The AI Stack Behind £100M Annual Ad Spend in 2026

0:00Olly:I've got it into such a good spot now where I can literally just take a screenshot of a landing page and just pop it in and it'll just give me like the best like critique and output for an audit.

0:15Olly:We've not done a joint episode in a while. Another little brief hiatus.

0:18Loukas:I feel like we say this every episode now. It's been a little bit hit and miss just with obviously the office move. We had 80 plus people in the office last week for the group social, which was a really great day. Working on our new EVP across the whole team. How did you find it all?

0:36Olly:Good, yeah. Good. It was good to be a bit more forward looking versus backwards and reflective this time. And just share a bit about the strategy and direction we're going in as a business. it's such an interesting place to be owning a service business right now in like trying to create a really strong strategy with so many like variables outside your control which I think we've done but it was interesting, yeah, great to share a bit of that with the team, I thought so yeah, it was a good day

1:11Loukas:I think yeah, it's interesting looking forward And I think the big bets that we're obviously, you know, talking to the team about and reverse engineering around, you know, how software and service, you know, the lines will become more and more blurred across both of those. And outside of that, how we are going to, the service industry is very much going to flip from paying, you know, you get paid for your service to you're paying for an outcome. so it was yeah good to get the team brought in on the direction and I guess some of the steps that we need to take to get to that point good karaoke for showing from yourself as well yeah broken strings James Morrison don't worry about it mate maybe that's why the voice is gone right now put too much heart and soul into that one yeah it was powerful it was a powerful ballad yeah but good night nonetheless is influencer marketing the most unpredictable line item in your budget Big month, dead month, big month, dead month.

2:13Loukas:You feel like you never know what's actually coming. The brands winning at this have stopped doing one-off influencer campaigns. They've built a system instead, seeding new influencers, converting the best ones to affiliates and retaining the top performers. This way, your pipeline never stops and revenue gets predictable. To build that system, you need a platform. That's Saril. Find influencers, reach out, manage every relationship all in one place without all of that chaos. 200 plus brands including Grunz, Soulwave, Space Goods and many more are running their influencer programs on Saral. If that sounds like what you've been looking for, go to getsaral.com slash demo and book a demo with their team.

2:54Loukas:Tell them we sent you and you'll get your$500 discount and white glove onboarding. Cool, today we are, we are, I mean, what's crazy? So we're doing an episode today, just a bit of a spitball into AI and like how we are just using it day to day, both in our personal lives, as well as in the business. I think we did this, what was this, about six months ago now?

3:20Olly:Yeah, maybe a little bit more, but yeah.

3:22Loukas:Six, seven months ago. And we were just talking about some of the tools that we were using back then and how we were kind of integrating it into our lives. I mean it was like a 25 minute episode that was supposed to just be we didn't really put much time or effort into it transparently but actually was a super popular episode because I think there were lots of actionable takeaways and ideas that people could apply to their own lives I think what's crazy is just if you then went back and looked at that episode it would feel like basic stuff now so it just kind of shows the compounding changes that we are going through So super excited to dive into some of that today.

4:05Olly:Yeah, it's interesting to... We're actually hosting an event at the office next week for women in e-commerce and helping them in collaboration with a couple of partners, helping them with their AI journey and supporting them with implementation into their business and into their role and education around that. and looking at like the content for that day it's interesting to see how like people go through like the adoption phases of someone even using AI themselves I think when we probably did that last episode we were still at that stage of like using chats and using tools but now we've really gone through a journey of creating like code, connecting data, rebuilding process and yeah just just creating like net new output and and really i just think that competency level internally is just elevated s like come so far since that previous i think i think what you'll

5:12Loukas:see like the difference is we were paying for a lot of softwares then in terms of almost not wrappers necessarily but tools that now you know by building your own operating system you can have far more control of and still do a lot of the things that that you know these individual sass products might have been able to do um so it shows you know that that kind of shift towards customization and building something bespoke around your own lives and your own you know desired outcomes so yeah let's start on the personal operator operating system piece um i know we've both been building some stuff here slightly differently to one another um and yeah how are you using this right now or what gives maybe some top level context of what that looks like for you?

6:00Olly:Yeah so Andre Carpathy I always get his name wrong I should know that by now Twitter OpenX OpenAI just like forefront of the of the industry put out a tweet probably about four or five months ago on like how to create like a second brain or personal operating system so So I think you've functionally created it in a slightly different way to myself. But for those watching, we can link that tweet down below. He shared a GitHub that walks you through this process. So if you're wanting to build what we're going to go through for yourself, I think that would be a great place to start. And he uses a tool called Obsidian, which is almost like a visualized neural network of context that you ingest into it.

