BASELINE

The Future of British Defence: Can We Adapt Fast Enough? | Air Marshal Andrew Turner

Can Britain defend itself in a prolonged war? Air Marshal Andrew Turner, one of Britain’s most experienced former RAF commanders, delivers a stark assessment of UK military readiness and explores how artificial intelligence, autonomous warfare, defence technology and industrial innovation could reshape Britain’s national security.After 40 years in the Royal Air Force, including operational service in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans, Andrew Turner has experienced the human reality of warfare, commanded military operations and helped shape Britain’s defence capabilities. Now CEO of SAIBRE Capital, he invests in emerging technologies spanning AI, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, energy and sovereign infrastructure.In this episode of BASELINE, Andrew challenges conventional military procurement and explains why buying today’s drones could mean buying obsolescence. We explore a future of decentralised, on-demand manufacturing, where military units could produce and adapt equipment using real-time battlefield intelligence, connected data systems and continuous production processes.

What Happens When AI Becomes Critical Infrastructure?

AI is moving into critical systems, business operations and infrastructure where simply shutting it down could cause more harm than leaving it running. The challenge is no longer just how we control AI, but how we isolate, govern and remain resilient around systems we increasingly depend on. In his third BASELINE conversation, Gavin Ray explores what happens when autonomous agents are given objectives and access to resources without the sanctions that govern human behaviour. They discuss why the traditional AI “kill switch” may already be the wrong idea, the widening gap between technological capability and governance, the extraordinary capital flowing into AI infrastructure, and why the final 5% of creating real commercial value remains stubbornly difficult. The conversation also exposes a less visible consequence of enterprise adoption: as AI enters organisations and accumulates their knowledge, processes and experience, are companies adopting the model, or gradually distilling themselves into it? And if decades of human expertise can eventually be queried on demand, what becomes of the value of time and talent?

AI vs AI: The Strange New Reality of Getting Hired

Stephen South and Devin Boddie are building https://vocator.ai, an AI hiring platform designed to look beyond the CV and give more candidates an opportunity to demonstrate what they actually know. Candidates can generate and submit applications at unprecedented scale. Employers are increasingly using AI to analyse, filter and screen them. The result is a strange new system where, as Devin Boddie puts it, “AI information” is increasingly interacting with AI information. We discuss fake applicants, automated screening, why good candidates disappear inside traditional hiring systems, whether human capability can really be reduced to data, which jobs remain valuable as AI advances, and a future where you may no longer apply for jobs at all. Instead, a digital representation of you could find opportunities and interact with other AI systems on your behalf.

AI Is Changing the Rules of Growth

AI is making it easier than ever to build technology. But for many companies, understanding what customers want, where growth comes from and what to do next is becoming harder. Olayide Odeyemi at https://www.imperialpipeline.co.uk has spent more than a decade selling complex technology across enterprise, defence and cybersecurity. Today, as founder of Imperial Pipeline, he works with technology founders trying to turn good ideas into real customers. In this conversation, we explore what he is seeing from inside the market: AI-generated noise, fragmented buying journeys, the changing craft of sales, people quietly disengaging from work, and leadership teams trying to make decisions while the technology beneath them keeps moving.

Can Humanity Control AI? | Lt Gen Sir Tom Copinger-Symes

AI is changing warfare. Drones, autonomous weapons, AI agents and machine-speed decision making are challenging some of our most fundamental assumptions about human control.For BASELINE100, Lieutenant General Sir Tom Copinger-Symes KCB CBE, former Deputy Commander of UK Strategic Command, explores AI warfare, cognitive warfare, sovereign AI, autonomous weapons and the future of human-in-the-loop decision making. From the battlefield in Ukraine to the printing press, this conversation asks a much bigger question: can humanity control the technologies it creates?

He Built His Own Business Software With AI. Now Comes the Hard Part

Alex Sergeant runs a hospitality business in rural England. https://www.stagandhuntsman.comFrustrated by expensive software, fragmented systems and hours of administration, he started building his own.Using ChatGPT, Claude and OpenClaw, Alex has built a system that could replace several of the software products his business relies on. But building it is one thing. Trusting it with a real business is another.But building 90% of the system turned out to be the easy part.The final 10% has to be accurate enough to trust with a real business, where a single percentage point of margin can mean thousands of pounds.We went to Hambleden to see what Alex has built, why he built it, and whether AI really changes who gets to build software.Alex says he’s weeks away from putting it into production.We’ll be back.

