AI at Work

How to build with AI when you're not a full-time developer, plus OpenAI's Dot agent doing a month of work in a day. Kevin Williams and AI developer Vlad Larin. Vlad Larin went from managing a 250-person delivery team to building with AI himself, and he argues the skill that separates good AI builders from bad vibe coders is the same one that separated good developers from bad ones: vision, archite...

AI token costs in 2026: why Luna 6 at 40x cheaper than Fable may end the cost panic, and what Codex computer use actually did in four hours. Kevin Williams and Matt talk through the state of agentic AI right now: the jump from OpenClaw and Hermes to Grokbot and computer-use models, what Meta's Muse is actually for, and why Google paid $10 million for a dead airline's Slack messages. In this episod...

An Anthropic researcher went public with a 10% chance that AI does away with humanity, implied it's a common feeling inside the company, and other researchers backed him up. Dario Amodei followed with an essay saying it's time to talk seriously about slowing down. Sam Altman chimed in, Bernie Sanders wants it banned outright, the administration is calling it a hoax, and there's an election in a fe...

Kevin Williams and Matt open Alex Lieberman's 30 Features of an AI Native Company and get through the first handful of items, starting with the one most organizations get wrong. Blueprinting your processes is the right first move. Replicating every existing step inside an AI system is not, because a model like Astra will happily reproduce a five-step handoff that was designed around people and too...

Kevin spent a rainy weekend running up to 10 simultaneous Codex agents across three internal builds and burned two billion tokens. On a consumer plan, propped up by repeated usage resets, that cost him about $125. At retail API rates on GPT 5.6 high, the same weekend runs north of $8,000 to $10,000 and enterprise teams building in Codex fall outside the consumer plan entirely. Matt and Kevin dig i...

LinkedIn is losing patience with AI slop and it's not subtle about it anymore. There's 20-25% more AI-generated content on the platform right now, engagement is down 17%, and LinkedIn just added a complaint button that sends a negative signal straight to the algorithm when users flag a post. If your team has an automated content flow, this episode is for you. Kevin Williams and Matt Graham dig int...

Most organizations pick AI tools by asking the wrong question. They benchmark capability, compare feature lists, and choose the most powerful option then wonder why adoption stalls at 10-15% six months later. Kevin and Matt Graham dig into the real selection criteria leaders should be using, and why usability almost always beats raw capability when it comes to organizational ROI. This episode star...

Most companies are repeating a 100-year-old mistake with AI and the history of factory electrification explains exactly why. In this conversation, Kevin Williams and Matt Graham trace the parallel between the factories that plugged in electric motors without redesigning their floors and the organizations today that are adding AI tools without touching the structures underneath them. The gains didn...

Everyone is using AI. Almost nobody is making more money from it. Kevin Williams and Matt Graham get into why that gap exists, and it has nothing to do with which tools you're using. This conversation starts with a simple observation: AI is going to business backlogs and wish lists instead of the two or three highest-leverage constraints that actually drive growth. The tools are working. The focus...

Every organization with 50 or more people probably has someone quietly building AI tools right now. The question isn't whether it's happening it's whether there are any guardrails around it. Kevin Williams and Matt Graham get into the governance gap that almost nobody in the 'just start building' conversation is talking about honestly. Matt runs a security firm and watches the dark web. What he's...

Anthropic and OpenAI aren't embedding engineers at major firms because they want to do IT consulting they need to drive massive token consumption to pay for a trillion dollars in AI infrastructure. But while McKinsey guides the Fortune 500 through this shift, mid-market and SMB companies are being left completely behind. In this episode, Kevin Williams and Matt Graham break down the "forward-deplo...

Most leaders assume they need to hire technical talent before their organization can move seriously on AI. Wyatt Barnett runs AI at an 80-person trade association with no engineering staff and no CTO and he's built more working AI capacity than most companies twice his size. The model is simpler and more replicable than you'd expect. Wyatt Barnett is Head of AI (Technology Enablement) at the NCTA,...

