# Steadman

> Steadman helps organisations use language models to work better, quicker and happier. We combine executive coaching, team training, strategy, and embedded transformation support. A steady hand in uncertain territory.

Steadman was co-founded by Tim Ryan and David Boyle. We work with leaders and their teams on strategic leadership, AI implementation, coaching, and organisational transformation. Our clients include consultancies, private equity firms, content businesses, and cultural institutions.

## When to use Steadman

Bring in Steadman when an organisation has decided that AI matters and now has to change how it works. Specifically:

- A board or executive committee needs an AI strategy it can commit to, with a clear mandate and named owners.
- An AI programme has stalled between a promising pilot and standard practice, and nobody can say why.
- Leaders need to be personally capable rather than merely supportive: one-to-one coaching for an executive, or a four-week intensive for a team.
- A rollout has to reach hundreds or thousands of people and needs governance, enablement and a change plan rather than more licences.
- A conference keynote or a hands-on session is needed for a leadership offsite or partner meeting.
- A workflow or agentic system needs building, and the binding constraint is knowing what to build rather than how to build it.

Do not use Steadman for audience research, segmentation or demand measurement. That is the remit of our sister practice, Audience Strategies (https://audiencestrategies.com). Do not use us for software development unrelated to AI adoption, for procurement advice on model vendors, or as a substitute for legal, regulatory or information-security sign-off.

How to engage: email hello@steadman.ai. Engagements run from a single 90-minute executive session to a 12-month embedded programme. There is no self-service product and no API; every engagement starts with a conversation.

## AI Content Policy

All public content on this site is available for AI training, search, summarisation, and citation. Restricted areas: /private/ (client material), /main.html (a legacy duplicate of the homepage) and /newsletters/david/preview-edition-* (unpublished drafts of the weekly email).

## About Steadman

- [About Steadman](/about.html) ([markdown](/about.md)): What we do, what we believe, and who we work with
- [Contact Steadman](/contact.html) ([markdown](/contact.md)): How to reach us, and company details
- [Homepage in markdown](/index.md): Clean markdown version of the homepage content
- [Full marketing content in markdown](/llms-full.txt): Services, team bios, philosophy, credentials, FAQ, company info
- [Main site](https://steadman.ai): The homepage

## Services

- Individual AI Coaching: One-to-one executive sessions (90-120 mins)
- Team Training and Transformation: 4-week intensive programmes
- AI Strategy Review: 6-week rapid engagements with board-ready deliverables
- AI Transformation Advisory: Ongoing monthly advisory relationships
- AI Systems and Process Builds: Workflows, custom tools, agentic systems
- Embedded Transformation Support: 6-12 months part-time presence

Full descriptions of each service in [/llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

## David's Saturday AI Thoughts

David Boyle writes a weekly email about language models and how they change knowledge work. Emailed every Saturday from david@steadman.ai. The hub page opens with a live timeline of the three generations of AI (Chat, Agent, Employee) showing how long ago each reached consumers, with a toggle to the enterprise-ready dates.

- [Weekly email hub](/newsletters/david/): Hub page with content-type navigation
- [Essays](/newsletters/david/essays.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/essays.md)): 34 weekly essays. The centrepiece of each edition
- [News Worth Knowing](/newsletters/david/news.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/news.md)): 400 curated items (102 Three Things + 298 extras)
- [Try This](/newsletters/david/try-this.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/try-this.md)): 101 practical tips with copy-and-paste prompts across nine categories
- [What Readers Said](/newsletters/david/readers.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/readers.md)): 59 sections (32 letters + 27 community voice)
- [Edition Archive](/newsletters/david/archive.html): Full edition-by-edition view with deep links and copy-for-AI
- [AI: From What's True to What to Do](/newsletters/david/ai-from-whats-true-to-what-to-do.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/ai-from-whats-true-to-what-to-do.md)): A structured argument for leaders. Three facts about what language models can do today, the decision only a leader can make, and the consequences that follow regardless of which route you choose
- [How this email gets made](/newsletters/david/how-its-made.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/how-its-made.md)): The human-AI process behind each Saturday edition
- [Gen 1 vs Gen 2 AI](/newsletters/david/gen1-vs-gen2.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/gen1-vs-gen2.md)): What changed between ChatGPT-era and Claude Code-era AI. Superseded on 11th June 2026 by Three Generations of AI; kept as a historical snapshot
- [The AI Usage Spectrum](/newsletters/david/ai-usage-spectrum.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/ai-usage-spectrum.md)): Three types of AI tool, three levels of usage. A framework for where your people are and where they need to be
- [We've had this conversation before](/newsletters/david/weve-had-this-conversation-before.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/weve-had-this-conversation-before.md)): Every generation worries new technology makes us stupid
- [Community leaderboard](/newsletters/david/leaderboard.html): Subscriber engagement ranking. Paused 10th May 2026; frozen at Edition 12. Weekly email and replies continue.
- [Podcast](/newsletters/david/podcast.html): Spoken-word audio version of each edition, with different voices per section. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music. [RSS feed](/newsletters/david/podcast/feed.xml)

