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Chatting GPT

Real conversations with the humans making AI work in business today.


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  • 2. RICS Says AI Literacy Isn't Optional

    30:20||Season 8, Ep. 2
    Most of the AI conversation is a numbers game: licences bought, people "using AI", whether the firm has a strategy yet. James Garner thinks that is the wrong number to watch. The money is flowing and the strategies are written, but the thing almost no one is funding is capability — whether ordinary professionals can actually use the tools well. That gap, he argues, is widening, and it is where the real risk now sits.James is Head of AI at Gleeds, a Fellow of RICS, and co-founder of the Project Flux podcast. He has been a quantity surveyor since 1998, a profession he jokes you could pull someone into from 1890, give a day's training, and they would manage fine today — which is exactly what makes this moment different. He sat on the RICS working group behind its new responsible-AI standard, in force since March, which for the first time makes baseline AI literacy a requirement for every chartered surveyor, not a nice-to-have.James walks Maryrose through why an "AI strategy" that is not a business strategy powered by AI will fail, the difference between transparency and explainability (and why he prefers "bookending" to "human in the loop"), the model-cost reckoning coming for anyone on a flat monthly plan, and the eight Claude files every professional should set up to get real value from Claude Code. Along the way, the habit that keeps him ahead: half an hour, every Friday, to do nothing but experiment.A practical, clear-eyed and genuinely useful conversation about closing the gap between owning AI and actually using it, before it widens any further.James Linkdln

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  • 1. The Race To Super Intelligence Has Already Started

    31:23||Season 8, Ep. 1
    Most of the AI conversation is fixated on AGI: when machines will match human intelligence, and which lab gets there first. Dr. Craig Kaplan thinks that is the wrong thing to watch. The real story is what comes seconds later artificial super intelligence, systems a thousand times, or even a trillion times, smarter than the smartest human alive. And he believes it is arriving faster than almost anyone is prepared for.Craig has been working on this since the 1980s. He earned his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon alongside Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon, one of the scientists who named the field of AI, and he has spent decades building collective intelligence systems — including ones that traded billions of dollars on Wall Street and beat the best hedge funds. That track record is the foundation of his core argument in this episode: the widely held belief that safer AI must mean slower AI is simply wrong. You do not need to slow down, he says. You need a smarter design.That design is a democratic "society" of cooperating AI agents — millions of them, each carrying the values of a separate human checking one another in the open, rather than a single monolithic black box no one can see inside. Craig walks Maryrose through why this is both more powerful and far safer, what Pope Leo's first encyclical gets right and wrong about treating AI as a mere tool, and why the values we hand these systems now, in their "childhood," will shape everything that follows. He also makes the case for sovereign AI and the Global South, where cultures like Nigeria's Yoruba risk being erased by models trained overwhelmingly on Western data. And the pace is staggering: some AI capabilities, he notes, are now doubling in as little as 1.3 months.A sharp, grounded, and surprisingly optimistic conversation about getting the most important technology in human history right before it arrives.Find Craig's white papers and free designs at superintelligence.comHere's you can see Craig's Linkdln
  • 8. The Web Is Being Componentised

    23:51||Season 7, Ep. 8
    In January 2026, Google was granted a patent that lets it read your website, break it into components, and serve searchers an AI-generated page assembled from your content. Visitors may never see your actual site. Joe Toscano — former Google designer, one of the voices in The Social Dilemma, and founder of Service Stories — saw this coming. Joe left Silicon Valley in 2017, before Cambridge Analytica broke, because of what he was being asked to build. He now runs Service Stories, which helps small and mid-size service businesses get found by AI search engines by converting their existing work orders and job data into content — automatically. Early results from their pilots show direct web traffic growth of 228% within 90 days, and over 400% across longer periods. The shift that makes this possible: search is moving from "plumber near me" to "why is my HVAC system creating complications in my house?" Topical authority — specific, question-answering content — is now the edge, and AI makes it viable to produce at scale for the first time. He also just returned from two months in China — and his account of robots delivering room service in three minutes, seamless phone-based identity and payments, and a level of operational fluency the West hasn't reached yet is genuinely uncomfortable for anyone who assumes Europe's regulatory caution is the only sensible posture. A sharp, grounded episode on where search is going, what China is building, and what AGI actually looks like when it arrives. Find Joe and a step-by-step guide to doing this yourself at servicestories.com.
  • 7. The AI Problem Isn't the Tech — It's the Adoption

