The Frontier Leader Show is a podcast for senior leaders, advisors, and operators navigating AI adoption, business transformation, and the future of work.
Hosted by Martin Wheatley, founder of The AI Leader Lab and an AI strategy advisor with 20+ years in financial services and operations leadership, each episode explores how executives are actually using AI, generative AI, and emerging technology to make better decisions, lead their teams, and run sharper organisations.
This isn't theory or hype. It's honest, practical conversation with the people doing the work: experienced leaders, AI practitioners, technologists, educators, and platform builders sharing what's working inside real businesses right now.
Each episode covers:
How AI is reshaping leadership, strategy, and operations
Practical and ethical AI adoption for senior teams
What human leadership looks like in an AI-augmented environment
How the right tools create space for better thinking and better outcomes
Frameworks for AI maturity, judgement, and decision-making
If you lead a team or growing business and you're working out what AI means for your organisation, your role, and your judgement, this is your show.
New episodes weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen.
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Données mises à jour le 30/10/2026
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Eleven Years in Three Weeks: AI-Ready Data Without a Faster Mess
Épisode 28
mardi 20 octobre 2026 • Durée 35:51
Eleven and a half years. That was one council’s estimate for sorting 800,000 legacy property files by hand, assuming they could find some poor soul willing to do it.
Sarah Heal, CEO of Information Leadership, helped them get it done with AI in a few weeks. And she’d be the first to tell you the speed is the least interesting part.
Sarah started out at Archives New Zealand and co-founded Information Leadership about 22 years ago, back when a memo could take a week or two to get from the bottom floor to the top floor.
Since then she’s been helping government and enterprise organisations get their information into a state they can trust. Information governance and AI readiness might sound dry but with Sarah, it really isn’t.
In this episode we get into:
Security by obscurity, and why AI has quietly ended it
The council job, and what happened once the files were sorted (roughly a quarter can now legally go in the bin)
Leavers’ OneDrives full of sensitive staff data, and a weekly chore that went from up to two days to under an hour
What human in the loop looks like when checking every file would put you straight back to doing it manually
Where to start safely if you’ve been told to “do AI” with no further instructions
Why Sarah thinks the next decade belongs to the business analyst. I’m married to one, so I’m not arguing.
How Copilot’s PowerPoint slides went from underwhelming to astounding in about a year
More sheep than people. Yes, it’s relevant.
If your organisation has twenty years of shared drives and someone upstairs has just asked for an AI strategy, this one’s for you.
Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It’s a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.
Subscribe to The Frontier Leader Show wherever you listen to podcasts.
Four Years to Four Minutes: Leading at AI Speed, with Steve Rowbotham
Épisode 27
mardi 13 octobre 2026 • Durée 37:26
What happens when an Olympic rower who measured progress in four-year cycles ends up running a tech company where it feels more like four minutes? Steve Rowbotham, Team GB bronze medallist and CEO of Navigator, joins me to talk about leading through that change, and what AI has actually done inside his business.
Steve spent 11 years as a professional rower, competing at two Olympic Games and winning bronze in the double sculls in Beijing. When his career ended at London 2012 he lost the identity that came with it, and he’s honest about how long that took to rebuild. He now leads a team of 35 at Navigator, a London travel audience platform that turns booking behaviour into consumer insight for brands well beyond travel.
In this episode we get into:
Going from a sport that revolves entirely around you to a business that revolves around 35 other people, and why he loves that more than he expected
The hard-coded platform Navigator set fire to, and what took its place
A Fanta brief aimed at neo-hedonists (yes, that’s a real thing)
Why he refuses to treat AI as a good or bad question, and how a non-technical founder finds the right layer to start with
What changes when you’re marketing to someone’s AI agent rather than to them
His three takeaways, including a book he treats as an operating manual
And the thing he wanted to say before we finished. It might take some pressure off.
Steve’s a non-technical founder running a data business, which makes him a useful person to hear from if AI still feels like someone else’s specialism.
Will AI Take Your Job or Hand You a Second Act, with Jay Samit
Épisode 26
mardi 6 octobre 2026 • Durée 50:23
Jay Samit has spoken about AI in dozens of countries, and he says the mood in the room changed about six months ago. People stopped asking what AI can do and started asking what happens to their job.
