London - Fero's (formerly Ferovinum) second Young Leaders event held last week brought back a familiar crowd of faces, and a fair few new ones, for an evening dedicated to a topic nobody in the drinks trade can ignore right now: AI. James Grant, co-founder of AI consultancy iwantmore.ai, led the session and talked through what it actually means for the people building careers in this industry.
Grant, works with some bigger players across drinks, but also works with clients outside the industry as well, bringing a unique perspective. Helping drinks businesses was a passion project born out of James' own love of wine (he's currently finishing his WSET diploma, nerves and all). His clients span recognisable names in the trade, and he's been on stage recently at events like the London Wine Fair.
Before diving into demos, Grant ran through a quick reality check on how fast this technology is moving and how far behind most organisations still are (both in the drinks industry and across other fields).
A few numbers stuck with the room:
- Adoption is accelerating at a pace nothing else in tech history has matched. Mobile phones took 16 years to reach 100 million users. The internet took seven. Facebook took four and a half. ChatGPT did it in three months, with platforms like Gemini having since crossed a billion users.
- The gap between leadership expectation and employee capacity is widening. In one major annual workplace survey James referenced, a majority of business leaders say they need higher productivity, while a larger share of employees say they're already maxed out. Grant also highlighted that the humans working are often interrupted by notifications hundreds of times a day, on average. That gap is exactly why so many organisations are now exploring "digital labour" (i.e. agents) to pick up some of the slack.
- Despite all this, AI literacy in the room and in most businesses James works with remains low. Across the thousands of people his firm has surveyed, roughly half rate themselves as AI novices, and most organisations offer no formal training at all.
His practical takeaway for the room: break your job down into its component tasks, be honest about which of them AI could already do, and take ownership of your own AI literacy, because very few employers are going to hand it to you.
Rather than run through a string of demos, James set the room with a challenge: build an entire drinks business from scratch, live, crowd-sourced, in roughly half an hour, using nothing but AI tools and audience suggestions.
You can watch full session here.
While it was gloriously chaotic, there were some really practical hacks that could help speed up adoption, alongside stories of individuals who a have benefited from leaning into their own AI journey.
Some hacks included: how to and the benefit of working across multiple terminal windows running Claude simultaneously
- How to and the benefit of working across multiple terminal windows running Claude simultaneously
- Built a financial model, monetising via a B2B venue-listing model with an advertising layer, and set a target of 8,000 signed-up venues within three years
- Generating brand concepts and a full brand book, iterating live on colour palettes and logo concepts
- Drafting legal documents, including a first pass at employment contracts and an NDA reviewed by an AI "legal agent"
- Building a working website, in Claude Code, based on the generated brand assets
It wasn't seamless. James was candid throughout about bad prompts, dead ends and the risks of rubber-stamping AI output without checking it ("I'm just going to press yes on all of them. Don't ever do that").
The floor was opened for questions throughout the build, and the conversation ranged well beyond the demo itself:
Topics covered include:
- Cost and "tokenomics": Grant provided some things to consider when about genuine budgeting for businesses
- Data privacy: A clear practical distinction was drawn between model training and memory and some pros and cons to consider when looking at paid vs free models.
- Carbon footprint: With examples of how different clients are considering this moving forward.
- Job security and over-reliance: With practical tips on how to think about the future of roles within an organisation.
- Driving change from within an organisation: Rather than waiting for leadership to mandate change and the real benefits of doing this.
- Insights into why the drinks trade lags behind: With a real understanding of why drinks may be slower to adopt AI, but some meaningful reasons for people to start now.
- How AI is being used in wine production itself: Again Grant shared real examples of what he has seen in vineyards and automation even in agriculture.
If there was one thread running through the whole evening, it was this: the technology is moving faster than almost anyone's literacy with it, but the barrier to getting genuine use of out these tools is lower than most people assume. And we still have a long way to go to unlocking the full potential of these tools as well.
The session ended with Grant pointing people to where they could further access free tools to help encourage them on starting their journey with AI.
An insightful and fun evening and a huge thank you to James for a brilliantly led session and to everyone who came along.
Fero's next Young Leaders event will be "Young Innovators in the Drinks Industry: Redefining What's Next" and will be held on Thursday, October 22nd. Speakers will be announced shortly.
