you have been to Amsterdam.

Yeah, I've been.

Las, las, lads.

No, it was not.

It was a work trip.

It was a work trip.

There was a photo booth show in Amsterdam, which is fantastic.

And what are we looking forward to in the next year coming in with the new stuff? What's different?

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the million-copy best-selling author of the Geraldine Steele series, Lee Russell.

Hello, everyone.

Just for a moment there, it sounded as though I had won that award.

I'm sorry to disappoint you.

It's a great honour to be invited to present this award.

And the shortlist for the 2026 Dagger in the Library Award is Paula Hawkins, J.D. Kirk, Claire McIntosh, Frieda McFadden, Abiy Mukherjee, Tim Sullivan.

And the winner is Tim Sullivan.

And obviously, thankfully, you're in our circle.

I think there's levels to that game, right? So you don't need to pivot your entire company, launch a piece of software that you're going to try and scale to thousands, millions of users and kind of go on that journey and have that, you know, eight figure exit plus.

That's your moonshot.

That's the highest level you can play the game at.

But I think every business needs to become what we call AI native in the way that you deliver value.

And that is, I think, really difficult for companies at the minute because they're just sprinkling AI on top of what they used to do.

That doesn't work.

and i think there's like a competitive advantage with which comes with being the person who can vision like have the vision of the different future because i think at the moment it's like well as long as i'm keeping up with others and my business is the same it's okay but actually if you've got the opportunity if particularly if you're running a small practice or starting now or thinking about how you're going to change some you're thinking about using some new software for example actually is that the right answer and what if this what if you re-looked at the whole process what would you do then

Mm-hmm.

"What do we need to give in order to get a result, a, a working feature or functionality out of that program?" And actually de-risk it for us, but then de-risk it for the client.

They lower their costs with AI, those kind of things.

So you, you've gotta be thinking about data security.

I am forever watching through my hands as my clients kind of vibe code things together, or the most recent ones is installing OpenClaude or whatever, MaltBot, whatever it's called this week.

I had a client that's installed that into all of their Slack channels and all of their systems, and I had a, a, a conversation with him and said, "Hey, I think you need to be really careful with this because I don't think you understand the attack, what's called the attack vector.

It's, it's like the surface area of the ways in which I can breach your systems." And he's like, "Ah, no one really knows about our company.

[laughs]

Mm.

We're getting more and more inquiries.

So we're, we're hosting the wedding and DJ-ing at the wedding, and then the following day they're doing some form of event for all the family to enjoy the wedding again.

Or if some people can't get to the wedding, they're invited to the second day.

Always.

I literally, I, I, I'm a firm believer, there was a, um, I won't go into details, but I had a message this morning, wants to cancel their wedding this week, unfortunately, unforeseen circumstances with her family.

Really sad.

Um, but obviously, why they, we then go back to them and say, "Thank you very much.

I did say

to someone the other day, we had an amazing wedding last Saturday and a couple of things just went wrong.

But I said, pulled the groom's side, I just said, he was like getting a bit upset that we were overrunning and he goes, But no one knows.

No, exactly.

Apart from us three.

Yeah.

Because he had literally...

to give these to people that know what they're doing and coach them first.

So tell us anything that you remember looking back and you think, I don't know why I did

that.

Playing music, what I thought people wanted was a moustache.

I thought because you're older, you want older music where... no they they don't they with the radio now they listen to oh people say to me oh yeah so i always when we have a meeting with couples before and i was what um what radio station do you listen to and you'll be so you'll be blown away by the rate like oh i listen to history i'm like you're 65 years old I didn't think you'll be list I thought you'd be on a magic or a heart or a smooth but so you can never judge a book by its cover and I think that's when you look at couples as well I remember doing a wedding once and um they were just like the normal couple like just look to look at them but they were like no we want heavy metal we want rock and I was like I would never have got that from you two at all.

So I think like learning over the years, you never judge a book by its cover.

And I think communication with couples is so important.

Like the whole music side of things.

So how has the industry changed from when you started to where you are now in terms of marketing and getting clients and all that kind of thing?

So you then went to build on something that protects children online.

Yes.

Tell me a bit about that.

So this was with a company called Smoothworn.

This is really where I started to learn about machine learning, natural language processing, and, you know, intelligent system design so Smoove will essentially will analyze children's behavior online via their school devices so in the UK you must have active monitoring on children's school devices so we'll know what they're doing how they're chatting with each other what they're visiting typing all of this stuff and then we must flag safeguarding risk to the safeguarding lead within the school who can then decide like is this a police matter do i need to intervene with a child maybe health services whatever it is and the same in america um and so we were we were operating across millions of students and and working with government agencies to take like school shootings counter-terrorism events things like that It's a very revealing job, like searching through that data.

You learn about some pretty horrendous things and the prevalence of some very dark aspects of our society.

But that was a...

So by 2030, 35 and 40, what do you think the differences are going to be in the IL world and us personally for businesses, day-to-day life, people? I think it's pretty safe

[laughs]

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I, I love everything about this from top to bottom.

I love how fucking janky and stupid is, it is.

I, I love how fucking problematic it is in the background with all the weird shit happening.

Um, I love how, like, it's just like Roger Corman, like, "We gotta get by.

We have to make this happen no matter fucking what.

Yeah.