In this episode, Jay Samit joins me to talk about his new book, The Second Act Advantage, and why he thinks decades of experience are worth more than most people give them credit for. He's a serial entrepreneur and former chairman of an AI company, and Wired once described his job as the coolest in the industry.
It's an optimistic conversation with the odd blunt moment, and a useful listen if you lead people who are wondering where they fit.
We get into:
✳️ The compliance professional who started posting on LinkedIn, and what landed in his account on day one
✳️ Retirement made sense when life expectancy was 70. Jay's case for what comes next
✳️ Where Jay thinks AI's blind spot is, and why it favours people with a few miles on the clock
✳️ The top ten iPhone apps from year one, and why two of them shape his optimism
✳️ His take on regulation, including the rules Jay says early AI researchers set themselves and what's since happened to them
✳️ A one-question investing quiz where the answer isn't Apple or Google
✳️ And a Ford training film with a deliberate mistake in it
Jay also writes a free Substack where he asks what figures from history would have made of AI. All links below.
Augmented, Not Artificial Intelligence, with Dr Jonathan Schaeffer
Épisode 25
mardi 29 septembre 2026 • Durée 44:37
He holds two Guinness World Records for artificial intelligence. So why won't he put his own medical records anywhere near it?
In this episode, I'm joined by Dr Jonathan Schaeffer, the AI researcher whose checkers program Chinook beat the best humans alive and earned him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records twice over, for checkers and for poker.
Forty years into the field, he's now building something that runs against almost everything the big AI labs are selling: a private AI that lives on your own desktop and never sends your files anywhere.
We get into:
Why he thinks the word "hallucination" is doing AI's PR for it
The Star Trek computer that shaped how he's thought about AI for forty years, long before ChatGPT existed
What actually happens to your data the moment you ask a chatbot a question, even if you never upload a file
How Kind, the desktop AI he built, only answers from your own files and says "I don't know" rather than guessing
The trillion dollar data centre race, and why he thinks most of it is solving the wrong problem
And a shelf of 1990s book catalogues that Google can no longer find anywhere on the internet, but his laptop still can
Key takeaway: Jonathan's case for treating AI as augmented intelligence, an apprentice you're in charge of rather than an oracle you defer to, and why that distinction gets harder to hold on to every year AI gets better at sounding certain.
Book: "The Games that Computers (and Humans) Play"
Rebuilding an 18 Year Agency Around AI and Remote Work, with Andy Firth
Épisode 24
mardi 15 septembre 2026 • Durée 45:44
If you're weighing up whether hybrid working is worth the hassle, or how far you can actually push AI into your own operations, this episode was made for you.
Andy Firth, owner of Leeds digital agency Ascensor, joins Martin to talk through both changes at once. He took his business fully remote and rebuilt the whole business around Claude.
They get into:
Why "three days in the office" quietly became three or four people in a 10,000 square foot building most Fridays, and what that was costing Ascensor in recruitment
Claude going from a personal experiment to what Andy calls an additional member of the team, wired into HubSpot, Teamwork, Slack and N8N
A BCG stat on the gap between what leaders say about AI and what their business actually does.
The apprentice who built an AI driven World Cup results tracker running through Slack. Yes, really
What made Andy stick with Claude over ChatGPT and Gemini, and why he thinks tool choice gets stickier the longer you leave it
Why GEO and AEO matter more than SEO now, in Andy's view, and what "agentic commerce" could do to the way people buy things
And Andy's three takeaways, including a book on how much of what we call decision making might not actually be up to us
How AI Is Quietly Reclassifying Work, with Amanda Daering
Épisode 22
mardi 25 août 2026 • Durée 44:16
One person in your business builds twenty AI agents and is accountable for everything they produce. Proud, or terrified?
Amanda spent two decades in workforce advisory, built and sold Newance, a US recruitment and people operations consultancy, and now writes on Substack about what's shifting underneath the headlines in companies and the people who work in them. Her argument is that the job is no longer the smallest unit a business gets organised around. The workflow is. And because that reclassification happens inside the same job titles, the employment numbers don't show it.
