he was raising funds for mental health treatment because he suffered a few tough years himself but now encourages others to just talk to someone and don't bottle it up don't suffer in silence is his message and david has been telling me his story and indeed his mom's story

my mom passed away in 2009 you see and i want to help people who have lost their loved ones through the bad times and good times you see so I want to put out there that people are not alone.

When your mum died, had she been ill? She was ill, then she was brought to Mercy Hospital and she got the call that on the 31st of October, she was brought into hospital and in Cork and the five weeks she passed away, you see, on the 24th of November 2009.

Okay, okay.

tough on you when you found your mental health in a bit of crisis afterwards,

did you? Yes, yeah, because I was just finishing college in Tralee, you see, and I was coming back and forth, back and forth from Tralee to Cork, you see.

And I came to, I said, I finished my course fairly early finished my exams, and then I was looking after my mum.

My dad was with me, and my sister was with me as well, you see.

And David has been telling me his story and indeed his mom's story.

My mom passed away in 2009.

You see, and I want to help people who have lost their loved ones through the bad times and good times, you see, so.

I want to put out there that people are not alone.

When your mum died, had she been ill? She was ill, then she was brought to Mercy Hospital and she got the call that on the 31st of October she was brought into hospital in Cork and the five weeks she passed away, you see, on the 24th of November 2009.

Okay,

And that was very, very tough on you when you found your mental health in a bit of crisis afterwards, did you? Yes,

yeah, because I was just finishing college in Tralee, you see, and I was coming back and forth, back and forth from Tralee to Cork, you see.

And how did you decide which two to kind of, or which two or three to start with, the tax savers for SMEs, the making tax digital, and then the spending quiz? You know, we heard that they were requested by the customers, but how did you prioritize those particular ones?

Yeah.

So, you know, Starling, we're really fortunate.

We have quite a disproportional share of the SME market for a bank of our size.

So, you know, we have a very healthy kind of customer base of SME.

So we never wanted the assistant to be something that kind of purely serves retail customers.

We always wanted it to also be able to assist business customers with their kind of unique needs and you know we know there's a lot of change going on at the moment around making tax digital starlings also acquired a company called ember that provides a kind of suite of digital accounting tools so so really it's a perfect opportunity for us to kind of lean into that angle and provide some assistance through ai which can genuinely help with solving some of those common uh business banking kind of everyday friction points for customers so again with the changes going on at the moment making tax digital was the obvious starting place and we hear a lot of kind of feedback from customers as those that they don't really know necessarily where to start with making text digital.

Kind of talk me through the move from AI that gives sort of financial information to AI that can actually take action here and sort of where's the sort of value for customers there? Is this something that they're asking for? Is it just a natural evolution of the product?

It looked like there was nothing happening, and all of a sudden, Linda Daly snipes up a break, puts it over the bar, gives you a two-point cushion.

Yeah, well, look, the, the one thing I've tried to do since I came here is build strength and depth.

And when you are able to turn around this evening and turn to girls who have three county titles and two Munster titles each and bring them from the bench to see out the game, like, these four weeks in a row is, is quite tough.

And we lost Scan from last weekend due to, you know, due to a small minor injury.

She just wasn't able to start.

But I asked her 10 minutes to go, was she ready? And I tell you, the answer was yes, and there was no doubt in her mind that she was, she was going to come in and contribute.

But she's a great girl, and as is Laois and Rachel, and it's just great to have options.

We hand you back to the studio.

Peter's brother, David.

Look, we're ecstatic.

Got to say, though, I'm feeling sorry for her.

Uh, obviously Diane and her family.

The poor girl and the family have gone through an awful loss.

They thought they had the right person that actually carried out that crime.

We knew that they didn't.

Do you have any feelings about how the case was handled at the time? David told me about something that happened when Peter was first pulled in for questioning.

Bludgeoning Diane to death and then, you know, assaulting and mutilating her with it, um, was unspeakable and gruesome beyond belief.

They say Peter was in possession of that crowbar.

Was he on the night? Did he have it with him in the pub while he was playing darts? Where was he? He's been drinking heavily all day.

He's left that pub, right? So, where's the crowbar? Has anybody seen it? Anybody given it to him? It's not in his pockets, uh, you know, 'cause it was quite large.

So, he's playing darts.

What's he done? Has he gone home and got it? So for him to get there, wherever this crowbar's allegedly come from, then he's had to walk all the way back.

He's, uh, let, supposed to have committed that crime, and then he's supposed to have got away with it without being seen, but he's drunk.

His route that day was Borough Road.

This is Peter Sullivan's brother, David.

He was looking for somebody with a big nose and a tattoo and his name, uh, being Pete.

And then he, "Oh, Peter was in there.

He was playing darts." My mum worked, uh, for the council, and one of her colleagues was actually pulled in, and he was interviewed.

And when he went back to work, he was talking with Mum, and he said, "God help anybody if they get pulled in there.

Hope to God they don't go for Peter." And then, if she was here now, she'd tell you exactly the same.

But, uh, but she was worried for him because she knew of his mental capacity, the way he was.

His family managed to see him once.

And then sort of, yeah, can you can you lean into that a little bit more in terms of that sort of leap from a technical and a cultural perspective to sort of change the way that both the app works and also how people would work with it?

Yeah, so, I mean, from a technical perspective, we've really rebuilt how we ship AI at Starling from the ground up.

Before Starling Assistant, we launched a few in-app customer-facing features, spending intelligence, scam intelligence.

Each of those took a critical kind of massive engineering effort to put together, right? And we're talking...

roughly six months build into each of those.

With the styling assistant, we really wanted to move at a much faster pace with this technology.

So we can now ship new agents in a matter of weeks instead of months.

But yeah, do we think this is sort of a real paradigm shift that we are genuinely moving towards and the big players kind of need to get themselves in order because this is the future?

What can you tell me about the framework?

So, the framework goes back to the formation and launch of the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership a little over four years ago, and as I think you and listeners to this podcast know better than anyone else, when it comes to trying to figure out how to have safe and trustworthy digital products and services, but not unduly constrain people's human rights, including the right to freedom of expression, this is a really challenging matter.

And so our partnership really brought together companies providing all kinds of different digital services around, I think, a simple but powerful idea about how to deal with this challenge, which is that instead of trying to standardize what types of content or conduct should be allowed online, standardize the practices that all companies are using to address whatever risks are particular to those products or services.

So rather than saying, "Hey, this is trying to get companies to agree on what types of, you know, content should be promoted or demoted on their sites," or, you know, try to agree on definitions of really contested things like hate speech or what have you, the idea is that all the companies are more or less using the same types of practices as part of their trust and safety operations, and let's clarify those.

And so we do that with a framework that has five overarching commitments that all companies can make that are around product development, product governance, which is, you know, the rules and community guidelines, what have you, enforcement of the product governance, improvement over time, and transparency with the public.

So that's the framework, and we've built that out also to include a way of assessing how companies are implementing those practices.

And all of this is, I think, aimed to be scalable and proportionate (laughs), um, so that companies can align with these best practices without expecting, you know, small startups to do the same things that a big company like Meta or Microsoft is doing.

What's the main thing that you hope that they get out of looking at the standard?