Having started her career as a tech journalist, Georgie Barrat then moved into TV where she spent seven years presenting The Gadget Show. These days she works in live TV on BBC Morning Live and The Jeremy Vine Show. In this interview Georgie chats about her love of tech and her career, as well as ‘The AI Method’, a practical programme she’s created to people use AI with confidence, to make life easier.
My brothers got me into tech early on.
I have two brothers – I was the only girl in the house – and tech was a common thing we would talk about. They were really into gaming – I wasn’t so much, but I would always watch them. Basically, to hang out with them and have a conversation with them, I would have to be speaking about tech and gadgets.
I remember the excitement of our first computer.
I still remember going on the internet for the first time and searching for a picture of chimpanzees. I couldn’t get over that I had access to pictures of all of these chimpanzees, which I then proceeded to print off and probably cost my parents an absolute fortune.
I started thinking about tech as a career when I was at uni.
I didn’t study ICT, as it was called back in the day – what I really wanted to do was be a journalist and study English. That was my passion. I did English at university, where there was a student radio station that I started to get into. It wasn’t called a podcast
then, but you did these little pre-recorded shows that you’d then put out every so often and you’d have it up online, not that anyone really listened to it… I created these Desert Island Discs of people’s favourite tech, though it wasn’t called that. I’d ask them to talk through their favourite pieces of technology, and this is when I started marrying the two together and I was like, “Oh, tech and my journalist hat can come together!”
I grew up watching The Gadget Show and was deliberate in becoming a presenter on it.
I was a bit like, “Wow, that would be great to get on, wouldn’t it?” I was quite specific in thinking it would be a fun show to work on, and managed to get an agent who represented one of the other presenters – Ortis. I was very upfront about it and said if they were ever looking for a new presenter I’d love to be put in the mix. I don’t know quite how it happened, but I pulled that one off!
After returning to work from maternity leave for the second time, I really leaned into AI.
I have personally seen the benefits of using these tools as a sparring partner, as a companion, as a tool to help you strategise, think about the bigger picture of your career, think about all the different elements of your life – where you want to go and how you’re going to get there. Especially as a freelancer, I’ve never really had that support structure around me in such obvious ways. Unless you spend a lot of money on a coach, you don’t have that ability to look at life holistically and work out how to offset the bits you don’t enjoy, to encourage yourself to take action.
My AI method is all about making it a sparring partner and companion.
The starting block is creating your AI blueprint with your chosen tool. Your blueprint is a set of documents that you create with the AI – you’re not having to write them out yourself, instead you’re having this back-and-forth conversation with something like ChatGPT. From it you develop what I call your ‘North Star’ – a document about what you want the next six months, year, five
years to look like. You create your ‘Voice DNA’, which is how you show up online or through the written word; you create different voice guides for how you talk, what your personal stories are. You almost collate those stories together, so it starts to be able to talk like you and help you create content that sounds like you. Then you basically say to it, “Let’s strategise and talk through the steps to help get me to this point.”
I always time-block my day with AI.
I’ll speak out loud, using the voice functionality – I just talk though my day, tell it what meetings I have, what time I need to pick the kids up, and it’ll time-block everything out. Often it prioritises the right tasks and chops them up in a way that helps me achieve them more easily.
I want to get an electric cargo bike this summer.
My little girl is starting school, so I need an electric cargo bike that I can take both my girl and my boy on. They are the main mode of transport around my area but I need to think about where on earth I’m going to park it, because I don’t have a driveway.
I’m a spiritual person and I love spinning!
Housing a spin bike is another problem – they take up a lot of room, don’t they? I also have quite a big spiritual side to me – I enjoy meditation, I go on spiritual retreats and do a lot of gratitude journalling.
I do feel the need to unplug sometimes.
I’m very conscious about the detrimental impacts of social media and mobile phone usage. I actually hope AI is going to undo some of those wrongs because sometimes, when I would otherwise be doomscrolling, I’m now reaching for AI and having more of an interaction. It’s helping me work through a problem, think about something or work on an idea, which feels like a better way of doing life.
See www.georgiebarrat.com.
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