---
title: "You Built a Brilliant AI Agent — Now Get 300 People to Use It"
episode: 105
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Christopher O'Donnell"
guest_title: "Founder & CEO"
date_published: 2026-08-27
date_modified: 2026-09-03
duration: 01:11:04
word_count: 11375
topics: ["ai-in-gtm", "revenue-operations", "gtm-strategy", "sales-leadership"]
canonical_url: https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/podcast/christopher-odonnell-day-ai-single-player-multiplayer-agents/
source: "LeanScale Knowledge Hub — https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# You Built a Brilliant AI Agent — Now Get 300 People to Use It — Full Transcript

> Episode 105 of The LeanScale Podcast, with Christopher O'Donnell.
> Published August 27, 2026 · 01:11:04 · 11375 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/podcast/christopher-odonnell-day-ai-single-player-multiplayer-agents/

## 00:00 — Cold open + intro

**[0:00]** I do think we will see a lot of people from this era who went really deep early just run.

**[0:08]** My guest today is Christopher O'Donnell, founder and CEO of Day AI,

**[0:14]** where he's building sales agents with customer memory, an agentic GTM stack backed by Sequoia.

**[0:20]** Every single person I talk to that works in this field, or anywhere close to it, go-to-market engineering,

**[0:26]** or CRM admin, anything. People have started collating documents around what their company is trying to do.

**[0:37]** It comes back, it's just like, this is what you need to do as a company. Like, great.

**[0:43]** It's not to end, just a quick sidebar. Also, you were talking about speed to table stakes,

**[0:49]** then Kimi coming out with a relevant model at a fraction of the cost. A couple months from now,

**[0:55]** the capabilities that you'll be able to have access to at really, really affordable levels,

**[1:02]** I don't know. And then whatever the next frontier model is, I can't even really imagine what that's

**[1:06]** going to unlock. We are at a unique time where we've done all of the work in manual mode.

**[1:12]** Are there any concerns around atrophy and the ability to leverage these models if you don't have

**[1:21]** some baseline of skill as the foundation in the first place? I think it is a genuinely

**[1:27]** brilliant question, and extremely relevant. This is outside of the one-year time frame.

**[1:35]** I would say really the question.

## 01:47 — The one folder every RevOps team is quietly building

**[1:47]** Christopher, you've said almost every RevOps person you talk to now has this one folder

**[1:52]** that's become the center of their universe. Walk me through what's actually in it and when you

**[1:57]** started noticing the pattern and problem. Yeah, I mean, first of all, thanks for having me. I've

**[2:04]** really been looking forward to this, and it's great to see you again. There may be RevOps

**[2:10]** people out there that don't have one of these folders on their laptops. I have not talked to

**[2:17]** one in the last 60, 90 days. Every single person I talk to that works in this field,

**[2:25]** or anywhere close to it, go to market engineering or CRM admin, anything, people have started

**[2:33]** collating documents around what their company is trying to do. ICP definitions, pipeline definitions

**[2:42]** at a really, really detailed level, like a CRO, sales ops-y kind of level, a CEO kind of level.

**[2:51]** Just documenting everything, decisions, internal meetings, not just like to-dos. I mean, there are

**[2:58]** a million apps that can tell you after a meeting what your to-dos are from the meeting, but real

**[3:02]** decisions, and then starting to expand from there. A lot of RevOps people are very technical,

**[3:09]** obviously. Maybe they're not software engineers. More and more of them that I run into have some

**[3:15]** software engineering background, which I think is really cool for career paths and sales

**[3:21]** productivity, certainly. But it doesn't matter anymore. You know what I mean? You can become

**[3:26]** familiar with cloud code. I think particularly that seems to be really what people are using,

**[3:34]** because it's so good for this. That basic recipe of, "Well, wait a second. I can take all of this

**[3:42]** raw material that is sitting around a Salesforce export, and some granola notes,

**[3:48]** and a Gong transcript, and a Wiki page, a Notion doc, and sales training stuff,

**[3:55]** enablement stuff. I can just start mashing it up in cloud code. The minute you start doing that,

**[4:01]** you realize, "Oh, this works. There is something here." Because these are RevOps people doing it,

**[4:09]** I feel like their curiosity and creativity very quickly brings them to the strategic altitude.

