Week 82: Beware the combine harvesters

Posted by: Frankie Roberto
Published: 31 January 2026

This week our CTO Duncan Brown gave an updated version of his Team dynamics after AI talk. I won’t bother trying to summarise the whole thing, as you can go read his published version for yourself.

However he introduced a new analogy which struck a chord.

It relates AI to climate change. No, not the impact of data centres on electricity and water usage (although that is an issue too). But how AI has the potential to take the communities of products, platforms, design systems, open source tools, shared knowledge and so on that we’ve built up, cut it all down and replace it with a monoculture of less diverse products. This perhaps gives us a immediate higher yield, but ends up destroying the ecosystem.

In this scenario it’s not hard to identify the big tech firms promoting the combine harvesters. But we’re the bats and bees.

If this sounds depressing, the upbeat note was that we can resist it by having diverse teams, telling stories about what we do, and getting on the front foot.

Beware the portals

Also this week, the government launched an AI Skills hub offering free (mostly) training from a bunch of big name partners.

It didn’t take long for people to realise that the hub doesn’t actually host the courses themselves, but instead links out to existing course elsewhere.

You can see where this strategy may have came from. If you take the premise that there’s a skills shortage around AI, you might then conclude that this gap exists partly because people don’t know where and how to acquire the skills. Hence a proposed solution of: a portal. You might even have some research where people suggest this or think it sounds like a good idea.

The thing this: this applies to just about any domain. The world is complicated and messy, and finding out about anything, whether it’s clubs you can join, places to eat, entertainment you can watch, or health services you can access, is hard work.

But a portal rarely solves this problem. More often that not, they just add another website to the existing cacophony of websites.

And sure, there are some successful examples. Deliveroo, Netflix, Happity, and so on. But they’ve survived through a combination of heavy marketing, initial discounting, adding extra value like payment processing, and a good deal of luck.

As for skills and training, well the government already has Skills for careers, National careers service, Free courses in England, T-Levels, Apprenticeships and probably several other portals I’ve missed.

For NHS prevention services, it’s tempting to think of the NHS App as our ultimate portal. And in some ways it is. But I still think we need to embrace multiple front doors, not put all our hope in having a single one.

Beware the public deadline

On Record a vaccination, this week we finally removed the old interface for recording vaccinations. We had been dual-running the old and new interfaces side by side for several months, allowing users to get used to the new one and to switch to it in their own time.

However we twice advertised a date for retiring the old interface, only to postpone it due to technical issues requiring a bit more work. In many ways this proves that the strategy of dual-running rather than switching everyone all at once was the right one. It reduced the risk and meant that the new interface is more robust than it might have otherwise been.

But we’ll definitely think twice in future about giving our users an exact date for changes to the service.

Beware the portals

Beware the public deadline

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