"How to thrive as an employee in the AI era": Euan Blair, Founder and CEO at Multiverse

0:00Scaling Europe:Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show presented by Deal. I've got an amazing guest joining me today, Euan Blair, co-founder and CEO of Multiverse. How are you doing today? I'm good. Yeah, how are you doing? Very good. I'm thrilled to have you. It's great to have you here. 2026, I believe Multiverse is turning 10 this year. Is that right? Yeah, I guess it is right. We didn't really start delivering until 2017. So I hadn't really thought much about that milestone. But yeah, I guess, look, since I decided, hey, let's incorporate a company in Ray Strong Companies House, yeah, pretty much correct.

0:34Scaling Europe:Amazing. Well, can you give a quick overview of kind of what you do today? But also, I'd love to hear a bit about the journey, because when you started, you had a different name, different brand and a slightly different mission. So it'd be good to sort of get a bit of the history of multiverse over the 10 years. Sure. So our mission today is equip the workforce to win in the AI era. Basically, AI is both the biggest threat and the biggest opportunity to the workforce. our job is to mitigate the threat and maximize the opportunity by training people on the job in the flow of work how to kind of use ai but also data skills tech skills to give themselves superpowers so they can work quicker and faster and return better outcomes for their employers and we deliver apprenticeships right applied learning on the job and apprenticeship is basically a series of projects and use cases that show you can do your job quicker and faster and AI is a massive focus for us, partly for the reasons I said, but also because every organization is trying to figure out where do I start?

1:30How do I make this practically useful for my people? And look, on the journey, we've been through a few iterations, right? We started really as a kind of alternative to university for young people and evolved out of that for a couple of reasons. First, because to most organizations, it wasn't that strategic where they got their junior talent from. Actually, they were much more obsessed with how do I get my current workforce more productive? That was a big kind of focus. And you want to be addressing the biggest challenges for your customers if you're going to be really helpful to them. And also just because in any given year, about 98 % of the workforce is incumbent.

2:05And increasingly the obsession was, well, what are we going to do for that broad mass of people who have been in jobs for a while? They've often built up really valuable domain expertise, but they will be rendered obsolete by technology if they can't adapt. And that will create a serious social challenge for us so we sort of morphed into what i'd characterize as reskilling and upskilling for the post-industrial age with a big focus on data and now ai you know the the wave is sort of hitting everyone like a ton of bricks um and our best way to mitigate against widespread job displacement is training as many people on the job as we can reach to make this a force multiplier for themselves.

2:45And so we are all in on that. The kind of company we've built, the sort of position we're in, the relationship we have with our customers made us perfectly positioned to say, okay, let us kind of be the adoption layer for AI, right? There's a lot of noise and attention going into foundational models, huge amounts of investments in compute data centers, everything else, lots of AI applications springing up all over Europe, America, China, the world. But actually, if we're going to stop AI feeling to a lot of people, sometimes like a solution looking for a problem, we're going to have to make it practically useful in a work context.

3:21Scaling Europe:And that transition as you kind of went from the early stages to more of an AI upskilling platform, what was that transition like? Was that like a moment in time where you thought, okay, actually, this is what we need to be focusing on? Or was it a sort of market pull where you kind of found yourself gradually focusing more on that type of skill set? it was a combination of sort of push and pull and it's yeah i remember reading um a great piece a few years ago written by vc that basically said we much prefer to back entrepreneurs over founders because founders are so wedded to their original idea they struggle to evolve as the world around them changes entrepreneurs are continually figuring out how to make their business relevant versus what's happening in the world so it was what one of the biggest things was it was obvious technology was important was becoming increasingly important what wasn't necessarily obvious as we started to evolve was that basically non-technologists were going to have to become way more conversant in applying technology than they were at this moment in time you know we've had a what 20-year relentless march of software tools um across the stack within work and yet productivity growth is basically flatlined.

4:31And that's because there's been huge investments in the technology and the tooling and often quite elite tech talent and relatively little investment in your average worker and basically trying to kind of bring the human capital on that journey with you. And if we look at what's going to happen with AI, the adoption cycle could take a very long time or it can happen very quickly. I think a determining characteristic will be just how quickly we can skill people and get them to kind of build their work around it.