We get into:
Why "will AI replace jobs" is the wrong lens, and what's actually being reclassified underneath it
Cog work versus marquee talent. Same title in the same company, and a completely different deal underneath
The OpenAI finding that 43.5% of job-specific ChatGPT tasks fall outside the person's own role, and what that does to accountability
Whether the CTO and the CHRO end up being the same person
A client who still keeps paper files, and why adoption is running slower than the model releases suggest
What acqui-hiring actually means, and why trust is the thing some companies are now trying to buy back
Grief. Not a word I expected in a conversation about workforce data.
Amanda's takeaway for the week is one I've been chewing on since we recorded: check the weather, not the headlines.
Dubai's Two Year Deadline for Agentic AI, with Jeff Ross
Épisode 21
mardi 18 août 2026 • Durée 39:10
Dubai has given its entire private sector a two year deadline to adopt agentic AI. No pilot phase.
Meanwhile, the honest answer to "what does your AI tool actually do for you" can often be a shrug, or three minutes of enthusiasm that never lands on anything specific.
That is where this conversation with Jeff Ross lives. Jeff has spent 25 years being sent into businesses that had come loose, hotel groups, retail chains and service organisations across three continents, with stints at Starwood, St Regis, Swissôtel, TUI and Apple Retail.
These days he runs Nexus Point Project Management from Dubai, helping owners across the UAE, the GCC and Southeast Asia get the important things done once growth has outpaced what the founder can hold in their own head.
We get into:
Why Dubai's two year agentic AI mandate is different from every AI strategy document sitting in a drawer elsewhere
The one line test Jeff uses on leaders: if you can't explain how your AI tool helps you, you're not ready for anything bigger
What a post-acquisition integration between two of the biggest players in a Swiss market could look like with today's tools, instead of the manual pattern recognition it took at the time
Why employees quietly resist big AI rollouts long before the rollout is even announced
What Jeff still believes only a human leader can do, whatever the tools end up being capable of
And a story about self-driving taxis, his 14 year old son, and why he trusts the cars more than some of the human drivers
The mandate is arriving whether leaders are ready or not. Readiness starts with being able to explain, in one sentence, what the tool in front of you is actually for.
Connect with Jeff:
LinkedIn:
Every Company Needs Someone With AI in Their Job Title, with Jim Spignardo
Épisode 20
mardi 11 août 2026 • Durée 33:29
Ask most businesses who actually owns AI and you get a pause, followed by a name and a caveat about how it isn't really that person's job. Jim Spignardo reckons that has about twelve months left to run.
Jim's the Director of Cloud Strategy and AI Enablement at ProArch, a global IT services and consulting firm, and he's the person doing that job inside his company.
He reports an assisted value figure of AI to his executive team every single month. It's gone from a few thousand dollars a month to somewhere around $75,000, across 160 licensed users in a company of roughly 400.
In this episode we get into:
Why the twelve month clock, and why that person doesn't have to be a new hire or a full time role
How he builds the baseline that makes a monthly ROI number possible, when nobody has ever measured what the work costs today
Why governance is there to protect the organisation and not shackle it, and who belongs on the council
The one toggle in agent builder that Jim tells everyone to switch off before anything else
Why archived and untouched data quietly drags down the quality of what Copilot hands back
What happened at ProArch when free Cowork credits became paid ones. He uses the word "riot"
Jim's book, The AI Turning Point, came out in March and there's a second one on the way.
Share this with whoever in your business has quietly been doing the AI job without the title.
Open Weight, Closed Weight or Open Source: What Every Leader Actually Needs to Know
Épisode 19
mardi 4 août 2026 • Durée 14:06
What happens to your AI-powered workflows if the model you built them on disappears overnight?
I'm on my own this week, catching leaders up on what actually happened in AI through July, because it was a genuinely packed month even by this year's standards.
In this episode:
Why Fable 5 vanishing for two and a half weeks in June still matters even though it's back
Satya Nadella's "reverse information paradox," and what he says every prompt is quietly costing you
There's closed weight, and then open weight, and then full open source. All three explained with one car analogy
China's most crowded month yet for open weight releases, and the distillation row that followed
A letter fifty companies signed on open weight regulation this week. Anthropic wasn't one of them
Whether you're trying to work out what "open weight" actually means or you're just wondering what your backup plan is if your AI vendor gets cut off tomorrow, this one's for you.