6:52Olly:The reason it's so powerful is because it categorizes that data. You can set it up to connect to Claude code, so you just ingest via Claude. You can also set automated triggers that pushes into Claude and then it pushes it into the Obsidian Vault. His process has like a wiki attached to it that teaches the model how to use and how to ingest that data correctly. It links, it categorizes it by topic. So I've got like post-click, media buying, creative strategy, and all of these things. And then within that, there's multiple different pieces of context or data that I've ingested, whether that's resources, whether that's just call transcripts, whether that's QBR decks, things internally that have then started to link together.

7:42Olly:And it acts as this like retrieval database when you then prompt Claude. it references the knowledge base, will retrieve data around, through that network of information and then surface an answer. And the level of output that you get relative to just like normal prompting is just insanely valuable.

8:08Loukas:Yeah, it's that idea of like context compounds, but like the models themselves don't. So the more that you can invest in creating a system, that allows itself to compound in context that is related to whether that be domain context or business context, whatever that might be, the better that you can build that and then alongside that reasoning traces as an asset as well. So like, for example, if you make a strategic decision in the business saying what the decision was, why you made that decision and what you're going to be measuring that against, as an example, it will be able to actually store that context and as a result slowly start to understand the reasoning and why we made certain decisions and slowly be able to make better judgments and better outcomes as a result of that.

9:04Olly:Yeah, I think that Obsidian Vault is a really visual way of creating that database. It's crazy how sometimes I put a piece of our IP in there and it connected to so many things and it brought it all together into a super node which was really interesting it was like this new operating system we've built but yeah I've been just building that out over the course of like four to six weeks now and it gets better and better as I'm then using it for like the post-click part I've got it into such a good spot now where I can literally just take a screenshot of a landing page and just pop it in and it'll just give me like the best like critique and output for an audit that's so valuable and then i could just turn that into a brief without really having to do much like work because it's already ingested like the way i would go about that process myself um you can get context from so many different places i just went through a lot of thought leaders um in that sector and space and ingested a lot of their best content um that was really valuable yeah i think what this comes back to it's like you know if

10:10Loukas:you're quite early on in this process and i'm going to be doing a mastermind next week that goes goes i guess a step back but then showing you how you can get to this end state of like building an operating system um is really deeply understanding some of those basic fundamentals like how to create context documents yeah or build context that relate to why the domain or business um and then also things like skills as well so like once you've got skills and understand how to create skills in Claude, you can then quite easily build that on top of an operating system that will be able to drive much better outputs as a result of that.

10:49Loukas:So I've built a similar system slightly differently to you. So I used VS Code, which is basically just a source code editor that similarly connects and ingests with Claude Code. So again, what is useful about that is you can see the whole hierarchy of the operating system that you've built and the different elements that bring that together. I'll show a screenshot right now. And I actually want to shout out Liam Otley, who is an AI YouTuber. We both know him. We met him a few times. He's blown up in that space probably since we last saw him. But he's got a whole video that goes through like how you can build your own personal operating AI operating system, which is super super great and um it's a great video just to like get started um i can talk about maybe some of the use cases that i've done on top of that so obviously in terms of like the parts of context that it will require from from you within this this kind of hierarchy it's got it's got in-depth context and all of the brands um that that uh we we we run or that we own all the people that live with inside those brands, all my direct reports as well, and then domain context around certain specialisms within the business.

12:12Loukas:There's also a learnings context document, which again will update itself based on decisions that we've made in the business and why. So again, it's that idea of avoiding context blow and self-updating each of these context buckets by providing it with the tools to drive those inputs. So for example, I've got it connected to my AI notetaker. So every call that I have every single day, it will essentially transcribe every call. It will then take that and it will break it down into certain triggers or buckets that I've identified, such as this is an action item that needs that we need to add to your to-do list this is a strategic decision that was made in the business this is actually an update to people that we need so for example we're talking about someone leaving the business or someone getting promoted so then it will send me a recap at the end of every day saying these are all of the things we need to enrich your context documents with here's the category here's the update and then you essentially just say yes or no to each of them and it so every single day it's constantly updating according to your meeting transcripts, but then also your Slack.

13:31Loukas:So it is in your core Slack channels as well. So my favourite use case from a personal perspective that has been really useful so far is actually on the management side. So it has a deep, deep understanding of every single person that I manage within the business. It knows that we have a skill for how it can build quarterly reviews so it has a deep understanding of how we build quarterly reviews into notion what we score against um every single piece of feedback i've given that person it will obviously log that if it's on a call or in slack it will know to log that feedback and it will identify patterns over the period of time it also will cross reference against the last review that you did with that individual to see where they are improving maybe where the the points that they need to keep growing are and then I guess the domain context that I've also built into that is like my favorite um management books that I think are incredibly uh that create this kind of really useful layer of uh context before if I then need someone to to get some feedback on or or you know ask for some um advice on maybe a certain situation that's happening I've also it's also transcribed a of Leila Hormozy's videos and she's great with like leadership ops management so again what it will help me help me do is actually through its vectorized database it will be able to pull elements that are really relevant to what I'm working on and give me advice as if it was like Leila Hormozy or as if it was the person that had written one of these management books so it's a it's a great way to kind of continue to become better as a manager and a leader but also at the same time um you know ensure that we are identifying some of those patterns with those that we manage so we can become more intentional uh in in the way that we support them it's also trained on clifton strengths personality tests so it will adapt the way that you uh and tailor the way that it speaks to to each individual as a result or that give guidance on how best to to give them feedback um so that's i think that that piece is really valuable and that kind of self-learning system through decisions through context um has has massively helped me yeah i

