Show Notes
Season 3 of A Class Act is here. Every breakthrough in AI begins as an idea almost nobody believes in yet. But brilliant technology doesn't change anything until it survives contact with the real world. So why do some AI products transform entire organisations while others never make it past the demo? And who are the people capable of closing that gap? This season, host Michael Young sits down with the category-defining founders, the scientists moving the field forward, and the forward deploy...
More from A Class Act: AI Builders & Founders
Emma Rattray picked chemical engineering at seventeen because she liked maths and physics. She’s now an AI engineer in Stockholm, working on a product thousands of people use every day. How she got from one to the other is the interesting part. Michael Young asks her how each of those steps actually happened. What the master’s demanded that neither her degree nor her job had. And what she’s learned about getting AI into production now she does it full time. What you’ll hear: ✔️How a Li...
Stuart is Chief AI Officer at Sabio Group, a CX consulting and technology firm that has spent two decades helping large organisations run their contact centres. He was working on speech recognition and natural language when it was still called speech technology, long before ChatGPT made any of it mainstream, so he has watched several waves of this arrive and seen which ones actually changed anything. In the second episode of season 3, Michael Young asks him what genuinely changed after ChatGP...
Every AI company seems to want a forward deployed engineer. Yet very few can explain what they’re actually hiring for. Tom McLaughlin was doing the job before it became one of the hottest titles in AI. He went from software engineering at JP Morgan to Tomoro, the applied AI firm OpenAI acquired in May 2026, and he’s now a forward deployed engineer at The OpenAI Deployment Company, working inside enterprise clients across the UK, Europe and the US. In this conversation, he chats to host Michae...
Most organisations adopting AI are bolting agentic AI onto the same old processes, then wondering why nothing actually changes. In this season 2 finale of A Class Act, Michael Young sits down with Stuart Bell, Head of AI & Innovation M&G who went from Java developer to shaping how some of the biggest regulated financial-services firms adopt agentic AI at enterprise scale. It’s a straight-talking, practical conversation about why the gap between a slick demo and real production...
In this episode of A Class Act, Michael Young sits down with Stuart McMeechan, EMEA Deployment Engineering Leader at OpenAI. Stuart leads the team that OpenAI sends into the biggest enterprises in Europe to help them get AI into production and he’s seen first-hand why most never make it past the pilot. In this conversation, they get into👇 ☑️ What OpenAI’s AI deployment engineering team actually does and the two objectives behind every project ☑️ The three types of customer OpenAI wor...