Forget your employees – how hard is your AI agent working?

Summary

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The Times Tech Podcast

Episode: Forget your employees – how hard is your AI agent working?

Hosts: Danny Fortson (San Francisco), Katie Prescott (London)
Air Date: March 27, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Danny Fortson and Katie Prescott explore the rapidly shifting role of AI agents in the workplace, focusing on how companies are measuring productivity not just by human output but increasingly by AI usage—measured in “tokens.” With AI “agent swarms” taking on more of the workload, both employees and executives are grappling with a new anxiety: are you using enough AI to keep up, and what does that mean for the future of work and software itself? The hosts break down industry trends, share real-world examples, introduce their own newsroom’s AI “pet,” and interview Dean Forbes, CEO of Fortero, a leader in industrial software. Together, they dissect whether we’re entering a productivity boom or a jobs apocalypse.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Shifting Legal Landscape: Social Media on Trial

• Meta and Google found liable in social media addiction trial (01:21)
  • “This is, I will say, monumental... You are tobacco, you have to pay for things as if you are a tobacco company. So this could be the beginning of a very huge change in social media.” — Danny Fortson [01:31]
• Previews broader regulatory and ethical scrutiny in tech.

2. AI Agents in the Workplace: Productivity Redefined

• Rise of "AI Agent Swarms" and ‘Token’ Metrics (03:14)
  • “Engineers aren’t just writing code anymore. They’re using armies of AI agents, and they need to come up with a better name.” — Danny Fortson [03:14]
  • Tokens: Units representing AI output, now seen as a proxy for productivity and influence.
  • “They’re becoming a bit of a currency. So engineers...are now judged on how many tokens they’re using.” — Katie Prescott [03:40]
• Token Anxiety & Performance Pressure
  • AI usage becoming a KPI; not using enough may now jeopardize career advancement (Meta, Nvidia examples).
  • “So this has started to create a culture of token anxiety in Silicon Valley.” — Katie Prescott [05:03]
  • “It's really interesting because...it’s supposed to lead to us working less...But instead people are working more.” — Danny Fortson [05:17]

3. Job Apocalypse or Productivity Boom?

• Are AI Agents Augmenting or Replacing Workers?
  • Ongoing job cuts tied (or attributed) to AI, e.g., Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, debut of “AI CEO agent”. (06:15)
  • Hosts ponder whether AI marks the start of Universal Basic Income—or job elimination: “Is the agentic era a productivity boom or is it the beginning of a job apocalypse?” — Danny Fortson [06:21]
• SaaS Market ‘Sasspocalypse’
  • AI agent automation hitting valuations of big and small software companies.
  • “Now we have agents and vibe coding...don’t necessarily need many of the software products...That’s led to a collapse in..." — Katie Prescott [06:37]

4. Experimentation with In-house AI Agents

• Times Business Desk’s AI “Class Pet”
  • Introduction of ‘Snappy,’ an OpenClaw agent (AI running on Raspberry Pi) — an internal experiment.
  • “Snappy is on the eighth floor...probably be doing some writing...definitely be doing some research” — Katie Prescott [09:13]
  • Raises question: Could such agents replace entry-level staff?
  • Comparison to Cleveland Plain Dealer's “AI reporter” as an example of newsroom automation [09:33].

5. From Answer Engines to Action Engines

• Agents as Digital Butlers and Enterprise Tools
  • Nvidia’s Jensen Huang declares OpenClaw moment “bigger than the ChatGPT moment.”
  • “This is now an action agent...the promise of that—everybody’s going to have their own Jarvis, their own digital butler” — Danny Fortson [10:54]
  • Corporate strategy shifting: Buy AI tokens or hire interns?
• Identity Crisis for Tech Workers
  • Aditya Agrawal (ex-CTO, Dropbox) reflects on seeing his skills replicated by AI:
    • “There’s something deeply disorienting about watching the pillars of your professional identity get reproduced in a weekend by a tool that doesn’t need to eat or sleep.” [12:05]
    • Yet, he also notes new creative possibilities and “superpowers”.

6. Token Maxing & Industry Paranoia

• Culture of “Token Maxing”
  • Employees now maximize AI usage (token output) to signal value.
  • “Now it’s becoming a KPI, a key performance indicator, something that’s going to be used for your reviews.” — Danny Fortson [14:51]
  • “We are in a super weird time right now and everybody’s trying to, like, you know, protect themselves basically.” — Danny Fortson [15:33]

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In-depth Interview: Dean Forbes, CEO of Fortero

(18:12–41:46)

Forbes’ Background & Fortero’s Role

• Dean Forbes: From homeless South London teenager and aspiring footballer to CEO of a leading industrial software firm.
• Fortero: Core software provider to the mid-market manufacturing sector in Europe (“the backbone of the economy”).
  • “We provide the core systems and the backbone applications that people who manufacture things [use]...” — Dean Forbes [19:09]

Navigating “Sasspocalypse” & Technological Upheaval

• Enterprises are anxious: “$250 trillion has been wiped from enterprise software companies’ market cap in the last 80 or so days.” — Dean Forbes [29:19]
• Immense upheaval of longstanding business models—pricing, recurring revenue, cloud—due to AI.
• But: Most mid-market customers want tech that just works, not DIY automation.