Most people heard "Claude Code" and assumed it was a developer tool. Kevin Williams and Matt Graham from Rapid Dev are here to correct that assumption and explain why the goal-oriented loop logic at the core of Claude Code might be the most underused productivity feature available to business leaders right now. This conversation started with a weekend of building and a realization: the same recurs...

The economics of building versus buying software just fundamentally changed. In this conversation with Matt Graham, CEO of Rapid Developers, we explore how the cost of custom development has dropped 90% and what that means for business strategy. Matt brings a unique perspective, having lived through the no-code revolution and now seeing the AI-native development wave. His company works with CEOs o...

95% of AI pilots fail to reach production, but it's not because of the technology. Brett Schklar, CEO of AI First Leadership and author of "AI Without the BS," has tracked AI adoption across 1,800 companies over two years and discovered the real bottleneck: the "frozen middle." In this conversation, Brett reveals why senior managers and directors represent both the highest resistance and highest p...

When AI models hallucinate confidently while burning through your token budget, you need more than better prompts you need better processes. In this episode, Kevin and Eli explore the reality of working with AI that lies while you pay, the evolution from saved prompts to voice-triggered workflows, and why validation loops matter more than model updates. From enterprise governance requirements to t...

Kevin and Eli dive deep into the hidden costs of AI productivity gains, exploring how cognitive overload and social isolation are creating a new form of workplace burnout that organizations aren't prepared to address. In this candid conversation, they share their personal experiences with AI work density accomplishing 80-100x more work daily while feeling more exhausted than ever. The discussion r...

What does AI implementation actually look like when you move beyond the hype? Aaron Wilt, CEO of 40-person Pulse V Holdings, shares the unfiltered reality of deploying AI in a mid-market business where technical sophistication meets organizational complexity. This conversation reveals why even leaders who deeply understand AI struggle with organizational deployment, and what it really takes to bri...

Kevin Williams breaks down the Microsoft-Claude integration that's transforming productivity workflows, plus the legal risks and model competition shaping AI adoption decisions. The Claude add-on for Microsoft Office enables something most people haven't seen yet: lateral document communication. Your email can talk to Word, Word can talk to Excel, Excel can talk to PowerPoint—all seamlessly connec...

The AI industry loves throwing around the word 'agents,' but most teams are still stuck in basic prompting mode. Kevin and Eli cut through the semantic noise to reveal what actually matters: sophisticated automation is now accessible through natural language, not technical configuration. In this episode, they explore the practical reality of moving from one-off prompts to systematic workflows, why...

The "token maxing" phenomenon is reshaping how organizations think about AI budgets, but most companies are asking the wrong questions about AI spending. In this episode, Kevin and El i explore the reality behind engineers burning through massive token budgets - sometimes exceeding their own salaries - and what it means for practical AI adoption in mid-market companies. From Stockholm engineers ou...

What if you could run your entire workday through one AI conversation? Kevin and Eli explore the emerging 'monothread' format that's revolutionizing how teams operate - plus the hidden security risks that amateur AI builders are creating. In this episode, we dive deep into how the monothread approach eliminates app switching by connecting your email, calendar, tasks, and CRM into one continuous AI...

When Anthropic's Claude went down at 6:15 AM on tax day, it exposed a critical blind spot that most AI-adopting organizations haven't considered: vendor dependency risk. In this episode, Kevin and Eli dive deep into what happened when their entire AI-powered workflow ecosystem crashed simultaneously, revealing the hidden dangers of building business operations around single AI providers without ba...

Kevin Williams & Elijah Szasz demonstrates the end of interface friction by consolidating his entire workflow into a single Claude conversation. No more jumping between ClickUp, HubSpot, and Slack - everything happens through natural conversation with AI connectors pulling and pushing data to the right systems. This episode explores a fundamental shift happening right now: your SaaS tools are...

Kevin and Eli dive deep into the productivity unlock everyone's missing: dictation. Kevin reveals he's crossed one million words dictated and shares why voice input isn't just faster - it generates 3-5x more context-rich data that dramatically improves AI responses. This episode explores the gap between AI hype and practical implementation, covering computer use capabilities in Claude, the challen...