Ben Rees

Ben Rees

GEO, AEO and B2B marketing strategy.

I've been writing about AI and marketing since 2013. Now I build the measurement frameworks to prove what works in AI search. VP of Marketing at Geckoboard.

Recent writing

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My journey through AI - since before it was called that

1993-97

Writing code, building systems - learning how computation works at the most fundamental level

1998-99

MSc in Information Processing and Neural Networks at King's College London - statistical learning before it was practical

2000s

Applying machine learning in industry - promising but constrained by data and compute

2014

Deep learning course at Cambridge Judge - watching the convergence of GPUs, data, and better architectures in real time

2016

Sentiment analysis on Twitter data - first serious work with transformer-era thinking

2023-24

Foundation models enter the workflow - shocked at what small models running locally could do

2024-25

RAG and agentic systems - AI stops being a tool and starts being a process; building pipelines that draft, review, retrieve

2026

Agentic AI at scale - the question is no longer capability, it is governance: when should systems be allowed to act?