Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey guys, so in this episode I speak to Michael, who interviews me very kindly on the recent exit that I went through with Pretty Green Group. We dial into a bit around ai, how that's being used in marketing funnels, as well as how to scale a business for sale. Hopefully you find this one useful. It's the other side of the table. It's me being interviewed, but wanted to share it with you guys. Anyway, hey, it's Oliver Bruce and welcome to the Unlock. Previously known as Success is in the Mind. I'm a UK entrepreneur, angel investor, and neurodivergent founder, and I recently exited my first business, which I scaled from my university halls into a multimillion dollar agency with no backing, no funding, just grit, mistakes and determination. I want to pass on some of the lessons that I've learned, the barriers that I had to overcome and the challenges that I'm still coming up against today. This podcast doesn't grow by itself, it grows with you. If you could possibly share this with friends, family, colleagues, anybody you're in business with, somebody that you think might find this useful, I would be greatly appreciative. Anyway, let's get into it.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Oliver Bus, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
Thank you, Michael for having me. Oliver,

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Congratulations. With your recent acquisition by Pretty Green and you have gone from one man band in your door room to a global exit, what do you think made Pinpoint media such a success and also what made something really valuable for Pretty media for acquire? Yeah,

Speaker 1 (01:30):
Cool. So I guess what made us a success I guess is accumulation of individuals within the business and the stickiness of what we offer to clients, right? So we started 10, 12 years ago at university producing content in high volumes, which is somewhat ironic. Seeing as 10, 12 years ago video was fairly new. We were doing it at significant volumes to get levels. Now people are obviously wanting hundreds of units across the course of a couple of days to put out on social media. So we were a little bit ahead of our time, not necessarily saying that's down to the success of why we scaled as we did in terms of where we really started to become sticky as an agency, we offered search social and creative as a kind of turnkey solution, if you will. I hate that phrase, but all under one roof is probably a nicer way of summarising it and which allowed us to control, not lease the creative for our clients, but also distribute it on specific channels, put budget behind it, drive returns, et cetera, which naturally made us more indispensable from an agency perspective comparatively to if we were just doing creative.

(02:34):
So at the point that we actually managed to sell the organisation, we had about 75 to 80% of our revenue was retained, which meant that it was actually a really attractive proposition when bringing that into a larger group because there is that element of being able to plug in something that is a bit more sustainable than maybe something that is a bit more hand to mouth.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
And you have mentioned before that sometimes the most expensive failure are turning into really big success. Can you give us an example of that?

Speaker 1 (03:07):
Yeah, I mean I think it's a well-known saying. Most entrepreneurs hear it said in some way, shape or form from somebody that there is no such thing as failure. It's only feedback or failure for instance is speed bumps in the road to success, all those kind of different ways of summarising it. I guess from my perspective, I have failed. There have been things that we've done that haven't necessarily worked well. We've placed bets on the wrong industry or idea. For instance, I've lost 110,000 pounds in the pandemic by putting a bet on the wrong industry to go into with all the confusion that was happening around where people should go, what it looks like in terms of working from home, what it looks like in terms of in real life, et cetera, which didn't work out. But all of those things sort of lead you I guess to what ultimately becomes always perceived as a success, which is again a subjective term.

(03:56):
What is success? Success actually could be anything from just having time. It could be building something greater than the sum of its parts. It could be having fun, it could be having a nice home life. It's very rarely depicted as financial, although there's a lot of podcasts out there that say become a millionaire overnight, which frankly is a load of rubbish. Real success for me is freedom is fun and is having that ability to keep going and to do a lot of other things with great people, all of which came out the back of fundamentally failing over the last 10 years or so in some way, shape or form, both big and small. So I don't think people should shy away necessarily from failing. I think there's a cultural difference in the UK to what there is in the US when individuals in the US for instance, do have a business that goes under or maybe don't execute a raise as they specifically or ideally wanted, they're somewhat congratulated for that because they've been through a slightly different journey to the norm, whereas in the UK you are looked at as somebody who maybe just isn't able to do it.