15:54Olly:think that's a really intentional way of using a process like this for a specific outcome it's also like an area where it's like it's very easy to think of ways to use ai and like the execution but and the people process maybe i imagine a lot of people watching aren't aren't leveraging it to that level of intentions i think it's super impressive system i haven't really i think where Yeah, I've been on the other side of just mainly using it for execution and strategy. So yeah, I think the context for me has been very client-led, growth-led. Yeah. Starting with fundamentals. When I'm thinking about getting the most out of this process when using it for a client, you really do need to start with personas, with brand, even if you're doing work on landing page post-click.

16:44Olly:because I think when it has that context and that anchor to support with the output, it really produces just like far greater value. But I've gone through the similar process. Shout out Carl Weiss. I just ingested like 50 of his CRO videos and like documents that he's published online and it just built this amazing engine for offer optimization and post-click optimization, which isn't something we do like direct service, but it's massive lever when consulting with clients on unlocking further growth. Yeah. I also am using it in a similar way to yourself, I think, from a personal level. I've started to build out like a personal CRM through this process.

17:28Olly:So like a network, like visualizing your own individual network and using it as a way to better manage relationships, which I think is really interesting. apply a similar way to the similar view to like the management piece but on a personal level there's a few gaps in there like WhatsApp for example like not being able to fully connect every point of communication but I think they're very solvable over time

17:53Loukas:WhatsApp have API access oh no because I guess it's encrypted isn't it

17:57Olly:yeah it's a bit of a difficult one you can get it into OpenClaw but I'm not using OpenClaw so I've not actually I've not spent enough time going deep enough in to have to fix that problem yeah but um yeah just like better structure and management of that data um i know you've got a bit of a slack process from like a daily perspective as well

18:17Loukas:haven't you yeah it's quite funny actually because it's um created a uh a slack member called lenny um who's actually my my chihuahua or my fiance's chihuahua so it's just his little uh his little picture but he he's essentially my um he kind of almost like a va in many ways so i get a slack message daily with my to-do list for that day a breakdown of my calendar and where the gaps are and where i should be prioritizing my time as a result of that it gives a daily update on business figures as well across all of the businesses um and i think actually like my favorite part of it is i mean one is great because like obviously if you're just out you can just tell it to um you know if you remind me to do this tomorrow or next friday at 2 2 p.m it will just be it will just log that and then then add it to your reminders um but sec i think the the most valuable way i've been using that is at the end of every day it will it will give me some journal prompts so what it will ask me is like five questions every day how you feeling today what has impacted the way that you've felt and why um are there any kind of key learnings or insights that that you can take forward into tomorrow uh another thing that i've asked it to do is ask if i have felt um imposter syndrome that day because for me i've as the business has kind of scaled as quickly as it had I kind of fell into this trap of getting imposter syndrome more and more and I was very fascinated with identifying the root cause of that and when I feel it and why to then look to how I can improve in that area and as a result become more confident so what's great is like if I feel imposter syndrome that day I will log when I felt it and why and what is great is it's like like started to identify patterns in what, what, why I feel that.

20:22Loukas:And actually it's almost there as like a reinforcement loop of, for example, if you said something, um, did this recently, like I was, I felt, you know, imposter syndrome about this one thing. It pulled a quote that you said on a call that kind of, I guess, completely countered that, that me feeling like an imposter. And that's like, I think when you're, you know, it's that self-worth piece of you always mute the good things, but actually like you know you're very self-critical so it was a great kind of reminder of oh actually you know i am in my head here so yeah it's kind of like a bit of a bit of like an

20:58Olly:empowering mentor as well in some ways that's a really interesting i think that's a really interesting example of a concept that i've been talking to quite a few of the team about is like using it using using ai as a feedback loop in in situations where you struggle to generate that I think founders or people who are in senior positions of a business get less feedback. Yeah, exactly. And that can often, I think that can somewhat put like a ceiling on progression, your personal progression. Because I think it's, so things like in calls, when I'm doing sales conversations, built skills that take my the transcript and give me feedback based on like a framework of like best practice for that yeah um i think that's really powerful for for agencies because it's impossible to shadow every like team members call um really hard to give direct feedback across an ever increasing number of individuals consistently so i think that's that's a really good example of that on like a personal level that I think people can leverage yeah there's that um Vin