Impact of AI on Workforce & Skills

• DM: Blending human and AI strengths:
  • “We’ve created a lot of value with human endeavor and intelligence...[now] that can now be supported and enhanced with AI.” [32:25]
  • Growth enables employment to stay steady, even as productivity per employee goes up.
• “AI-washing” — companies highlighting AI for layoffs that may have been coming anyway.

Precision over Paranoia

• For mid-market manufacturing, AI serves as “people enabling” support:
  • “For the kind of work we do...we have to be correct, we have to be precise...AI at least at the moment...still has some propensity to be a little bit off...So at least for now, the value and efficiencies to be gained through deploying AI tools is people enabling and people accelerating.” — Dean Forbes [34:41]

Career Advice for the Next Generation

• Blue-collar comeback: Jobs that require hands-on skill (e.g., plumbers, electricians) could become premium as white-collar entry roles are automated.
  • “We seem to be going back to where blue collar work is a premium...because those jobs are last in line to be automated meaningfully by AI.” [36:25]

Building Tech Companies: US vs. UK/Europe

• US scale is easier; Europe is fragmented with regulatory/language barriers.
  • “That makes it harder, in my opinion, to do that in Europe, which is why I have huge admiration for...my European colleagues who have built scale companies.” — Dean Forbes [39:52]

Robotics Revolution—Hype vs. Reality

• Robotics in manufacturing is growing—more “real than not,” but timeline still unclear.
• Forbes emphasizes societal impacts over just automation rate:
  • “The broader question is the societal impact...what happens when we've automated our companies...that makes the problem a little bit worse.” [41:26]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On token anxiety:
  “It is no longer about doing your job well. It's about proving that you're keeping up with the machines.” — Katie Prescott [05:03]

• On AI’s effect on self-worth:
  “There’s something deeply disorienting about watching the pillars of your professional identity get reproduced in a weekend by a tool that doesn't need to eat or sleep.” — Danny Fortson quoting Aditya Agrawal [12:05]

• On job market shift:
  “We seem to be going back to where blue collar work is a premium...those jobs are last in line to be automated meaningfully by AI.” — Dean Forbes [36:25]

• On robotics:
  “Probably more real than not...but again, to what timeline? Who knows?...The societal impact is probably more the thing to focus on than if, you know, is it two robots per factory or 10?” — Dean Forbes [41:26]

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Notable Segment Timestamps

• Landmark legal ruling against Meta/Google: 01:21
• Defining AI tokens and their new workplace role: 03:14–04:22
• Token anxiety and performance reviews: 05:03–05:17
• Sasspocalypse & company valuation drops: 06:37–07:22
• Introduction of Snappy, the AI newsroom agent: 08:29–09:13
• Nvidia’s “OpenClaw moment” and shift to action agents: 10:54–12:05
• In-depth interview with Dean Forbes: 18:12–41:46
• Blue collar jobs and future-proofing careers: 36:25
• Discussion on robotics and the future of automation: 40:43–41:46

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Final Thoughts

The episode serves as a snapshot of a tech world in upheaval: a time of extraordinary productivity gains—and existential anxiety—driven by the proliferation of AI agents. The hosts and their guest highlight the competition to remain relevant, the struggle to measure value, and the uncertain future of work, reminding listeners that while the robots may be coming, the human story remains as complex and compelling as ever.

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Contact the show:
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Transcript

[Progressive Insurance Announcer]

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.

[Danny Fortson]

This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow.

[Katie Prescott]

Danny, one thing we keep hearing from business leaders right now is AI sounds great, but how do you actually make it work inside a company?

[Danny Fortson]

Exactly. Because most organizations aren't neat, shiny systems. They're layers of software, legacy tech and teams, all doing things slightly differently.

[Katie Prescott]

ServiceNow sits across all that, acting as a control tower for making work move seamlessly through the organization, connecting people, systems,

[Danny Fortson]

data, and increasingly AI agents so that things don't happen in silos.

[Katie Prescott]

Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for [e-mail]

[Danny Fortson]

Boom. Look at this.

[Katie Prescott]

What's happened?

[Danny Fortson]

Jury finds Meta Google liable and landmark social media addiction trial awards $3 million in damages.

[Katie Prescott]

You are joking.

[Danny Fortson]

This is, I will say, monumental. Not trying to be too dramatic, but this is the first of these series of cases and the whole notion is if you can establish a legal theory that these are designed to be addictive, faulty products that hurt people. You are tobacco, you have to pay for things as if you are a tobacco company. So this could be the beginning of a very huge change in social media.

[Katie Prescott]

Astonishing. I mean, as we record, this was almost 6 o' clock in the evening on Wednesday, 25th March is actually really good timing, Danny, because of course, next week on the pod, we've got the social media campaigner Baroness Kidron, who's really been leading the charge here when it comes to things like the online safety bill, the implementation of that, what the government needs to do about things like the safety when it comes to chatbots. So I'm sure she'll be.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah, no Baroness, she'll be reading this news with interest. Yeah, this is. This is the snowball starting to roll down the mountain. Hello and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast, where every week we unpack how technology is reshaping business, culture and everyday life. I am Danny Fortson covering all things tech out here in Silicon Valley.

[Katie Prescott]

And I'm Katie Prescott looking at technology here in the city of London. And this week, a new question is continuing to emerge in the workplace, which is, how much AI are you using? And believe it or not, Danny, the answer is, the more the better.