(04:55):
So there was a cultural difference in those two areas, but for me it should be championed, failure should be championed. It's something that actually makes people who they are in the longterm.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
Yeah, completely agree. Also, me coming from Italy, the failure culture is even worse. You are even worse than UK I think. Really? Yeah, there is not that propensity to fail and to try your looks like you are. If you fail, there's really yeah, you look no really good. Instead of seeing as a step into the process of success, as you said, many entrepreneurs, they all have been going through thousand and thousand of failed attempt to make something great. Dyson famously have built I think around thousand 500 prototype before making his famous Dyson vacuum Hoover. So it is like very big difference.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
Yeah, it's not game over when you fail, it's game over if you quit, right? And that's the reality. I think you just need to have that level of endurance, keep pushing on, put one step in front of the other. I guess your Dyson analogy is a perfect one, but look at Musk and SpaceX. One rocket failed, he went and built another one. Second rocket failed, he went and built another one. If that third rocket hadn't worked, the company would've gone under the third rocket worked. The company was okay. And I guess it's that tenacity, it's that ability to just keep going when maybe the odds aren't necessarily in your favour. That is what makes a founder, that's what makes an entrepreneur and ultimately that's what makes somebody successful.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
And Oliver, you spent a decade building an agency on new creativity and now there is a new technology that is changing completely the creative process. You also been involved into investing in different companies at the forefront of ai like open AI and others. How do you think AI is now reshaping the creative and paid out landscape? Yeah,

Speaker 1 (07:08):
I mean AI is exciting fund basically from my perspective. It's exciting. I know there's a lot of people that are scared of what it could do and can do, and I think that's maybe the wrong position to take. I think embracing it is the right position to be in. From my perspective as an agency, we're building out multiple different agents to operate in multiple different ways. Markets, industries, work with different platforms. For instance, be it performance or be it CRM systems to allow our team to essentially do the stuff, do the job that they enjoy doing and not necessarily the heavy lifting that sometimes they don't enjoy doing. So what AI agents for us will enable us to do is to do deeper, to do better and to do more valuable work for our clients without necessarily having to do the mundane tasks. The filing, for instance, the reporting that sometimes individuals don't like to do, what essentially it means for multiple other industries is volume, is scale is hyper-personalization.

(08:08):
So if we have to look at it from a marketing perspective, there will be, and there already are, you can see it online, but significant more volume from a creative standpoint, but that volume will be hyper-personalized to an individual, be it locality wise or sex or gender for instance, even frankly age name if you will as well. For instance, if you go onto Netflix and you are watching Ozark and I'm going onto Netflix and I'm watching Ozark, the album cover will be different for you as it will be for me because of what our interests, what our likes, our motivating factors are, I guess. So what AI will do for organisations is essentially allow them to offer far greater volumes to clients, but in a far more personalised and far more approachable way. It has to obviously resonate with the individual, so there has to be some authenticity there still that's super important, which is why you can see the uprising of micro and macro UGC creators.

(08:59):
Influencer obviously has been a huge growth market over the last couple of years, but as we move into 20 27, 20 28 and onwards, AI agents that create their own AI influencers, we'll start to become more and more become accepted as well as witnessed I guess. And I think that will be quite a divisive period of time for quite a lot of organisations and people because that level of authenticity may not be bought at that point because it is an agent, because it is an AI influencer that is selling you a can of EV AM water, right, or a bottle of EV am water. So that's something I think that is on the horizon is starting to happen, hasn't quite been adopted just yet, but it's something to definitely watch out for.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
And on the day-to-day operation of the business, can you give us some example of our AI power media agency works comparing to maybe five years ago?

Speaker 1 (09:56):
Absolutely. I guess five years ago an AI pound agency would, well, you could hardly render out any imagery, right? From an AI perspective, it was only three, maybe three and a half years ago that chat GPT offered the ability for you to prompt and render a mildly acceptable image. I can remember us doing a hackathon in the agency three or four years ago where we were literally asking it to create a flying hamster and using prompts to build that, right? Some people were creating a really basic image of a hamster flying to space on a rocket. Others were flying, I had flying hamsters with wings, all that kind of stuff that you get at hackathons, right? What it allows us to do now is so much more, I think agencies right now that are adopting it are using it in a way whereby they can both resell it to clients from a SaaS perspective, but also implement it within their organisational structure to, as I said earlier, allow individuals to essentially do better, deeper, more valuable work and to let go of the stuff that they don't like doing.