**[4:16]** What leverage can I offer the company here in terms of implementing big changes, big decisions,

**[4:25]** in terms of automation, in terms of driving behavior, starting to really change the life

**[4:33]** of a frontline seller out on the sales floor, incorporating marketing, giving feedback to

**[4:38]** marketing, collaborating with product. It goes a bunch of different directions. Everybody seems

**[4:43]** to have one with a similar kind of core. Yeah, and I think you're also dealing with

**[4:49]** a group of people that are really tinkerers. They're used to working with a multitude of tools

**[4:54]** and being flexible in the exact discipline, cross marketing, sales, CS. I know for sure,

**[5:01]** I have turned my computer into the ultimate repo of all the things that I need, and almost becoming

**[5:09]** a hoarder of knowledge and skills and things that I use to operate every day. It has opened up this

**[5:17]** whole new world. I think, especially in RevOps, these people are fascinated by it, and they've

**[5:22]** been unlocked in a way where they've been held back for so long. There are so many analyses

**[5:30]** I've wanted to run. There are so many permutations of a plan I've wanted to model out, but it just

**[5:36]** wasn't really practical before, and now the work almost seems unlimited. I totally relate to what

## 05:45 — Internal meeting capture: the breakthrough hiding in your Zooms

**[5:45]** you're saying. These are folks who are patient, technical, in the room for lots of meaningful

**[5:53]** conversations. There's a lot of content around them. If they're running granola notes or whatever it is,

**[6:00]** they're exposed to a lot of kind of high stakes information and decisions, a lot of which

**[6:05]** traditionally just totally gets lost. It's like, "Oh, didn't we say that we were going to ... " Well,

**[6:11]** I guess I can't really remember, blah, blah, blah. A big breakthrough for us has been understanding

**[6:17]** the value of internal meeting capture vis-a-vis go-to-market. It's not just about the customer

**[6:23]** calls. It's about these internal meetings. We had one very well-known company in particular where we

**[6:28]** went in to work with their sales team. The more we talk to them, they're like, "Oh, yeah. We spend

**[6:37]** so much time in meetings, and we don't really know what happens with these decisions that we make."

**[6:42]** It's like, "Oh, yeah. Right. Let's do something about that. Okay, cool."

## 06:51 — "If I get hit by a bus": documentation as a compounding asset

**[6:51]** I think the other thing about RevOps people is this is one of those classic roles, like the

**[6:57]** classic role of you would have to go ask Kevin. You would have to go ask Ariana, whoever,

**[7:07]** if you want a certain report or if you want to drill into something or understand why something

**[7:11]** is this way and not that way. Because as clean as the system gets, there are always caveats.

**[7:18]** There's always context behind a field that gets added in a snowflake view or context behind why

**[7:27]** a looker projection of the data is a particular way. The LLMs working so well with natural language

**[7:37]** being able to flip back and forth between processing quantitative data and following

**[7:45]** accounting for all of this asterisk, caveat, consideration, nuance type of stuff that only

**[7:53]** lived in a RevOps person's brain. It's really nice for the RevOps person. I think it's also

**[7:58]** really good for just enterprise value to have all of this stuff documented in plain English.

**[8:05]** Even if you're doing this stuff, I do a lot of this where it's like, "Oh, that actually should

**[8:13]** count as a pilot in that time period, even though there was a card in Stripe or whatever."

**[8:22]** Document that somewhere, update your agents and skills, and make sure that that's always

**[8:26]** explained and accounted for. I've never read the file that that's in, but if I get hit by a bus,

**[8:35]** you could read that file and you would know exactly 100% of the context that's behind it.

**[8:42]** In a system like Looker, Tableau, or Databricks, or Snowflake, whatever, Salesforce,

**[8:49]** we're doing all of this data work and there's no place or reason really to document what it all

**[8:57]** means. Now that we're in this world of like, "Oh no, we're just talking about it as we're working

**[9:03]** with the hard quantitative data," you're also starting to get this compounding asset of what

**[9:09]** everything is and why. Something too, I think I've talked about this before. I wonder if the moment

**[9:19]** would be as big if the push to work remote from COVID didn't happen, because I've also realized

**[9:29]** that we're just sitting on absolute gold in our transcripts for meetings. Now, at least if you're

**[9:35]** in the B2B tech and SaaS space, most of your meetings are going to be recorded. You're going

**[9:42]** to have a transcript for everything. Realizing how much value is there and then being able to

**[9:49]** pipe that into the agents and skills that you've built has been an absolute game changer for me.

**[9:55]** I'll give you an example. I run a GTM ops agency. We do GTM ops for companies. It's a very heavy

**[10:03]** people process type of company, but I can keep track of everything going on because I can monitor

**[10:10]** the Slack channels. I can monitor the transcript repo and I can see everything that's happening

**[10:15]** with our customers and flag anything that's going on. All of that would have been, I don't even

**[10:21]** think it would have been possible to do before AI. I think you make a great point. We had COVID,

**[10:29]** we got very used to Zoom, and then we got very used to having transcripts and notes.