[Danny Fortson]

Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. Out here, something strange is happening. We're in a moment. Engineers aren't just writing code anymore. They're using armies of AI agents, and they need to come up with a better name. They're calling them AI swarms, Agent swarms, to do their jobs. And the way you measure productivity, it's not output, it's data. Tokens, baby tokens.

[Katie Prescott]

It's probably worth just saying what tokens are. So the tiny. They are the tiny little bits of data, sort of chunks of words sometimes the AI systems use to process information, they're becoming a bit of a currency. So engineers now, in some quarters, are now judged on how many tokens they're using. So if you use more AI, generate more tokens, you look more productive.

[Danny Fortson]

That's right. It's kind of become a bit of a status game. And. Yeah, so tokens are basically the unit of measure of intelligence. Tokens in, tokens out. And the more you use, you know, the higher you are ranked. Whoever's running the most agents who's scaling themselves the fastest is becoming a thing.

[Katie Prescott]

So Jensen Huang, the boss of Nvidia, recently said that he'd be deeply alarmed if his engineers, who were running half a million dollars, sorry, the sums, are just not using at least $250,000 worth of tokens annually. He'd be deeply alarmed, quote, unquote.

[Danny Fortson]

Exactly. That's your salary plus 50%. So you're not costing the company 500 grand, you're costing him 750. And that's what he wants. And it's not just Nvidia Meta. AI usage is reportedly becoming part of performance reviews. So you use it a lot in your head. You don't, and you're at risk.

[Katie Prescott]

So this has started to create a culture of token anxiety in Silicon Valley. So it is no longer about doing your job well. It's about proving that you're keeping up with the machines.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah. And I would say there's kind of like a vibe of paranoia that has taken hold. And it's really interesting because I feel like we're in the strange, strange moment where you've had the arrival of these very, very powerful tools, these agen. And theoretically, it's supposed to lead to us working less. Right. People are like, oh, these agents are going to do everything for us. And instead people are working more. Right. Because now you have these AIs, companies are tracking what you're doing with them. And the notion is like, well, I better just supercharge what I'm doing and even work more, be more productive, or maybe I'll just get replaced. Right. And I talked about it last week. Mark Zuckerberg is supposedly considering cutting up to 20% of Meta's workforce. And there's news out this week that he's building his own AI CEO agent. And so all of that leads to this big question of, like, if you have to deploy an army of bots to do your job for you, is the agentic era a productivity boom or is the beginning of a job apocalypse? Is it tokens plus people or tokens versus people?

[Katie Prescott]

It's quite sad, isn't it? I was sort of holding out for the era of universal basic income and kicking back.

[Danny Fortson]

Well, we may get there.

[Katie Prescott]

My job for me. Speaking of the jobs apocalypse, remember the software apocalypse where saspocalypse. Sasspocalypse. So the apocalypse that's happening to the software as a service industry, which is basically that now we have agents and vibe coding that we don't necessarily need many of the software products that are already on the market. And that's led to a collapse in the valuations of publicly listed companies and certainly investors in the private sector taking a very hard look at their portfolio and the valuations of some of those

[Danny Fortson]

smaller software companies and the big ones. Right. That's the huge, huge, huge fear. And whether it's well founded or not, I think it speaks to the time we're in right now.

[Katie Prescott]

Well, later on we're going to be talking to Dean Forbes, who is the chief exec of a company called Fortero. It's one of the largest private tech B2B companies in the UK. One of those companies that does important things that you've never heard of. It builds the software, running thousands of the factories that make the things that we use day to day really serving sort of what they call in Germany the middle strand, the sort of middle sized businesses.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah. 50 to 100 person kind of manufacturer.

[Katie Prescott]

Yeah. Making things from furniture to jewelry. And we're going to ask him about whether the rise of agentic AI is the death of software and hear more about his extraordinary story. But before that, I wanted to ask you a question. Do you ever have like a class pet when you're at school?

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah, I think we had one year we had a snake and then we had a turtle one year.

[Katie Prescott]

Gosh, you're so exotic in America. Where's your hamster?

[Danny Fortson]

No hamster. No hamster. Sorry.

[Katie Prescott]

I am pleased to tell you that the business desk at the Times has got its own class pet. Oh yeah?

[Danny Fortson]

What'd you get, a snake or a turtle?

[Katie Prescott]

We got an open claw agent.

[Danny Fortson]

Oh, you did? We did.

[Katie Prescott]

We got an open claw agent on Tuesday.

[Danny Fortson]

What's the name?

[Katie Prescott]

Snappy. Snappy built on a Raspberry PI, which is one of the computers that's obviously done incredibly well out of the. The agent revolution. So anyway, Snappy is on, on the eighth floor at the moment of this building, which is where the. Yeah, I mean if you're going to boss something around it, rather it was a man and with the, with the tech team who have been incredible, the News UK tech team at really embracing this idea and Tom there building Snappy for us.

[Danny Fortson]

What is Snappy doing? Doing any writing?

[Katie Prescott]

Probably be doing some writing, definitely be doing some research and is plugged into Google Docs as well as the Internet. So can do that and can start pulling information together.

[Danny Fortson]

Is Snappy mining Bitcoin doing something useful?