4:59Scaling Europe:So what did you think of the announcement yesterday? I was at DCIT interviewing Kanishka, the Minister of AI, about their announcement. I know that Multiverse is part of the program of partners. I saw Liz Kendall's kind of keynote speech at Bloomberg yesterday and her thesis, which I found actually really compelling. It's not something I thought about before, but it was the idea that we can sort of win in AI through adoption. And that to your point, we're not investing in LLMs, but actually so much of the productivity gains that we are expecting to see. And actually so much of the valuation of so many of the LLM models is predicated on this view that it's going to drive widespread productivity gains.

5:34Scaling Europe:But those gains are not going to be driven in the LLM companies. It's going to be the mass adoption implementation across industries. So what did you think, how do you feel seeing a government taking that approach, which aligns, I guess, so perfectly with the mission of your business? So you won't be surprised to hear that. Look, we're delighted. We're really keen to be a part of it. I love that. I think the AI opportunities act and the sort of the focus on AI opportunities was great from the government. I would say there was probably a little too much focus originally on sort of deep technology specialists and AI engineers.

6:10It's brilliant. They're saying, actually, look, how do we make this relevant for everyone in the workforce? That's how we're going to win with our energy costs, with our infrastructure costs, everything else. realistically we're probably not going to compete on data centers compute some of the other things that are vital to foundational models but you know we have an incredibly skilled and talented workforce right if we can give them these additional technology skills and help kind of become the fat you know the sort of ai nation the fastest adopted nation for ai within the oecd that feels like an achievable objective for britain um and also one where policymakers should be really focused on so it's it's great that there's that level of alignment and you know i think it's it's brilliant it was brilliant to hear liz's speech yesterday and what do you think is

6:56Scaling Europe:missing in current government policy at the moment regarding ai and ai adoption i think the biggest challenge is that i think a lot about and it's one of the things that defines europe you've always had this and i include britain in that mix right you've always had this sort of social contract between employer and employee that is very different from in america where people are hired at will. There's an expectation that your employer is going to invest in you, you're going to be paying things forward for the workforce. You're going to have people who are tenured in there for a long time on the journey with you.

7:28And when I think of what probably the most important right you could give workers right now, it would be a right to reskill, right? I think if we think about this serious threat of job obsolescence, right? And it is a threat, though it isn't automatic, um people get so much value and benefit from work allowing people and supporting people to reskill on the job and adapt to what's happening means we won't make the same mistakes we made in de-industrialization right we jolted our economy out of the industrial age in a way that left a lot of wreckage and we've seen that throughout europe and it's something that we should be

8:04Scaling Europe:really wary of doing again yeah absolutely and when we talk about ai skills and i guess it's quite a broad term when you're talking about ai skills and kind of upskilling the nation what kind of a what are the core skills that you think most people need to get up to speed on so a level of kind of ai literacy bleeding into fluency is really important understanding what are the limitations and capabilities of foundational models and the applications you're using where can you insert them into the flow of work what things can you basically start to deconstruct and then reconstruct with AI at its center.

8:42Practical implications that are really important. How do you navigate your company's infosec policies, legal policies, data protection policies, regulation that exists in both the sort of EU-wide level and a national level? Because AI's sort of efficacy is going to be defined less by what the bleeding edge of the technology is capable of and more of what is actually permissible and actionable in your working day-to-day life. And this is, I probably do, what, 10, 15 customer meetings a week. I'm often speaking to CEOs, CIOs, COOs, and their big challenge is, look, we're under huge pressure to say we're doing things with AI.