**[10:37]** This was obviously well before these language models. As we returned to the office or partially

**[10:43]** returned to the office, we kept that expectation and behavior to where the average team, if it's

**[10:50]** just four people in a room ad hoc talking about something, somebody will capture it. You know what

**[10:56]** I mean? It's like everything is recorded. What do you do with it? It's like you have this raw

**[11:05]** material. It's a Slack message from a customer who reports a bug. It's a feature request from

**[11:12]** a key account on a call that you record with Gong. It's the same feature request that another key

**[11:19]** account said was make or break for them the week before. You have all of that. You have RevOps

**[11:29]** people who are starting to go, "Well, wait a second. I can cook that together into these

**[11:36]** incredible assets," but also it should be not just a brain. It should be like a whole organism that

**[11:42]** is just moving and acting under my direction with the correct permissioning, the correct feedback

**[11:51]** and eval, the correct ownership of that automation and who can personalize it and who can't.

**[12:00]** That intuition is developing, I feel like right now. When you and I were talking about this,

**[12:05]** I threw some of this by you and you were saying you were seeing a ton of it out there, right?

## 12:11 — Your Claude account is the new Excel spreadsheet

**[12:11]** Oh, I think what's happening right now, so everybody's cloud account is basically

**[12:17]** their Excel spreadsheets. This was the old problem. Everybody ran around with their Excel spreadsheets.

**[12:22]** They built their own formulas. They had their own database of things that they thought were

**[12:26]** important to them. Then people show up to a meeting with different spreadsheets and different

**[12:31]** numbers and different things going on. What SAS did is it created that harness. It created that

**[12:37]** governance. It created that standardization of those data tables that enabled a large organization

**[12:46]** to take advantage of the power of something like a spreadsheet, but across the entire work.

**[12:52]** Now it's happening. Everybody has their own repo, their own agents, their own skills. They're

**[12:56]** running in their own unique way. They have their own nuances, but when you want to start using it

**[13:02]** at scale, like, okay, I built this thing. That's really interesting and really helpful. Now I want

**[13:07]** every single salesperson to use this thing in the exact same way or carve out what nuances

**[13:13]** and regulations they're allowed to change and customize for them. That becomes a massive

**[13:21]** problem. You're exactly right. I mean, for every Twitter article that you read where people are

## 13:28 — Where single-player AI falls over (and why MCPs get abandoned)

**[13:28]** talking about the agents they've built for their company. You say to yourself, okay, well, what

**[13:35]** happens when you need email data? What happens when you need data from private Slack conversations,

**[13:45]** or if somebody changes the permission on a Slack channel? How do you get all of this stuff in a

**[13:52]** format, first of all, that actually performs? Even just using single player, literally,

**[14:01]** using Clod with MCPs for these kinds of standard go-to-market apps that we're talking about that

**[14:09]** are well-built products that have been around for a long time. People give up. The creators of Clod

**[14:20]** internally have given up using Salesforce MCP, and they open up a tab in their browser to just

**[14:27]** enter the deal notes, which I find to be pretty hilarious that they're entering deal notes about

**[14:32]** the god-tier AI demo that they just did for some prospect or something. It's like, okay,

**[14:39]** better open up a new browser tab to salesforce.com and punch my notes in by hand. What? It's

**[14:45]** ridiculous. But if you don't have the right kind of binding into your harness, whatever it is,

**[14:54]** Clod code or a first-party web app like ours or Clod web, whatever, if it's not set up to actually

**[15:00]** work, it does not actually work. If you say, go run across every gong call and all the Slack

**[15:09]** conversations and find moments where the prospect really gave up on the deal or the gatekeeper

**[15:18]** became a champion. I want to see all those moments and drill in and explore that. These

**[15:23]** are reasonable things. Things that, by the way, anecdotally, I think six weeks ago,

**[15:28]** if I got on a Zoom and somebody was trying to do that, I'd be like, oh, okay, you're a super early

**[15:33]** adopter. And now I'm seeing people like, yeah, I am trying to do that. I have tried to see how the

**[15:41]** new sales reps are doing compared to the tenured reps. That stuff just falls over. You can't

**[15:48]** actually get it to work. Then you get into, okay, let's put all of our data into one place.

**[15:57]** And folks, I think earlier this year were getting Elasticsearch or TurboPuffer or Pinecone,

**[16:02]** whatever. And some really clueful person was maybe borrowed from engineering or something,

**[16:09]** was ingesting all of that into some central graph or database or whatever and putting that

**[16:15]** in front of the agent. And the problem with that is, sure, it's a lot of work. Some of it's not that

**[16:20]** hard to do, actually. And people got a fair bit of the way. We're talking in mid-July, late July.