(10:57):
I think in terms of people building out proprietary software, there are a lot of areas that you can bet in right now and building out proprietary software is obviously one of them, but not necessarily knowing what the correct foundational model is to build it out on is meaning that there is a lot of organisations out there that are just banging together, claw chat, GPT, et cetera, and kind of re-skinning if you will. It would be very expensive to build out your own fundamental foundational model anyway, but I do think there is a lot of innovation happening at a rate of knots that we've never seen before. Lovable being valued at a billion after a year is just unheard of open claw releasing the way that you can now build out agents on open source software. Again, 12 weeks ago that didn't exist. So this stuff is moving at a speed like we have never seen before. Adoption, there's far more appetite for adoption than there ever has been before, but there is still an element of apprehension and I think there's a huge security consideration around the open claw piece for instance, that people need to understand if they are to fully implement that into their business, whatever that might be, agency or otherwise.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
Are you using open claw in your organisation? We

Speaker 1 (12:07):
Are using open floor in our organisation, yeah, we have a number of Mac minis on a dedicated server. They're fully secure so it can't access our own data. We've got its own wifi network as well to make sure that, again, it can't use our own wifi to be able to access any confidential information so it guys within the organisation have set it up in as much of a secure way as they can, but we are using it because it is very exciting technology. I appreciate that Nvidia are releasing, I think it's called Nvidia Claw, obviously you've got Claw that are releasing c Claude co as well. So this is the early stages of what essentially an ag agentic business will be. I think over the next six to eight months you will see tens if not hundreds of new types of open source agent platforms being released. It just so happens that OpenCL is the first of what will be many

Speaker 2 (12:56):
And what is one of the biggest challenges right now both into the business and also into the adoption of ai? What are these challenges?

Speaker 1 (13:06):
The challenges, I mean isn't actually the security piece that people need to always consider, but that's been the same with anything, right? As soon as anything was on the cloud, there was a security consideration and that's just a fact of running a company. I think people have this magpie effect, right? Where they go, okay, cool, this agent or this process can solve on my problems, so I'm going to ask it to do all of the things that I probably want it to do for instance, rather than what they should do is take a step back, go very deep, go very narrow, choose two or three things that they think would make their life a little bit easier, would make their business a little bit more efficient, or might even unlock for instance, some new revenue streams and then they should build out those specific areas.

(13:48):
The reality is don't go broad brush stroke, don't try and build something for everything because it just won't work and it will fall over. You will naturally solve a problem and you'll break another part of the process. So make sure that whatever you are trying to build for intrinsically and you know how that process should work in the current way of working IE in the world of humans and with that knowledge you can then interrogate the agent that you are building out to make sure that essentially that agent is doing the job as you would expect it to be done rather than just building an agent to do everything and not really knowing how everything works on a day-to-day basis anyway.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
So security and the second you said it was around, did you say asset management? Are you facing some with all these kind of assets that there are agent are creating, how are you managing the assets creation?

Speaker 1 (14:42):
Asset creation, I mean, again, there's multiple different platforms out there that you can use, Higgs Field and so on. We have our own proprietary platform, which we've had for a while called Core ai, which does do gen ai creative, so one can go on there. We use it internally as an agency. We don't resell it as a SaaS platform to clients, but what it essentially will do will be create high volume statics. It doesn't necessarily do video just yet. It doesn't really do UGC, it's starting to get there, but it's not quite there. But that will allow us to produce high volume, as I said, assets, tag them correctly, put them into the right folders, ensure that they're distributed across the right campaigns, and then the performance team for instance, in our case, we'll make sure that they're optimised and the money is being put behind and deployed in the correct way, make no bones about it from a performance perspective.