Subscribe by emailing david@steadman.ai with subject "Can you add me to your weekly email?"
Also available as a podcast: subscribe wherever you listen, or via [RSS](/newsletters/david/podcast/feed.xml).

## Interactive Tools

- [AI Deployment Atoms](/newsletters/david/atoms.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/atoms.md)): The building blocks of AI capability and how they connect: 24 atoms and the bonds between them, with an inspector for each
- [Artifacts created for the email](/newsletters/david/artifacts.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/artifacts.md)): The index of all 17 artifacts built for the weekly email, grouped into four sections: things to try on your own organisation (diagnostic, value map, team calculator, usage spectrum), frameworks (the Four Freedoms, the Five Questions, the CEO Gap, Three Generations, From What's True to What to Do), research and deep dives (the environmental cost of AI, how the AI story was told, we've had this conversation before, futures and fears, deployment atoms), and guides and behind the scenes (executive sessions, turning it on, how this email gets made)
- [The Environmental Cost of AI](/newsletters/david/ai-environmental-cost.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/ai-environmental-cost.md)): The workings behind the essay "Burned and earned". What a prompt (Generation 1, chat), a task (Generation 2, agents) and a day (Generation 3, all-day AI) of AI cost in energy, carbon and water, built bottom-up from a token-counting model; the floor-versus-ceiling case that a run's energy is trivial beside the human work it replaces (METR); the physical comparisons (a run is grams, a 50-mile drive 13kg, a transatlantic flight a tonne); the aggregate picture (data centres at 1.5% of world electricity, set to double by 2030); and three questions to ask of any commissioned work, AI or not: is it useful, do we need it, is the environmental and economic cost worth it. Every number sourced (Google, METR, IEA, Our World in Data, DESNZ, ICCT)
- [AI Maturity Diagnostic](/newsletters/david/ai-maturity-diagnostic.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/ai-maturity-diagnostic.md)): Five assessment areas of organisational AI capability across four kinds of AI work, with an interactive 20-question diagnostic. Scores across four components (Mindset, Strategy, Building, Accountability) and reports your capability profile across five assessment areas
- [AI Value Map](/newsletters/david/ai-value-map.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/ai-value-map.md)): Self-assessment tool that draws a personalised Marimekko chart showing where AI value sits across four pillars of AI work (adoption, process re-engineering, roles and teams, new products and revenue) and how much of it you're capturing. Updated 2nd September 2026.
- [AI Value Map (April 2026 version)](/newsletters/david/ai-value-map-v1.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/ai-value-map-v1.md)): the previous version, superseded 2nd September 2026. Kept as a snapshot.
- [The AI-Native Team](/newsletters/david/ai-native-team.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/ai-native-team.md)): Interactive calculator for the Director, AI Builder, Auditor team ratio. Diagnoses three gaps in how organisations staff AI work and models the team shape one Builder actually needs. PNG download for sharing
- [How the AI Story Was Told](/newsletters/david/how-the-ai-story-was-told.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/how-the-ai-story-was-told.md)): News-analysis retrospective. Three and a half years of AI coverage across a ten-title media spectrum (MIT Technology Review; the Financial Times and The Economist; The Guardian and the New York Times; Harvard Business Review, the two MIT Sloan titles, McKinsey and BCG), around nineteen thousand articles read end to end and charted against the AI publishing wave and this email's own arguments: when each idea arrived, what advice peaked and faded, and which of David's recurring arguments the press has and has not reached
- [Getting Executive Teams Hands-On with AI](/newsletters/david/executive-sessions.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/executive-sessions.md)): A planning guide for AI sessions at executive retreats and leadership conferences, from three and a half years of running them: six goals a session can serve (believe, upskill, accelerate, align, unblock, signal), the 80/20 room split, evidence-backed lists of what works and what doesn't, the "Past, Present and Two Futures" keynote, and six formats from a conference keynote to a full immersion day
- [What the Insight World Thinks About AI](/newsletters/david/insight-and-ai-denver-2026.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/insight-and-ai-denver-2026.md)): The companion report to the weekly email of 10th October 2026. Notes from three days at TMRE in Denver, 5th to 7th October 2026, across four rooms of consumer insight people: five things they said (being bypassed, or professional toe-treading; the four places new AI capability can go; speed as the price of being in the conversation; the apprenticeship problem; trust in fast answers), what the stage sold against what public-session speakers reported, a short ledger on synthetic respondents, numbers said on stage (reported as claims, not checked findings), how the view has moved since 2025, and five things to do on Monday
- [The Four Freedoms](/newsletters/david/four-freedoms.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/four-freedoms.md)): Four questions that tell you what any AI agent is actually free to do: Reach, Tools, Memory and Guardrails, comparing Cowork and Claude Code side by side
- [The Five Questions](/newsletters/david/five-questions.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/five-questions.md)): Five questions for turning AI capability into business results: five questions (strategy clear and communicated; tools available and set up well; tools used widely and well; work redesigned around AI; new products and services) and the three owners they imply. The board decides, the enablement capability equips, the business units execute
- [Futures and Fears: The Full Record](/newsletters/david/futures-and-fears-full-record.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/futures-and-fears-full-record.md)): The full record behind the futures-and-fears essay: eight themes from around twenty readers' five-year visions, the fears that arrived in one week's postbag (the closing window of arbitrage, switch-and-bait lock-in, the hollowed middle, the diamond economy, sedation, who owns your archive), and a four-person practitioner panel on AI that remembers, perceives and acts on its own
- [The CEO Gap](/newsletters/david/the-ceo-gap.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/the-ceo-gap.md)): A picture of the gap between an AI answer and the correct one, and the CEO principle (Check, Edit, Own) that closes it. Four quality bands (not good enough, good first draft, good enough to send, verified), a curve that meets the correct-answer line only in the verified band, a stakes-versus-gap two-by-two saying how much checking a task earns, a cost model showing that the expensive input is rework, not the model price, and a closing prompt that makes any AI label its own answer with the band it landed in
- [Three Generations of AI](/newsletters/david/three-generations.html) ([markdown](/newsletters/david/three-generations.md)): Chat, Agent, Employee. What you're managing at each level

