AI is going to redraw the map of work. The question isn’t whether jobs change – they will. It’s whether we use that shift to open doors for people without the right postcode, school or surname, or just build a faster version of the same old system.
Joe Seddon turned his own experience of navigating elite education into Zero Gravity, built around a simple idea: talent is everywhere; opportunity isn’t.
Growing up in Morley, West Yorkshire, Joe Seddon did not see Oxford as an obvious destination.
A question from a local BBC journalist after his GCSE results helped put the possibility on the map. He applied, got in, studied PPE at Mansfield College and graduated with a first.
What stayed with him was how unfamiliar the process had felt – and how much easier it was to navigate if someone around you already understood the rules.
So instead of treating his own route through the system as the end of the story, he turned around.
Using money left from his student maintenance grant, Seddon began connecting students from lower-opportunity backgrounds with mentors who had already navigated leading universities.
That idea became Zero Gravity, which has since supported more than 23,000 students into top universities and careers.
Now AI raises the same question on a larger stage: will disruption widen access to opportunity, or simply make an unequal system move faster?
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