Ben and Frazer are on the road again, just up the M1 in fact. They’re in Milton Keynes at the headquarters of Aiimi. A fast-growing data, AI, and digital business, interviewing their CEO Steve Salvin.
Aiimi
Aiimi stands for ‘all information is made insightful’, a perfect summary of their mission. Their journey began in London Bridge back in 2007, moving to Milton Keynes in 2019 as they continued to expand. They chose Milton Keynes as a sweet spot between their various clients across a range of sectors, particularly automotive businesses, as well as easy access to the tech hotspots of Oxford and Cambridge. Now, they have a headcount of over 200 and have forged deep links with educational and technological institutions throughout the town.
As they’ve grown, Steve has spoken about his shift from referring to his employees as a ‘family’ to calling them a ‘team’. Both Ben and Steve have lent into creating a familial vibe in their businesses, rejecting a more corporate approach.
However, once a business reaches a certain size, performance becomes more and more of an issue, and sometimes people have to be asked to leave. This isn’t how a family works, and employees can take the view that the company’s values have been betrayed, increasing their own insecurities.
At a certain point, it becomes much more like a sports team, where the whole institution strives for greatness. Frazer asks if Steve has any regrets about using this familial language, and Steve says he doesn’t as it can be appropriate for smaller organisations, giving employees a unique drive.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The conversation turns to AI. While it may be in a hype cycle at the moment, it is by no means new, Steve did a module on it at university in 1987. Some think it might take over the world, some think It will transform everything for the good. It’s probably somewhere in the middle.
Most importantly for Aiimi, it shines a light on how important data is. AI requires high-quality data to make decisions, and businesses need to make sure their data is good and organised before even looking at AI. Business people can be put off by data, as it is seen as a boring, technical subject. However, AI has helped begin conversations about what data businesses have, how to organise it, and how to generate more and better data.
Aiimi’s purpose is to create ways for the data a company produces to be easily accessible and used by all within an organisation. Their analysis suggests that 73% of data created by businesses is only used on the day it’s created, meaning that data is constantly being reproduced that doesn’t need to be. Aiimi aims to create a technological layer that can take data from disparate systems and create insights that can be used by everyone.
They’ve been talking about this stuff for over ten years, but recently terms like ‘data mesh’ are becoming increasingly common across sectors.
Discussions of recruitment challenges and mental health in the workplace close out the episode, before the All Things Business favourite: the dinner party question. Steve picks an all-star table of Kylie Minogue, Nicolas Cage and Elon Musk.
Watch and listen to episode 51 of All Things Business – The Podcast:
