The Next Thing Now Podcast

Welcome to The Next Thing Now —a podcast for bold thinkers and entrepreneurial spirits shaping the future of business. Hosted by CxOs Rob Borley & Kev Smith, each episode dives into the cutting edge of innovation, exploring: New and Emerging Technologies – The tools and platforms redefining industries. Disruptive Business Ideas – Bold strategies and startups challenging the status quo. Trends at the Intersection – Where these forces collide to create transformative opportunities. Tailored for CxOs, senior leaders, and ambitious professionals, The Next Thing Now delivers the inspiration, insights, and fresh ideas you need to stay ahead of the curve. With a lively, conversational tone, we make complex concepts accessible and actionable, helping change makers like you spark innovation within your organisation. If you’re ready to e

The Next Thing Now Podcast is a business podcast hosted by TNTN, with 28 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

TNTN hosts The Next Thing Now Podcast, a business show with 28 episodes published.

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  Episode #28

  The Secret To A Successful AI Transformation

  Sep 28, 202653 minS1

  The Secret To A Successful AI Transformation | Yuliya Fontanetti, MMR Research When a graduate joins, we give them training, time and support. When an AI tool gets something wrong the first time, most organisations write it off. In this episode of The Next Thing Now, Rob is joined by Yuliya Fontanetti, Chief Digital Transformation Officer at MMR Research. She spent two decades in operations, compliance and ethics, mostly in pharma, before taking on the job of leading MMR's AI transformation. By her own admission, she's the least technical person in the room, and she thinks that's part of why it's working. We talk about why AI transformation is a change management job first, and why they revisit tools they've shelved. We also get into retraining the pilot group, building an AI Task Force, and why GDPR is a useful guide to the EU AI Act. And Yuliya explains why asking for ROI on day one misses where the real return shows up. If you haven't started yet, or you've started and it isn't going well, there's plenty here for your Monday morning. #AI #DigitalTransformation #ChangeManagement #AIAdoption #TheNextThingNow

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  Episode #27

  The Fear Is Rational

  Sep 7, 202636 minS1

  Most leaders have bought AI by now. They have the licences, the consumption bill and the internal comms to prove it. What quite a lot of them don't have is a business that works any differently to the way it worked eighteen months ago. Dr Faye McDonald has spent her career in data, research and behavioural science, and her read on why these programmes stall has very little to do with the technology. Quite a few organisations bought AI without ever writing down the problem they were buying it for. That leaves employees with no reason for the change, so they supply their own, and the one they land on is the one that ends with their job going. Faye's argument is that the resistance leaders keep describing as irrational is nothing of the sort. People have read the announcements. They watched both sides of the pandemic. They are doing the maths. That makes it a leadership problem, and it puts the awkward question back on the people running the programme: what have we done, over years, that means our people won't trust us with this? In this episode we get into the two camps in every workforce, why licence uptake and login counts diagnose nothing at all, how to tell an AI literacy gap from a trust gap, and where Faye thinks human value sits once the producing is handled by something else.

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  Episode #26

  Businesses Are Terrible At Decision Making - and ai makes it worse

  Jul 31, 202649 minS1

  Most organisations were never built to decide. Hierarchy, committees and sign-off chains exist to slow things down, spread the risk and keep any one person clear of the consequences. That was survivable while information was the moat. It isn't any more. Simon Cuthbert, co-founder of Arthurian Labs, joins Rob Borley to work through what happens when the thing businesses competed on for two hundred years becomes a commodity, and the only advantage left sits either side of the decision: who asks the right question, and who can act on the answer. We get into why many decisions are made on emotion rather than evidence and why AI should be recommending and not deciding. FIND SIMON Arthurian Labs: https://arthurian-labs.ai LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simoncuthbert/ #AI #DecisionMaking #Leadership #AIGovernance #BidManagement #TheNextThingNow #Dootrix

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  Episode #25

  AI Sovereignty Emergency

  Jul 20, 202644 minS1

  The era of instant access to frontier AI is ending. A big model launches, the benchmarks are stunning, and then you're told you can't use it. In this episode, Rob and Kev unpack what this change really means: the rise of gated frontier models, the AI sovereignty question nobody in Britain is asking, and why the real opportunity might not be the model at all. We get into the GPT-5.6 launch (Sol, Terra, Luna), Fable as an orchestration engine, the great infrastructure pivot, X buying Cursor, Meta selling its compute ... and the debate the UK and EU should be having but aren't.

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  Episode #24

  Why You Can't Trust Anyone

  Jul 6, 202641 minS1

  AI that your security team will actually approve. Everyone wants to use AI. Almost nobody has worked out how to trust it. In this episode Rob Borley sits down with Abbas Khan, co-founder of Togii, to unpack the question sitting underneath every stalled AI rollout: what does trust even mean in an AI world, and how do you get it back? We get into the Fable Five withdrawal and what happens when a frontier model you've built on simply disappears overnight, why compliance teams are the grown-ups in the room rather than the villains, the risk of "intelligence sprawl" as AI creeps into every tool in your stack, and why explainability and control now matter more than raw capability. If you're a CIO, a compliance lead, or anyone trying to get AI past the security team, this one's for you. 👤 Guest: Abbas Khan (Togii) 🔗 Abbas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbas-khan-04596811a/ 🔗 Togii: https://www.togii.ai/ 🎧 The Next Thing Now is a weekly conversation about where AI is really heading, cutting through the hype to the stuff that actually matters. New episodes regularly. 👍 Like, subscribe and hit the bell so you don't miss the next one. 💬 What would it take for you to trust AI with your real data? Let us know in the comments. #TheNextThingNow #AI #DataSecurity #Compliance #EnterpriseAI #Togii #AIgovernance

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