9:25We've got some initiatives and pilots and hackathons and everything else, but we're really struggling to kind of generate serious alpha from that and quantify how is this actually driving our business forward and that like for us that's the battle signal it's great right we can go after that but um it's a it's a huge problem and how do you prove that value to

9:44Scaling Europe:to businesses and customers that you're working with you know when you are working with them to help upskill their workforce how do you say at the end of it this is the value that we've provided this is the change that we've driven forward so there's a sort of general approach and then there are kind of individual sectoral approaches at a general level nearly every organization really cares about three things. Cost avoidance, cost reduction, revenue generation. If you can quantify the impact that AI and skilling are having in those areas, you're off to a great start, right? Companies don't really care about hours saved if it means their employees get more time to walk their dogs or take a longer lunch break.

10:19Like, might be nice, but it's not sort of generating real value for that organization. But the things that do matter are those three metrics and then how they might be applied or adapted to sectors. We do a huge amount of work within the NHS, training doctors, nurses, matrons on data skills, AI skills, and helping them create automations. There, they care about lives saved, right? We help one NHS trust see double the number of patients in the acute care ward. Things like that are really helpful, right? We help unlock blocked beds that were listed as sort of occupied, but were in fact not occupied.

10:54And the trust was having to spend money on hotel rooms for patients when they didn't need to these things are sort of really impactful what with one big um auto manufacturer who we helped ship an extra 100 cars a week from one of their factories due to redesigning um their manufacturing and production line um using data skills like there are there's so much you can do it differs on context but in the end it it requires you to kind of have a pretty intimate understanding of what matters to that company and that function and that team and this is the key with the kind of context element um if you can't first understand what an organization really cares about it's hard for you to help them in anything more than a generic way so the way we kind of operate on a practical level we'll diagnose the gaps between the goals of organizations and the capability of their people we'll then prescribe learning pathways to sort of meet those gaps and then use a mix of human coaches our agenda coach atlas and our platform to deliver the treatment playing back to them here is how that initial diagnosis is being tackled and here's the value you're seeing that's one of the it's been all the missing loops in education and especially education

12:03Scaling Europe:on the job for a long time amazing and when you're when you're going to businesses and you're pitching i guess the multiverse package treatment what are the reasons when you know prospects say no you know what are the often or the the uh the pushbacks that you have to overcome the biggest reason they say no is a perception that this will require time off the job from their employees that they will struggle to give up and it's it's something we've been working on for a long time right the tighter you can make that relationship between the learning and the work the better the faster you can get someone to be able to kind of be demonstrably more efficient and evidence that the better so the biggest challenge is always how do you show that this isn't a kind of time sink, but this is actually resulting in better productivity.

12:49The other challenge that I think any B2B business has this is just one of priorities, right? Now, one of the things that's helped about all the heat and the light around AI is every business leader has to take this seriously and try and prioritize for it. Often they've spent huge amounts of money on one or another AI application and they're trying to justify that spend. That definitely bunters up the priority list, but at any given time, business leaders will be dealing with an array of issues, you've got to try and justify why yours is more important than something else they might be spending money on or solving.

13:20Scaling Europe:Got it. And I imagine you work with like a really interesting wide range of customers and clients across the country. Are there any insights that you see across industries? Like are there certain industries or maybe even CEO profiles or specific roles where you're seeing actually this type of organization, this industry, this kind of persona is leaning much more heavily, is being much more engaging, is seeing a lot more value out of the program yeah the ones that have the most to gain are in many ways some of the least digitally transformed right we see this particularly in the public sector where you can almost look most organizations are still trying to deal with the last digital revolution right never mind this one you can kind of help them skip a step right given where ai is today and you can start to automate much faster than would have been possible previously so we're seeing huge gains in the public say it one of the really interesting things we're seeing is over 45s are actually adopting technology faster in work than under 45s i thought in part because they feel a genuine sense of will i still have a job in five to ten years if i can't kind of prove i'm i'm a part of this change um and that is a really interesting thing to see and i think again non-technology workers if you imagine someone who's built a huge amount of domain expertise we work with children's services workers and local authorities as an example they know that space incredibly well they understand kind of what support families need when to give them that support when to dial it up and down um they love getting ai data skills technology skills because they can start to not only triage families much faster but figure out how better to parcel out what is pre-limited time and allocate it where it's most needed and you find that kind of for people who hadn't traditionally been using technology this is just like a it's an amazing aha moment when they think i wish i'd had this 10 years ago right yeah that's amazing i must be real uh validation for what you've built over 10 years as well right you must be really feel good feeling when you can see the outcome and and and see the change that's driving for people it's the best thing about what we do is that you we're talking about real people right with real case studies on the job you know we have every couple of all hands will have some apprentices we've worked with and people we've trained come and talk to us about their story and the things that they've they've sort of experienced since doing the apprenticeship over half of our apprentices get a promotional pay increase while they're still doing their apprenticeship right we've had people move from kind of part-time work often kind of manual labor into boardrooms and offices and doing things they wouldn't have believed possible before right we've had kind of incredible um we've had people undergo incredible trajectories in just a couple of years and those are the things on power to stop amazing you obviously do great work kind of upskilling individuals even across different organizations how do you kind of equip them with whether it's like certifications or credentials you know you've talked a lot about degrees and apprenticeships is there an ai equivalent that you've built or trying to build to say that this person is adequately equipped in certain areas of AI that they can take with them to future jobs?

