Beyond The Prompt - How to use AI in your company

Geoff Woods returns to Beyond the Prompt to discuss the updated edition of The AI-Driven Leader and what has changed over the past 18 months. Rather than focusing on the latest AI models, Geoff argues that leaders need to use AI themselves before asking others to, using it to think more clearly, shape strategy, and make better decisions. The conversation explores why many organizations confuse acc...

Christian believes the AI era will be defined less by generating outputs and more by evaluating them. As intelligence becomes cheaper and more accessible, the people who create the most value may be those who can distinguish good work from exceptional work and help guide increasingly capable systems. The conversation explores verification, judgment, and why expertise still matters in a world where...

Chantel Prat studies how different brains make sense of the world. Her work starts from a simple idea: every experience leaves a mark. The inputs we consume shape how we think, what we notice, and ultimately who we become. The conversation explores why people often choose familiar rewards over uncertain opportunities to learn. Chantel explains the tension between exploration and exploitation, why...

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and the newly released Incorruptible , joins Beyond the Prompt to explore why most companies drift from their original mission over time. The conversation dives into governance, shareholder primacy, Anthropic’s unusual structure, and why AI makes these questions more important than ever. Eric Ries argues that most companies are built on a contradiction. Founde...

Ryan Holiday argues that while AI can generate outputs, it cannot generate wisdom. Drawing on a story from Seneca about a Roman who used educated slaves to sound intelligent, he compares outsourcing thinking to outsourcing exercise: the value comes from becoming the kind of person who can do the work, not simply producing the answer. The conversation explores the difference between useful cognitiv...

Laura Jones explains that generative AI is raising the bar for creativity. When everyone can produce “pretty good” content, the real challenge is creating something that actually stands out. The risk is not poor output, but settling too quickly for what already works. She argues that as products become more similar, brand becomes a signal of trust. Not in a visual sense, but in the experience behi...

Dan Klein, professor at UC Berkeley and CTO at Scaled Cognition, explains that AI systems generate answers based on patterns in language rather than verified knowledge. This makes them highly capable across many tasks, but also means they can produce confident answers even when they are not fully accurate. He introduces the “jagged frontier,” where AI performs very well in some areas and less reli...

Melissa Cheals leads Smartly, a payroll and people management platform serving 24,000 small and medium businesses in New Zealand. In this conversation, she shares how AI is reshaping product development, leadership, and how organizations operate. A key moment comes when her team estimates new features will take 12 months and $1M to build. Instead of accepting it, Melissa pushes back, using AI to b...

Greg Shove describes a growing gap between individual and organizational AI adoption. A small group of employees are already using AI effectively, while most companies are still early. AI is generating real productivity gains, but those gains are not being captured at the company level. Instead, they are absorbed by individuals who use AI to work faster, often without changing team outputs or stru...

Leidy Klotz has spent years studying a simple but overlooked phenomenon: when we try to improve something, our first instinct is to add rather than remove. He shares the Lego bridge experiment that sparked his research and explains how this additive bias scales from small design decisions to entire organizations. Over time, companies accumulate reporting lines, meetings, software, and policies wit...

Fathom was built on the assumption that transcription would become commoditized and generative models would steadily improve. Rather than training proprietary models, Richard focused on building the infrastructure around them and waiting for model capabilities to reach the right threshold. In this conversation, he explains why AI has made effort and impact harder to predict, and why that shifts pr...

In this episode, Bryan McCann joins Henrik and Jeremy to explore how search is evolving from simple queries into more conversational and agent-driven systems, and why prompting is likely a temporary skill. Bryan shares how his definition of productivity changed as an AI researcher, moving away from doing the work himself and toward designing plans and experiments that machines could run continuous...

In this episode, Humza Teherany breaks down how he bridges deep technical fluency with strategic leadership at MLSE, home to the Raptors, Maple Leafs, and more. He shares how a vacation turned into an AI reawakening and how that hands-on immersion led to a fundamental shift in how his organization builds and experiments. Humza walks through MLSE’s build in a day practice, their internal AI platfor...

