WELCOME
Things are moving fast right now, in AI, in UK innovation funding, and in how organisations are thinking about how they build and deploy. That's why we started this newsletter.
SHIFT is our way of making sense of what's changing to take a look at what matters across what we're seeing in the work we're doing, and conversations we're having, what the industry is signalling, and what it means if you're building something or trying to get more from AI tools inside your organisation.
We'll keep it practical, honest and relevant. And we'd genuinely love to hear what you're working on, so hit reply.
Chloe and Simon (and Milo)
CO-FOUNDERS, SHARP INSIGHTS
WHAT'S ON · THREE EVENTS
Belonging and Reframing Belonging: Female Product Leaders
WEBINAR · 22 APRIL
Chloe is speaking at the Female Product Leaders event about belonging. This talk is based on the idea of social capital, which is how people connect, communicate and collaborate.
22 April · 12–1pm · Online
Free Copilot Webinar and Masterclass
WEBINAR · USING COPILOT STRATEGICALLY - 29 APRIL
Sign up for our webinar that gives you an overview of how to strategically use Microsoft Copilot in your business, what AI maturity looks like and what changes are coming in 2026.
29 April · 12–1pm · Online
MASTERCLASS · COPILOT FOR BUSINESS LEADERS AND FOUNDERS - 13 May
This is a practical working session for business leaders and founders who are ready to move beyond curiosity and into capability. Bring your Copilot licence and we'll work through the key applications together from Word to Excel, covering how to use Copilot across the tools you're already in every day.
13 May · 9.30–12.30 · Online
WHAT WE'VE BEEN UP TO
Startup Weekend, mentoring and new projects.
Chloe kicked off March at Startup Weekend through the Bettany Centre of Entrepreneurship at Cranfield University. She will be going back this week for the second phase of the programme. Chloe had a few reflections about the Startup Weekend, which you can read about on LinkedIn here.
On the delivery side, we ran an internal company workshop on agentic AI and continued our Copilot training with clients. The demand for structured, practical AI adoption support is only growing and we've got some new exciting projects to help more companies adopt AI.
On the mentoring front, we've been active with Help to Grow, CoSTAR and TechUP AI cohorts this period. It's been great helping founders and SME leaders through challenges, from making AI more visible in their organisations to how to get the most out of talking to customers at events and pilots, not only for developing the product, but also for understanding the strength of buying signals.
INTRODUCING JUNO AND THEIA
We've spent the last few months building two AI assistants to sit inside the validation work we do with founders. Both are in limited release.
Juno
PRODUCT VALIDATION · BETA
Juno supports you through the early process of developing a product. She helps you refine your idea, who it's for, what the competition looks like in that space and creates interview guides for you. Once you've spoken to people, she'll help you improve your interview technique and pull out key insights.
Theia
VALIDATE MARKET DEMAND · COMING SOON
Theia designs and helps you execute on testing demand for your idea in a broader market. From building an early prototype to writing copy for landing pages and ads to experiment with different channels, audiences and messages.
A PROPER SHOUTOUT TO OUR PARTNERS AT PEOPLE PLANET PRODUCT
If you're working on hardware or impact-led products in AgriTech, MedTech or CleanTech, they're the people to know.
INDUSTRY SHIFTS
Innovate UK's new prospectus.
Innovate UK published a new prospectus on 19 March during UK Tech Week, setting out a sharper, more selective approach to backing deep and hard tech businesses with serious commercial potential.
The diagnosis is blunt in that the UK is world-class at generating ideas and spinning out companies, but too few of them scale into globally competitive businesses. The prospectus frames this as a two-sided problem, first is that founders have to crack the science and build a viable commercial path, and second, the system hasn't been set up to support both sides of that journey.
What's changing in practice is the bar for funding. Technical merit alone won't be enough. Innovate UK wants to see evidence of a credible route to market, a convincing case for the commercial opportunity, and a reason to believe the innovation represents a genuine step change and not just an incremental improvement.
They're also launching Velocity, a continuous account management service that replaces fixed-term programme support with an ongoing relationship. This is designed to stay with high-potential businesses from early-stage grants through to serious capital. Alongside this, Innovate UK is positioning itself as a "due diligence engine" for the deep tech ecosystem, aiming to give private investors confidence that the hard technical validation has already been done.
This matters if you're seeking Innovate UK funding, but it also confirms something we've been saying for a while. Commercial validation is no longer a nice-to-have at the end of the process, it's part of building the business behind the product.
Copilot: what's changed recently.
Microsoft shipped Wave 3 of Copilot in March, and two changes are worth paying attention to.
Agent Mode across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint is the headline shift, from one prompt and one output to an iterative workflow where Copilot makes edits, adjusts structure, and refines content across multiple steps while the user stays in control. This matters because the bottleneck was never generating a first draft; it was the revision cycle. Agent Mode is now generally available for licensed Copilot users, and available on the web for unlicensed Microsoft 365 users too.
The Copilot Dashboard has also had a significant upgrade. Admins can now track user satisfaction through thumbs up/down trends over time, and new intent-based metrics show how people are actually using Copilot across Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, including specific scenarios like suggested replies, coaching, and data cleaning. For anyone mid-rollout, this is the first real-time data on whether Copilot is landing.
The challenge hasn't changed: the tool won't create value if it lands without context, training, or clear use cases. That's what the webinar is designed to help with.
Until next time.
Simon and Chloe (and Milo)
CO-FOUNDERS