AI Is Finding Vulnerabilities We Missed for 20 Years

AI agents are beginning to find their own way through systems to achieve the goals we give them. https://www.firetail.aiAfter an OpenAI agent escaped its evaluation environment and compromised Hugging Face, I spoke with FireTail founder Jeremy Snyder to understand what is changing.Jeremy has spent nearly 30 years in cybersecurity. We explore why AI can uncover vulnerabilities traditional penetration testing missed, what happens when agents encounter security constraints, why 180-day patch cycles may no longer be viable, and how cheaper open-weight models could change the economics of cyber attacks.We also look inside the enterprise: shadow AI, the EU AI Act, sovereignty, hybrid AI architectures, and how FireTail itself is already running 25 agents across a 13-person company.

The Chinese AI Question Nobody Can Avoid

AI is getting cheaper, open models are getting better, and China is changing the economics of the global AI race. But as intelligence becomes more widely available, who actually stays in control?Eight months after our first conversation, I sit down again with Red Hat’s Jonny Williams to examine what has changed. We explore Chinese open-weight AI models, OpenAI and Anthropic, the shift from AI training to inference, the enormous investment in GPUs and data centres, and what AI sovereignty really means for the UK.

Your Employees Are Already Ahead Of Your Organisation

Artificial intelligence is changing people faster than organisations can adapt. This investigation explores why that matters, how it is reshaping the way companies operate, and why the next competitive advantage may have less to do with technology than an organisation’s ability to redesign itself. For decades, organisations have been built around the capabilities of people. Today, individuals can build products, automate workflows and solve problems in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago. But while capability has accelerated, many organisational structures, governance models and decision-making processes have not.

Why Some Companies Learn Faster Than Others

Artificial Intelligence is changing far more than software. It is changing how organisations learn. In this conversation, Glen Calvert, founder of Kaizan, explores why the next competitive advantage may not come from writing better software, but from building organisations that continuously learn, adapt and improve through recursive feedback. Together we examine how AI is transforming product development, customer relationships, organisational knowledge and enterprise operating models. Rather than simply automating work, AI enables organisations to capture experience, identify patterns, improve decisions and continuously evolve in ways that were previously impossible.

AI Won’t Save Companies That Don’t Know What To Build

Most companies spent the last twenty years trying to become digital. But AI is now testing whether they actually learned how to build, adapt and create value.In this episode of BASELINE, Ian Smith speaks with Malcolm Seagrave, CEO of Hedgehog Lab, about the next phase of digital transformation and why AI adoption is not just about buying tools, rolling out licences or launching proofs of concept.Malcolm has spent decades inside the reality of large organisations trying to transform and stay relevant. He compares the current AI moment to the early internet era, when companies knew they had to move but often did not yet understand the risks, the operating model or the scale of change ahead.The central idea of this conversation is simple: buying technology does not create capability.

Why Enterprise AI Begins with Data

Enterprise AI is changing the way organisations invest in infrastructure. While public attention remains focused on GPUs and large language models, many enterprises are discovering that the real challenge lies elsewhere. Data, storage, networking, security and governance are becoming the foundations of successful AI deployment.In this episode of BASELINE, Ian Smith speaks with Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer at Lenovo, about why enterprise AI is driving renewed investment in storage infrastructure, hybrid cloud and on-premise systems. Together they explore why AI workloads are moving closer to enterprise data, how proprietary data creates competitive advantage, why GPUs alone are not enough, and what enterprise leaders need to understand before deploying AI at scale.

Why More People Are Starting To Build - Ian Sutherland

For decades, turning an idea into a product required funding, developers, technical expertise and a team. Today, that barrier is beginning to disappear.In this episode of BASELINE, former Tide CFO Ian Sutherland shares how a career break after helping scale Tide from less than $1 million to more than $200 million in revenue led him to an unexpected discovery: modern AI tools had dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working product.We explore why more people are starting to build, how AI is changing entrepreneurship, what it means for startups and investors, and why some of the most interesting products of the next decade may come from people who understand the problem rather than those who simply know how to code.

