About

GloriaMundo is built by Andy Surtees, working from Hartlepool in the north-east of England. It is, at the time of writing, a project of one — though that will change.

Before this I was an IT consultant for about a decade, mostly inside large organisations: GSK, the NHS, Santander, IBM. The thing those years taught me, slowly, is that the gap between how software is sold and how it actually behaves inside a real company is enormous. Tools get bought on the promise of saving time and end up consuming it. People learn to distrust the systems that are meant to help them. The reasons are almost never technical. They're almost always about visibility and control — about whether you can see what the tool is doing, and stop it when it's wrong.

I founded a video AI company called Vlogbase in 2017, then a computer vision company called Sentigral. Both taught me things, mostly about what I would do differently the next time. GloriaMundo is the next time.

The thing I think automation has been getting wrong is straightforward: it asks people to trust systems that don't show their work. The current generation of AI agents is making this worse, not better — agents that act first and report afterwards, in a language designed to sound competent rather than be inspectable. My belief is that this is solvable, and that solving it is most of what's worth doing in this space right now. GloriaMundo's Glass Box principle — that an agent should show you what it's about to do, not what it's already done — is the smallest version of that thesis I know how to ship.

The longer-term goal is more ambitious. I want GloriaMundo to be a platform that can eventually run any workflow you can describe in natural language, and to do that without the trust model getting weaker as it gets more capable. That's a long road. I'd like to build a team that can walk it.