[Katie Prescott]

I mean there's so many things that you could do with Snappy. I think it's incredibly exciting. So I'll keep you posted.

[Danny Fortson]

I guess the question is kind of, this is very pertinent to the discussion, which is, will Snappy take the place of a work experienced person or a junior reporter? Right. Because they're at, for example, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, one of the oldest newspapers in America, is now using an AI reporter to do a first go at various types of news stories. And there's been a big kerfuffle inside the newsroom and the editor's like, this is the future, everybody relax. But that's why I think kind of things like Snappy freaking people out.

[Katie Prescott]

It's scary, I think at present because of the limitations on Snappy and particularly not being connected to our extraordinary systems at news, with access to things like a back catalog of news articles until, you know, from the 1880s or whatever. I don't think it's going to replace anyone. But that's why we're, we're playing with him and seeing what he can do. And I think it's. Everyone I speak to in the business world is doing this sort of experimentation, even if it's just in a wall garden in their tech team, not really using it for anything important. They're coming, the agency coming and you know, and the most. And most of the tech companies already are using them.

[Danny Fortson]

Last week was Nvidia gtc, their big annual developer conference. And Jensen Huang went up on stage and he had A two and a half hour keynote. But there are a few key messages. One is, he was like, the Open Claw moment is bigger than the ChatGPT moment. ChatGPT was, you know, basically like a, a cooler version of Google, you know, giving better answers, conversational. But like agents, things like OpenClaw are like, oh, this is now an action agent going from an answer engine to an action engine. And it's the promise of that. Everybody's going to have their own Jarvis, their own personal digital butler, whatever. But to your point around the security involved, you don't know how these agents are going to, what they're going to do, what motivates them and all of that stuff. And what was really interesting, the other thing that came out of Nvidia last week was the announcement of Nemo Claw, which you, which you referenced, which is an, what he said was an enterprise ready version of openclaw. So something that has more guardrails, more safety built in. And the whole idea is that like you or I can have an agent or a swarm of agents doing stuff for us. And if you're a business, you're like, huh, it goes back to that point around tokens. Like, you know, do I want to hire an intern on 30 grand a year or do I just want to like spend 20k on tokens, not have to hold somebody's hand and have 80% of that work or 90% of that or 100 plus percent work of that done. This kind of moment that is bigger than ChatGPT when you have folks like, there's kind of people are reckoning with this in real time. I'll give you one example is Aditya Agrawal. He's a former CTO of Dropbox. He wrote this open letter about 10 days ago about this notion that what was once made him a special snowflake, that he had these amazing coding skills, now we're free and abundant and everywhere. And he wrote, there's something deeply disorienting about watching the pillars of your professional identity get reproduced in a weekend by a tool that doesn't need to eat or sleep. And so there's lots of people kind of coming out being like, whoa. The positive caveat of that is that he went on to say, after I kind of got over myself, I did more coding in five days than I did in the previous five years. And what's more, what I produced was more ambitious. It was better because now I have these superpowers that I can kind of bring to bear. So it's the kind of two Sides of this jobs apocalypse coin.

[Katie Prescott]

Anyway, astonishing to watch.

[Danny Fortson]

And of course, Katie, you're not the only one building an agent. It's. Yes, it's the thing. As we said a minute ago, Mark Zuckerberg, meta CEO, is also building his very own CEO agent to help him do his job. So, you know, he wants everyone inside and outside the company to eventually have their own personal AI agent, or as I said, many. And he's starting with himself.

[Katie Prescott]

It is amazing because they learn what you need the more time you spend with them. They learn your style. They can obviously suck up from your inbox how you write. So it's not that surprising. I mean, Zuckerberg has said this is going to help him get information faster, cutting out middlemen, I'm afraid. And, you know, employees have started to use personal agents that have access to their chat logs and work files and can go and talk to colleagues.

[Danny Fortson]

So are you. Can I ask you a question, Katie? Are you token maxing?

[Katie Prescott]

I don't. You see, when, when we were talking about this at the beginning, this idea that you've got to use AI, I, I still don't feel that psychologically we're there. So. No, I'm not.

[Danny Fortson]

You're not token maxing.

[Katie Prescott]

I don't think in journalism there's still a this, there's this thing of, you know, you should be using we're token

[Danny Fortson]

lessing or token minimizing or whatever. But yeah, token maxing for those outside this weird bubble is this idea that, you know, what we kind of talked about at the top of people trying to kind of maximize their token use to show how switched on they are in AI. So again, inside these companies there's this kind of growing sense of paranoia and you have to token max, you have to maximize your use of AI because now it's becoming a KPI, a key performance indicator, something that's going to be used for your reviews. And again, it's just, we are in a super weird time right now and everybody's trying to like, you know, protect themselves basically. And again, I think it's, we're in this moment of paranoia. But it's also like, what are those tokens being used for? Like, are you just making these really amazing cat videos? Are you actually producing something that's important and useful and productive? But people I'm meeting are like, I'm really freaked out. And it's not like you're kind of hair shirt wearing Luddites. It's the people building this stuff and it's the arrival of these kind of really powerful coding tools, the arrival of openclaw all at the same time. And you know, we are somehow landed amazingly in a kind of second chatgpt moment. But that's potentially even, probably even bigger than the original chatgpt moment.

