At one point, ITM Power struggled to raise £3 million. Dr Graham Cooley recalls how one fund manager’s backing helped keep the business from running out of cash.

Years later, it raised £250 million in a single round.

Between those moments lay years of patient investors, difficult decisions and industrial partnerships that changed the company’s prospects.

In Part One of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE speaks to the former ITM Power chief executive about the journey from physicist to technology entrepreneur, and the difference between inventing something remarkable and building a business around it.

Graham grew up in Slough with a mother who taught maths and science and a father, the engineer and trade unionist Mike Cooley, who believed technology should serve people. His father gave him a conviction that stayed with him: the future is not something we wait for. It is something we build.

His career took him into the electricity industry, pioneering energy storage, Cambridge startups and the hard commercial lessons of turning research into products. He recalls a three-year intellectual-property battle that ended with the opposing company becoming an investor, and why access to experienced entrepreneurs and the right backers can change a business’s future.

Then came ITM.

Graham explains why he stopped fuel-cell development to concentrate on electrolysers, how partnerships with Linde and Snam unlocked institutional investment, and the long climb from a £12 million market valuation to a peak of £3.5 billion. He also discusses building manufacturing capacity in Sheffield and recognising when the next stage required a different chief executive.

Along the way, he challenges Britain’s approach to energy. His argument is that electricity cannot be considered in isolation: storage, gas networks, hydrogen and industrial demand must be planned together. The technology matters. So do the incentives that determine whether anyone builds it.

Part One is about turning science into industry. Part Two asks who will finance Britain’s next generation of businesses, with a focus on UK stock markets, pensions and growth capital.

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A 14-year-old refuses to study a Van Gogh painting because they are convinced it was generated by artificial intelligence.
Children challenge their teachers with incorrect answers from ChatGPT. Young boys disappear into the online manosphere, absorbing misogyny, conspiracy theories and the belief that figures such as Andrew Tate offer the answers adults cannot.
This is no longer a future problem.
In Part Two of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE continues his conversation with Dr Carolina Scarton, Senior Lecturer in Natural Language Processing at the University of Sheffield, about what misinformation is doing to children, classrooms and democracy.
Carolina explains how engagement algorithms amplify anger, fear and division, why online extremism can move into the physical world, and how social media companies shift responsibility onto users while continuing to profit from the systems that created the problem.
But the greater danger may not be believing what is false.
It may be losing the ability to believe anything at all.
The conversation examines the collapse of trust in teachers, scientists, journalists and institutions, and the risk of a generation treating AI as an oracle while dismissing human expertise. Carolina argues that banning smartphones or social media will not solve the problem. The stronger answer is education.
She describes Finland’s approach to media literacy, where children learn to investigate claims, recognise manipulation and act as their own fact-checkers. She makes the case for teaching AI literacy in British schools so young people understand that a large language model is a tool built from data and probability, not an all-knowing source of truth.
The discussion then moves into cognitive warfare, foreign interference and the deliberate flooding of the information environment with so much noise that society becomes paralysed. Carolina reveals how researchers identified Russian-linked propaganda operations through posting patterns, Russian bank holidays and traces left behind in website metadata.
She also addresses the decisions being made inside the world’s largest technology companies, the removal of ethics teams, the use of AI in warfare and what happens when extraordinary technological power is concentrated among people drawn from the same narrow demographic.
This is a conversation about children, education and artificial intelligence.
But ultimately, it is about whether democracy can survive when people no longer share a basic understanding of reality.
Carolina’s closing message is simple:
Keep going. Do not give up.
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The algorithm did not decide to divide us.

Someone built it to make money.

In Part One of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE sits down with Dr Carolina Scarton, Senior Lecturer in Natural Language Processing at the University of Sheffield, to examine how misinformation evolved from playground rumours into a global industry.

The conversation begins far from Silicon Valley. Carolina grew up in a modest family in rural Brazil, where her parents placed education above everything else. Her journey took her from public school to the University of São Paulo, then Cambridge and Sheffield, helped along the way by teachers and mentors who saw what she was capable of.

There is even an extraordinary family connection to Pelé. Carolina still owns a trophy bearing the footballer’s name from the years when her grandfather played alongside him as a boy in Brazil.

Then the discussion turns to artificial intelligence.

Carolina explains what Natural Language Processing really is, why systems such as ChatGPT can appear to understand us without understanding anything at all, and why so-called AI hallucinations are the predictable output of statistical models rather than machines losing touch with reality.

She also reveals the hidden human labour behind AI safeguards, including poorly paid workers exposed to disturbing material while labelling the content technology companies do not want their models to reproduce.

But the central question is not how AI works.

It is who profits when it goes wrong.

David and Carolina explore engagement algorithms, echo chambers, Cambridge Analytica, Brexit, deepfakes and the extraordinary case of a Muslim man in Pakistan reportedly earning around $1,500 a month by producing AI-generated Islamophobic content about Keir Starmer.

He was not trying to change Britain.

He was optimising for engagement.

Carolina’s conclusion is blunt. The algorithm is only a tool. To understand why misinformation spreads, follow the money.

In Part Two, the conversation moves into schools, the manosphere, collapsing trust in evidence, smartphone bans, Finland’s approach to media literacy and whether AI can help defend truth from the industry it helped create.

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