**[16:28]** I talked to those same people, and they have given up on that. Partially because it turns

**[16:35]** into a vendor-level problem to just ingest this data. Partially because they have realized they

**[16:42]** need data sources, like, for example, Gmail, that you're just not going to do internally. You're just

**[16:47]** not doing that, trust me. And then largely because you need to have permissioning on the data. I mean,

## 16:55 — Governance and permissioning: the unsexy thing that lets you scale

**[16:55]** it's not a fun thing to talk about. You know what I mean? It's a little bit like discussing curfew

**[17:00]** with your teenage kids or something. It's not the most fun thing to come into work and be excited

**[17:06]** about. But we get pretty excited about it, just having worked in this stuff for so long. Doing

**[17:11]** that natively so that if I come work for you, Anthony, maybe you can see all of my emails in

**[17:18]** that graph. Your agents can see everything I'm doing. I can see emails from you, but only when

**[17:26]** they're relevant to a deal. And you don't have to install a Chrome extension or do anything like

**[17:32]** that. It's like the AI is managing all of that permissioning with us as the final judge. That

**[17:38]** type of modern system, I think, it's just table stakes. Absolutely. Yeah, it won't be able to

**[17:45]** scale without it. And it's easy for the people who are posting on X and whatever, or even people

**[17:51]** like me, like, yeah, founder, CEO, I have God mode access to all of our data. So I can make any

**[17:57]** agents I want and just have it run loose. But when I want to build agents that are specific to an

**[18:03]** architect or engineer on the team, I don't need them to have access to our financial information.

**[18:08]** I don't need them to have access to my emails or my private slacks. Those are things that

**[18:13]** there's obviously lots of sensitive data. So we do, you cannot scale unless you have

**[18:20]** the governance and permissions. And I really do think there's a lot of different aspects of this

**[18:26]** wave compared to the SAS wave. But I do think SAS did bring in that standardization compliance and

**[18:33]** governance that people could rely on and count on. And that is what enabled them to scale. So yeah,

**[18:38]** it's not the sexiest topic, but it's necessary if you want to get the actual enterprise value

**[18:44]** out of what people are building. A hundred percent, you know, and it's a lot of founders

**[18:50]** that I talked to that, I mean, basically do every founder I talked to through the spring

**[18:57]** was building and they always had a name for it, you know, Atlas or, you know, you know,

**[19:04]** Sauron or whatever. I'm like, I don't know if you want to call it Sauron, you know, but, you know,

**[19:09]** coming up with a personal agent and in the back of their heads, they're thinking, boy,

**[19:15]** this is going to get so good that I can generalize it for the company. One founder I talked to was

**[19:22]** spending between three and $500 a day on Google Cloud running his agent. And you can do,

**[19:31]** like you're saying, a God mode CEO, you know, founder agent stack all day and you're just not

**[19:39]** blocked. You know what I mean? There's just nothing blocking you along the way at all.

**[19:45]** Every single one of them that I've talked to has given up on this and spun them down or kept them

**[19:50]** just for themselves. Because you very quickly see for me to push this out to people, okay,

**[19:57]** now it's like really a product. You know, these founders who are building agents are engineers.

**[20:04]** They're engineers who are senior enough to have gone and started a company, you know,

**[20:08]** some tech company. Then they have some success. They hire a sales leader. They hire their first

**[20:14]** five reps. Then they hire 20 more. And, you know, maybe they forget in their daydream of rolling

**[20:21]** this out. These are salespeople. These are not technical folks. They're going to interact with

**[20:26]** it the way they interact with it. And you're not going to change that. How do they interact with it?

**[20:33]** They reply, dude. You send somebody a slack from an agent and say, here are the deals that matter,

**[20:41]** you know, such and such sales rep. And here's how to think about the meeting you have at 3 p.m.

**[20:46]** Sales rep is going to go, well, what about this one or what about that one? Wait, that's not a

**[20:52]** deal. Oh, wait, it is a deal. Oh, that is a deal. Oh, right. Because so and so is on vacation. So

**[20:58]** I'm doing that one. Okay, right. And it's talking with the agent. So first of all, you need to be

**[21:03]** able to continue the conversation. These are not just like one off web hooky, fire and forget slack

**[21:09]** notifications. You need to have like a commercial chat, you know, concept that is deployed across

**[21:16]** platforms. The other thing that people say when they reply, they get it in a sales rep. And by

**[21:22]** the way, they're well within their rights to do this. They get something and they go, you send this

**[21:27]** to me every morning. I don't want it like this. And I don't want it every day. I want it Wednesday

**[21:32]** morning ahead of my pipeline meeting. And what I need is for you to like triple check that none of

**[21:37]** my deals can be moved forward any more than they are because like I really want to show as much

**[21:42]** progress as possible. Give me this kind of summary in the details here. And by the way, give me

**[21:49]** something really smart to say in the meeting, you know, give me the talk track for my one on one

**[21:54]** with why not? What like they're within their rights to tell the agent what they want, especially

**[22:01]** salespeople, Anthony, where we give salespeople a lot of room to be themselves and to do things

**[22:10]** their way. That's what we're paying them for. We need to kind of solve this paradox of wanting to

**[22:17]** dictate their behavior and let them be themselves and hold them accountable to a result and say you

**[22:26]** have the talent and intuition, instincts, rapport building, et cetera, be yourself, but be yourself

**[22:32]** within like this sales process that we're telling you to follow. That's nothing in agentic coding

**[22:40]** comes anywhere near solving those problems. So you can't just like grab codex or a quad code

**[22:46]** and use the automation there to accomplish this goal. You can't like push it out, manage it,

**[22:52]** deploy it and have your salespeople come to you and be like, I love this thing. It's not happening.

