Ask AI a vague question and you'll get a woolly answer. That rule isn't new. It's just louder now. This week I'm joined by Maggie Sarfo, founder and CEO of Meres Consult, a growth and AI adoption consultancy. She's a Gartner alumni, a TEDx speaker, and one of the UK's top 100 female founders in 2025. We started the episode by fighting the technology. We had to switch to Maggie's phone to get recording. That felt like the right way in, because the more complex something gets, the less predictable it becomes. Ask a chatbot a simple question and you'll get an answer. Ask it to build you an MVP wired into your CRM and you've entered a different world entirely. Maggie's point stayed with me: the human at the start, the human sanity checking, and the human closing the loop. All three, or none of it works. The line that stopped me was about emotional intelligence. We're working with machine intelligence, so we need to become more human, not less. I've had a lot of conversations on this podcast and nobody had put it quite like that. If you can hold your own perspective and other people's at the same time, you write a better ask. Better ask, better outcome. It really is that simple, and that hard. Then Maggie said something I think students and worried employees need to hear. Those who hone their craft and learn to use AI to do better will carry on doing better, and they won't lose their jobs. If you go lazy on your craft, the output goes with it. That's what AI slop actually is. A poor ask, no expertise behind it, and nobody checking what came out the other end. It costs more than it saves. We also talked about the question almost nobody asks: should I use AI for this at all? Not ethically, but practically. I still use BBC Weather for the weather. Every prompt has a cost in tokens, in money, and in energy. Maggie's three questions for leaders are worth writing down. What business challenge am I solving? Is AI part of the solution? And if it is, which solution is right for me? I finished this one thinking about my M&S Bank letter, and about a bank that made it almost impossible to reach a person. Automate the work if you must. Don't automate away the door.

Connect with Maggie Sarfo:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggie-sarfo/

Website: https://meresconsult.com/

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Your host - Shaun Phillips

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