Saturday Sessions: Clout

Hey,

This week I’ve:

• visited Google to talk about setting up some AI enterprise education

• scheduled conference interviews with 7 heavy hitters in the AI space

• pissed off the UK government by dragging their AI portal through the mud

NONE of this would have been possible without having an audience.

I say this not to boast but as a reality. This is how the world is. For better or worse!

When you are able to talk to 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 people at a time you get leverage.

One of my favourite websites is this https://blog.lime.link/visualizing-crowd-sizes/

It gives you an idea of crowd sizes. Here’s 100,000 for instance:

Being able to talk to that many people at the same time is awesome. In the literal “holy shit…” sense of the word.

But using social media we can do this with relative ease. That’s sort of magic. And we take it for granted.

For instance this week I found out about the new UK government AI Skills Hub. It’s here if you want to see it https://aiskillshub.org.uk/

This project cost £4.1M (about $5.5M). All the money going to PwC.

The result is basically a page of links to courses. Not courses they made. Or even host. But links to Microsoft, Google, Coursera etc.

It’s not even a custom build. It’s a £750/$1000 a year pre-built platform that you can buy a subscription for.

And the research they did to fill the list is second-rate. I found many more using Claude in 10 minutes. With richer data. And higher accuracy.

I could go on.

The big outcome of all this being: well, what did the UK government spend £4,100,000 of taxpayer money on?

A valid question. That I asked on socials:

@iamkylebalmer

join free community (link in bio) for updates on the project! What even is this? the UK government just gave PwC £4.1m to build a terrible... See more

Sitting at 50,000 or so views (on Tiktok) and rising.

I’ve started rebuilding and improving the whole thing and off the back of that:

• 13 people have offered their services with the rebuild

• 7 people have contacted their local MPs and sent my video

• two UK civil servants have independently reached out to me

We’ll see what comes of it but it’s becoming something of a side-quest. For me personally and the business.

Why tell you all this?

Well. Audience. It all comes back to this.

Me being pissed off about a government website and overspend and shooting a video on it leads to nothing if I’m talking to myself.

The reality of the situation is that there’s only impact at scale. When you are appearing in front of enough people.

We’re not talking Kylie Jenner levels of fame. That’s not needed. Although obviously useful! And yes she’s pretty much my only celebrity reference, don’t tease me.

We’re talking about being able to talk to 1,000 or 10,000 or so people. That’s (by social media and reach standards) very low. But it’s more than enough to start being impactful. And when you can reach an audience like this stuff just sort of “happens”.

You can’t necessarily predict it. And not all of it will pan out. That’s alright.

Because you get opportunities. At high velocity. More “at-bats” if you’re sporty!

Growing my audience to 250,000 has taken 2 years or so. And it’s taken a lot of work. It’s not easy. But it is life changing. It opens doors.

Right now there are still a lot of opportunities to carve out your space in AI. It’s all new. We need people who can talk to their industry. To their niche. To their demographic. To their language speakers. To all the other people out there - we need voices.

As someone who is actively engaged with AI (you are reading this right now) you are in a very valuable position. By translating why AI is important to others you can carve out an audience.

And (if you please!) use it to bully government departments for spaffing £4 million on a rubbish website! Or indeed for anything you want!

Next week (Moday) we’re reopening the AI Authority Accelerator where we’ll be helping you build an audience.

See you on the inside,

Kyle