A coffee with…Steve King, co-founder and CEO, Dragonfly AI

From teaching robots to spot what humans notice, to helping marketers and sports teams win the battle for consumer attention, Steve King’s career is a testament to following your curiosity.

After co-founding Black Swan Data, where he uses AI to predict market trends, King spun out Dragonfly AI – a predictive visual analytics company that models human attention to help brands and sports organisations make content that captures the eye.

Dragonfly AI’s technology deciphers which parts of a visual, be it an advert, a website, or packaging, are most likely to grab human attention.

As a data and technology advisor to the Welsh Rugby Union, King is also working to make the team the most data-driven sports organisation in the UK, using insights to guide decisions from ticket pricing to player analytics.

Over coffee, King shares the lessons he’s learned from AI, branding, and why postal workers might just be the unsung heroes of community healthcare.

Could you walk us through your career, leading up to Dragonfly AI?

I studied Cognitive Science at university back in the early 2000s. Then I became a DJ for two or three years.  After that, I tried starting a music studio – my first failed business. I borrowed £50,000 from my parents and lost it all. Then I moved to London and became a software engineer because everyone was throwing money at software people.

I really loved it, but I wasn’t very good at it, so I became a project manager. Since then, Dragonfly AI is my sixth startup or scale-up. I’ve seen some wins and some losses along the way, but always in technology.

I’ve recently fallen in love with data and AI. I love what you can do with it. Dragonfly was an amazing business idea: predicting what people will look at with AI. It sounded cool, and we scrambled together a business around it.

Is it harder to grab people’s attention now?

We should measure that. My guess is yes. Everything has become advertising space. Even walking down the street with the new Google AR map, there are ads everywhere. Cutting through that noise is more important than ever.

What inspired you to start Dragonfly?

Dragonfly was originally founded inside Black Swan but spun out because it wasn’t core to its business.

The original idea came from Queen Mary University. They were trying to teach robots to have human-like attention. Robots would walk into a room and scan it left-right mechanically. But humans are wired to notice things instantly. That noticing, and that instinct, is what fascinated us. We realised if we could model it, it would be powerful… and then we took it into marketing!

Is it more challenging to predict trends now, with platforms like TikTok where things go viral overnight?

Yeah, it’s gone through cycles. At first, it was hard to get social media data. Then it became easy. But then people started gaming the system and manufacturing trends, so it got hard again.

Black Swan predicts product trends, so you need data on what people buy, not just what they talk about. Social data is messy, so you need to train models on actual purchase behaviour.

What does your work with the  Welsh Rugby Union involve?

I’m Welsh. I love rugby. I’m into data, so it’s awesome.

The CEO there wants to make it the smartest sports organisation in the UK, and I think we could make it the smartest in the world. It’s about embedding data everywhere, such as hiring decisions, ticket pricing, and player analytics.

I was a useless rugby player, so now my dream is to help Wales win the World Cup through data. Even if I couldn’t play, I could still contribute something important.

Is there a digital divide in sport, where smaller clubs struggle to keep up with tech?

Yes. Some clubs don’t have the money. They’re barely breaking even. They can’t afford big IBM-style analytics platforms. But they’ve got bright kids building their own tools, scraping data, and delivering it to coaches. In a way, maybe that’s cooler, and maybe that’s better than a big business data project.

You’re also on the Royal Mail Health Advisory Board, tell us about that?

That is, in my opinion, one of the biggest untapped opportunities in our country. Postal workers already look out for people in their communities – it’s always happened, especially where I grew up in Broadhaven.

As NHS care shifts into the community, we need trusted people who aren’t doctors but can still notice when someone needs help. Posties could be that – helping pick up prescriptions, checking on people, or even delivering medical devices. I think it’s such a great ambition for them to have, and it really excites me.

Where did your interest in tech begin?

From about zero. I persuaded my dad to buy a computer. One of my first tellings-off came from plugging a modem into the phone line and browsing private servers. I didn’t realise I was basically hacking at 12 or 13! My dad was torn between being annoyed and seeing that I was passionate about it.

How do you take your coffee?

I have a flat white these days. I don’t know how I got there. Too long in London, maybe.