## 22:59 — The schoolyard fence: how boundaries expand what reps do

**[22:59]** Yeah. And I think again, not the funnest topic, but having boundaries actually expands how far

**[23:06]** people will go to. There's a famous study where they would put a fence around elementary schools

**[23:11]** or not put a fence around elementary schools and the kids intuitively, you would think maybe,

**[23:17]** Hey, if there's no boundary, they might just go as far out as they want to go.

**[23:21]** But if there wasn't a boundary, they would actually stay really, really tight to the school

**[23:25]** and really tight to the building. And they wouldn't venture out too far. If you did put

**[23:28]** a boundary around the school, the kids would go all the way up until the fence and then walk around

**[23:33]** and expand where they would actually go. So in this case, I think if you give some AI capabilities

**[23:40]** with the right boundaries and guardrails, it'll give the sales team the flexibility they need,

**[23:46]** but also give them the ability to expand and actually leverage AI in a meaningful and helpful way.

**[23:53]** I had not heard that. That is incredible. And I really believe it.

**[24:00]** We could take a couple examples and play with them because this is exactly what I'm talking

**[24:04]** about. I was not aware of the school experiment. That is fascinating. And I totally believe it.

**[24:11]** So let's say we're going to do a couple of things with agents, basic stuff like this,

**[24:16]** the stuff we do with our customers. First of all, you have a CRM already. All right, great.

**[24:21]** Let's eliminate all the data entry. We had a rep join our company and by Thursday or Wednesday,

**[24:29]** she looked up from her laptop and said to everybody, I just don't have these CRM data

**[24:35]** entry blocks on my calendar anymore. And I'm never going to in my career again. That's crazy.

**[24:43]** That's amazing. And we're like, hallelujah. And we knew that, you know what I mean? But seeing

**[24:50]** someone just sitting at the desk next to us, around the couches in the middle of our office,

**[24:54]** say it in the look on her face, she's like, that's psychedelic. That's crazy. So that's a basic thing.

**[25:03]** You probably as the RevOps super admin, founder, whatever, if you're the person in charge of the

**[25:12]** sales process, if you're the RevOps person who has the real sales process in that folder,

**[25:19]** and you want to push that out so that agents are updating everything on behalf of the reps

**[25:26]** in HubSpot, Salesforce, whatever, you want it to be proving why it's moving an opportunity,

**[25:34]** creating an opportunity, updating a, you know, med pick field, whatever it's doing.

**[25:41]** And so let's say maybe you roll that out. And that has to be like a managed skill that only you

**[25:47]** control. Now, what's another like really bread and butter thing that, you know, that we do with our

**[25:54]** customers, but it's the type of thing everybody's going to be doing or trying to do. You know,

**[26:00]** we call it meeting prep historically, it's like way different from hitting prep. This is somebody

**[26:06]** grabbing you before the meeting and telling you exactly what you need to say, you know, based on

**[26:13]** a deep analysis of exactly what's happening in this conversation, maybe deeply researching to

**[26:19]** find similar deals with similar companies that got stuck in a similar way and how they got unlocked,

**[26:25]** like, you know, just like fanned out sub agent, deep research, long horizon agent, just whatever,

**[26:32]** which is like, sounds like Star Trek, but it's, it's like drinking a glass of water these days.

**[26:38]** You probably want to roll that out and allow the person to have some feedback about what's

**[26:45]** helpful and not as they walk into a meeting, the morning of a key meeting, whatever it is,

**[26:53]** the rep has a right to say, talk to me like this, be more direct with me, you know, be less direct

**[27:00]** with me, position this in a way that pumps me up, you know, tell me the stuff software engineers

**[27:07]** are doing where they're writing cloud code plugins that make them do pushups, you know,

**[27:11]** every couple of hours, like literally, I have not seen that. I have not seen that.

**[27:18]** I might need it. If you could send me the plugins, I could probably use it.

