00:33:36 · James Wise
[00:33:36] S1: Yeah, and and actually once again, because of the Geordie um uh product launch around cost analysis, you know, we've we've got rid of a load of tools which we signed up to last year. We couldn't have signed up to those tools about Geordie because they needed to be within our structure, and now we've moved on from them because we found we weren't getting value for money. And we're using a whole host of new tools because now we're confident we can say, look, actually, for the next three months we're willing to spend a bit more to experiment, because we know in three months' time we'll have the data to say, yes, we can rationalize this or we do more of that, or you, or we cancel that, which I think is an incredibly powerful part of this ROI, which you know historically you didn't get from the security team. Um, but they're being asked about it now. Yeah, yeah. And they and it's a very hard time to be in the security world. I guess we see it as investors every day. Our job is to be at the frontier. Um, but if we miss the frontier, you know, it's a bad fund. If you miss the frontier, you know, it's a risk to Fortune 500 companies now and some really important institutions. So, how do you at Geordie and in your team stay at the frontier? And you know, what are the things coming down the pipeline that you're most excited about in terms of new AI capabilities, but which will also drive obviously the need for protection from Geordie?
00:34:46 · Hanah-Marie Darley
[00:34:46] S0: Yeah, you have to do your own homework. So you have to stay at the forefront of research. We both have to perform internal research, and I also do a a huge amount of reading of what's coming out of labs and and not just OpenAI and Anthropic, but what's coming out of universities and what's coming out of um think tanks and those kind of labs where AI testing is a little bit more old school, where we're still thinking about it in terms of peer-oriented reviews rather than just product launches. Um and I think the other thing that you have to do is um you have to plan to be flexible. Um and what I mean by that is if you really, really lock yourself into one mode of operations. And so a good example here might be vendor lock-in. Um, but another good example is actually uh the gateway that you brought up earlier. The only way that we can solve this challenge is a perimeter protection. That means that you necessitate not only how you're going to receive the information and how you're going to lock any bad operations down, but it also means that you're limiting the surface areas where agents can expand to within your business, whether or not you're calling that out. So a good example would be um we're just gonna have agents operate in the cloud where we can control them, or we're just gonna have agents operate on employee desktops. And then anything in the cloud we're gonna call workloads instead of agents because we have different control mechanisms for them. But we only have agents on the endpoints and we only have gateways on the endpoints to control those agents. Well, you know, agents are gonna be operating from a commerce perspective in browsers even more than they already are now. Um the forecast looks like, uh especially with the work that Google's doing around payment work and some of that has already been released with OpenAI and Stripe in the US. Um, it's expected to come here uh in force very soon. Um, I think the the EU is hoping to kind of pause that a little bit and get some more data around it before they say yes. But agents are not just going to operate within tiny little boundaries that we've drawn out for them. They're gonna be operating across your business as well as inside your business. And so again, you have to plan to be flexible. How do you expect the unexpected?
00:36:42 · Hanah-Marie Darley
Well, you make sure that you have systems in place that can adapt. You make sure that you have systems in place that aren't only functional, only possible with one operational structure. They have to modularize and come accommodate. I think the things I'm really excited about are non-LLMs. Um, I I love LLMs, uh, they're they're great. You know, don't come for me in the comments about the LLMs. But I think there's so many other ways to solve interesting AI challenges beyond just language models. Um, the work that world models are doing are really interesting. They bring about some new challenges around do you own your uh your representation in in visuals because world models operate from spatial awareness? Does that have implications for automated driving? Does that have implications for the way that we process personal data because current court rulings would tell you you do own your likeness and everything associated? But if you could imagine an agent that can take in computer vision context, plus take in world model context, plus take in reasoning, and then give you a holistic new solution, operate that solution, and then provide reports on the outcomes. That's incredibly transformational for businesses. And I think one of our customers said it best. Um they are essentially completely identifying their business. It's Forge Holiday Group. They're they're up in Chester. Um, and basically they were talking about it at an AI day, and their CPO said, AI lets us redesign work from the ground up. So it's not just let's make this process faster. It's let's rip out everything that we've done for the last 15, 20 years and let's do it completely differently. Let's see if we need to even continue to do it and let's transform the nature of work. You can only really do that if you have ways to measure that work, if you have ways to make it accountable, and also if you can understand, secure, and control the agents that are operating it.
