A Little Usefulness Never Hurt Anyone
The important thing about Sidekick (our first platform) we built a technology that worked straight away. It was easy, anyone could use it. It was essentially one of the first Agent Building and sharing platforms - at this time not even big tech had cottoned on.
It gave all of our employees safe, secure access to the latest AI models and the ability to augment these tools to help them in their daily lives.
Luckily making great AI product comes naturally if you use it 8-9 hours a day. You inituitively know the friction - also luckily we had 200 colleagues around us to keep us honest in Manchester. Plus Louis Georgiou is a phenomenally talented guy.
Agents are basically AI assistants/tools (imagine a prompt is stored in the background, maybe some knowledge or data and it does a function for someone). Technology folks will turn their noses up here as technically agents are autonomous.
I would argue for the forseeable we'll mostly be making our assistants more agentic - until such a point that they can be trusted to do what we say. Personally building agents is like working with animals on a movie set - sometimes they take shit in live broadcasts.
In my world this would be - erroring in a live demo or asking me questions when I want it to just run autonomously - or telling someone they can fly to the moon when they can't.
Some of the agents I’m most proud were the first as they made a real difference to people; (spoiler alert) they aren’t the flashy ones.
The Consultant Agent — one of my team members suffered badly with imposter syndrome. It was genuinely holding them back. Having an agent they could bounce thoughts off in private gave them confidence. It was like a safety net. Suddenly they had a voice, and that made a massive difference.
Transform Words — looked tiny, but solved a real bottleneck. Specialists would write long, dense, super-intelligent text, and leaders ended up spending hours condensing it in pitches instead of thinking strategically. Transform Words flipped that. It let specialists distil their own thinking, which freed leaders to focus on the bigger picture.
The Dyslexia Assistant — built bottom-up by Patrick Singleton . No one asked for it, but it became one of the most-used agents in the system. Thousands rely on it every week. A colleague told me she’d even been using it with her children at home, and it was making a real difference there too.
Spelling & Grammar Checker — another “tiny” one, but it mattered. I had a colleague who was incredibly anxious about writing emails to clients because of spelling and grammar slips. It was limiting her confidence. Suddenly that anxiety disappeared. A whole barrier to her job was gone.
The Personal Development Agent — just a simple tool to help people quickly construct or explore their own personal development plan. Not glamorous, but people use it every day.
Family day agents - We even ran a session in America where people brought their families into work. The kids used a fun agent to make cartoon characters, songs, stories. That reminded me AI isn’t just about automating workflows. It’s genuinely fun and human.
And look, don’t get me wrong — we built some incredibly complex multi-agent workflows in the business. They could take research that used to take days and condense it into minutes. They can produce their own briefs, write creative specs, build media plans, generate multi-channel assets, and even spin up a full measurement framework — all within about fifteen minutes.
But if I’m honest, the things that made the most material difference to people are the small ones. Transform Words. The Dyslexia Assistant. Spelling and grammar support. The Consultant Agent. That’s what I really love about it.