**[27:21]** Dude, and they're good. And they're like, they use the webcam to verify that you

**[27:25]** actually did the pushups and they and you can't keep working until you've done them stuff like

**[27:30]** that. I mean, maybe I want it this way. I want it that way. So how do you from your folder, push,

## 27:39 — The deploy button: pushing skills into personal harnesses

**[27:39]** almost like a, like a Vercel or Netlify, like deploy button, push skills out,

**[27:46]** but then they live within a personal harness. So you can actually take what you want to be central

**[27:55]** and controlled by you, keep it that way, deploy that, take what updates you want to all of the

**[28:02]** personal harnesses that are out there in the wild, that are all a result of what you've given them in

**[28:08]** the feedback they've given the agents. And to be able to modify those things over time in really

**[28:15]** strategic ways without sacrificing the personalization that everybody wants. Like this is going to be

**[28:20]** super obvious in a year. And it's just like starting to occur to people now. That is a

**[28:27]** really hard problem. We have a harness for Cloud Code and folks are like losing their minds over

**[28:32]** it. You know, they just add this stuff to their, the folder they already have and Cloud Code's like,

**[28:39]** I know exactly what to do. Like let's develop a plan. You know, it's got to develop a plan.

**[28:45]** Give, you know, give me feedback on this plan. How do you feel about it? Okay. Here are the changes

**[28:49]** we're going to make. You want to go? All right. Let's go. And it versions it, you know, does change

**[28:55]** log to get stuff. I'm sure you're doing a lot of this tooling. And we're just kind of giving those

**[29:00]** best practices to people in ways that like we're giving it to them through Cloud Code. So they just

**[29:08]** have to understand kind of why they're getting it. And then the rest of it just all makes sense and

**[29:12]** works forever. Yeah. And I think maybe going a little bit deeper on the architecture and maybe

**[29:20]** specific problems that you run into, especially like, okay, when you're pushing it, which is very,

**[29:26]** we mostly use Netlify. So like, okay, we're going to push an app to Netlify. We're going to push

**[29:31]** this thing there, but then how is it getting customized to that particular user? So like,

**[29:38]** Hey, we're going to push this thing out. We want sales directors to be able to use it a certain

**[29:42]** way. We want sales reps to use in a certain way. And then the other one too, there's, there's one

**[29:47]** where it's, Hey, these are personalized agents that kind of run within the parameters for you,

**[29:52]** but then how do we get the team working on a kind of like open source multiplayer mode agent? And I

**[30:00]** almost think of them as employees on the team. Like, Hey, this is our podcast coordinator agent

**[30:06]** and anyone can operate with it. And then these are some of the parameters. How are you opening

**[30:11]** up kind of those different unique scenarios? Well, you're speaking my language. First of all,

**[30:18]** huge fans of Netlify, huge fans of Netlify got to hang on to that recently.

**[30:23]** Claude apparently loves Vercel though. Even like, Hey, we use Netlify here. You want to push this

**[30:28]** to Vercel? No, we use Netlify here. Yeah, I mean, you know, whatever. It's at a hobbyist level. You

**[30:34]** know, we all use everything, I think. You know what I mean? We got stuff on every one of these

**[30:38]** things. For a commercial app, I think Netlify is a great company. We invested way back in the day

**[30:45]** and there's series C and I love Matt and Richard over there and everybody. Anyway,

## 30:53 — The virtual employee: rolling out agents like a new hire class

**[30:53]** you're thinking about it the right way. If you ask me, the virtual employee kind of concept

**[30:59]** is correct. So what is shared with the standards in software engineering, the concept of an agent

**[31:06]** definition where there's kind of a job description, you know, in a code repo, your rig is going to

**[31:14]** look like, you know, front end performance, you know, optimization agent or, you know, react,

**[31:21]** UI designer builder, front end generalist agent, whatever. And then everybody's going to use the

**[31:27]** same definition. When it comes to these virtual employees, when it comes to a seller or a CSM

**[31:36]** or whoever being given an agent, they have to be able to give it feedback and have it

**[31:42]** modify itself, like be coached. And so it's not that same concept of universal agent definitions.

**[31:52]** You can have templates, you know, and we do, but I do actually, and we've never talked about this,

**[31:59]** I do literally have an agent named Chloe who is in charge of this whole part of my life, what we're

**[32:05]** doing right now, podcast stuff, you know, this type of content partnership, hanging out, doing

**[32:10]** Riverside, you know, whatever it is. And that's her full-time job. So she'll slack me, she'll

**[32:18]** email me, she'll give me email drafts for podcasts that she's found that are a good fit, talk to me

**[32:24]** about where she found them, why she thinks they're a good fit, you know, off in the background,

**[32:30]** running through based on what I've done in the past, based on how things have been received,

**[32:35]** like, hey, Christopher, here's a podcast. Here's why it's interesting. You know, here's what we

**[32:42]** could talk about on it that we think would be a good fit. What do you think? Okay, I have an

**[32:45]** email draft ready for you, click here to send it, etc. That's the shape. Then I have a chief of staff

**[32:52]** agent that is grabbing me and saying, hey, Christopher, a really interesting thing happened

**[32:56]** with this deal over here. Why don't you write the CEO? Why don't you write the VP a product?

