Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft theorises that leaders in the age of AI are no longer managing human teams alone, but orchestrating networks of autonomous intelligent systems that work continuously alongside them. He calls it “the management of infinite minds”. When I first heard that phrase, I loved it! Not because it was new to us. Because it described perfectly what we’ve been building over the last five years at Oxygen.
Fewer than 40 people successfully manage more than 50,000 acres across the UK, a real asset fund north of £400 million, a sector-leading technology platform, and a content creation business that out-produces businesses five times our size. We’ve always used data and information to run an incredibly small, elite team. What’s changed is the scale of what that team can now do.
We Recruited for This.
I want to be clear. We didn’t accidentally hire people who turned out to be good at working with AI. We recruited hard for these traits. Systematic thinking. Creative problem-solving. Communication and collaboration. Sporting or adventure backgrounds that demonstrate resilience and the ability to achieve what others consider impossible. We’ve always said experience is overrated and that we can teach skills. We wanted determination, adaptability, and intellectual curiosity – people who marshal every resource available to them.
What we didn’t know was that these exact attributes, skills, and personality traits would become the perfect foundation for accelerating into the age of AI at the most extraordinary speed.
The traits we recruited for because they built the business we wanted can now leverage AI to become exponentially more valuable.
We had Claudia before Claude
The entire Oxygen Intelligence suite was built over five years, ahead of the AI boom.
Chris Winter, Lara Salam, and the Intelligence team were embracing machine learning for monitoring, reporting, and verification technology long before OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini were words any of us knew.
We built proprietary models. We scanned estates at centimetre precision with drones and LIDAR. We modelled and assessed every square metre of the UK for land use and natural capital potential. We even named our first model Claudia right around the time Anthropic named Claude – you won’t find a reference to that anywhere publicly; we kept it quiet. In hindsight, we probably should have shouted about that!
The point is this: everyone else is scrambling to adopt AI now. We’ve been building the infrastructure for it since before most people knew what a large language model was. And when the general-purpose tools arrived, they met an organisation that was already designed and wired to use them.
We are a data and tech business. That surprises people. Lots of people think of us as a natural capital asset manager, but what they don’t know is that OC is a data platform by its DNA.
The Apprentice Is Digital Now
We’ve always loved the master and apprentice model – where our most senior people coach and mentor future talent.
What’s changed is that every person at Oxygen Conservation now has many digital apprentices.
Every team member is being equipped with their own technology stack and budget so they can flex, adjust, and move as the tools accelerate. Some are working in Claude Cowork. Others prefer ChatGPT or Gemini.
Many are building Projects, custom GPTs, Gems, and specialist agents alongside purpose-built natural capital applications produced by our Intelligence Team. The principle is the same: give talented people the resources and freedom to solve problems their way.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the digital apprentice is the inversion. From a knowledge perspective, the AI is always the master – it knows more than you do, faster than you can look it up. But from a creativity, judgement, and application perspective, it always remains junior. It gives you an extraordinary training partner for lifelong learning and progression, but it never replaces the human spark that turns information into insight.
Think about something as simple as handover notes. When someone moves roles or leaves a team, the institutional knowledge has historically walked out the door with them. Now your AI assistant can build that handover instantaneously from the body of work, correspondence, and context that already exists.
Double Capacity. Halve the Cost.
Over the next year, we’re going to double the capacity of this team – the volume and quality of work we produce, the impact on the sector, and as we raise capital, the portfolio – and we will do it while being incredibly selective on who we add to the central team. We will effectively halve the unit cost of asset management. Of course, we’ll still need our incredible AI-enabled operational colleagues on the Estates. But the central function is going to achieve something that should make every fund manager and allocator pay attention.
We’ve already cancelled two planned recruitment roles and reinvested that budget into individual technology stacks, improved hardware allocations, and compute access for every team member. I think this pattern will continue across marketing, content, legal, and finance. The money that would have added to the headcount is instead making the people we already have dramatically more capable.
And to any aspiring future OC employees, the high bar only gets higher. You shouldn’t just be convincing us why you’re better than other applicants; you should also be convincing us about the team of digital resources you’re bringing with you too.
What AI-Enabled HR Actually Looks Like
Andrew Dewar PhD, leading performance psychologist and the man who runs our people function, might be the most AI-enabled and focused person operating in HR anywhere in the country. Working with our incredible Capital and Intelligence Teams, he’s created the most sophisticated screening criteria I’ve ever seen. We did this because we didn’t rate the available off-the-shelf tools highly enough.
For our recent PA recruitment, they took a 30-page role description and instruction manual and used it to create a multi-criteria analysis framework. This was inputted into by a wide range of the team, building screening criteria from the people who actually understand what the role demands. Then, using human-in-the-loop AI, they shortlisted nearly 1,000 applicants in two hours. The shortlists were checked and validated by the people team. That’s not AI replacing human judgement – that’s AI enabling humans to see candidates better, not filter them out faster.
Beyond recruitment, they’ve built a platform to create individualised quarterly review documentation and training plans tailored to the future development of each individual person. This is the opposite of what most people expect from AI in HR. Most organisations hear “AI recruitment” and think robots rejecting CVs. We’re using it to invest more deeply in every individual.
The Business That Never Sleeps
The pace of the business has changed. It’s faster, more responsive, and the working day looks fundamentally different. Some people deploy their human hours earlier in the morning. Others shift to later starts and finishes, with digital assistance providing progression through the quieter hours. The surface area of the business is increasing – we’re operating across more hours of the day, producing more work, covering more ground.
And the line we’re hearing from the team is that this type of learning, creating, and building is addictive. Are people working more? Some are, yes. Are they working differently? Absolutely. The structures we’ve put in place over the last few weeks – redesigning people processes, changing how we recruit, investing in tools, techniques, hardware, and compute – have been built around our principles of flexibility, freedom, and agility.
This Isn’t a Thought Piece. It’s an Invitation.
When I first heard the phrase “the management of infinite minds,” I liked it instinctively. Now I realise why.
Because what we’re seeing inside our organisation is a fundamental change in leverage. Individuals are able to think further, explore faster, and execute at a scale that previously required entire teams.
From a leadership perspective, that’s extraordinary to watch.
It changes how companies grow. It changes how teams operate. And it changes what small groups of determined people can achieve.
That’s what the management of infinite minds actually looks like. And for those of us building businesses in this moment, it’s an incredibly exciting time to be doing it.