AI for Local and Global Business Growth with Polly Barnfield OBE - VistaTalks Ep #162

5 Feb 2025 · 33 min
Episode

5 Feb 2025 · 33 min

0:00

In this VistaTalks episode, host Simon Hodgkins interviews Polly Barnfield, OBE, founder and CEO of AI‑first company Mabie. Polly explains how Mabie builds tailored AI tools that enable any business, from small‑scale SMEs to large public sector organisations, to generate multilingual digital content, automate repetitive tasks, and improve customer engagement. She details a flagship project with Birmingham City Council that delivers AI‑driven, 13‑second multilingual business‑support answers, boosting online visibility for local merchants. The conversation covers Mabie's people‑first AI workflow, the importance of a curated knowledge base, and the balance between AI automation and human handoff. Security and trust are highlighted through SOC 2 compliance, data vectorisation, and private model deployment, with warnings against using public LLMs for confidential data. Polly contrasts scaling AI for SMEs with top‑down implementations for global brands, emphasizing documentation, model training, and workflow integration. She shares her personal background as a former Team GB equestrian, her OBE‑honoured philanthropic work, and how those experiences shape her leadership. Finally, she offers practical advice for organisations starting with AI – secure data, start with a small, annoying process, and iterate quickly – and reveals Mabie's future roadmap: a multimodal, plugin‑rich agentic platform that can orchestrate multiple tools to answer user requests in a single interface.

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