GAEA Talks

This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Stephanie Balaouras, who oversees technology research at Forrester. This is the first in a new series of one-to-one conversations with Forrester's experts, ahead of the Forrester Technology and Innovation Forums in Austin, London and New York, where GAEA Talks will be recording live and in person.
Stephanie has been at Forrester for twenty years, starting as an analyst covering data storage, backup and disaster recovery, moving into business continuity, cybersecurity and risk, and now overseeing Forrester's technology research agenda.
Filmed in our new London studio, this conversation is about separating the reality of enterprise AI from the noise. Stephanie walks through Forrester's analysis on whether there is genuinely an AI bubble forming, why technology leaders should care regardless of the market, and why the demand is not there yet to absorb the supply being built. She then bursts several other bubbles. Nobody is actually firing developers because of AI. There is no SaaS apocalypse coming. Productivity is the wrong use case to lead with.
Topics covered:
Whether there is an AI bubble, and why CIOs should care
One trillion dollars of capital investment expected in 2027 alone
Forrester's "AI voyage" research on what successful companies actually do differently
Why nobody is firing developers because of AI
The technical debt problem and why 20% of IT budget should pay it down
AEGIS - Forrester's framework for securing agentic AI
Why the CIO's job is shifting from uptime to trust and assurance
"Minimum viable sovereignty" for multinationals
AI resilience - the research originally titled "When AI Fails"
Forrester Technology and Innovation Forums: Austin 14-15 October, London 29 September to 1 October, New York first week of November.

This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Professor Hany Farid, one of the founding figures of digital forensics and one of the most authoritative voices in the world on authenticating images, video, audio and information itself.
Hany is an applied mathematician and computer scientist. He spent twenty years at Dartmouth, eight at UC Berkeley, and is now back at Dartmouth. For twenty five years he has developed the techniques used by media outlets, law enforcement and courts of law to determine what is real and what is not. He has advised regulators, worked on countering online terrorism and child sexual abuse material, and been asking "who benefits" since long before it was fashionable.
Filmed in our new London studio, this conversation cuts through more of the current AI and social media narrative in ninety minutes than most think pieces do in a year. Hany's argument is direct. If you are getting the majority of your news and information from social media, you should stop.
Topics covered:
The 10 to 1 ratio of AI fake content to real reporting in every major world event
Why disinformation is cheap and information is expensive
The Silicon Valley trillionaire race and what it means for you
The Grok example - Elon Musk hard-coding his own AI to protect his reputation
Why LLMs may be worse than social media for consolidating ideas
The Palo Alto paradox - billionaires banning screens from their own kids' classrooms
The airplane question - would you get on it if the engineers did not understand it
Hany's practical advice on deleting apps, using AI properly, and rebalancing life

This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Rob Garlick, former Head of Innovation Research at Citi and author of AI: Anarchy or Abundance? Why the Future of Work Needs Pro-Human Leaders. Rob spent 28 years at Citi and was at the front row for the Netscape and Google IPOs.
Filmed in our new London studio, this is one of the most economically grounded AI conversations on the show. Rob's argument is that this wave is fundamentally different for three reasons - pace, scope and nature of change - and that the biggest economic trade in history is now being made in front of us. People are the largest line item on most corporate P&Ls, and AI now offers a way to substitute them. That is great news for shareholders. It is not automatically great news for people.
Topics covered:
The three reasons this wave is different: pace, scope and nature of change
Milton Friedman's 1970 shareholder primacy essay
Charlie Munger on incentives
The Engels pause of the Industrial Revolution
Humanoid robots with a payback period of under ten weeks
OpenAI agents beating experts 70% of the time at 11x speed and 99% lower cost
The economic singularity and the risk of wage collapse
Universal Contribution Income (UCI) as an alternative to UBI
Rob's BEST framework starting with better jobs
Einstein and Bertrand Russell - "remember your humanity and forget the rest"

This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Natalie Monbiot, one of the earliest and most thoughtful voices in the world on digital twins, AI avatars and human-centred AI. Natalie joined the podcast from the US.
Natalie left the corporate world in 2019 to join Hour One as one of its earliest team members, and helped turn AI-generated video from a category dominated by deepfake pornography into a legitimate enterprise business, with customers including Johnson & Johnson and Berlitz. She now collaborates with AE Studio on AI alignment and safety, who recently co-published a paper with Anthropic on removing dangerous knowledge at the training stage.
The title of this episode comes from a question Natalie borrows from the Cosmos Institute. When the AI is not in the room, are you smarter and more capable, or are you diminished? If it is the second, something has gone wrong.
Topics covered:
Are you smarter and more capable when AI is not in the room
Why the digital twin is a healthier mental model than the answer engine
The cognitive atrophy risk of outsourcing your thinking to an LLM
The shift from AI as answer engine to AI as action engine
Yoshua Bengio on stripping AI of any intrinsic personality
John Vervaeke's "relevance realisation" as a distinctly human capability
Sovereign personal AI - your data, your model, on your device
The Echo Studio and Anthropic paper on removing dangerous knowledge at training
Family-safe AI as a real consumer category
Natalie's three prescriptions for using AI in a way that makes you stronger

This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Connor Leahy, US Executive Director of Control AI. Connor is one of the most technically credible and politically clear voices in the world on the risks of superintelligence.
Connor has been in AI his whole career. He co-founded EleutherAI, which built some of the first large-scale open-source language models. He then founded Conjecture, a research company focused on controllable and understandable AI systems, before winding it down to move to Washington, D.C. and lead the US work of Control AI.
Filmed in the new London studio, this conversation cuts through more of the current AI narrative in ninety minutes than most policy papers do in a hundred pages. Connor's argument is that superintelligence is not a technical problem, it is a political one. He walks through why modern AI is grown rather than written, why reinforcement learning produces optimising sociopaths by default, why the labs are selling a political product not an economic one, and why "there are no adults in the room" is the single most important thing every leader must understand.
Topics covered:
Why superintelligence is a political problem, not a technical one
Neural networks in plain English - grown, not written
Why we only understand about 3% of what happens inside modern AI
Why reinforcement learning produces optimising sociopaths by default
Why the labs are selling a political product, not an economic one
The leaded gasoline parallel for AI regulation
"Saliency control" as the primary method of mind control
Connor's three prescriptions - write things down, find community, engage policy