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
01:57 Reverse Information Paradox
03:28 Open vs Closed Models
05:46 July Updates
06:54 The Emergence of Open Weighted Models
10:16 Closed or In-house?
12:15 Future of AI: Open Models vs. Frontier Models
Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.
AI Can't Write Your Story, But It Can Find It, with Rob D. Willis
Épisode 18
mardi 28 juillet 2026 • Durée 33:52
AI can generate a thousand polished slides that say absolutely nothing. So what actually makes a leader worth listening to now?
Rob D. Willis went from producing top 10 records in Germany to coaching executives on narrative. He calls himself a strategic story producer, and the parallel holds up. An artist used to walk into his studio with an eight minute song and no chorus, and his job was working out what they were really trying to say. He does the same thing now for leaders at HelloFresh, Moneybox, Salesforce, Babbel and Pfizer.
Rob also hosts the fantastic Chief Story Officer podcast.
In this episode we get into:
The pronoun pattern in Andy Burnham's first speech outside Number 10
How to be strategic by answering Kendall Haven's three questions
Why the investor deck grows from eight slides to forty, and what that says about being too close to your own idea
What AI is genuinely good at for helping leaders with stories
Three great things leaders can take away to become better storytellers
And a scene from Margin Call that does more for executive communication than most presentation training
Key takeaway: the stories you need are already sitting inside your organisation. AI is unusually good at surfacing them but working out which ones matter is still your job.
Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It’s a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.
Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI. www.theaileaderlab.com/roadmap
Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.
Subscribe to The Frontier Leader Show wherever you listen to podcasts.
Time Stamps:
00:00 Intro
01:20 Meet Andy and Ascensor
04:26 Why hybrid stopped working
09:13 Staying connected, remote
12:59 Claude as the tool of choice
15:44 The BCG alignment stat
20:15 Balancing freedom and safety
21:41 Why Claude over ChatGPT, Gemini
25:26 What clients make of it
29:11 GEO, AEO and agentic search
34:29 ChatGPT ads in conversations
35:51 Three takeaways
44:26 Find Andy and Ascensor
Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.
Subscribe to The Frontier Leader Show wherever you listen to podcasts.
Time Stamps:
02:26 Amanda's background
04:15 Jobs vs workflows: the atomic unit
05:33 Cog work and marquee talent
07:35 Scope creep and the 43.5% study
09:41 Twenty agents: proud or terrified?
12:18 Should the CTO and CHRO be one job?
14:38 Paper files and fifth-generation CEOs
17:39 Start with the business model
20:58 Decks to desks: the coexistence era
24:40 Anxiety, grief and AI-native ensembles
26:25 What acqui-hiring actually means
30:21 The orchestration layer and $10m PMs
32:47 Checking the weather
35:22 The deal underneath the job title
37:05 How Amanda uses AI
40:14 Takeaways
Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.
03:30 Jeff Ross: A Journey Through Hospitality and Business
05:46 AI Implementation in Dubai: A Bold Mandate
09:33 Challenges in Leadership and AI Adoption
12:05 Change Management: Lessons from Experience
16:33 Utilizing AI Tools for Business Efficiency
17:17 Transformative Potential of AI in Past Projects
19:07 Leveraging AI for Process Improvement
20:11 Embracing Technology in Education
22:03 Generational Perspectives on AI and Employment
24:10 Leadership in the Age of AI
27:54 Knowledge Retention in Organizations
30:43 Client Engagement and Ideal Partnerships
33:45 Leadership Ethos and AI Implementation
Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.
07:18 Challenges of Legacy Systems and AI Integration
09:55 Measuring ROI in AI Adoption
12:47 The Importance of Governance in AI
18:10 Navigating Change in Organizations with AI
18:37 Navigating AI Governance and Strategy
19:27 Data Security in AI Implementation
21:52 Understanding AI Usage and Monitoring
23:19 The Future of AI: Risks and Opportunities
25:23 Public Sentiment on AI: A Complex Landscape
27:53 Key Takeaways for Business Leaders
Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.
Get your copy of the Multiply Method ✖️ It's a FREE roadmap walking you through how to multiply the capabilities of your people and your business with AI.