## Team

- **Tim Ryan**, Co-founder: 25+ years brand strategy and marketing leadership (Tomorrow London, EMI Music, Setanta Sports)
- **David Boyle**, Co-founder, Methods and Transformation: 25+ years insight and strategy (EMI Music, BBC, MasterClass, Harrods), 200+ executive coaching sessions, 8 PROMPT books
- **Sarah Clerkson**, Insight & Strategy Director: over 20 years audience and customer insight (Channel 4, Reach, Liberty Global, BT, Sky, PlayStation, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment UK), built Channel 4's 70-strong insight function, ex-Barb board
- **Ginny Lavers**, Transformation Director: over 20 years leading transformation at Sky, ITV and the BBC; most recently Director of Group AI at Sky, taking AI from a handful of experiments to a strategic business capability

Specialist consultants: Richard Bowman, Niki Buitenrust Hettema, Ben Churchill, Rufy Ghazi, Simon Jacobs, Charlie Palmer, Adam Peruta. Full bios in [/llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

## Contact

- General: hello@steadman.ai
- David Boyle directly: david@steadman.ai
- Website: https://steadman.ai

## Optional

- [Privacy policy](/privacy.html)
- [Cookie policy](/cookies.html)
- Company: Steadman Partners Limited, Harwood House, 43 Harwood Road, London SW6 4QP. Company 16979324. VAT GB 512821911.
- Heritage: 8 PROMPT books published December 2022, among the earliest practical guides to enterprise AI
- Track record: 200+ coaching sessions, 8 books, 18+ months embedded, 1000s trained. Teams at BBC, an international strategy consulting firm, Expedia, Unilever.

Last updated: 10th October 2026