This week, I’ve been out and about again, discussing, solutions for customers in financial difficulty. It was all very interesting.

Yet outside of the event itself, what struck me was how the price of everything has leapt up, there has been a step increase.

I mean, inflation has increased prices, it seems to have been permanently in the news for the last year and I have certainly seen it in the weekly shop. But, despite my grumbling at the time (and lots of grumbling when my motor insurance renewal came through), it was something that I accepted and, to a large extent, absorbed.

However sometimes, when you do something familiar, but a little less frequent.. it is then when you understand the cumulative nature, impact, and shock of the change. This is exactly what happened when I bought a quick sandwich for lunch at the station.

A packed lunch, the one that I used to get for six pounds, is now closer to ten.. a 60% increase (especially if I add a couple of those chocolatey treats).

It is a sharp increase from what I remember, and sadly one that I know is never really going to reverse; it is a new normal.

Jump around

We often think of inflation as gradual, rising at a steady pace of 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5% per year. What struck me is the reality of this is really quite different.

This did not feel gradual at all, prices jump around, and every so often they leap.

Businesses it seems, must have been absorbing some price increases for a long time. They have no doubt been finding efficiencies where they can, cutting corners (or product quality!) all to maintain margins.

Eventually, there is after all only so much compromise that can be made. It becomes too much and with the cost of living being in the headlines, there is a valid reason to pass costs on. The opportunity is taken.

With the floodgates of bad news open, it’s time to rip the band-aid off and all the price increases flow through… at once. (sorry too many analogies there!). Unfortunately for us poor consumers, this often is a steep increase in cost, sometimes way above annualised inflation rates.

This allows for margins to be normalized, and hopefully product quality to be restored (although we will see on the latter).

It seems, in good times competition is a good driver and can keep costs down. However in harder times like these, through the magic of game theory, these same market dynamics can become a driver to enable above-inflation increases across the board.

Think of the poor consumer

All of this of course also has consequences for us consumers and our reaction to this is often mixed.

Short term, we can cut back on expenses, consume less, or find cheaper products. However, to keep things the same, longer term, incomes need to increase.

In case anyone has not noticed getting a pay increase, for most people, doing the same work is at best lagged, at worst it just hasn’t happened. So many of us are then left trying to find new ways to cope. Cutting back is fine, but longer term a more fundamental shift in the demand for goods occurs instead.

Think back to some of the previous periods of high inflation, for example the 1970s, 80s, 90s, can we use this as a guide?

Back then the world seemed in the doldrums—nothing much to look forward to, stagnating and crumbling economies. Many products, those that seemed luxurious, lavish, and desirable at the time, simply eventually disappeared from the market (… monthly book club subscriptions, anyone, Leyland princess, or even the 3500?).

However little did we know at the time that our lives were also about to change for the better. The invention of the transistor, microchip, and later the computer all fundamentally changed our standard of living, bringing in extra income, jobs, and products (… hello Netflix, Telsa and certainly the sat nav).

So despite my grumbling over lunch, I was left wondering… Are we actually at a similar inflection point…. is this the start of a similar pattern… has another great shake-out begun?

Jump up

If true and this is the case, what we know is that looking back, trying to use what worked before or try to return to the ways things were is just not going to work… we cannot go back, and going forward things will be different.

Staying the same will be hard, however watching, listening to the next set of changes, and then adapting to those changes can really keep us ahead… (I should have been a PC game designer, back then… now I know!).

So if you can seize the opportunity, this could be the time to get in on the ground floor for something new. In the end, it could turn out to be something very positive.

So Stay flexible, onwards and upwards I suppose.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

It was a bank holiday this weekend, and, for what felt like the first time this year, a strange, warm orange ball appeared in the sky.

Travelling into town, this had clearly caught everyone with a sense of surprise. Everyone was wearing an interesting mix of clothes.

• Some, clearly those who got up early, were bundled up, clad in coats, shoes, and winter wear… seemingly refused to believe it was warm
• Others, those who surfaced later, had made the switch and were in summer mode, breaking out the T-shirts and shorts. I was the latter, with socks on, of course… extra middle-aged comedic value.

Now, having decided to avoid the crush at the supermarket for sausages (it’s a reflexive thing; a sunny day equals barbecue in the UK)… I opted to sit in the sun at a local café, soaking up some sun. It was just lovely. Of course, I was also on the phone…

Grokkle

Now, I know a lot has been written, much of it lament, about the demise of Twitter and the change to X. For someone who uses Twitter/X to look at news, I have also noticed a change in the last year or so. However, as it is still the best source for breaking stories I have stuck with it, on my free plan, until now.

However, with the continued premiumisation of features, and especially the loss of TweetDeck (now X-Pro) it has been hard. Reluctantly, this last month, I eventually relented and signed up for a paid subscription…. and I have been pleasantly surprised.

Harmony has now been with X-Pro and to my delight I also discovered that Grok, X’s AI, is now available in the UK (from this weekend).

And, Grok was interesting. Different from both ChatGPT and Claude, it has been built with access to the live Twitterverse (or X-verse, I suppose).

You can simply ask it for what you want to know, and it will come back with a summary, with references to sources (tweets). The difference is it all seems very real-time. I can see it changing my reading and searching habits too… especially for news. It is so targeted.