**[33:02]** Because they're starting to get interested in how this thing is, like, keeping linear up to date,

**[33:08]** which is something we're hearing. Like, product teams are super interested in what we're doing,

**[33:13]** which I think is a good sign. A lot of fun for me as a product person. You know, that agent is saying,

**[33:19]** write this, call this person, talk to this sales rep. Like, this is where you can be involved in

**[33:24]** all this stuff. So that's how you accomplish it. You roll these agents out as though you were

**[33:30]** introducing a new hire class, you know, to those managers. And a manager could be a support rep,

**[33:40]** could be anybody at the company now has these agents that have a name, that have a job

**[33:45]** description, that have skills. Those skills can run, you know, on a schedule. They can run based

**[33:53]** on a meeting happening or an email coming in, whatever. We package those things together,

**[33:59]** which I think is, it's one of these things. I think we're going to see a lot of apps do this.

**[34:04]** I haven't seen anybody do it yet. But it's like you have a skill definition. And then boom,

**[34:09]** right there, you can say, just run this every morning. Run this every time we do a meeting.

**[34:14]** You know, super easy for anybody to set this stuff up. So then the workflow is, sure, you could have

**[34:21]** brown bag lunches and have everybody open their laptop and like click through and build these

**[34:26]** agents. It's way better for the RevOps person with their folder, with their ICP, their pipeline,

**[34:35]** their big initiatives from the CEO, you know, whatever it is, to connect the day IMCP,

**[34:42]** which allows it to then go do a bunch of research super fast and develop a plan.

**[34:49]** Look at everybody's agents, everybody's skills, and come up with a plan of edits that it wants to

**[34:55]** make. So let's say the CEO is, you know, as you know, we get very like stubborn hell bent on

**[35:04]** something. So let's say the CEO's big thing is like we have this new product and we're not talking

**[35:10]** about it, folks. Like we got to get everybody selling this new product that is like our baby.

**[35:15]** It's the future of the company. And the sales reps are like, yeah, sure, you know, whatever.

**[35:19]** They're already feeding their family selling the core product. Like what do they need this new

**[35:23]** product for? Where would you update the automation? Here's where you start. You start in cloud code

## 35:32 — Changing the behavior of 1,000 reps as one change

**[35:32]** by saying, let's review the actual day in a life of these sellers. Let's go look at the last

**[35:39]** hundred meetings, hundred email threads, the last hundred ops, everything that happened on them,

**[35:45]** maybe. Identify where we should have talked about this new product. Okay. Now come up with

**[35:56]** insight about how to identify that moment. Okay, done. And especially by the way, dude,

**[36:02]** with something like Fable. Oh, it's unbelievable. It comes back. It's just like, this is what you

**[36:09]** need to do as a company. Like great. It's nuts. And just, just a quick sidebar. Also you were

**[36:16]** talking about like speed to table stakes, then Kimmy coming out with a relevant model at a

**[36:22]** fraction of the cost. Like I'm just thinking a couple of months from now, the capabilities that

**[36:28]** you'll be able to have access to at really, really affordable levels. I, I don't know. And then

**[36:34]** whatever the next frontier model is, I can't even really imagine what, what that's going to unlock.

**[36:39]** That's why, I mean, we're priced pretty low for the capacity. You know, it's not,

**[36:47]** it's something that as the model prices come down, you know, we'll be able to build a really

**[36:54]** amazing business around right now. It's like, it's definitely on us. There's a lot of like open bar

**[37:02]** of the, of the AI revolution here, Opus, Opus on us, you know, whatever kind of thing. But you know,

**[37:07]** a lot of people are doing that. That's, that's totally fine. But being able to take those insights,

**[37:13]** watch all those meetings, you know, come up with a plan and then review at a very granular level,

**[37:19]** all of the automation that's there, and then deploy those changes and preserve the personalization

**[37:27]** and preferences that everybody has. And actually like change the behavior of a group of a hundred

**[37:34]** people, a thousand people, like it literally doesn't matter, Anthony, how many people there are.

**[37:40]** And to just do that as like one piece of change management under the covers, it's just wild.

**[37:47]** Well, and I think there's something to be said about how humans organize things in their head

**[37:53]** as well. So if you're thinking about, okay, we're going to have X amount of workflows,

**[37:58]** X amount of skills and capabilities, organizing them into roles and jobs, that is a container

**[38:06]** for these things. I think it was just really intuitive. And the same way you would build an

**[38:12]** organization, you'd start to specialize and have teams and these teams have access to certain

**[38:16]** information. They have certain skill sets on these teams. I think it's the same way as you're

**[38:21]** building your agentic empires that you would start to organize things in that way. And I just,

**[38:28]** I think some of how things are built, if you're not using something like day,

**[38:33]** it's just not as intuitive. So creating that container, creating that harness with all of

**[38:37]** the security and governance and all the things that we've talked about amazing, but also just

**[38:41]** the human intuition of, Oh, I need an executive assistant agent. They should be able to do these

**[38:47]** things. Oh, somebody else on my team needs an executive assistant for them. Copy paste those

**[38:52]** skill sets and all the things that work across everybody tailor it to how they like to manage

**[38:56]** their calendar and their email and X, Y, Z. So, and then all the other roles you could think of,

**[39:02]** I think there's so much value in just that aspect alone.

