Now is the summer of our content…

In homage to the bard and fresh back from Shoptalk Europe in the great city of Barcelona, I felt compelled to scribble a few thoughts down.

Saying farewell to the Mediterranean warmth is always hard particularly when rosy fingered dawn would creep over the horizon each morning.  Now back to reality at Dragonfly HQ, where we have much to celebrate, some excellent new joiners who will help shape our future, a new cadre of clients of world class reputation, some of the biggest and best agency groups in the world…and I think a bright future ahead.

But just to pull focus for a moment on this halcyon dream...we’ve been at this AI malarkey a while now, not like some genuflecting old sin jobbers, but more so a bunch of Trojans, who (and without a horse) have been chipping away at the coal face of artificial intelligence since 2014.  That’s getting darn close to a decade and a lengthy innings - but it is my friends the reality of start up. 

My advice to anyone taking the plunge is learn how to live on fumes and take a degree in mindless optimism, before you take your leap of faith as I don’t think the flash in a pan ideas that sell overnight to Google really exist…but, the only thing you got in this world is what you can sell.

I've learned a lot and probably forgotten at least half of the useful stuff, but it’s been an incredible journey so far.  Investors of course want fast growth, buyers want a long forecast in ascendancy and clients want nothing but the best and rightly so.  But when I reflect on our secret sauce for survival - it’s all been about our people, prudence and perseverance - the three P’s - choosing the right ones, spending resource like it was your own (and that does not mean like a lottery millionaire) and having a strength of belief in your self worth, your co-workers and of course your product.  

At the end of my other career (when I worked for someone else) I made a promise to myself, having seen so much toxicity in the last few corporate roles, to:

1. Only work with people I like; and,
2. On a proposition I believed in.

And so it is, with these strategic components and a promise, we have survived the years of pandemic, the recession (possibly two), Trussonomics, the cost of living crisis, and still seem to have doubled in size as a result, so something is working. But since Christmas I have sensed the wind of change and never more evident than at Shoptalk.

AI has rebranded, from bad boy - to golden child, now front of mind and for us the world has turned from winter to summer, with everyone talking about it across the brand and retail space.  

Without a doubt triggered by popularising CGPT and, wait for it…Gen AI (the new cool handle for generative AI - first heard at Shoptalk).  I think we have all realised it’s not going to make us all instantly redundant or take control of government (more's the pity), it’s become clear it’s a force for good and mostly benign - at least our is.  And of 700 speed dating tables in Barcelona, it was definitely the primary topic of conversation.

As a former member of the Hackmaster community it reminds me very much of the preferable future model we used to apply to future forecasting. Bear with and I will attempt to explain.  

Imagine a triangle (or see the accompanying picture) with its point on the LHS of the horizontal and a line from this point to the midpoint of its base (which is on the right), this line is our preferable future. The top line of the triangle is one extreme of future in which data and tech prevail; the bottomline is the alternative - the counterpoint extreme in which we live off grid and knit our own food. The point being the preferable future is the one of our making where we influence our preferred existence by the choices of what we are prepared to accept from either of the extremes.

AI is a choice, determined by whether it will be beneficial to existence - no doubt fuelled by our perceptions and misperceptions.

If you would like a whistle stop tour of ours; or if you can name the three plays and wish to claim your prize, use some form of electronic media to make contact (bearing in mind that 20 years ago none of these channels were part of our preferable future…to be human is to be adaptable).