(15:28):
We are building out with those guys agents to make the performance even more effective for our clients to make sure that we're analysing the data even more deeply to make sure that every pound, penny and shilling that we're putting into these campaigns is driving the maximum return for our clients. And that is one of the perks that comes with building out these agents, but where we currently are, we are very much using it for high volume creative. We obviously have to have a human to quality control that because we all know AI can hallucinate pretty badly. AI is not that good with really tiny numbers for instance. It can still merge those together. It's not that good with brand labels or logos. It can sometimes get those wrong. So we can use it essentially to take the horse to water, but we can't really get the horse to drink, so to speak. That's where the human comes into play.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
We're exploring some ideas around AI creative director because there is this massive, a lot of facets created into agency and there is the need of creative direction consistently across all the assets. How do you say as a solution, do you think it's something that you will adopt internally or would you build yourself? Would you look for a solution?

Speaker 1 (16:46):
I think AI creates directors or I CDs if you will, whilst a nice idea, we have to remember that AI isn't empathetic in any way. It doesn't have any level of emotion, so it's not necessarily going to know if the advert that you are making for VW with a lovely family going on holiday who are all looking very cheery and happy is actually the right type of creative for the campaign that you're trying to produce, right? So AI doesn't quite get that. Yes, AI can do volume, yes, AI can understand data. Yes, AI can write narratives to a certain extent, but it won't have that emotional intelligence and it won't do for a while and that is why you'll need to have some human, as I said, be that a creative director or otherwise to be able to almost audit and make sure that it aligns to the brief.

(17:30):
Obviously if we're doing something that is more top of funnel, that is high volume, that is very simple from a creative perspective, absolutely you can churn through this creative pretty rapidly with an agentic process, but if it's something slightly more robust, something slightly more in depth if you will, that needs to resonate with an audience, needs to talk to an audience from a sort of emotional perspective, AI won't be able to do that. It'll do a lot of the heavy lifting, but it won't necessarily allow you to take it from start to finish. So there will always be that need for a CD as it stands at the moment that said, they might the CD for instance, be able to put it through a process to be able to go actually, am I positioning the creative in the right place? Is the eye line for instance of the viewer going to look at where the primary subject is or have I positioned it in the incorrect place that I can get on board with that I can understand a CD using AI for, but I don't see a CD necessarily just passing everything over to AI and going, thanks very much over to you, run this campaign from start to finish.

(18:29):
That I don't think is quite right just yet because it doesn't understand that empathetic piece.

Speaker 2 (18:35):
Imagine we could scale maybe not replacing the cd, but if we can scale it, so take is taste, so an AI agent is really train specifically on a specific CD taste high aesthetic with his tone and copy style, et cetera. Would that help?

Speaker 1 (18:58):
Yeah, a hundred percent that'll help. And as I said, that'll do a lot of the heavy lifting and it's the same as any job in any business. If you were to train it on what your day-to-day is, then it will naturally help you in some way, shape or form, right? Whether that can write emails from a tonality point of view to make sure that anything you are sending from an email perspective sounds like you, whether that just understands how you like to work, whether that can block time in your diary, whether that can respond to Slack messages. There are things that your day-to-day can benefit from using agents. There is just parts of roles where it just simply won't work currently and I think that cd, that empathetic part within a CD's role is one of those anomalies, but absolutely if they were to upload their back catalogue of the styles that they like to produce, the tonality, the typography, the campaigns, the markets, the demographics that this specific CD is an expert in, so let's just say it's a CD for an FMCG brand, right? That that's targeting Gen Zs yet understandably it will be able to a certain extent help them with the campaign planning, but as I said to you, it'll never take it from start to finish. It will just help them with that heavy lifting.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
Oliver also, you are working with the influencer actors and creators in your agency.

Speaker 1 (20:21):
Yeah, we do influencers. We work with actors if you will, or talent everything through from on camera through to I guess,

Speaker 2 (20:30):
And there is a growing debate around intellectual property for creators, tour sector on using their intellectual property to train AI models and seems like we still didn't have a clear framework to reward and making sure that everyone get benefit from this technology. What do you think a fair framework that protecting and incentivizing creativity will look like?

