers to offer on-demand delivery. Yet only 22% of UK merchants, across various industries, currently provide such services, revealing a stark gap between capability and demand that represents a significant opportunity for forward-thinking businesses.

Uber Direct is addressing this gap by extending its food delivery network to all retail categories, from pharmaceuticals to DIY supplies. The model leverages existing Uber Eats couriers, demonstrating how innovation often means creatively repurposing assets rather than building from scratch. “We’re effectively a logistics innovator with a strong Uber backing,” says Yamaguchi, “utilising our existing fleet rather than investing heavily in new infrastructure.”

This approach has proved particularly valuable for construction companies and time-sensitive deliveries. When builders run short of supplies, sending workers to fetch materials can result in hours of lost productivity. Uber Direct’s solution enables rapid replenishment without disrupting work schedules, illustrating how modern logistics can directly impact broader economic efficiency.

Innovation in last-mile delivery is accelerating globally. In China, companies like JD.com are already using drones to service remote areas, particularly mountainous regions where traditional delivery proves challenging. Meanwhile, Uber is piloting autonomous vehicles in California. These developments hint at a future where the final stretch of delivery could be entirely automated.

Rise of the robots – working alongside humans

DHL Supply Chain is taking automation several steps further. The logistics giant will be the first company in the UK to deploy Boston Dynamics’ Stretch robots, using computer vision to unload trailers. Machine learning algorithms improve inventory accuracy while reducing labour needs, while generative AI streamlines back-office processes from legal work to solution design.

“Innovation and change should be embraced as something positive,” explains Saul Resnick, chief executive officer of DHL Supply Chain in the United Kingdom and Ireland. “These technologies ultimately improve job satisfaction, work quality, and safety for our people.” Rather than replacing workers, DHL’s automation strategy focuses on eliminating repetitive, physically demanding tasks while creating opportunities for employees to develop new skills.

Perhaps the most transformative development is the rise of ambient IoT – networks of battery-free sensors powered by surrounding radio waves. Wiliot’s postage stamp-sized computers can be attached to virtually anything, creating what Statler calls “an app store for the physical world”.

This capability enables use cases from monitoring vaccine temperatures to ensuring proper stock rotation in retail. “When you can see everything continuously, you discover issues people didn’t want to see before,” says Statler. “Products left at wrong temperatures, incorrect loading, poor stock rotation – all these inefficiencies become visible and addressable.” The technology has profound implications for food waste reduction and medical supply chain safety.

Navigating supply chain disruptions

Geopolitical disruptions and supply chain resilience remain critical concerns for business leaders. Resnick states that working with partners like Everstream Analytics provides access to predictive insights and risk analytics which help to calculate how events – from blocked shipping lanes to natural disasters – might impact supply chains weeks in advance.

“Having those tools available allows us to be more dynamic,” Resnick explains. “We can tell you that a ship won’t arrive because it’s stuck in the Red Sea and needs to go around Africa. You may need air freight – yes, there’s a cost, but on a case-by-case basis, this can be less than the delay.”

These predictive capabilities, powered by AI and enhanced visibility, enable businesses to make proactive decisions about inventory levels, alternative routes, and transport modes. This agility is crucial as supply chains face continued volatility and disruption.

Despite the promise, implementing these technologies isn’t straightforward. Innovation cycles often outlast executive tenures, making long-term transformation difficult. Integration with legacy systems poses technical challenges, while workforce concerns about automation require careful change management. The shift to more resilient, diversified supply chains following COVID-19 and geopolitical disruptions also demands investment, stresses Resnick.

Using the power of partnerships

For companies beginning their digital transformation journey, success requires a clear focus on business problems rather than technology solutions. Resnick emphasises the importance of viewing technology as an enabler rather than an end in itself. Statler notes that building ecosystems of trusted partners is crucial. “The notion that you can succeed by building everything yourself is shortsighted.”

Yield management emerges as a critical concept across all three experts’ insights. Whether it’s Uber maximising courier utilisation during off-peak hours, DHL optimising warehouse operations through automation, or Royal Mail enhancing its legacy infrastructure with modern tracking capabilities, the key is leveraging existing assets more efficiently before investing in new ones.

In the next 12 months, the convergence of AI, IoT, and innovative delivery models will create unprecedented opportunities for supply chain optimisation. Early adopters are already seeing significant benefits: Royal Mail’s rolling cage tracking system has reduced asset losses and improved fleet efficiency, while Uber Direct’s expansion into new retail categories is helping merchants meet evolving consumer expectations.

Tomorrow’s supply chains will be visible, predictive, and responsive in previously unimaginable ways. For business leaders, the imperative is clear: embrace technological change or risk being left in the dark. “Innovation is business critical,” Resnick concludes. “You can’t stand still in this regard. The alternative to moving forward doesn’t exist.”

This article was first published by Raconteur, in December 2024, following an in-person roundtable event that I moderated

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:

Seeking and sharing true understanding
Connecting for good
Human-focused
Improving – physical and mental – health
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.