EP172 - Two Pints and a Crisis: Talking AI, Value and the Future of Photography

I recorded this episode in my second favourite place on earth - the local pub - with a pint in hand and a genuinely fascinating guest across the table. David Finch spent most of his career in marketing and creative agencies, most recently selling Purple Frog, a marketing consultancy. He now runs Thinking In Fields, which focuses on decision architectures - helping businesses bring AI into their operations in a coherent, orchestrated way rather than a scatter-gun approach.

David introduced me to two ideas I hadn't heard before, and I was quietly furious about that. The first is the Book of Remarkability - a framework for understanding what makes your business distinctive. The spine of the book is your emotional hook, the cover unpacks it, and the bulk of the content is 24 short stories from clients describing the value you created for them, in their words. Only six pages are yours to explain how you do it. It's based on the Canterbury Tales, and it's a genius analogy.

The second is the swimming pool with five lanes - customers in lane one, your people in lane five, your processes in lane three. AI sits in lane two (improving the customer journey) and lane four (improving internal efficiency). Most businesses focus on lane four and quietly destroy the customer experience. Some nail lane two but then drown their team with demand they can't fulfil. The whole point is keeping the business moving coherently through all five lanes at once.

We talked about AI as a team member rather than a tool - the most intelligent five-year-old you've ever met! Knows everything, but doesn't know what to do with it. David's view is you want to train it to be a teenager and never let it become an adult, because a teenager still has a bit of creative spark and a spiky opinion. Train it to full adulthood and it homogenises everything - it's a probability engine, and probability gives you 80% of the answer, perfectly averaged.

The conversation moved into what AI genuinely can't do - and that comes down to human experience. It has never had a first kiss, lost someone it loved, or stood in a field at a beer festival. Any task that depends on that kind of felt, embodied knowledge is still ours. The challenge is that a lot of what we thought required that - writing, design, commercial photography, music composition - turns out not to need it as much as we assumed.

For photographers specifically, David's view is that weddings and portraits are relatively safe for now, because the human interface is the whole point. Commercial photography is more exposed - brands are bringing production in-house, and that overcapacity will push talented commercial photographers into our market. The answer isn't to chase efficiency. It's to charge for value, not hours. Ask clients what they genuinely value, attach a price to that, and let the production tasks flow through the tools that do them best.

David ended with a metaphor I loved - the future of creative business isn't a pyramid or even an obelisk. It's going to be full of jazz bands. Highly talented people jamming together, creating something that no algorithm could have predicted. I hope he's right.----more----If you have enjoyed the episode, please do subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts!

Transcript

Paul: [00:00:00] Let's hit record both channels. Recording. At which point I put my podcast voice on. You've gotta forgive me. Alright.

David: Okay.

Paul: Uh, alright, well cheers David.

David: Cheers.