The Question Hasn't Changed. Everything Else Has.

The Question Hasn't Changed. Everything Else Has.

My first job out of university in 1995 was sitting between two radios in a Sydney office, both tuned to talkback. One in each ear. I'd taken a psychology degree from a regional university and arrived in the city looking for work. What I found was a desk, a stack of paper, a pencil, and the job of listening for our clients' names on the airwaves and writing down what was said about them.

In 1995 this kind of work still needed a degree. Not because the tools were complicated, but because the job itself was linguistic. You'd hear a five-minute political interview at 7:14 in the morning and have 10 minutes to produce a paragraph that captured the substance accurately, briefly, and in clean prose.

A few metres away, another team worked through the morning's newspapers with scissors and glue, cutting articles and pasting them onto backing sheets to be couriered to clients before lunch. That team was led by John Croll, who'd end up co-founding Truescope with me twenty-four years later. Broadcast monitors and press clippers. That was the job when I started. Honest work, but the technology hadn't changed much since the 1950s.

By 1996 we were building our first digital tools. Windows 3.1, WordPerfect for the writing, a search system called ISYS for hunting through what we'd already captured, and a system called Telex to move data between capital cities so a story monitored in one office could land on a client's desk in another the same day. Crude by modern standards, but a real step up from scissors and glue.

The bigger leap came in 2003. I was leading a team building one of the first web-based media monitoring platforms in the world. SaaS wasn't a term in common use yet. The idea that a client in Brisbane or Perth could log in to a browser and see their coverage in close to real time felt slightly miraculous. We spent a lot of nights on it. It worked.

Looking back, that was the first time I felt the particular feeling that comes from being just ahead of an obvious wave. The technology was crude compared to what came later, but the shape of the future was clear: this work would never go back to pencils and paper.

Then came the long middle. Search got better. Social media arrived. The volume of content exploded from manageable to absurd. Every company in the space, my own included, was bolting online onto systems built for print and broadcast. Then social bolted onto that. The industry kept building, and so did we.

People sometimes ask why I never moved into an adjacent industry, or a quieter one. The honest answer is that media intelligence has never stopped changing, and the potential locked inside vast amounts of media data has always been a little further ahead than the tools we had to work with. Every few years the gap between what was possible and what was buildable narrowed, and another door opened. That gap is closing faster now than at any point in my career.

In 2019, after working together that whole time, John and I started Truescope. The pitch to ourselves was straightforward: build a cloud-native platform from scratch, designed for the volume and complexity media intelligence had actually become, without two decades of bolted-on architecture slowing everyone else down. We had no idea at the time how well-timed that decision would turn out to be.

Today the platform ingests, transforms and enriches millions of items every day. Content is processed within minutes of publication, classified, scored, and given context. The architecture is built to scale to a billion items and beyond. The pipeline we built without quite knowing it has turned out to be the kind of foundation you'd want if large language models came along and changed how people expected to interact with data. Which they did.

So today we're launching Truescope AI. Two products to start with. Assistant handles the questions you ask every day, fast, grounded in your data. Analyst runs the deeper work: multi-step investigations that used to take a human analyst hours or days. Now they run in minutes, producing something you can put in front of a client or an executive.

I want to be careful here, because the AI category has a lot of hype in it and a fair amount of nonsense. What we're launching is good. It's useful. But it isn't the destination. It's the first version of something that's going to keep changing quickly, probably faster than anything I've seen in this industry before. The honest framing is that we've spent the last six years building the data foundation that lets us move at that pace, and we intend to.

Almost everything about the work has changed. What customers want from us hasn't. A communications director in 2026 wants to know the same things a client wanted to know when I was scribbling notes between two radios: what's being said, by whom, does it matter, and what should I do about it. The interface changes. The economics change. The speed changes. The underlying question doesn't.

Something else has stuck with me. The skill that got me hired in 1995 was writing accurate summaries under time pressure. I spent the next twenty years writing code. Now, building AI tools, the work that actually moves the needle is writing prompts: clearly, precisely, with everything trimmed back. The psychology degree and the pencil feel less random than they did at the time.

Three decades between those two radios and an AI that draws insight from hundreds of millions of items in minutes. I don't have a clever way to summarise that, and I'm not going to try. Mostly I feel lucky to have done the boring jobs and the hard jobs and the good jobs in the order I did them, and luckier still that none of what we launched today is the work of one person. It's a team, and a good one.

I have no idea what the next year will bring, let alone the next five. The rate of change keeps accelerating, and Truescope is built for it. That change is what kept me here. It's also what makes the next phase fun.