In this episode of Being Liminal, you’ll find Brian and Martin hitting record just as the conversation is really getting going - another no-guest, no-plan conversation that ends up diving into a single, very topical thread: organisations are reacting to AI without ever having prepared for it.
It begins with design. If AI-generated work mostly looks like slop, is that a victory for human designers, or a distraction? Martin’s argument is that reacting to bad AI visuals only reclaims production-level craft - the surface layer - and that the harder, systems-level work most design teams never reached is still sitting undone. From there the conversation widens into what a shrinking design team is actually for, why “designerly” thinking is migrating into roles that aren’t called design at all, and why human-crafted things - music, pottery, a book someone actually made - may become a premium people pay for rather than something widely shared.
Brian brings his perspective on the AI backlash running through publishing, where detection tools flag century-old novels as machine-written and writers are cancelled on suspicion. They work through the economics nobody priced in - the honeymoon-phase pricing that has to end, and annual budgets that can’t survive consumption-based billing. And they touch on the foundational work every organisation has avoided for thirty years: sorting out its data.
Underneath all of it sits a worry about time - that leadership has stopped thinking about the future, traded big bets for endless optimisation, and is now improvising. Or, as Martin puts it, what we’re seeing is the result of reactiveness without preparedness.
Mentioned in this episode:
Nick Foster - Could, Should, Might, Don’t: How We Think About the Future (book)
Edinburgh Futures Institute; Southampton University (”Future World”)
Barnes & Noble and Waterstones; Hachette (publishing and AI)
Atlassian Rovo, Microsoft Copilot, Figma Make, Claude Code (tools referenced)
Arup and BT foresight teams; Corning’s aspirational glass videos
The futures/trends work Martin did at Lloyds (with Kathryn, Nathan and Laurent)
Ryanair and Lloyds - flagged as counterpoints for a future episode
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