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01The argument
Fifteen years handing ideas to other people to make. What changes when the strategist can build.
Creative Strategists Can Build Now: AI Collapsed the Conveyor Belt In 2013 it took six months to take a payment online. Now ideas ship in an afternoon. Fifteen years as a creative strategist handing ideas to creative teams, and what changes when you can import your taste and have AI build it. The Prototype Is the New Pitch Forrester puts US agency pitching at $12.5 billion a year, and only four in ten winning ideas ever get made. AI just dropped the cost of building to near zero. The performance is over. The prototype replaces the pitch. How to Evaluate an Agency That Builds When agencies pitch with prototypes instead of decks, the evaluation changes. Five things a prototype reveals that a pitch cannot, and how to run a prototype evaluation.02The receipts
Things I shipped, what broke, and what it cost.
The Dataset That Didn't Exist – London's Pram Map 1,140 London venues verified by phone call. The dataset that didn't exist, built for a 2-year-old, and what 10,000+ calls to London cafes and restaurants actually found. How My Sites Started Healing Themselves Two days. That is how long it took me to notice 394 venues had vanished from one of my sites. The story of building a self-healing data layer across six solo projects, and the one rule worth starting with. AI Agents in Production: What a World Cup Opening Night Proved Opening night of the World Cup was the first time Beat the Gaffer met reality: 141 predictions settled in one run, a scoring guard defused hours before its first real use, and the case for instructions as infrastructure when AI agents build your product. Modern Retro: 100 Brand Films for $196 One hundred brands reimagined as 1970s stores. Each one got a custom brief, a cinematic camera move, and a film generated by Luma AI. Total cost: $196.10. Here is how the production actually worked, what AI cannot do, and what that cost buys you versus a traditional production. Case Study: The Pattern Every morning at 7am, a website publishes itself. 140+ RSS feeds, Claude AI synthesis, a cloned voice podcast, trend tracking, brand heatmaps, and predictions with deadlines. The story of building a fully automated daily culture intelligence briefing that runs without human intervention.03The belief
Why Britain's builders should stay, and build here.
The Optimist’s Operating System We've done it before, from the industrial age to the information age. Now, Britain needs to show it can lead again, this time with optimism at the core. Because the future doesn't arrive, it's imagined, shaped and built. And we need to be the place that people stay and win. There's a quiet re...