22:09Loukas:Vin uh gang I want to pronounce his name correctly but he's like a communication expert um sent you his podcast he's been on Dara of a CEO as well as a few others but you've got a great course uh all about presenting and communication I think another great example of what you just said there is um he's got loads of YouTube videos right so a great if you're struggling if you struggle as a presenter or communicator which is one of the most important parts of you know driving authority or ensuring that your uh your message is communicated in the correct way to the best possible outcome then you know you may want to work on your presenting or communication skills as you said if you're a leader in a business or you're someone that doesn't get that feedback loop as often as you would like.

22:58Loukas:Literally go to his YouTube channel, just transcribe like maybe 10, 15 of his top videos. You could easily build a really strong skill that reviews all of your transcripts from your calls, puts it through that skill to identify based on what he says is a great communicator. And he gives lots of actionable tips on how to improve in certain areas. It will give you direct feedback on your transcript and maybe where you've used filler words, how you could have said things slightly differently, where you were repeating yourself, where you were like mumbling or kind of exaggerating certain areas. And it will kind of, it's that constant feedback loop that will just make you better at that one thing by being truly intentional.

23:43Olly:Yeah, I think that's really powerful. It's definitely, I've definitely seen it drive positive change within specific members of our team, even like stripping out hedging language. I say it's like, the concept of like how you show up really matters in in in client relationships less so if you're in an econ brand i'd say but maybe if you actually progress up a business i think um how you show up is still very important um but yeah it's really difficult to generate that feedback yeah is

24:15Loukas:influencer marketing the most unpredictable line item in your budget big month dead month big month dead month. You feel like you never know what's actually coming. The brands winning at this have stopped doing one-off influencer campaigns. They've built a system instead, seeding new influencers, converting the best ones to affiliates and retaining the top performers. This way, your pipeline never stops and revenue gets predictable. To build that system, you need a platform. That's Saral. Find influencers, reach out, manage every relationship all in one place without all of that chaos. 200 plus brands, including Grunz, Soulwave, Space Goods, and many more are running their influencer programs on Saral.

24:56Loukas:If that sounds like what you've been looking for, go to getsaral.com slash demo and book a demo with their team. Tell them we sent you and you'll get your$500 discount and white glove onboarding.

25:09Olly:Talked a lot about personal there. I guess we've also gone through this process internally within the group. And we've got to a position now where we've just created a really strong foundational context and data engine that's making building on top of that layer more and increasingly easier. So yeah, I spent the last six months building this out, haven't we? Like ingesting platform data, creative data.

25:48Olly:client data, call data, refining our processes so they're easier for AI to pull through from the various places in which we store them. It's really exciting to see how that's coming together to create value for the team, both through easier processes like reporting, processes like new ways of doing QBRs and strategy decks and surfacing more value, speeding up execution, improving strategic decision making I still think we've got a way to go but yeah I definitely feel

26:24Loukas:like that value started to come through yeah 100 % I think most people jump to like function but really like it needs to start with data and context at a foundational level because I think once you and it's just about best practices right now like if you can if you can effectively set up a data warehouse or a data layer and context that feeds into domain and also, you know, brand, then you have the foundations to build anything on top of that. As long as you've got the idea of how you do that, then, you know, you're able to quite easily build on that. But it's really important that we are, you know, we're going back to those foundations before you're kind of jumping to, oh, I've got this cool idea that could do X.

27:09Loukas:because I think people just get a bit lost in style over substance without any kind of proper back-end architecture that will allow them to get the best possible outcomes.

27:19Olly:Yeah, it allows you to move a lot quicker once you've got that foundation in place as well. Building tooling becomes really much faster than when that foundation isn't set.

27:31Loukas:Yeah.

27:32Olly:We've built a really interesting process across our marketing data, so every time we do these episodes, we have created a process where we've built a context layer for the for the for our marketing output it ingests all of our lead magnets podcasts posts pulls them and transcribes them and then if it's a podcast it'll push it into a notion process where it'll create a draft of like here's four ways we can distribute this podcast episode through written output that draft is then taken by a team member who then refines the draft and then creates the actual post and then it compares the final version with the initial version and then um the difference between the two it creates feedback and then pushes it back into the the process so it's improving the quality of output itself over time it's like doing its own reinforced learning built into the process that we've set up which I think is really interesting I think you can apply that to other areas I know you're going to do a Claude sort of skills work, a masterclass but like script writing reviews comparing using a skill to compare feedback on like final version versus initial version using the gap between the two to generate a view of what was different and how that should be ingested as a way to improve the skill and that reinforced learning process over time to improve that output is really valuable.