Speaker 1 (21:03):
Super difficult. I mean that's the million dollar question I was with some guys yesterday that are producers, music producers for the like of Ed Sheeran and Pharrell Williams and such, and I was talking to 'em about this exact thing, but in the music world, and there are labels like Sony who are just simply not signing any artists be that up and coming or current that have any level of AI in their scripting. For instance, narratives, lyrics, music, whatever it might be, anything to do with that specific soundtrack, that specific piece of music that's being produced. If it has any type of AI involved within it, they're not signing it, they're not taking it because they don't necessarily know in three to five to 10 years time where that soundtrack, where that lyric was inspired from who actually owns that melody, for instance, there may be a legal case that comes out of the wash.

(21:52):
Nobody really knows the answer to that at the moment. So to your point about creators, it's exactly the same. If there is a creator who is putting their image into AI, for instance, and then somebody happens to have used that open source piece of software and it's used that image as inspiration, where does that live from a legal perspective? It's super, super difficult to answer without necessarily getting too nerdy. One can actually look at potentially a bit of a blast of the past, let's say NFTs rights. The pandemic NFTs were massive minted on the blockchain. It's got this obviously code that is forever owned by that individual, by that asset, if you will, that digital asset. There is an argument in time, and I can see why crypto goes hand in glove with this. From an agent buying perspective, there is an argument that legally you could have an NFT or something on the blockchain to say you own that ip and actually if an agent or if something in the future from an AI perspective were to use it, then it would have some kind of record on the blockchain that it was your ip.

(22:54):
Similarly with crypto and such, if an agent is to transact with another agent, they will need a form of currency and that is where things like Bitcoin will come into play. That is five, 10 years away I admit. But I think to answer your question in a bit of a roundabout way, that is a potential solution to it.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
Yeah, I agree. I completely agree. I think a decentralised network, and there are actually different company that they are trying to create a protocol for ip, right example, story foundation is one of them and I am really interested to see how that is going to develop because I do think there is an important discussion as a society, companies and government that they have to approach because I don't think it's completely fair for all the creators and writers, actors that use their IP to train models that are making millions for companies. So why are we not getting rewarded by that? So creating a network that can distribute the small micropayment also can be at least more micropayment for the use of the different content will redistribute. The value of the difficulties is the implementation and also I think the current capitalist system that has to change to frame differently some certain business model. So I think it's probably is going more towards the centralised application and trying to incentive this kind of business model instead of maybe mainstream application, but it's going to be a huge challenge. As you said, probably in the next 10 years maybe we can find some solution.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
Yeah, I mean certainly in the next 10 years I would imagine we will have to find some solution. I was reading the other day that Disney I believe have fallen out with Sawa as in I believe chat gt. I think it's chat GT Sawa because they were producing such visually realistic content that actually Disney were going, well actually you guys are now using the inspiration from us to produce this. For instance, you'll have seen that video with Brad Pitt and Tom Hanks in again, that was totally fake, but actually if you're going to Hollywood and you're paying these actors to do it, it's a lot cheaper just to use one of these platforms and you can get the same, you can get us an output. So yeah, for me it's an answer I can't give you. I don't know what the rights and wrong is there other than that the creators should absolutely be looked after in some way, shape, or form, however that may be. And it's wrong to use somebody's IP if you haven't got the rights to.

Speaker 2 (25:53):
On another topic, you have mentioned that AI won't replace founders, but founders using ai, we replace those who don't. For a media agency today, what do you truly transform the creative workflow look like in this 26? I mean we have been speaking already some of that part, but maybe specifically on some, if you have some advice for entrepreneur or people that are starting today or companies that are trying to adopt ai, how that could look like?