Mikkel B. Rasmussen brings a rare lens to the AI conversation. As an applied anthropologist, he has spent decades helping companies like LEGO uncover what is really going on beneath the surface. In this episode, he shares how deep insight often begins with being wrong, why surprise is the clearest sign you have found something meaningful, and how the pain of not knowing is essential to breakthroug...

Diarra Bousso returns to Beyond the Prompt to share how she's reprogramming the fashion industry using AI, math, and a relentless spirit of experimentation. From selling AI-generated products before they exist to cutting out waste and wait times, she walks us through a radical new approach to design and operations. She explains how her team uses scientific rigor to test marketing ideas, create on-...

In this episode, Illia Polosukhin joins Henrik and Jeremy to trace the origins of transformers and how practical constraints inside Google led to a breakthrough that reshaped modern AI. He explains why recurrent models were hitting limits, how parallel attention opened the door to scale, and why he believed a major jump in capability was imminent long before the rest of the world saw it. The conve...

In this episode, Christian Keller joins Henrik and Jeremy to explain how world models are shaping the next stage of generative AI. He talks through how AI learns using different types of inputs, and why video adds a sense of continuity, change, and cause and effect that text alone does not provide. Christian shares vivid analogies and clear examples to show what multimodal models make possible. Th...

Generative AI is moving fast, but most organizations aren’t. Tim Creasey and Paul Gonzalez have spent their careers studying why. As leaders at Prosci, they’ve worked with thousands of teams navigating complex change, and in this episode they share what their research says about the human side of transformation. They discuss why traditional tactics like comms and training break down in the face of...

Applied Intuition builds the kind of AI you don’t see, but can’t live without. Co-founders Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig share how their $15 billion company powers vehicle intelligence across cars, trucks, tanks, mining equipment, and defense systems operating in some of the most demanding conditions on earth. They explain why combining AI with safety-critical systems raises the stakes, how a sing...

As Head of IBM Consulting, Mohamad Ali led one of the most ambitious enterprise AI transformations to date. By making IBM its own “Client Zero,” his team tested every AI solution internally before bringing it to market. The effort began with massive hackathons involving 150,000 employees, turning curiosity into capability and belief at scale.  Mohamad shares how leadership alignment, process redes...

Martin Reeves has spent decades advising CEOs on how to think about strategy. As head of BCG’s Henderson Institute, he has built a career challenging leaders to balance efficiency with imagination and to prepare for the next disruptive shift. In this conversation, Martin tells Henrik and Jeremy why AI alone will not give companies an edge and might even strip them of advantage. He unpacks the “two...

Adam Brotman and Andy Sack sit down with Henrik and Jeremy to unpack their book AI First and the framework they have developed for leaders. They argue that AI is not just another technology wave but a leadership reset that demands new playbooks, new structures and new ways of thinking. They explain why AI should be seen as an augmentation of human intelligence, an “Ironman suit” for leaders, and h...

In a shift from the usual format, Henrik Werdelin steps into the guest seat—alongside Nicholas Thorne—for a live conversation with Jeremy Utley about their new book Me, My Customer, and AI . They explore what it takes for entrepreneurs to compete in the age of AI — from redefining resourcefulness to thinking like founders, even inside a job. The discussion dives into the book’s central frameworks,...

Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier, joins Henrik and Jeremy to talk about how AI is changing the company from the inside out. He shares the moment Zapier declared a “code red” on AI and the steps they took to turn urgency into action — encouraging more experiments, removing tolerance for inaction, and celebrating wins along the way. Wade discusses his own AI use cases, the importance of int...

In this episode, Evan Ratliff, journalist and creator of the podcast Shell Game , shares the wild and personal story behind his experiment in AI voice cloning. What began as curiosity turned into a six-month dive into building an AI version of himself—one that could answer phone calls, conduct interviews, and even fool friends and family. From scamming the scammers to testing AI therapy, Evan walk...