In fairness, this is something that MS Co-pilot also does well. It searches the web, giving referenced stories (with ChatGPT doing this via Bing too). These tools however still refer back to newspapers and searchable web content… The advantage (or disadvantage 🙂 ) with Grok is the immediacy of Grok doing this live on social media. I was impressed.

This will have implications for search too.

Searching Social

I don’t know about you, but once I have seen something on social media, I find it almost impossible to find it again.

That hack… fixing a charging cable, stats from around the world… the one I saw on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook… I thought was interesting, and then quickly move on.

My reactive/emotional brain is satisfied… but, my logical/slow thinking side (read thinking fast, thinking slow) about 5 minutes later says… “hang on a minute, that could be useful later, you need to bookmark it”!

So then I am stuck in a scroll loop trying to find it again.

Except of course the algorithm has now been updated, and finding it again is not easy. I have to resort to searching for fragments of what I remember… whilst all the time my feed is off down another rabbit hole. (1980’s dance moves anyone).

So maybe here Grok can help, maybe this is the future of search and maybe this is also the future of searching knowledgebase at work, for employees, and in apps for customers… Ie if we know roughly what we are looking for and can describe it, it does the searching for us.

Sounds good, and undoubtedly a step improvement over the boolean search we have today… I suspect we will see this in every customer service app in the very near future and not a fancy, ‘added feature’ but something that will be just expected.

A different approach

And like the search engine, once this starts to happen it will also change the way we write too. Remember ‘keywords’ and ‘tags/labels’.

I suspect we will start to add or include content to make it more easily interpretable by AI/LLM too. (I have already started taking notes differently, in a longer form).

This whole area is still moving fast, developments fast to market and close to the consumer. This week alone.

Meta released Meta.AI (not in the UK yet) and much like GROK, they have the benefit of access to social media data, think Facebook/WhatsApp and Instagram public content… The difference however is Meta owns 3 of the 4 top social platforms… the reach is huge, and this will be worth watching too

And then in the background, we have Google, who this week released NotebookLM. It again uses data (uploaded by you) to inform and enhance your note-taking. More developments from the search engine giant.

So whilst the demise of the search engine has often been mentioned… maybe it is not quite the case. Increasingly it seems to be less a question of search engine OR AI (LLM), but AI AND search engine both in combination…

…. we await OpenAI and ChatGPT-5 any time soon.

Have a good week everyone.

Last week I had an evening trip down to London. As it was after work, after a full day and with the travel, well I felt like skipping it… it would be easier to stay local.

However, a casual unrelated, comment “it is always much better to meet in person” – set a seed and made me change my mind… I’m glad I did; they were right. Sometimes is better to take the more difficult path in the end and meeting in person does make the difference.

Yet, in my rush to get out at 5pm, to make the train, I forgot my spare phone battery. Imagine my horror, too late I saw my battery percentage at 24%, it was not ideal.

No Battery, Nothing to do?

With a phone now being the Swiss army knife of the 21st century, I needed it to both communicate and find the meeting location – running out of battery juice was not an option. So as I sulked back into the seat on the train, I resigned myself to having to eke it out and strictly ration its use. Glumly I starred out the window for the rest journey.

You see these days killing time is not normally a problem – grab a coffee, maybe a pain au raisin, and a quick surf of the news, it’s enough to fill an hour. But without a phone or online access? what then?

So arriving ahead of time I was stuck with dread. I head to Pret (of course) with 40 minutes to kill… and nothing to “do”.

• First 10 minutes. Felt very self-conscious, didn’t fit in. (everyone else – on their phone). Found myself staring at passers-by and trying not to look too much like a weirdo (I’m not sure I succeeded, and I apologise to those who noticed). Time passed slowly.
• Next 10 minutes. I thought… “I can do some thinking”… “now where is my pen?”. I had forgotten a pen!… Checked watch 20 times, time did not seem to move.
• Next 10 minutes… Some strange stirrings in the brain… a few interesting things to think about… ideas started to pop up… how would I approach this, think about that?… I was definitely checking my watch less now!
• Then… time to go… hang on, where did the last 10 minutes go? I ran out of time, lost in thought and now needing to hurry.

It was an interesting experience, just stopping and thinking. There were some surprising results.

If our lives are filled with noise, can we actually hear ourselves think?

In all our busyness, doing, being active, and need to feel busy (which the phone is great for by the way), how much critical thinking time are we actually missing?

In today’s world we are so reliant on our devices, yet as this (enforced) exercise really illustrated, these devices also feed yet more busyness.

Had my phone not been almost out of charge, I would have spent a pleasant 40 minutes doom-scrolling the news or watching TikTok (mainly of Excel spreadsheet functions these days, it seems!). It most certainly would have passed the time; I may have learned something and would have at least felt ‘busy’.

Yet I would not have had as much in the way of new big ideas, nor been able to use my rational, conscious, brain to think things through.

Is our modern world shutting down our ability to think, instead training us to scroll, shortening our attention spans? Is it forcing us to rely on our unconscious, automatic reactionary decision-making centres in the brain instead? It feels like it may and this may not be a good thing, at least all the time.

Fortunately, not all is lost; and although difficult at first, with a bit of practice, we can get these skills back… and maybe some new ideas too. It is worth a try, at least for 45 min.

So this week, my resolution is to put the phone down a little more… maybe pick up a book, or just stare into space again. You never know it may be worth it.