16:31So we give them a formal certification through the apprenticeship system. We also give them a multiverse credential so that can access our sort of stamp where every person who undergoes one of our programs will at the end produce a project that is evidence of basically the things they've achieved at work as a result of using the learning. like i've actually never been all that interested in learning for learning's sake i kind of care much more about or so what right you learn this thing what does that mean that you can change about your circumstances or your working environment or whatever else and we get these really tangible connections to that through people basically showcasing their work and we will include their line manager their coach and the individual in that so they can basically play back here's the incredible things i can do that i couldn't do a year ago those moments are really cool yeah i

17:21Scaling Europe:bet no it's amazing and uh i always want to talk about something that i've heard people talk about talking about yesterday is like the the risk of inequality and how inequality can rise with the with the gap within ai skills you know i think you sort of mentioned it that you before we were very much focused on ai engineers and upskilling people who were already top earners and amazing builders who were exactly the 10x engineer right is the phrase that's used um do you see that playing out in real time or you know is that i guess how do you mitigate against how do companies mitigate that what look it's it's basically what i've talked about which is is don't focus on that that kind of elite level of talent right or the pure technology layer of talent in your organization really focus on those people who wouldn't otherwise be able to go meaningfully quicker and faster.

18:16There are often people who don't get the latest technology tools, who haven't had lots of investment made in them, in part because you'll see the gains much more materially, much faster. And in part because it's amazing how many solutions can be supported by technology, but aren't in and of themselves technology solutions, right? Most problems that a worker is solving in their workplace are not really technology related. So technology is just one of the tools at their disposal. And we've seen incredible gains with software engineers. We've seen it internally. You know, cursor, Claude Code, these things have completely upended software engineering as a field.

18:52But the reality is we're talking about hundreds of thousands of software engineers in the country versus millions and millions of workers.

19:01Scaling Europe:Yeah. Yeah, and the skills that you need are changing frequently. You know, we talk about like, you know, yeah, Claude Bort and all of these skills are just evolving so quickly. And how do you keep on top of making sure that your programs are on top of the trends, on staying on top of the technologies that are constantly changing, the models are evolving, the technology is getting better and better. How do you stay on top of the evolving landscape within AI? So we're pretty well plugged in. And it helps, by the way, that one of our board members is one of the biggest investors in both Anthropic and OpenAI.

19:33Right. Nice. We raise nearly all of our funding from Silicon Valley. And so we have a lot of connectivity into the tech companies. I speak a lot to the folks at Microsoft, Google and other places to really stay fresh. I meet a lot of founders. I spend a lot of time with people, including people who've been on your podcast. right uh running some of these ai application companies and understanding really uh the capabilities of the tech they're building because we need to but we kind of play the role of switzerland and the technology stat right we're kind of neutral and agnostic we'll work with whatever your tech stack is whatever application you're using again all of our energy is going into let's build this adoption layer so whether you're buying microsoft copilot you're buying lovable you're buying gemini whatever else it might be we will guarantee that we will get your people using it and driving hard business outcomes does that does that give you a level of insight

