Will Collins

Exciting news! 🔈 🔉 🔊 Meta has announced the opening of a new $16M audio research lab in Cambridge along the Government’s Ox-Cam corridor, advancing sound technology for our next-generation AR and AI glasses. 📢 With motion-tracking zones, state of the art reverberation chambers and sensor-equipped living spaces, the facility trains wearables to amplify what you want to hear and filter out what you don’t, so you can stay connected in the noisiest environments. 📢 As our largest engineering base outside the US, the UK is not just planning for the future of AI and immersive computing, it’s engineering it. Meta is proud to support that momentum with the tools, research, and partnerships to help it thrive. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/d5CjFgTk #MetaAI #AudioTech #AudioInnovation

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My keynote at The Podcast Show highlighted a topic close to my heart and Acast’s core mission: the expanding definition of 'open' in podcasting, and what it means for creators. Have a read of the full post here if you’re keen to understand how an open ecosystem - in many senses of the word - fosters independence, innovation and even more diverse monetization opportunities. It's a bright future for creators https://lnkd.in/dMR3ZEu9 #Podcasting #CreatorEconomy

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The UK’s EIS and SEIS schemes have powered thousands of startups over the past decade, including CROSSIP, the startup I co-founded. But while founders and investors have moved fast, the system hasn’t. 🐢 The investment limits for these schemes, along with the VCT programme, haven’t changed in nearly ten years. Inflation has eroded their real impact, reducing the capital available to the next generation of innovative companies trying to fund R&D, hire teams, and scale from seed to Series A. This isn’t about tax breaks. It’s about keeping the UK’s startup funding pipeline fit for purpose, and maintaining our position as a global hub for innovation. That's why I’ve signed the Growth Beyond Limits open letter calling on the government to increase the EIS and VCT investment limits, so founders can keep building ambitious companies right here in the UK. 💪 If you agree, you can add your name here: https://lnkd.in/eNYQgV6g

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Fantastic work from the team with the launch of the new Straker Verify node, available within the n8n ecosystem, addresses a critical challenge faced by businesses scaling content creation and localisation using AI: maintaining translation quality and compliance at speed and scale. The option of Quality assurance on genAI content for their 230,000 customers.

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Today, I am proud to announce the release of a landmark research report on Commercial Open Source (COSS). The results are striking. The study, which spans 25 years, provides clear evidence that no matter which constituency you represent—whether you are an investor, founder or community member—venture funding improves your success metrics. Investors receive higher returns, founders build more durable companies, and communities grow their size, diversity and influence. Commercial Open Source is not just one way to build a tech company; it's arguably the most successful way. https://lnkd.in/g9nV9vva

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Would you rather give up your washing machine or your social media accounts? Your smartphone or antibiotics? I started asking myself these questions to figure out which innovations actually matter - and realised I'd been thinking about it all wrong. Humanity has been gifted by innovation. We have technology that increasingly feels like magic. Yet research shows Americans and Europeans are more concerned than excited about AI in daily life. Why the disconnect? I mapped 30+ innovations by their cost and social benefit (subjective, imperfect - happy to debate). The pattern: while the speed of innovation has increased, the net social benefit has decreased over time. Much of the low-hanging fruit is gone. Where past innovations saved us from deadly diseases and strenuous labour, many recent ones push against the upper rungs of Maslow's hierarchy. The marginal returns are smaller. This reframes how I think about progress. Every major innovation isn't a gift - it's a trade. You lose some, but you should gain more. In the past, innovation was an obvious steal. Vaccines, antibiotics, the printing press had benefits so massive that almost any cost was worth it. But when innovations don't offer outsized benefits anymore, we resist even small costs. We have also come to expect miracles without trade-offs, as if they were a birthright. Yet innovation without risk is hardly possible. AI puts us at a fork in the road. It could reopen high-benefit territory: breakthroughs in medicine, science, material wellbeing. Or we could squander it optimising for addictive content and labour disruption without absorbing the downsides. We're not owed good outcomes in the future. "It worked in the past, so it will work in the future" is very flawed logic. Making innovation worthwhile does not happen automatically. "You do not get what you want. You get what you negotiate." - Harvey Mackay https://lnkd.in/da3iJEpG

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The EU Inc news may feel like technocratic detail but is hugely exciting. Finally we have a single corporate structure that works across all EU borders, a unified share option framework and a digital onboarding system that will make it possible for founders to literally start a pan-European company from their bedroom in minutes. Having a quick, easy, cheap transparent way to start a company is obviously the first win. There is a reason why many companies prefer incorporating as a UK Ltd or a Delaware Inc. But the bigger win here is the cross-border nature of the structure. It's not just that you can now start a company easily in Germany, it's that you can, in that same company, hire product talent from Sweden, French engineers and a sales team from Spain, Italy and Ireland, treat them the same way, have them on the same comp and equity programs, etc, etc. It's an exponential explosion in supply-side talent combinations. It will take a while for this reality to hit home and people to start fully using it but, as they do, huge change to the sorts of companies you can build in Europe and the velocity at which you can do it.