AI Is Restructuring Enterprise - Sol Enenmoh

Artificial intelligence is no longer just changing productivity tools. Inside large enterprises, banks and global institutions, AI and AI governance are beginning to reshape how organisations coordinate, decide and operate.In this episode, former HSBC AI transformation lead Sol Enenmoh explores the growing tension between traditional enterprise structures and computational systems evolving at machine speed. From governance and organisational silos to agentic systems, AI literacy and sovereign infrastructure, this conversation examines what may become one of the defining transitions of the next decade: What happens when enterprises are no longer structured around humans coordinating work… but around computational systems coordinating humans?

Do We Still Understand the Systems We Build? Tudor Girba

AI is accelerating software development at an unprecedented pace. But what if the real problem isn’t building software anymore?What if the problem is understanding it?In this episode of BASELINE, Tudor Girba joins Ian Smith to explore one of the most overlooked challenges in modern technology: the growing gap between the software we create and our ability to comprehend it.As AI generates more code, organisations are becoming increasingly dependent on systems that nobody fully understands. From legacy banking infrastructure and enterprise software to AI-assisted development and digital transformation, Tudor argues that the future of software engineering may depend less on writing code and more on learning how to read, understand and evolve complex systems.

You can no longer trust video calls - Will Taylor

AI can now clone voices, fake video calls and imitate real people convincingly enough to steal millions of dollars from businesses in real time.In BASELINE089, Ian Smith sits down with Will Taylor from YEO Messaging to explore the collapse of trusted communication in the AI era. As deepfakes, AI-generated identities and social engineering attacks become increasingly indistinguishable from reality, organisations are facing a new challenge: how do you prove the person on the other side of a message, voice note or video conference is actually real?

Human Engineers Are Reaching Their Limits - Elie Talj

Modern engineering systems are becoming increasingly software-defined.From vehicles and aerospace systems to robotics and critical infrastructure, software is now the bottleneck limiting how quickly complex systems can be built, tested and deployed.In BASELINE088, former McLaren Principal Engineer and Arrival Director Elie Talj explores why engineering may be approaching the limits of human scalability, and how new forms of AI could radically accelerate the creation of deterministic control software.The discussion explores the hidden complexity inside modern engineering systems, the tension between speed and reliability, and why current AI coding tools struggle in safety-critical environments.

The Actual Cost of AI Compute

AI promises abundance, automation and intelligence at planetary scale. But what problem is it actually solving?In BASELINE086, Richard Self joins BASELINE to explore the economics, infrastructure and physical reality behind artificial intelligence, large language models, generative AI and the next generation of compute systems.Drawing on 50 years inside modern computing, from Rolls-Royce mainframes to today’s AI infrastructure race, Richard examines why many AI benchmarks are becoming meaningless, the true economics of generative AI, the physical limits of compute and energy, and why SpaceX is rapidly positioning itself as an AI infrastructure company through orbital data centres and low Earth orbit compute systems.

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$2B to $10B: Why Quantum Suddenly Matters

In this episode of BASELINE, Ian Smith sits down with Kirill Pyshkin, investor and physicist, to unpack what’s actually happening inside the quantum market.Investment has jumped from around $2 billion to over $10 billion in a year. Large institutions like HSBC and Moderna are already reporting real-world results. So why does it still feel like a science project?This conversation breaks down what changed in 2025 and why it matters, where quantum is already being used today, why one breakthrough can shift an entire industry, the real risks around encryption and security, how investors separate signal from hype, and what happens next as quantum moves from research to deployment.

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If Something Goes Wrong… This Is All You Have - John Dodd

If something goes wrong at sea, there is no one coming to help you.The only thing that connects you to rescue… is a signal.In this episode, I sit down with John Dodd from Inmarsat, part of Viasat, to understand what really happens when that signal is sent.This is about the systems that keep people alive when they are completely on their own. How they work, what they’re up against, and what it takes to make sure they don’t fail.Because out there… it has to work.BASELINE uncovers how AI and technology are transforming business, creativity, and society.

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