[Katie Prescott]

But anyway, please stay with us because after the break we're going to be hearing from Dean Forbes, who is a tech entrepreneur from here in the uk. He has got the most extraordinary story. He's transformed his life, life from being a homeless teenager at one point in South London to becoming the chief executive of Fortero, one of the largest private tech software companies in the uk. We'll be right back.

[Danny Fortson]

Today's episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow.

[Katie Prescott]

ServiceNow describes itself as an AI control tower for business reinvention, connecting people, systems, data and AI so workflows more smoothly across an organization.

[Danny Fortson]

The platform integrates with different clouds, models and data sources, bringing them together in one place to help your team.

[Katie Prescott]

To learn More about how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people, visit ServiceNow.com

[Progressive Insurance Announcer]

this episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.

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[Katie Prescott]

Hello and welcome back to the Times Tech Podcast. Now our guest today has the most extraordinary success story. He grew up on a tough housing estate in South London and experienced homelessness while he was a teenager. But fast forward to today and now he's the chief executive of Fortero, one of the largest private tech B2B companies in the UK. It builds the software, running thousands of factories.

[Danny Fortson]

He's been named the most influential Black Brit in 2025. But if you ask him, he's just a guy from Catford who has worked very hard and worked his way all the way to the top.

[Katie Prescott]

Dean, welcome to the Podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.

[Dean Forbes]

Thank you for having me.

[Katie Prescott]

Shall we kick off then by just explaining to listeners what is Fortero? And I was looking at the website and you have so many different trading entities and you're in so many different countries, just set out this sprawling conglomerate that you're the boss of and what you do.

[Dean Forbes]

So Fortero is a software and solutions provider to the industrial mid market in Europe. So we provide the core systems and the backbone applications that people who manufacture things or components of things, or who sell and distribute those things that have been manufactured or are making heavily crafted things like bespoke staircases, windows and archways. So we provide the core software solutions that those types of organizations use to run their business. Everything from selling, estimating, accounting, collections, project management, those core systems that organizations like that rely on.

[Katie Prescott]

It really does seem like you're everywhere. I have offices in China, us, every European country.

[Dean Forbes]

Yeah. Most of our business comes from the European, what we call the European mid market. Right where we're powering. The businesses that are typically founder led have grown to 50, maybe 100 people, often still family owned. I mean, it's really the backbone of the economy because when economies go badly, it's always the middle stand or the mid market that seems to seem to prop them up. So it's such an honor to support these amazing entrepreneurs.

[Danny Fortson]

Could we go back to the very beginning when you were in short pants and if you could just give us the potted version of your history because it's, you know, you have quite an amazing personal story that has got you to this point.

[Dean Forbes]

I mean, people are always gracious and say stuff like that. I grew up in southeast London. Like a lot of young men who grew up in the neighborhood I grew up in. The most viable and legitimate career opportunities were, you know, music and entertainment, sports, and then a whole bunch of less, you know, less savory options. I was very lucky. I had an incredible mother. I had a good run at becoming a professional footballer and was a professional footballer for, for a short amount of time. But when that didn't work out, I had to find my way in the, you know, in the corporate world, helped by a good body of debt that I ran up in my late teens as an aspiring footballer, which just created compulsion to go out to work and earn money to service that debt. And I'm very grateful for it because had I not had it, I probably would have spent more time pursuing this dream. But I was fortunate enough to find my way into a number of sales roles and then Ended up running the international sales, marketing, professional services, engineering of a US headquartered private equity backed software company. And that role and project went incredibly well. We ended up selling that company to Oracle. And as you know, many people may know when you're a exiting exec of a successful PE backed project, the phone rings after you do the first one. You know, people call you and ask you if you want to do. If you want to do another one. So that was in 2008 and since then I've done four more as CEO. All have exited reasonably well.

[Danny Fortson]

You kind of glazed over something that I just wanted to go back to because it's that moment and I was reading up a little bit before we got on where it became clear to you at a certain point that football was not going to be the thing. And then you had to go from that potentially fabulous, amazing life to a windowless room where you're making sales calls.

[Dean Forbes]

Yeah, I can't imagine a more contrast situation. You know, like on, on Friday there's you plus 24 friends running around on the pitch playing football. It's enjoyable. Not one part of his work, the camaraderie, the banter, the. There's a little bit of structure in a football club. There's nothing like you have in a 3,000 person company like the one I run. So it's just great. And I grew up playing football. I played football in my estate, I played football up and down the country. So this was just fun, right? It was fun, yeah. And then I went for dinner with Harry Gerber and Harry Gerber said, you know, they're not going to renew your contract. And we trialed up and down the country for another six months and it was a combination of you can have good money but on a three month contract or you can have terrible money on a two year contract. And neither one of those would service the debt I had. So yeah, Harry said, look, my friend at Motorola will give you a cold calling job. You need to take it because if you don't service this debt, it can cripple you for a good portion of your life. So you know, you start 8am on Monday and when I got to work at 8am on Monday, there was no field, there was little to no laughter, there was no football, there were no friends, there was just lists of phone numbers and semi maniacal line managers who managed at very high volume in close proximity. So it wasn't fun.

[Katie Prescott]

The company you mentioned that was bought by Oracle was called Primavera. And the current CEO, the current co CEO, I should Say of Oracle, Mike Sicilia was at Primavera with you. We can talk about that in a second. But do you think there was something about working for an American company and then kind of coming back to, to the UK that kind of really inspired your business journey? I mean, that's quite unusual in itself. You know, for, for your route that you took into tech.