00:38:21 · James Wise, Hanah-Marie Darley
[00:38:21] S1: Yeah. And I think that's the most exciting thing about working with Geordie is although you're a security company, you are enabling people to not just experiment but put into production the huge advantages that these models bring, the creativity of people behind the products, enabling individuals to do 10 times as much work as before. But all of that is only possible if you do it in a secure way with both observability but also the ability to uh influence the decisions at the agent level. So it's you know been great working with you so far. Uh and I look forward to the many challenges, uh, but also the many solutions Geordie's building in the years ahead. [00:38:56] S0: Thank you so much. And and I think that's at the core of what we do, right? It's the name behind it's the reason behind the name Geordie. We are focused on enabling innovation. It comes from the Industrial Revolution, as you know. Uh mining was a critical industry, not just to par homes and to par some of the more kind of daily life tasks, but really to par innovation, to power electricity, to power some of the things that in the industrial revolution changed the face of what worked looked like. So to do agents. And so we needed mining lamps in the industrial revolution to reduce risk and also to preserve worker safety, but also to operationalize and enable innovation. And that's what we're doing for the agentic era.
00:38:56 · Hanah-Marie Darley, James Wise
[00:38:56] S0: Thank you so much. And and I think that's at the core of what we do, right? It's the name behind it's the reason behind the name Geordie. We are focused on enabling innovation. It comes from the Industrial Revolution, as you know. Uh mining was a critical industry, not just to par homes and to par some of the more kind of daily life tasks, but really to par innovation, to power electricity, to power some of the things that in the industrial revolution changed the face of what worked looked like. So to do agents. And so we needed mining lamps in the industrial revolution to reduce risk and also to preserve worker safety, but also to operationalize and enable innovation. And that's what we're doing for the agentic era. [00:39:35] S1: Yeah, and it wasn't if it wasn't for the adoption of security tools like the Geordie Lamp, you know, so many other benefits wouldn't have been accessed. Exactly. Um I I often you know talk to American firms who are thinking about uh adopting Geordie as well. Have had to explain that story uh a few times. [00:39:51] S0: You gotta go mining lamps because they don't immediately know the Geordie lamp. Yeah, exactly. [00:39:55] S1: But I think it's a great analogy of you know security and safety being put first, but enabling innovation, which is probably the most important part of the discussion we need to be having now as we think about how these new models and these new technologies benefit us all. And if people want to learn more about Geordie, or indeed you, uh, how do they do that?
00:39:55 · James Wise, Hanah-Marie Darley
[00:39:55] S1: But I think it's a great analogy of you know security and safety being put first, but enabling innovation, which is probably the most important part of the discussion we need to be having now as we think about how these new models and these new technologies benefit us all. And if people want to learn more about Geordie, or indeed you, uh, how do they do that? [00:40:13] S0: So our website is geordy.ai, it's G-E-O-R-D-I-E, like Newcastle. Um and then me personally, my name is Hanah Marie Darley. You can find me on LinkedIn, it's Hanah with one N, which is a curveball. Uh but um otherwise, you can uh from our website, you can access all of our top people think. Um, you can engage with our blogs. We just launched the Northlight blog, so there's a lot of technical insights and research coming out of Geordie that you can engage with there. Um and you can find us on LinkedIn and socials. [00:40:42] S1: Thanks for listening to What's Next. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you want to learn more about the frontier of deep technology in Europe today, please like and subscribe. And if you're interested in learning more about working in deep tech, look at the Balderton website to learn more about us and our portfolio companies.