20:28Scaling Europe:into the type of tools that different organizations are adopting are you seeing certain industries certain groups of people navigate more towards microsoft copilot as like a an incumbent versus the lovables like what kind of insight does that give you look microsoft have an incredible advantage due to their distribution engine and the fact that so many companies are on the Microsoft suite on Azure various other things and they're you know it's incredible technology organization as a reason it's one of the most valuable companies in the world I think what one trend I'm seeing that maybe isn't yet being talked about enough is that particularly in Europe there is an increasing focus on well I'd say there's almost a nativist streak which is we need European solutions right Again, I include Britain in that.

21:14You know, Lagora versus Harvey, right, is an example because Europe has its own regulatory regime. It has its own framework. It has a different approach for America proudly, right? And at some fronts, rightly. So they cannot simply rely on US tools to be successful. And I think that will be a big tailwind, by the way, for European-focused AI companies.

21:37Scaling Europe:This is a question I actually wanted to ask Liz Kendall yesterday. but you know the uk government has announced big partnerships in the last year with open ai and anthropic and i think in many ways it's amazing you know like i want to see the government adopting implementing ai i'm very aware of the efficiencies and the transformation that can have in public services but it's given the geopolitical ongoings and the sort of changing nature of our relationship with the us do you feel like you know we should be perhaps looking at you know something like mistral in france well look i mean what arthur and the team at mistral done is is brilliant i actually i think on the foundational model level it is going to be very difficult to compete with the head start those companies have and the sheer amounts of funding that's being pumped in and um just the reach and i mean they built what they built is incredible right and actively useful and we'd be sort of mad to turn our backs on that i think the opportunity is probably more in the application space and the things you build on top of those because you can start to basically build applications that deal with very european or british specific problems either in government or outside of government um i i think it's going to be tough to to catch up on foundational models we could end up wasting huge amounts of money trying to do that you know it's great mistrial exist because we do need a european solution but it's hard yeah it's like a trade-off between having something from a more reliable partner but it frankly a decrease in quality um i want to given i don't know everything's happening geopolitically it'd be interesting to get your view on what it's like building in europe now versus 10 years ago you know you've been building and raising money across europe like as you say from silicon valley investors how has the ecosystem changed and evolved as your company has has kind of grown into maturity i think europe is much more technology open right and much less uh much less skeptical than it was of you know take germany as an example where we're expanding it to at the moment they've realized that technology needs to be a material part of their economy the french should have done the same they're investing heavily in their ecosystem and catching up with britain fast right um and and that's something that that That is a real trend at the moment.

23:55The big valuable companies coming out of Germany and France in particular, Spain, maybe not too far behind. I think that we are also seeing a sort of an acceptance, as I said, that we'll need European kind of led solutions. And we're seeing more. It is easier now than it was. And hopefully we'll get even easier as the EU starts to reform to scale across Europe, across individual countries. that looked a lot more like dealing with kind of many many individual nation states a few years ago now it is somewhat more seamless there are still speed bumps and you know let's see how much mario draghi gets listened to and and reform is taken really seriously it kind of needs to happen um and the the nature of the changing relationship with the u.s right i think uncertainty has meant that uh there is wariness about being reliant on america for anything at the moment and that you know that sort of always forces europe to get sad together and of course the big change we're seeing is in defense european companies are really uh european countries are really grasping the net along the fence germany in particular and uh that will be a tailwind for growth in europe um it'll also provide lots of opportunities for innovation yeah absolutely it

