Name: The Oxford Second Brain Bootcamp
Start: 2026-10-21T09:00:00.000+01:00
End: 2026-10-21T17:00:00.000+01:00
Location: Pitt Rivers Museum

Personal

Drummond Gilbert

Your AI has read the whole internet - but it has never met you. This is a hands-on day building the system that fixes that: a second brain on your own material, working by the time you leave.

Foundations - getting your material into a shape AI can use: meetings, files and messages, organised by project, person and decision.

Your second brain - a personal system that holds your context and gives it back to you when you need it. Real examples including:

Your company's memory - what changes when it stops being personal: shared context for a team, then a department, then the organisation, so "what did we decide?" has one answer - and what keeps it alive rather than drifting.

Hands-on from 9am: you build on your own meetings, files and messages. Bring a laptop and the accounts you use day to day; a short form beforehand tells us what you're working with so we can start building straight away.

Business leaders, founders and consultants who use AI most days and have hit the ceiling of what prompting alone can do.

Already keep notes in Notion or Obsidian? Good - that's the raw material. This is the step after: a system that reads what you keep and acts on it.

Adrian Shedden runs ai-ops.org - and his life - on the system this day teaches: one human, teams of AI agents. A fintech lawyer turned serial founder, he also hosts Mindstone Practical AI Bristol.

Glenn Smith has fifteen years in startups with two exits and enterprise experience at UBS, Barclays and advising HSBC on AI strategy. He  runs two AI-first companies built on proprietary memory systems: GenieOS, finding the marketing that pays, and Fueld, catching health issues early.

Drummond Gilbert teaches AI in Management at Saïd Business School and runs Oxford's practical AI meetup.