[Dean Forbes]

I'm often credited or it's suggested that there's, there's so much more serendipity and good fortune and amazing timing that has been helpful to my career than brilliant, genius or excellence. I'll give you some examples. When I played football, it was normal that performance reviews happened at halftime and full time and people shouted at each other and in the game you shout at each other. So when I went to Motorola and people were shouting at people, lots of people who work there struggled to deal with that because that was their first interaction with managers who talked to them that way. It didn't bother me because I'd grown up in football where people got coached by that. Right? That's one example. When I went to Primavera as a relatively junior sales rep, 12 people in the London office, about 300 in Philadelphia. For Primavera, the international business was not core, it wasn't important, it wasn't big, it wasn't meaningful. Because of that, a young, inexperienced, unqualified person could graduate to a senior leadership position. It was only because it was so unimportant to them at that time that that could happen.

[Katie Prescott]

I'm sure you're doing yourself a disservice

[Dean Forbes]

there, but I mean, I made my numbers. But I can tell you something. I would never give me the job Joel. I would never give me with that experience at that age, the job Joel gave me. And then Joel, who was the CEO, Primavera is an important person too, because for reasons that have never been clear to me, he took this amazing paternal interest in me. So when I would travel to the US and he was a CEO of the company at the time, maybe 300 people, maybe 200 million in revenue, maybe a bit less at that time. When I would travel to the US for meetings, management sessions, training, he would tell me to stay at his house and not in a hotel. So I would spend three days with a qualified, seasoned CEO and we would talk about running the company and what decisions he was making and acquisitions he was going to do. So I got this, I got this education that a 24 year old ex footballer without a degree and proximity that you just wouldn't, you couldn't buy it. But it's only that combination of situation and circumstances that allow that to happen. I get released from football a week later, none of this happens.

[Danny Fortson]

Right.

[Dean Forbes]

None of this at all happened. So, yeah, I'm very grateful to that part.

[Katie Prescott]

And then you have the acquisition of Primavera by Oracle, one of the biggest US Tech firms. Do you regret leaving?

[Dean Forbes]

No. I learned a lot in the year I was there. I worked with some amazing people in the year I was there. But one of the things I learned was I was most motivated by the freedom and flexibility to deliver the outcome in the way I saw fit. And in a big company like that, there's structure, there's discipline, there's processes. At Primavera, I didn't have any of that. So I looked for a new version of Primavera where I had that freedom and latitude. I wasn't going to succeed at Oracle for the long term.

[Katie Prescott]

You don't think I could have been the next CEO of Oracle?

[Dean Forbes]

Well, now Mike got the job, I suddenly thought, hey, I feel like Mike's a great guy, by the way. But when he got the job, I did think maybe I could have got that job.

[Danny Fortson]

Could we fast forward to this present moment? Because I'm, as you know, I'm out here on the west coast, and we were talking before you came on about the vibe out here right now. And especially in the last, like, 90 days, it feels like there's been this big shift between the arrival of these very powerful coding agents from Anthropic and OpenAI, and then you've had open claw, this idea that anybody can now have their own agent spin it up, et cetera. And I'm talking to a lot of founders, a lot of kind of billionaire types who are like, I'm really worried. Like, I'm kind of freaking out. And I'm just wondering, you know, you've been at this coal face of software inside industrial processes, companies paying for this stuff for a long time. What are you seeing? Like, how do you think about this moment? Does it feel as seismic as people seem to think it is out here? What is your view of this kind of moment we find ourselves in?

[Dean Forbes]

I think for sure it's the most energizing and motivating and thrilling opportunity of my professional lifetime. And I would argue most people's professional lifetime in the, you know, in the enterprise software space, I mean, just. Just an incredible opportunity. And it's challenging so many fundamental beliefs, not all fundamental beliefs. And this is where I think the, the kind of, you know, the market has reacted in a real extreme in too much of an extreme way, but it's challenging a lot.

[Danny Fortson]

Sasspocalypse, right? Sasspocalypse. You know you have an announcement from OpenAI and then it's like oh, there's 30 billion gone from you know, sector X because they're like oh, we don't need that anymore.

[Dean Forbes]

Well, 250 trillion has been wiped from enterprise software companies market cap I think in the last 80 or so days. Right. So on, on the left hand side, you know, for a long time, time to create software has been one of the barriers to entry. That's now changed deep expertise around software as a general horizontal was a barrier to participation in this space. You know, that's now changed pricing mechanisms and the way people like me build value in their company, long term contracts, recurring revenue cloud, that is changing. Right. So some of the fundamentals that we've built our businesses on have absolutely now changed. On the left hand side, on the right hand side, especially as it relates to the market we serve, which is the industrial mid market, you know, across Europe, 50 person companies who want to concentrate on making the tables that they make, making the zippers that they make, making the engine components that go into Rolls Royce engines or you know, playing their part in the automotive supply chain. As many of our customers, many of our customers do, they want to focus on that and they've wanted to focus on that for the 10, 20, 30, 40 years that we've served them. And over that time as each technological evolution has taken place, they've looked to us and said we rely on you to make sense of this in a way that's going to add value to us and our business. When that was mainframe to cpu, CPU to network and cloud, computer, the emergence of mobile. With each of these evolutions they look to us how do we leverage that? And I think that's what they're going to continue to do. As long as we step up with answers that make sense and deliver value, I think that's what they're going to continue to do. They've never wanted to write software themselves or code software themselves because it's a bit easier. I don't know that they're going to do that.