25:12Scaling Europe:does feel like there's been a real vibe shift or cultural change that trump has pushed forward with his agenda and a sort of a wake-up call for europe right yeah no of course wake-up call i mean it was we've been far too reliant on just expecting the us to kind of continue to defend to sort of pay to defend europe in perpetuity and it's it's right that european countries and again when i talk about europe i include britain in this right of course it should um that you know we've got to be really doing more and more than just some sort of token acknowledgement of our bit but actually really leading yeah yeah and i actually think britain could play a really uh leading role in europe you know i think we've we're still you know uh one of the leading economies london is the biggest tech ecosystem in europe um and i yeah i hope to see closer alignment and a much closer european ecosystems and community going forward um but let's touch on the european expansion right you've just acquired or you've just kind of announced the acquisition of stack fuel can you touch a bit about what that company is and why you acquired them so stack fuel are the sort of leading data upskiller in germany we acquired them for a few reasons first two brilliant founders in leo and stefan one a hugely accomplished accomplished technologist the other a really credible ceo who crucially had good relationships with government as well who's a really important stakeholder in germany because while stack fuel are providing um training to corporates up and down the country and actually some in the public sector they're also accessing german government incentives to help uh kickstart companies training their workforce of reskilling and upskilling people on the job and that combination of kind of regulation actually is a tailwind for growth and as a kind of means of really accelerating their business, I thought was really smart and very similar to kind of what we've seen in the UK.

27:02So it made so much sense. Look, Germany is the largest economy in Europe, but on some measures, the least digitally transformed. And it is a country that is being buffeted by America and China and is desperately having to transform its industries. The German government in their coalition agreement announced their ambition to become an AI nation. but at the moment 56 percent of the population have basic digital skills uh you know notwithstanding the other 44 percent not even having that it requires massive retraining and you've got a combination of real government intent real corporate need um and incredibly talented people

27:43Scaling Europe:who are eager to learn it's a perfect opportunity yeah no for us it makes so much sense and by the way you'll see that replicated across europe there you know the french economy is is facing similar pressures right spain italy austria etc yeah absolutely and what does that i guess what does the integration of that business into yours look like over the over the the next year or so so at the moment we're kind of integrating as you'd expect core functions people finance etc but keeping most of the day-to-day operations separate reporting directly into me they've got a great team they need investment they need some of our technology if they're going to go much faster and um they need our kind of go-to-market engine and so we're really focusing on on sort of using that to help fuel growth in germany um but from an operational standpoint they know you know they have a 92 completion rate on their programs they deliver really high quality it's astonishing actually they deliver really high quality education and it's something that that we sort of uh we see is just a really exciting overlay to what we do.

28:47Scaling Europe:And how big do you think that can be? Do you see that becoming as big as your core business is today? Do you see it overcoming? The market opportunity is bigger? It should be massive, right? I mean, look, the market itself is bigger, right? From a kind of TAM perspective, from a human capital perspective, than what we have in the UK. And I see this as being part of a kind of pan-European expansion for us. Amazing. So Germany is kind of one of the first steps. And do you think you'll expand within the wider DAC region? know have you got your eyes on france or spain dak interestingly but also by the way both west and east you know poland incredible uh economic story um not only are they experiencing uncommon growth but they're also really really trying to turn the handle on let's become a technology player in a meaningful way right uh they're just opportunities abound in europe and every every government is increasingly waking up to the fact that if we do not skill people on the job at the scale and prevent mass job displacement it will make the populist wave we've seen of the last kind of decade look like a storm in a teacup right yeah yeah i think it's uh it's a huge risk especially in germany you know there's a a very strong uh rise of the afd in a lot of germany the afd could win an election in in what three four years if things don't change in germany and i think you have that sense of urgency from the government yeah and it does feel like the chancellor is doing what feels like good work you know he feels like he's he's really changing the narrative within germany he seems very pro-tech pro-defense trying to transform it uh which i think is great i wanted to ask on the acquisition itself were you were you looking at acquisitions as a strategy more broadly were you looking at different markets or was it more the case that maybe you knew the team you knew the founders and actually this was more of like an opportunistic let's go after this right now because it's a great opportunity yeah no core part of the strategy right we'd been looking at the market and looking at where was the right combination of sort of close to escape velocity right if given more more financial firepower high quality product and smart people delivering something that was was kind of right in our sweet spot so it was a a kind of deliberate strategic bet and look it won't be the last acquisition we did yeah yeah And how will you know when this has been a success?

