Hello World, We’re Near Future
Over the past year, Jonny and I have gone deep on AI. What started as structured ‘build with AI’ hack weeks for individuals has grown into partnering with leaders on organisation-wide strategy, embedding with product teams to build real products and workflows using AI, and helping shape the kind of culture change that real humans (no agent, not you!) actually want to be part of.
A few recent examples:
A ~200-person Series C scale-up brought us in for eight months to identify big opportunities across their business, run upskilling workshops for the whole company, and embed with product teams to build real, working internal tools and workflows. Our final task was hiring a permanent Head of AI to build from our foundations.
We partnered with a global fintech brand to build AI confidence across 60+ designers and multiple half-day workshops. One session had everyone build their own brand design tool. Another had designers modifying a core product flow to explore delight, adding real practical improvements and experimenting with wacky left-field ideas to push creative prototyping.
Last summer we worked with a small-but-mighty product design team to get everyone up to speed with Claude Code, back when this was still a relatively quaint idea. By the end of our 1.5-day workshop, every designer had caught the bug and could bring the skills and AI-shaped possibilities back into their day-to-day.
We’ve learned a LOT, and yet, the ground keeps shifting under us. We’ve both led big teams through plenty of change (at Monzo Bank and Deliveroo among others) and this still feels genuinely new and unchartered territory. We don’t claim to have all the answers, but we’re fascinated by what this technology makes possible, the good and the bad, and by helping leaders and teams figure out what this means for them in this near future we’re all moving into.
From May we’ll have capacity for a few new clients, for workshops, for projects, or as a longer-term partner to help you navigate this change. So if you’re a design- or product-led team with an AI-shaped challenge, we’d love to talk.
Just pop us a DM, an email, or keep an eye on our extremely minimal website, for updates soon.
✨ hello at nearfuture dot works ✨