[Katie Prescott]

I was with a CTO of a bank recently who said they were looking across their software stack basically and working out what they could start to do themselves. But I guess when you talk about smaller customers, perhaps it's less likely.

[Dean Forbes]

It's different for a bank. You know, if you're a tier one bank, you had 2,000 people in it, before this happened, you had a few hundred people who wrote applications or finished applications or wrote integrations. So you had the muscle memory and you asked yourself that question often, can we or should we do this ourselves? That's what you did as a big bank or as a bulge bracket consulting firm. When you're a 40 person manufacturer of aluminum framed windows, you've never asked yourself, you are less likely to ask yourself that question. And if you do, you don't have the reflexes to do it as easily.

[Katie Prescott]

Well, let's talk about it now. The job apocalypse. What's happening to the labor market with all of this? Have you got any reflections on that? What are you seeing across, across your businesses when it comes to how you use AI and how that's changing your workforce?

[Dean Forbes]

I think the best companies, it's a kind of model that we're following is that we've, we've created a lot of value with human endeavor and intelligence and we'll continue to create a lot of value with human endeavor and intelligence, but that can now be supported and enhanced with AI. So the best companies, including us, are driving our people, supporting our people, enabling our people to leverage AI so that they can do a better job, so that they can be better, so that they can be more efficient. And for sure there are efficiency gains for us to have as a consequence of doing that. But we are growing so quickly. I mean we've trebled in the last five years. I think we can treble again in the next five years in terms of revenue, in terms of revenue, maybe go even faster because of AI. So maybe we can do that with a similar workforce scale to what we have today because they'll be powered by AI. Then there's two other motions I see there's people who have downsized their organization on the back of efficiencies gained from AI. And there are also people who have downsized their organization because they were just too big and have wrapped that under an umbrella of AI efficiency. Right. I think what we saw with Jack Dorsey's organization, we were all staring at that for a while saying this organization's too big. And then he, right, sizes and blames AI and suddenly his stock price jumps. But we're all looking at the company saying it was over hired in the first place. So I think that's a third stream of what I've seen.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah, there's that notion of AI washing, that people are being like, basically this is a poorly organized company and we're going to blame AI and fire everybody. But it does feel like there is a. And I'd love to get your sense of this of around hiring in particular, because we were talking about it and you know, Jensen Wong said, I think it was last week, he's like, if I have a $500,000 engineer, I want them to be using at least $250,000 worth of tokens. And $250,000 is a lot of money. Like that's a salary, many, many salaries to most people.

[Katie Prescott]

But yeah, well, in Silicon Valley, I

[Danny Fortson]

know Elliot's like half of one, but, but the point is, is like, you know, that's, that's an entry level salary for Aaron Silicon Valley. I'd love to get your sense of how you're thinking about this type of thing.

[Dean Forbes]

For a lot of our AI tool usage and proposed AI tool usage, we, we have a fundamental belief that it's, it's people enabling, right? It's, it's people enabling. For the kind of work we do in the end markets we serve, we have to be correct, we have to be precise. We've got legislation, we've got compliance, we're making, our customers are making components that, going into other components. So you can't be directionally correct or you can't be in the ballpark, you know, if it's, you know, four feet and two and a half inches, it's four feet and two and a half inches. And I, at least at the moment, you know, still has some propensity to be a little bit off, to make incorrect assumptions, to hallucinate a little bit. And that just won't work. The work that we do internally and the work that we do internally that serves our customers and then the work that our customers do. So at least for now, the value and efficiencies to be gained through deploying AI tools is people enabling and people accelerating. Which means, to answer your question, Danny, for the foreseeable, will take people to ensure precision and have those people supported by AI.

[Katie Prescott]

Can I ask about what you as a tech boss then tell your kids to do? Because we are seeing an impact of AI on entry level jobs, right. And it is young people who are being disproportionately affected. And if you look at the unemployment rate in the UK, it is, I think, about 16% for the under 24s at the moment, compared to 5% for the general population. Are you telling your kids to do, I don't know, to go in a certain direction, to look at a certain way.

[Dean Forbes]

What I find fascinating about this is the kind of full Circle nature of it. Right. So we went through a number of technological revolutions and evolutions which kind of moved the dominant workforce from blue collar manual labor into white collar higher paying, higher brow jobs, at least from a perception standpoint. And now because of technology, we seem to be going back to where blue collar work is a premium. Right. I saw something the other day where I think it was Gary Vee, the American businessman and social commentator was saying plumbers will be the new millionaires and electricians will be the new millionaires because those jobs are last in line to be automated meaningfully by AI. So I find that fascinating. It doesn't change my direction to my kids much, which has always been, you know, you have a craft, you have to get up and go and do meaningful work that, that matters to someone, including you, and you need to be good at it. Now the new part is I don't. There's going to be a category of jobs which won't be available to you or are unlikely to be available to you. So you're going to have to look, you know, in other places and develop skills and talents in other places. But the headline narrative, you know, I don't, it doesn't change in our, in our household.

