Field notes
Notes from the field.
What we're learning from building and landing governed AI systems inside real businesses — written plainly, by the people doing the work.
Written from the work.
Written when there is something worth saying, by the people doing the work. Woodlark’s founders also write on LinkedIn — Trent Peek and Richard Ardis.
12 October 2026 · Richard Ardis
What does AI consultancy cost a UK small business?
The four parts of the cost, what moves each one, and the questions to ask before you sign.
10 October 2026 · Richard Ardis
What a one-month AI business diagnostic should leave you with.
Long enough to find out whether AI belongs in your business, and where. The four things you should hold at the end, whoever you hire.
24 September 2026 · Richard Ardis
How to write an AI policy for a small business.
Which tools people can use, what data stays out, who approves what, and how AI earns more freedom. Includes a one-page outline you can copy.
17 September 2026 · Richard Ardis
AI adoption has almost tripled while depth has barely moved.
ONS data suggests most UK businesses still have AI at the edge of work, rather than inside the way the business runs.
15 September 2026 · Richard Ardis
Summoning the Demon?
A 2017 magazine predicted AI would take the boring work and leave humans the creative bit. Nearly ten years on, it's turned out almost exactly backwards.
9 September 2026 · Richard Ardis
No, AI probably isn't plotting to kill you.
That doesn't mean we should stop worrying. The extinction headline, the calmer read, and the far more ordinary risk in front of every business.
9 September 2026 · Richard Ardis
The notebook that never came back.
A music teacher was writing every lesson down three times, and the pupil’s copy still went missing. What changed when it all went into one place, in the teacher’s own words.
22 August 2026 · Trent Peek
Pallets & Pilots — working with Walker Logistics.
A family-owned Berkshire 3PL that started in a converted hangar on a wartime airfield in 1999. Who they are, and why the record matters more than the announcement.
10 August 2026 · Trent Peek
The process that only works because someone remembers how.
Frontier AI is built for enterprise, so everyone else gets headlines instead of help. What we actually tell a business to do first.
10 August 2026 · Trent Peek
The work nobody wanted to do.
The businesses getting the most from AI are the ones using it to take work away.
6 July 2026 · Trent Peek
The £400 back office.
The honest arithmetic of running a 30-agent fleet — including the part the £400 doesn't buy.
29 June 2026 · Richard Ardis
Landing AI with a team that's worried about it.
The fear is rational. Treating it as an obstacle is how adoption fails.
22 June 2026 · Trent Peek
One bad call: how an agent's autonomy is withdrawn.
Everyone asks how agents earn trust. The better question is how they lose it.
15 June 2026 · Trent Peek
Inside an approval queue.
What earned autonomy actually looks like on a Tuesday morning.
8 June 2026 · Trent Peek
What we tell clients not to automate.
The Blueprint deliverable that saves more money than the one that gets built.
Rather just talk it through?
Thirty minutes with a founder. Plain answers about where AI is genuinely worth using in your business, and where it isn't.