    16:29||Season 7, Ep. 7
    Simon Hodgkins has spent a career running global marketing — Sage, CMO Club president, and now Chief Marketing Officer at Vistatec, the Dublin firm helping iconic brands scale content and AI worldwide. He joins Maryrose to argue that the real AI bottleneck isn't the models. It's whether a company is ready to use them.Simon makes the case for gap analysis before tooling: before you buy, pilot or deploy, you need to know how you actually work today — what content exists, which workflows are documented, how the Frankfurt office differs from New York, and what ISO 42001 would expect you to prove. He explains why bolting AI onto broken processes wastes money, why regulated industries still need human experts in the loop, and what an "intelligent workflow" actually looks like.On the hype cycle, Simon is blunt: stop headline-reading. Figure out what you're doing first. Or as Rory Sutherland puts it — no robots are buying new cars.A conversation for any leader whose pilots keep going nowhere.
  • 6. Pints, Petrol and Prices

    23:21||Season 7, Ep. 6
    The CSO stopped tracking the price of a pint of Guinness in Ireland in 2011. The last official figure was €3.93. Nobody picked it up again until Matt Cortland and John Fleming decided to call every pub in the country and ask. Using Google Maps for contact data, 11 Labs to clone a Northern Irish voice, Claude Code to orchestrate the whole system, and Twilio to actually make the calls, they built the Guinndex: a real-time index of pint prices across Ireland and Northern Ireland. Over 700 pubs called. Total cost: approximately €200. They didn't stop there. With fuel prices dominating headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, they applied the same methodology to US gas stations, creating the Gas Index, complete with AI agents named after King of the Hill characters and a feature that tells you whether the cheaper station is actually worth the drive. This episode is a masterclass in what's possible when you connect off-the-shelf AI tools with a problem worth solving. And a cautionary tale about the Irish goodbye. Find Matt and John at guindex.ai.
  • 5. Sean Blanchfield: Don't Let Your AI Go Rogue

    19:38||Season 7, Ep. 5
    Sean Blanchfield, Co-Founder Jentic, joins Maryrose Lyons of the AI Institute for the second part of their conversation, this time diving deep into agentic AI, what it actually means for businesses, and how Jentic's infrastructure can help enterprise get there. From the risks of locking into a single AI model to a practical three-layer roadmap for AI transformation, Sean offers a grounded, builder's perspective on where enterprise AI is really headed. An essential listen for anyone in construction, professional services, or other sectors navigating fragmented systems and wondering where to start.Chapters00:00 Introduction and Welcome Back00:30 Model Neutrality — Why You Shouldn't Lock Into One AI01:30 Microsoft Copilot: The Hype and the Reality02:20 Self-Hosting and On-Prem AI for Sensitive Data03:00 Where Jentic Fits In — Mapping Your Software Ecosystem04:00 Building a Digital Twin of Your Business Infrastructure 05:00 Agents in the Sandbox — Testing Before Going Live05:45 Validating and Publishing Automations Incrementally06:30 Voice Agents and Real-Time Field Queries 07:30 Layer Three: Governance and Running an AI-Powered Company08:30 Humans in the Loop — Cross-Workflow Thinking09:15 Resistance to AI Adoption (Spoiler: Less Than You'd Think)10:00 The Future Company — Humans as Governors of Machines11:00 Wrap-Up and Where to Find JenticConnect with Sean Blanchfield : https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanblanchfield/Check out Jentic https://jentic.com/
  • 4. Sean Blanchfield Says: Don't Get This Wrong

    12:21||Season 7, Ep. 4
    Serial entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Jentic, Sean Blanchfield joins our host Maryrose Lyons for a conversation about Ireland's AI opportunity, and the risks of getting it wrong. From energy infrastructure and nuclear power to the future of the professional class, Sean lays out a bold, pragmatic roadmap for positioning Ireland to win in the AI generation. A must-listen for founders, policymakers, and anyone thinking seriously about the future of the Irish economy.Key TopicsIreland's AI strategy and infrastructureEnergy and regulation for AI developmentFuture economy and AI's impact on jobs and wealthData centers and inference centers in IrelandRegulatory environment and green energy initiativesChapters00:00 Introduction to Sean Blanchfield and AI in Ireland01:07 Ireland's Position in the AI Landscape01:43 The Future of Work and AI's Impact04:47 Regulatory Challenges and Data Centers07:40 Energy Needs for AI Infrastructure09:24 The Importance of Creativity in the AI EraConnect with Sean Blanchfield : https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanblanchfield/