Yesterday was about lunching with Nest and spending the day talking to people who helped and help me understand how digital technology. To my amazement, as I lay in bed last night, it came to me that they all had University Said Business education though only Edi and Ricki know each other. So here is my little tribute to these people and to the college that has helped them – and me.

Ritesh Singhania who helped me set up AgeWage, set up ClearGlass with Chris Sier and is now doing something new (Zango)  on the other side of the pond ( happier than Zelensky)

Sam Seaton who is now learning even more about Artificial Intelligence at Oxford Said after turning MoneyHub from a near-failed wreck into what it is today.

Eduardo and Riccardo who started Collegia and are now building a workplace pension we all (even Nest, Sam, Ritesh, Chris but especially me and my colleagues) can learn from.

AI as a learning experience

I don’t know why all these people came back into my world last week and especially yesterday. But they did! Sam wants to help share her unique commercial capacity , Ritesh is doing new things and wants to know a good pension to invest in from the States. Chris is fighting health problems but with Oliver Bell fighting to improve transparency in institutional pensions. Eduardo and Riccardo are back in my world with an offer to make large groups at work, understand what’s going on without having to be sold into advice.

What is bringing us together is a wish to use technology to help us understand what is happening, For Chris it might be the charges we pay to invest, Ritesh is helping banks to adopt AI in the future while Sam has already embedded it into banks and pensions and will do much more after investing in herself. Every one of these great people has been helped by the education that people are offered at Oxford (and other universities rival it in this). I hope that Luke Webster will read this and reach out!

Most of all, I hope that Oxford (not where I went) can become a place of brilliance where we can do more to bring forward learning and make pensions simpler for the ordinary person for whom artificial intelligence is already making life easier in many ways.

Most of all I want to promote Collegia, not because I have any commercial reason to do so but because they have the same ideas as I have. For them the way to explain pensions to people is not with a pot but a pension (see the illustration of their app at the top of this blog).

I have no need to become an AI driven individual, I am helped by WordPress who politely correct my most obvious errors. When sitting in a cafe with Sam last Wednesday she showed me that AI can actually read people’s minds and find out what images are dominating their imagination.

I told Eduardo and Riccardo this, they laughed at me and told me that she was helping me, AI can do much more than that! I know that it can also do bad. I see the nonsense that it suggests I re-blog when I get recommendations from AI created blogs. I know that AI needs to be working to make our lives better and that a commercial service must also have the needs of those it is targeted at- properly understood. Those needs need to be fulfilled.

Such is the power of inertia (note well “nudge” and the power of defaults), that AI in pensions is a scary thing for me. But that means we must embrace it and allow good people , like those mentioned in this blog, to press on.

Collegia, the firm that I am learning most from, is at the other end of the spectrum from where I entered workplace pensions. I suspect that Nest’s Paul Todd, who I had lunch with yesterday, would understand more but we do not want or expect Nest to open doors as Collegia are doing.

Sam Seaton has decided to do more by learning more, Ritesh has hooked up with software in the US while my firm AgeWage has people working for it that run rings around me on this stuff.

But I am sure that the best people, Helen Dean now at Standard Life’s Master Trust, Sarah Aitken at L&G, Phil Butler at People’s, have given me a reason to find ways to get AI to solve their and my problems. We are all approaching the later age of life when we need younger brains around us.

Collegia, our colleges and those who have devoted themselves to delivering through AI;- they are our future.