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2026 is going to reward speed and punish sloppy decisions. I sat down for a quick Q&A with Improbable on what founders should prioritise right now, and where the real trade-offs show up day to day. One word to describe my ambition this year is velocity. The challenge is increasing pace without letting quality slip, especially once delivery, sales, and engineering all start scaling at the same time. I also shared why I think AI’s biggest shift this year is moving from insight generation to decision automation – and here’s what I mean by that. Most businesses don’t struggle to generate insights. They struggle to convert them into decisions that hold up under pressure, with imperfect data, shifting constraints, and real-world consequences. Decision automation is about shrinking the gap between “we know” and “we do”. That does not mean handing control to a black box. It means raising the quality of decisions at pace, because the system makes assumptions explicit, tests scenarios quickly, and flags where confidence is low. The organisations that win this year will be the ones that can move from insight to action reliably and repeatably. And that’s where Kallikor fits - helping teams test decisions against operational reality before they commit time, money, or capacity. Read the full interview here: https://lnkd.in/e3XAn9sv 

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The MOJ AI Action Plan for Justice demonstrates a clear ambition to realise the benefits of AI with a 3-year plan - build strong foundations > embed AI more deeply > scale. The department has identified four high-impact categories which are Chat, Search, Speech, Automation and Coding. These categories will look to: ✅ Equip every staff member with a secure AI assistant ✅ Accelerate insight with AI-powered search and knowledge retrieval ✅ Use speech and translation AI to reduce admin burdens on front-line staff ✅ Automate repetitive admin tasks with AI-powered agents ✅ Support the use of AI coding assistants to accelerate development and modernise legacy systems Notably the action plan calls out: ➡️ Access for staff: commitment to equip all 90,000+ staff with enterprise AI assistants by the end of 2025. The MOJ is also implementing premium versions of Copilot and is piloting ChatGPT Enterprise. ➡️'Fail Fast' Approach: adopt a “test-and-learn” commercial model, running short proof-of-value pilots. POVs will be evaluated using clear and measurable metrics (e.g., accuracy, user satisfaction, cost-benefit, time savings). POVs will then scale, pivot or stop based on evidence. ➡️People-centred approach to design and adoption: engaging users early, including training initiatives and proactive job redesign, so that AI enables human talent, skill and judgement, but does not replace it. ➡️Streamlining engagement with suppliers: reducing procurement cycles, adopting proactive supplier engagement, and ensuring commercial frameworks are fit for AI’s unique needs, removing unnecessary barriers. Well-thought through, robust plan I think 💡 Summary screenshot below...

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“Our innovation unit was dissolved, and we didn’t see it coming.”   Last week, we spoke with a few members of Innov8rs.co Community about how innovation teams can avoid redundancy in 2026.   It became clear that safety is self-perceived, not structural.   Teams underestimate how quickly trust erodes once leadership language, collaboration with the BU, or visibility shifts.   Generally, there is low innovation literacy in the core.   That makes it risky when your most important stakeholder, that one leader who kind-of gets it and supports your efforts, leaves.   It doesn’t need to be that way, and in fact, it shouldn’t be that way. And yes, there ***is*** another way.   A handful of innovation leaders has already committed to our “Role Reset” program.   Facilitated by Frank Mattes, we’ll support a small group of innovation leaders from different industries and non-competing companies to ✔️ Spot the early warning signs your role is drifting ✔️ Create a strong, value-creating mandate ✔️ Show visible BU traction fast ✔️ Develop a credible case for C-suite sponsorship ✔️ Scale a sharpened role across the org   If you are leading innovation in your org, and you’re looking for ways to regain credibility, reframe KPIs, and rebuild trust before it's too late... let’s talk.

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Kicked off London Tech Week on CNBC’s Squawk Box with Karen Tso, Steve Sedgwick, and Arjun Kharpal. Jensen Huang told Keir Starmer today the UK is in a Goldilocks zone for AI: strong talent, solid capital, ambitious founders. I agree. It's about execution from here! At Synthesia, we’re living this every day. Our team just became the first in the world to train a video model on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in Google Cloud. That speed translates into real-world impact: faster content creation and more productivity for our customers. We also covered: – What that speed of execution means for our customers, with companies such as Wise creating training content 20% faster with AI video. – Why Europe needs to get serious about AI infrastructure. – And how AI video is fundamentally changing content creation, with personalization and interactivity high on our product roadmap this year.

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