LONDON UK: Our Founder and CEO Jurga Zilinskiene MBE has joined Pete Wakefield on The Firefighter's Podcast, in collaboration with the Blue Light Show. Throughout the session, they had an honest conversation about what AI is actually bringing to public services, why fear of it is misplaced, and what it will take for the technology to be trusted on the front line.
Watch the full episode on the Guildhawk YouTube channel.
The episode lands ahead of Jurga's keynote at the Blue Light Show, London Olympia, 1 to 2 July 2026, where she will return to these themes in person with leaders from policing, fire and rescue, and ambulance services.
From 'There be monsters' to a working tool
Jurga opened with the framing that gives her current speaking series its title: There be monsters. Old maps used to mark the unknown edges of the world with sea creatures and warnings. International trade only began once people accepted that the monsters were not real – and AI sits in the same place today.
'AI is not a villain. Absolutely not. It has so much potential.'
Her central reframe in the episode is simple. What we now call artificial intelligence has been in development since the 1950s; it is machine learning at scale, a system that can absorb a vast library of information and find patterns inside it very quickly. It looks like intelligence because it knows a lot; but the machine is still a machine.
'A machine cannot originate an original thought, because it is creating a pattern based on the previous information. Always.'
That distinction matters, because it sets up the question every regulated organisation is now facing.
If the output is a pattern, who is accountable for the result?
The case for human verification
For Jurga, the answer is not a slogan. It is an operating model.
'The way our entire infrastructure works, from insurance to accountability, we have no method of relying on AI output, period. To be able to rely on it, we are miles away. We will be reliant on human decision.'
She compared AI to a calculator. A productivity tool, useful, fast, occasionally wrong, and always paired with a human who understands what it is doing and what it is for.
This is the principle that runs through everything Guildhawk and GAI Labs build: human expertise plus verified multilingual data equals trustworthy AI. The technology is the accelerator. The human is the brake, the editor, and the signature on the work.
It is also the principle behindt GAI Translate, our secure AI translation platform, where every output can be reviewed and verified by certified linguists before it leaves the building.
The 20 percent who get missed
The most pointed exchange in the episode concerned how public services prioritise. Modern systems, Jurga argued, are increasingly designed for the 80 percent of cases that look statistically similar. The remaining 20 percent, the most vulnerable, the edge cases, the people who do not fit the template, become invisible.
'If we don't cater for that 20 percent, you spend 80 or 90 percent of your time fixing an issue that could have been prevented. It's a false economy.'
More time for the people who matter
The fear that gets in the way of every AI conversation in public services is the same one: will AI replace humans?
For Jurga, the honest answer is the opposite. Emergency services and the NHS are already under resourced, already running at the edge of what skilled people can deliver in a day. The cost is not borne by the staff alone, but by the patient given five minutes with a GP and rushed back out of the surgery. By the family waiting months for a specialist appointment. By the community that never gets the fire safety visit, the school talk, the prevention conversation that would have stopped the call out before it started.
This is what AI, used properly, is for. Not replacing the doctor, but giving the doctor back the half hour to actually listen. Not replacing the firefighter, but giving the watch the time to go into schools and care homes and community centres and have the conversations that save lives long before an appliance is dispatched. Not replacing the police officer, but freeing them from the screen for long enough to be visible on the streets they serve.
What Guildhawk and GAI Labs are doing about it
Guildhawk has been working at the intersection of language, data and AI for 25 years, with a 10-year research partnership with Sheffield Hallam University through the Knowledge Transfer Partnership programme, ranked in the top 50 KTPs in UK history. Our GAI Labs research arm continues to push the boundary of what verified, regulation ready AI looks like in high stakes environments.
The same conviction sits behind every product we innovated: clean, high quality multilingual data, verified by humans, governed by ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certified controls. It is what makes our AI safe to use in legal, financial, medical and public sector settings where being wrong has a cost.
Jurga Zilinskiene MBE is the founder and CEO of Guildhawk and GAI Labs. Guildhawk is a Queen's Award winning, ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certified multilingual data company, partnering with regulated enterprises across finance, life sciences, legal and government.
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