What happens when you give an AI consultant one evening, a room full of drinks professionals, and no business?

At our second Young Leaders session, James Grant — co-founder of AI consultancy iwantmore.ai, whose clients include names like Mentzendorff and Hatch Mansfield — set himself a challenge: build an entire drinks business from scratch, live on stage, with every decision crowdsourced from the room.

The audience pitched the idea. The audience picked the name. AI did the rest — with James running a swarm of parallel Claude sessions like a team of junior hires while fielding questions from the floor.

By the end of the night, the room had:

• A ranked shortlist of business ideas, researched live
• A full brand book (after ChatGPT got sacked mid-session)
• A complete financial model — which promptly revealed the business was unviable
• Employment contracts, privacy policy and a full legal document suite
• A researched list of the first 200 London venues to target
• A working website with a live waitlist

Around the build, James covers the stuff the drinks trade rarely gets straight answers on: which AI settings to check before you paste in anything confidential, what this actually costs to run, why the industry is so slow to adopt — and how to break your own job into tasks before someone else does.

About this session

Recorded at Fero's Young Leaders event in central London, this session features James Grant, co-founder of iwantmore.ai, building a drinks business live — from a blank terminal window to a working website — with the audience directing every decision. The business: GlassRadar, an app that finds every wine by the glass near you, pitched from the floor and named by vote.

The real lesson isn't any single tool. It's watching James run half a dozen AI sessions in parallel — brand, legals, financial model, prospect research, website build all going at once — and treating them the way you'd delegate to a team. That's the shift from "AI as a question-and-answer box" to AI as day-to-day operating leverage.

Chapters:

• [00:00] Welcome — plus news on our Drinks Trust mentorship partnership
• [00:00] James on the state of AI at work: adoption speed, agents, and what "digital labour" means for your role
• [00:00] The challenge begins — business ideas crowdsourced and ranked live
• [00:00] GlassRadar is born: brand, financial model, legals and contracts built in parallel
• [00:00] The first 200 target venues, researched live
• [00:00] Q&A: confidentiality, model training vs memory, and what this all costs
• [00:00] Q&A: making AI remember who you are — and when not to use it
• [00:00] Q&A: driving change from inside a traditional industry
• [00:00] The reveal: GlassRadar's website goes live

Mentioned in the session:

• Anthropic Academy's free courses
• JobsGPT - for breaking your role into AI-exposed task
• WhisperFlow - AI voice-dictation tool
• James on LinkedIn - Connect with James who's kindly offered to field questions from attendees, he'll be back at a future Young Leaders session.

Other Resources

• Download James' Slides here

About Young Leaders

Young Leaders is a Fero initiative for ambitious professionals building careers in the drinks trade — sessions on commercial skills, business literacy and career development, and the conversations the industry isn't always having loudly enough.

Want to be in the room next time? Check out future sessions on our events page

‍