Fancy dress and fancy graphics

Some exciting news that we plan to unveil next week. My video interviews for Business Leader will have a new look and branding. We've been hard at work with our in-house design and illustration team. If all goes to plan you will see them in the interview with Joanna Carman , due to run on Monday.

I paid a visit to the BT Group London offices to catch up with her recently. Graphics-aside, it's a great episode! Her advice is all about her personal experience of evolving into a leadership role and how you adjust to that on a personal level.

You may also notice that we publish the videos on LinkedIn in a vertical format. I prefer to shoot them horizontally, but they seem to gain a lot more traction this way, so we are doing vertical edits. This is the style that LinkedIn are encouraging, you may have seen their devoted video tab on the app.

AI tour

I started my week with a trip to the Microsoft AI Tour event in a central London hotel. It was a chance to see Satya Nadella in the flesh. He explained how he thought AI would change our working lives, as well as outlining the investment Microsoft had made in the area.

As you might expect, it was a slick, lavish and well-organised event. The lunchtime buffet was impressive, like an extravagant wedding. But maybe not as impressive as Microsoft CoPilot Studio, which I got to check out for the first time. This is the interface that lets you create and manage autonomous AI agents. It's another example of 'Low code/no code', you don't have to be a software developer to set up these agents. But they are given a lot of responsibility.

In fact, the big challenge for humans, I think, is to decide what kind of tasks you can set them to do in your business. For management consultants, it's used to sift through emails from potential new clients, for example. A legal firm might use it to streamline M&A work. This was explained in a few case study videos at the event. In short, it's very high-stakes parts of the business where you really don't want these bots to mess up!

Costumes

The video that went out this week was with Fraser Smeaton of MorphCostumes .

You can watch it here:

It's Halloween soon, their busiest time of the year. The podcast edition of this interview will come out in the next few weeks.

Food for thought

• Waste company Biffa has partnered with Olio • Share More, Waste Less to help combat food waste. I've followed Olio closely as a business journalist, seeing up close how their food waste volunteers work in this video in 2018, when I met co-founder Tessa Clarke . I also covered Olio's partnership with Tesco for BBC in 2020 in a video report, when I met its other co-founder Saasha Celestial-One . It looks like Biffa clients get access to Olio's volunteer network, so places like Cafe Nero and Nandos can ensure unsold food close to expiry is given to the community, rather than going to waste. More here.
• Research by eBay has found that 17% of consumers who celebrate Christmas will be gifting pre-loved items. Of those, 81% say this is to save money, while 68% say it is to be more sustainable. Of course, eBay sells second hand items, so they are interested in this. Would you give a second-hand gift? Personally I wouldn't be inclined to do that, unless it was some kind of unique item or antique. But there is definitely a boom in second-hand online shopping for clothes, especially on Vinted. So this could be a significant trend. More info here.

Events

• Super early bird tickets are now available for the Business Leader Summit in March 2025, in London. This is a unique event aimed at medium-sized businesses of £3m+ turnover. The idea is to help ambitious ones grow into large businesses. There are dozens of keynotes, panel discussions and of course opportunities to network. Find out more here.

Thanks for reading!

Dougal