Speaker 1 (26:26):
Yeah, I guess it really depends on what the businesses, right, in terms of why and how they should adopt these types of processes or platforms or agents. But for me, I would be building out as much from a data perspective as possible if I was starting my business from scratch right now through the use of these agents to understand where both gaps were, but where I also sat in terms of a bit a price point, be it a market or any other data that might be useful to me, I would then be producing high volume content through a lot of these gen AI platforms. I would then be distributing that content online across 5, 6, 7 different social medias organically. I would then be looking for the insight from an online perspective as to what is hitting well organically based on the data that I understand my market wants to see the imagery that I'm serving.

(27:15):
If that's performing well, I would then double down and put some ad budget behind it and then I would rinse and repeat and I would make sure that I'm myself based on if a piece of creative across seven platforms is performing super well, that is evidently resonating well with an audience from an organic perspective. So it will probably 10 x if I put some budget behind it from a paid perspective, and that is what I would do if I was starting a company right now, whether it's a service sector or whether it's a consumer focused business, the process could be similar across both of those. It would just be very different in terms of the content, but the actual methodology as to the data piece, the volume, the organic and vendor performance, that logic remains the same and you have to be on all these platforms to be able to understand exactly where your audience is.

Speaker 2 (28:03):
Do you think there is still opportunity in the software layer? We have seen so easy to build many, many tools. I mean, building software now is dropped basically to zero the cost of, so there is a really high competition into the software layer. What do you think the opportunity is moving then?

Speaker 1 (28:29):
Look, I think you can look at it two ways, right? There is a huge amount of commoditization from a software or a development perspective with no code, with open source, with even lovable frankly, where you just simply prompted and you get a great looking ux, even frankly a good ui. There is that level of commoditization, which therefore means there is I guess a decreasing appetite for people to put significant capital into developing software. But just to be clear, to produce a proper piece of software that really stands up and that is properly robust, you do still need to have an element and an ability to actually code and to be able to build an infrastructure that stands up to a hundred thousand or a million people using this piece of software. So it's great and I love it, and we can vibe code and we can sit down for days and we can build out some amazing platforms.

(29:18):
And for me, vibe coding is getting it to a level that's like MVP 2.0, so it's slightly better than MVP. It'll stand up to a certain extent, but it might not be the absolute, then you need to patch in somebody to basically polish it and to make sure that it does stand up and it is robust. So there is still huge scope for businesses that are both looking to raise money, be that Angel P or VC from a SaaS perspective. But what it essentially allows people to do is to fail faster, which means that they'll be able to come up with a solution far quicker as to what actually sticks rather than spending, which you would've done a year and a half ago, 300,000 quid on building out an MVP to then bring it to market and people go, well, actually I don't really like the UI here, so I'm not actually going to then use the platform.

(30:03):
You're then going to have to go back to the drawing board, raise money, and it's a labour intensive, a very capital intensive process. Now we can bring something to market super, super quickly, people will feed back very, very quickly. It'll be in the wild. You will then see the level of conversion. You'll understand that you've got product market fit, and then you can start to code it properly and put in some significant capital to making sure it stands up. It is making development accessible to the masses, but it does still take an element of technical knowledge to be able to actually produce something that really stands up and is robust from an enterprise perspective.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
And you don't think that agents are taking a lot of the value on the marketplace. I mean, we have seen foundation model like on traffic, open ai, they're now basically attacking the software layer. So basically they can do everything. So you don't think they're capturing a lot of that value?

Speaker 1 (31:04):
Yeah, for sure. I mean if we look at it here and now, and that's the current answer based on the current industry and current climate that we are in, right? Three, five years time, it's going to be very different. I do admit that that said, there is so much out there, so many shiny new objects, people don't necessarily know where to look and what to do. So there is a little bit of overwhelm at the moment and absolutely they will own the end to end in time, but people need to understand how secure is that data. If it's built out through let's just say philanthropic, is that data actually yours? Have you given it to the world? What does that look like? Where is that? How secure is it? So there will always be an argument, there will always be a point in time where you go, well actually, if we're building a CRM system and we have to have data, which for whatever reason needs to be hyper secure, it's got people's financial information in there.

(31:55):
Is that something that these platforms will allow you to build it out on? Yes, probably. How secure is that data? We don't really know yet, and there is a lot of unknowns with this, right? And that's why there is a huge amount of Chucky stuff at the wall and seeing what actually sticks and you can build anything you want to build right now and it is super exciting. It's just somebody else doing that quite possibly. Has someone else brought that to market? Quite possibly because it's so easy. So therefore, how quickly can you that, well, we don't really know what you can use it for. However, is understanding your current business, your current industry, your current state of the nation, and trying to make that more efficient, trying to do better work, which is why there's this whole argument that actually in real life and physical is going to be so much more valuable in the future because everything is going to be done by agents and I think it's a really interesting place that we're currently in because it is so new, no one really knows the answer, but physical will always be here.

(32:48):
You do a gym chain earlier, you're never going to be able to get your humanoid robot to get fit for you. Yeah, fine, but that isn't necessarily that safe and that doesn't make you fit. You just lose weight. So these in real life, physical things, events, occasions, places will become more and more valuable than ever before. Whereas action, ssas, tech development, it is a wild west out there at the moment. People are building whatever the hell they want to build and there's very little parameters around that. That's why it's super exciting. It's a bit like the Silicon Valley cousins where people were just going build, build, build, release, build, build, build release, and just seeing what happens. It's just there's a lot less money being pumped into it because it's a lot more commoditized.

Speaker 2 (33:31):
Yeah, I agree. I see the value really going, moving into trust into real life event. As you said, these experiences are going to be much more valuable and human connection, human to human and distribution as well because the building is basically now we solve, there is no any more problem solving. So I want to go into talking about a big discussion around the layoff as there is a lot of anxiety also, especially in the creative industry, film industry, also tech. So what do you think? AI will disrupt a lot of businesses and there is going to be increase of layoff. I

Speaker 1 (34:27):
Think it depends what country you're in because to use your term, laying off people is a lot easier in America, right, than it is in the uk. So I think there will be more brash decisions made quicker in America than there would be in the uk. I think to add to that, it depends on the scale of the business, whether it's a macro or a micro organisation. Again, if you're a micro organisation, the reality is you'll have a very different experience to if you are a larger organisation with thousands and thousands of staff, and again, it depends on the industry. So for sure there's no two ways about it for sure. People will leave their jobs will be made redundant because of this technology and because of this emerging future that we're currently experiencing. Humanoid robots, AI agents, whatever it might be, this syngen world if you will for sure, people will be made redundant, but does that mean that they won't be able to get a job ever again?

(35:21):
No. It just means that job's going to be a slightly different job maybe in a slightly different industry to what they were working in previously. And you've heard the saying, right? You've heard the saying said by many, many people that actually it's not AI that's going to replace you, it's people that can use AI that will, and that is a very, very true saying, right? If you don't understand how to work with your future colleague, which is a humanoid robot, then the reality is yeah, fine, you might be replaced by a humanoid robot, but if you have intrinsic value because you are making that humanoid robot bigger and better and coding it and working on it, then actually that's super valuable, right? That's the irony. So I do think to your point, yes, there will be a lot of change I think in terms of current change in the UK and in sort of medium SME businesses, there won't be that much in terms of churn and redundancy, but you have seen in larger organisations, the likes of the hold cos if you will, they have made significant redundancies, A, because they've got vast headcounts and B, because they have the capital to be able to put into technology that they've been developing three or four years ago.

(36:23):
So they are far further ahead than an SME organisation who are now just adopting it because it's become so much more commoditized and accessible. So I think there's going to be this slight delay, if you will, but the SMEs will just learn to adapt. They might not make redundancies. What they will probably do is stop hiring and they'll build out agent workforces and they'll train the individuals up within the business they've currently got and then hire people to be able to join the business based on what their future perfect looks like. The older, the larger, the bigger organisations who have been developing this for three or four years and are further ahead because of that and have more capital and have more headcounts, of course we'll be making redundancies, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing because those individuals will go into an SME, which have far greater opportunity moving forwards because they'll have that experience, they'll be able to implement that and they'll be able to scale for a very exciting future.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Oliver, before we go into a quick fire round, I want to ask you a little bit about the UK situation with economic growth.

Speaker 1 (37:23):
What

Speaker 2 (37:23):
Do you think we need to do to have a boosting to our economy as we have seen that we have been a bit slow downgrade, maybe America, American last year, 4.5%, GDP grow, respect our 1%, and in the last Q4, we basically had zero grow in the

Speaker 1 (37:53):
Uk

Speaker 2 (37:54):
And at the beginning of this year is pretty much the same. So what do you think has to change?

Speaker 1 (37:59):
Well, I mean why would you invest in the UK right now? I'll ask you that question because I bet you can't think of an answer. There isn't. There isn't. Why would you invest in the uk? Taxes are really, really high, right? There are very little perks for employers. Everything is weighted towards essentially paying government debt down. It makes very little sense to build your business. In the uk. Entrepreneurs relief has disappeared, right? It used to be 10% on the first 10 million, it's 10% on the first million now, right? And then you're paying a full whack thereafter, which therefore disincentivizes entrepreneurs to build something to a scale whereby actually it is noteworthy to the uk. That is why people are leaving. You've seen Sue and Suede and swes of individuals going overseas, be it to the UAE Portugal with the golden visa, frankly, even America because there is very little incentive.

(38:44):
There is far too much red tape and the policies that are being implemented, not just from this government, to be clear, and I'm not going to go into politics too heavily, but it just doesn't make a huge amount of sense for individuals right now to risk essentially their livelihood by starting a business when they're far more protected, not doing so. Essentially, they've got far more rights not doing so. They're far more looked after not doing so. There isn't the appetite there to go, actually, I'm going to remortgage my house. They're going to hire 20 people and I'm going to try and scale this business that just isn't there. Whereas it is in America and it is in other places like Dubai for instance, for many, many, many reasons, and money in the UK is far harder to come by to scale it in the first place. There were a lot less people willing to be able to invest in organisations. The best thing the government ever did was the SCIS and EIS tax relief. That is a great initiative and that does help, but there is so much more that can be done.

Speaker 2 (39:36):
So do you think change of government will be,

Speaker 1 (39:40):
I think we'd need a lot more than that, but I think that would help.

Speaker 2 (39:43):
Okay, thanks Oliver. I don't want to go too much into politics as we are more focusing on AI and business transformation, but maybe next time we can dive deep into that. I would love to know your thoughts. A quick fire round while there's prediction for media creative in the next 12 months. Prediction

Speaker 1 (40:05):
For media creative in the next 12 months going to be high volume, hyper personalised and it's going to be very much more interactive. I think you'll be able to buy a lot more through the likes of Amazon and Netflix through watching their content than you will be right now.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
One AI tool you couldn't run your business without. Right now, my

Speaker 1 (40:22):
Favourite AI tool at the moment is WIS Flow, spelled WISP flow, and it's brilliant. You hold down one of the keys on your keyboard, talks to the computer, it turns it into perfect copy. I write all my emails through it.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
Biggest myth, people still believe about AI in the creative agencies.

Speaker 1 (40:40):
The biggest myth people believe that AI in the creative agencies is that it will ideate, create content, distribute it, and optimise it with the push of a button. The reality is it still needs humans to do a lot of the logical thinking and a lot of the creative thinking and empathetic thinking. All the thinking that we've spoken about, Michael,

Speaker 2 (40:57):
The one you must skill AI will never replace in your industry.

Speaker 1 (41:00):
Easy question. We've spoken about that a lot. The one skill it won't replace is empathy, right? Is emotion. It's feeling. It is not going to be able to do that. Appreciate you listening to the podcast. Hopefully you found it useful. For those that want to read up or learn more, head over to my LinkedIn page, Oliver Bruce online where you'll find a weekly newsletter called the Brucey Bonus where we double click into more detail and give you more tips and tricks around how to scale your business. If you want to share this with friends, family, colleagues, business owners, people that are in your circle then might find it useful. I would be super appreciative if I said at the beginning of the podcast, this does not grow on its own. This grows with you and we do it for you. So thank you so much for listening and catch you next time.