[Katie Prescott]

You're a Brit who's got experience working in American, an American firm, and then also is running a business which is global but has a massive European footprint. What do you think about running a tech company in the uk and this is something we talk a lot about on the podcast, being a transatlantic podcast. And what do you think we're doing well here and what do you think makes it difficult for a business like yours?

[Dean Forbes]

I've always been envious of US technology companies that get to start in such a huge market. Right. To just fabulous, huge economy, that single language, single currency.

[Katie Prescott]

Sure, there's scary too, right? Today it's small fish, big corn.

[Dean Forbes]

It's quite scary. But oh well, that too, you know, you go state to state and there are some differences in taxation, some differences in labor law, but not that meaningful. So you just start with this opportunity to scale in your home territory to a meaningful size and then you decide to go conquer or you know, go scale internationally. Europe is a collection of smaller economies, right. Smaller gdp. So to get to similar scales you would in the US you have to master number of different, you probably have to master a number of different jurisdictions, languages, cultures, labor law, commercial law, ways of working and doing business. You might be able to do that in a single currency with the euro if you're headquartered here of Course, you have to deal with at least two currencies and it's just a different degree of complexity trying to do that. You carry a different cost base trying to do that. So that makes it harder, in my opinion, to do that in Europe, which is why I have huge admiration for some of the US supers and a lot of us would love to be them. But I have a higher degree of admiration for my European colleagues who have built, you know, built scale companies because I just know it takes something different to do that.

[Danny Fortson]

I have one other question that Katie is not going to be surprised to ask. So you service a lot of these companies, a lot of these manufacturers, as Katie knows. I love a robot.

[Katie Prescott]

I knew this was coming.

[Danny Fortson]

Okay. I love a robot. Lots of hype around. This is like we are about to enter this new era where labor is going to be free. Everybody's going to have their own robot. Every factory is going to be just a bunch of humanoids walking around doing stuff. What do you think? Do you have a view? Because like out here you have Elon Musk, you have companies like figure billions and billions, boys toys, billions and billions of dollars in promising the moon. But you have a unique vantage point given customers are, what do you think? Total nonsense or real or somewhere in the middle?

[Dean Forbes]

Probably more real than not. Across what timeline? I, you know, I don't know, but I would say probably more real than not. If I look at some of the, you know, forterra customers who great use of robotics in warehouse management, warehouse automation, some, but less on actual production line type work. So there's already a evidenceable footprint of deployment of robotics among our customers and in our sector. So like anything that will improve, people will innovate, that will get better. So probably more real than not. But again, to what timeline? Who knows? I think the broader question is the societal impact of all of this. Like what, what happens when we've automated our companies to the workforce that may get displaced if we add robots into that mix, that makes the problem a little bit worse. So the, you know, the societal impact is probably more the thing to focus on than if, you know, is it two robots per factory or 10?

[Katie Prescott]

Dean Forbes, chief executive of Forzero. Thank you so much for joining us. It's really, really nice to meet you. Thanks for coming. Coming in. So it was really great to have him on.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah, for sure. Such a cool story. And I was so interested in his call center. You know, you're a professional footballer on Friday and you're in a call center on Monday. I Just find that such that, that scene, it's got to be so brutal. And we have obviously very different upbringings. But I had a moment after college where I got laid off from my first job and I got my. The only job I could get was as a temp at this company called BabyCenter.com where it sold baby goods and services to new and expectant mothers. And my.

[Katie Prescott]

Not a cohort of people that you're probably that familiar with at the time.

[Danny Fortson]

No, I was 22 and I had, you know, I was all bright eyed and bushy tailed and the world was my oyster. And then I had been laid off, I had no money and I was working 8 to 10 hours a day fielding emails about breast pumps, baby poop, baby poop, color and consistency and breast pumps. And I was like, oh, this is it for me.

[Katie Prescott]

It's amazing. You described it as a scene in his life as well because I now can see it as a movie totally.

[Danny Fortson]

And obviously like from that point to like two years later he's like staying at the CEO's presumably mansion in Philadelphia and getting this kind of like learning and it's, I think it's amazing. I have not scaled to his heights but you know, I have moved on for baby center. But I just, it was, I could relate because it was a dark time.

[Katie Prescott]

Well, when someone makes the movie of your life that's, that's also going to make be very short, make a very, very lovely scene.

[Danny Fortson]

It'll be a TikTok holding up 45

[Katie Prescott]

seconds, diapers being like which way around does does this go?

[Danny Fortson]

So that is about it. That chat with Dean was really, I thought, a good bookend to the kind of question we started with, which is, you know, in the advent of agentic AI, is this a productivity boom or the beginning of a job site apocalypse?

[Katie Prescott]

Yeah. And I'll keep you posted on the productivity gains of the business desk at the Times. With Snappy as our boom boom bur secret agent friend and helper. We would love to hear your thoughts on the program. And if you are using a Snappy or agents in your office, let us know. How is it where it's going?

[Danny Fortson]

Yes, indeed. Tell us by emailing us at techpod the times.co.uk that is techpod the times.co.uk and that is it for us. I will see you next week.

[Katie Prescott]

Yes, see you next week. This episode of the Times Tech podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow.

[Danny Fortson]

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[Katie Prescott]

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