31:04It's a good question. Look, in part, we are, as a business overall, we're growing 70 % year on year at the moment, right? We want to be growing at probably double that in Germany, given it's a much earlier stage. The first kind of getting from 10 to 100 million is a lot easier than getting from 0 to 10 million, right? In part, because in that early part of the journey, you don't have clear product market fit. um in germany they just about got their product market fit this business we are going to be foot on the gas we think we can grow that really really quickly our immediate aim is to reach a hundred thousand german workers initially and then the government themselves has said they want to skill 40 million germans in ai well we want to be there to help them with that and it is an ambitious

31:52Scaling Europe:endeavor yeah amazing it's uh that's the type of the type of government targets that you want to here right that's exactly what you're there for um let's touch on some of the financial results then and some of the growth because you mentioned you know you're seeing really strong growth the last financial results that were published had you growing 36 to 18 million but to your point there it seems like growth is actually ramping up so it seems like you're now growing faster year every year that you're growing where's that coming from so so much is it coming it is coming from this kind of AI need, right, that exists.

32:25And essentially something that was important, but not urgent to companies, and what do I do in my workforce on how do I get them more productive, has now become both important and urgent, right? And we're seeing that really drive decision making. We're seeing companies not want to be the laggards in their sector or left behind. So the cause of learning in the flow of work, which as I say, was always something that was deemed important has moved from being the domain of kind of HR people and learning individuals into being the domain of the CEO. And that just means there is more urgency, a greater bias for action.

33:03And it's really helped both kind of shorten sales cycles, but also drive an acceleration of growth and just have much more productive and strategic conversations with people. If you look at the kind of organizations we deal with at the moment, ai transformation is one of the number one things they're telling their shareholders that they are going to be responsible for they've got to deliver on it right we can't deliver on it just by saying i'm going to buy some licenses of whatever product right yeah it's interesting i speak to so many ai

33:33Scaling Europe:founders and they say it's almost like the best time to be selling software because so many people have been given money to spend on ai tools and so you know you're seeing this sort of like inflation of sales almost with so many people buying so many tools and not really knowing what to do with them or getting much value from them yeah yeah well this is the thing i mean it's it's sort of in some course software's been written off i think it's too early for that uh i think the the challenge is always just going to be if you want to be relevant you need people using your product to do things their employer needs them to do right and and as i say this is where just i think one of the challenges if you take the ed tech space has been that education and learning was positioned as a sort of easily commoditizable employee benefit you know i characterize a lot of these systems as the equivalent of buying your employees a library card and saying you've educated them right like you go learn whatever they want online etc etc the reality is if you are actually going to teach people in a way that is highly productive and target it and aligns the interests of employee and employer which is where we always want to be right bring bring those two things together you've got to train them in the flow of work and teach them how to operate in their specific domain differently as a consequence of leveraging technology so it's just it's that that kind of change in focus is quite important yeah it's it's yeah it's a great time to be building um what you're building right because this is yeah the perfect moment in time and going back to like revenue and growth are there any updated numbers that you can share either where revenue is at today or kind of what you're hoping to get to by the end of the year not yet but um our accounts will be published before too long and they will show some very good growth they will show a very substantial decrease in um in burn and um i'll have some exciting updates on that from before too dark amazing it's great to hear that's great to hear yeah no no it's it's look it's by the way we and we always have to be careful in britain and in europe it's perfectly acceptable to be a loss-making company while you're in a growth phase right and that's something everyone should get comfortable with in the end we also need to realize every company is valued on its basis to one day generate free cash flow so you've got to have a path right and that's really important and for us fortunately that um profitability moment is not too far away but uh at the same time i sort of slightly roll my eyes when every year there's a story about uh loss-making companies it's just it's just such an easy headline uh that's what it's one of the things i really don't like about british media is that people engage with they actually like to see those headlines and that's why they're written so often uh but i thought what was really interesting is that you are in the stage where you are sort of like late stage maturing at the time where people start to expect profitability but also you're in this weird place where you're also growing faster and faster so it's like it's almost feels like the perfect time to be doubling down and investing and growth when you've got the tailwinds behind you?