Listen : Watch : Read #32
🎙️Listen 🎙️
A super interesting listen with Aaron Levie, CEO of Box with Martin Casado, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz on AI in the enterprise. Everything from how folks said they would never give up on to move to the cloud to how AI will take over the Enterprise. What the journey over the next decade will look like?. Now about how quickly humans can change their workflows, not necessarily how quick the technology is. How AI has universal buy in around the business, unlike other technologies before this.
Even a mention for ServiceNow and our AI agents and others.
Speaking of Aaron Levie, he also made a super interesting point here
The difference between people getting extreme leverage from AI Agents vs. moderate returns seems to be just a willingness to put the time into really good prompt design and fixing any errors from the agent. Once you make this mental jump, the output goes up enormously.
Lenny Rachitsky sits down with Benjamin Mann, co-founder at Anthropic and talks through loads from : What he saw at OpenAI that convinced him to leave, The AI nightmare scenarios that concern him most, His take on Meta’s $100M talent wars and one very close to me - What three skills he’s teaching his kids to thrive in an AI future!
Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind with Lex Fridman for a fascinating discussion as always - and the tough questions - do you think we could simulate the beginning of life? to the future of AI and AGI.. I won't spoil it!
📺 Watch 📺
Thanks to Coldplay, the internet united for a few days. But even more Kudos to Astronomer for their response with Gwyneth Paltrow! Marketing Genius, from of course - none other than Ryan Reynolds Maximum Effort agency, here. You have all seen it by now!
Back to Lenny Rachitsky - I feel this is the modern day six sigma black belt!, just for the AI era. Heres how Dan Shipper, co founder at Every and the need for an AI operations lead. It's not all doom and gloom, lots of new roles are bring created too!
"I sit with her once a week, and every time I'm doing something repetitively, we put it in a to-do list. She then builds prompts and workflows so that I and everyone else on the team are automating as much as possible.
📚 Read 📚
Sean Ringsted over at Chubb shared this from Carl Benedikt Frey over on the Financial Times. A great reminder, that AI alone can't or won't solve the productivity puzzle. I'm an AI optimist for sure, but I'm also a pragmatist! (Imagine living in my head!). Reminds me of the early debates around Digital Transformation - digtization vs digitalization. Automating a broken process, still leaves you with just a faster broken process..
I love this, Build distribution first, then build whatever you want on top! Harry Stebbings - How the wold of VC's will change over time. More creator, less Gatekeeper!
I'm somewhat surprised by this one! What does it mean for Copyright as we know it (My wife is photographer and we have this debate a lot). We've since found the outcome too!
In a mini motoring/auto section - the sector feels in turmoil - everything from Truckings un-easy relationship with Tech here from Sam Gruet on the BBC News
Through to Tariff Turmoil, with Porsche AG saying their model no longer works, from Tarrifs to Weak EV demand
Speaking of which the UK just re-introduced incentives to buy EV's here. While Tarrifs are hitting global car makers from Stellantis estimated to be $300m to General Motors $1.1bn Tariff hit, all while UK Motor Manufacturing hits a 70 year low, while Jaguar sold just 49 units in April, to be fair, they have nothing to sel right now!. That said, Im a fan of the rebrand and believe the new EV will be a roaring (see what I did there) success!
I started with Agentic, I'll close out with it too. Tom Goodwin always has good insights (and now great hair) when it comes to consumer, marketing and technology trends - and he never holds back. He may even dislike British Airways more than Christopher Sandilands. Although, according to Metro this week, he's not the only one. Back to Agentic, Tom outlines why he thinks this is destined to fail and makes a pretty good case here, at least for consumer agents.
My 2c - I don't want to shop this way, but there are some things that I'd love to automate in my life! (like re-entering the same thing 100 times on BA's website)
A good example here from Gabriel Lazaro at Chubb, while applying for a passport.. I even saw another example when the CAPTCHA was managed by an AI Agent..
Or my buddy Jake Wells from Meshed trying out multiple AI agents using OpenAI's new Agent tools. I think Jake just wants to buy and sell cars really! (love the example!)
The common theme here, these are getting easier and easier to try, but they do come with warnings too!. Like this AI tool deleting an entire live database! Replits CEO Amjad Masad apologised.
Finally, all this vibe coding, is what created. Lovable - invariably Europes fasting growing unicorn with a $200m raise, $100m in ARR in just 8 months and much more
Stockholm-based Lovable has hit over $100 million in annualized revenue in just eight months by using AI to enable millions of non-coders to instantly turn their ideas into websites, apps and online side hustles.
I remain super excited about the future! Theres a lot to do and learn!
👀 Quick bites 👀
Starling eyes NYSE listing - another blow for the UK market?
From Insurance to cars, we all want lovable! What Makes a Car Lovable? It’s Not the Tech, It’s the Cup Holders
Top UN court says countries can sue each other over climate change
And thats It! See you next week!