SXSW London — on being at the table, literally.

There is something quietly radical about sitting across from someone and giving them your full, undivided attention. No deck. No agenda. No metrics. Just a conversation about the thing they are trying to build, and how to make it more true to what they intend.

This week I had the privilege of doing exactly that, as a mentor at SXSW London — five back-to-back sessions at Table 20 in The Courthouse Hotel in Shoreditch, under the Venture track. Across those eighty minutes, I spoke with founders, strategists, and creative leaders navigating one of the most disorienting moments brands have ever faced: building identity in an era when the tools that shape perception are increasingly automated.

"The question I kept returning to across every conversation was the same one I carry into my work every day: how do you keep a brand human when algorithms are doing more of the work?"

The sessions covered a lot of ground — brand architecture, building creative systems that scale, the difference between using AI and actually mastering it. But the through-line, whether we were talking about a personal brand or an enterprise one, was always intentionality. The brands that will endure are not the ones with the most sophisticated tooling. They are the ones with the clearest sense of what they stand for, and the discipline to let that guide every decision — including which decisions to automate and which to protect.