**[39:09]** Of all of the really hard problems of trying to build a thing that is easy to buy, easy to use,

**[39:18]** easy to build a company around on our side, there are a bunch of really hard problems.

**[39:24]** The packaging and presentation of security, roles, perms, RBAC, IAM, whatever you want to

**[39:30]** think of it as, the pricing, a lot of these early apps like cursor and so forth,

**[39:39]** boy, they've, and God bless them. And they're doing a good thing. And it's no criticism of them,

**[39:45]** but they've stubbed their toes with customers over and over simply because there wasn't any

**[39:51]** intuitive concept for you're out of whatever. You know what I mean? And if we don't have some limit,

**[40:00]** you're going to bankrupt the company. There was a founder recently who was saying on Twitter,

**[40:06]** they had one query, they cost $20,000 and it's an amazing company, doing amazing things. They're

**[40:15]** very successful, but they're going to have to solve that. You know what I mean?

**[40:21]** Every one of these things, like how do you explain a quad code style, which is now by the

**[40:28]** way, a codec style, agent, skill, instructions, ecosystem, that whole shape changed a lot over

**[40:37]** the last three years. I know because I used, you know, I was like an OG, you know, cursor rules,

**[40:43]** MD, you know, guy back in 20, like 2023. I mean, they're trying to do cursor rules. You know what

**[40:51]** I mean? Now that's coalesced. It's intuitive for software engineers, mostly, not even entirely.

**[41:00]** And now we have to explain this to sales reps. All of these problems actually are not problems

**[41:08]** when you adopt this idea of a virtual team member. I give them a job description. They have a certain

**[41:15]** set of things they're trained to do repeatedly. Any of these things they're trained to do, I can

**[41:19]** ask them to do at a regular cadence or when a certain thing happens. Everybody, 100% of people

**[41:25]** are like, that don't make sense. And we say, okay, and we have tiers of these. And the higher tiers

**[41:32]** can do more work in a day and are smarter and have access to, you know, more powerful tools and

**[41:38]** capabilities. People are like, yeah. Can we hang on that topic for a second? Because I think it's

## 41:48 — The coming "AI Operations" team

**[41:48]** something people are not going to realize. I'm forecasting there's going to be a team that's

**[41:55]** called AI operations within every company. And those are some of the problems that they're going

**[42:00]** to have to manage of, okay, what type of agent is this and what type of model do we need to? Because

**[42:08]** the subsidization of all of this, it'll go away at some point. So then we'll have to figure out,

**[42:14]** okay, we can't just use the highest end frontier model for every single thing we do and just burn

**[42:18]** through usage credits. We're going to have to figure out, oh, this is a simple agent. It doesn't

**[42:23]** need more than this level of model. And we can manage our costs this way because there are real

**[42:29]** hard costs to leveraging AI. In some cases, it's comparable to bringing on a full-time person.

**[42:35]** So I know it'll not be at that point forever, but people will have to manage that. And I think

**[42:42]** organizing your agents or organizing your capabilities in that way actually helps give

**[42:49]** you a framework to say which model you need, what level of access you need. And that's going to be

**[42:54]** a big problem too. Packaging it also in a way that is very intuitive to humans has the benefit

**[43:06]** that it is also very intuitive to something like cloth. And so you could grab our product

**[43:16]** and let's say you have some data laying around, you have Gong, you connect Gong,

**[43:21]** all the Gong stuffs in there, Salesforce, whatever it is. You could just go in through

**[43:27]** cloud code and say, talk to me about what I might do. And if you use our, we have a sort of a GTM

**[43:38]** brain template repo that basically you just download or you can even give the URL, the GitHub

**[43:45]** public URL to cloud and you don't even need to download it. I discovered this the other day that

**[43:50]** it can just read the online stuff and it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally get it. Yeah, yeah,

**[43:54]** what did you want to do? Well, you tell me, I want to see what's going on in here and it'll

**[44:00]** read the instructions of basically how to think about DAI and how you might think about this. This

**[44:06]** is like tens of thousands of dollars of onboarding. You know what I mean? That's just in there and

**[44:12]** cloud can go, well, let me look around. You can just run a slash start command and it'll say,

**[44:17]** yeah, yeah, let me go figure out what's going on. And it reads everything and watches all the

**[44:22]** meetings and all this stuff comes back and it goes, okay, this makes a ton of sense. All right.

**[44:27]** So for your SMB East Coast team, how about we eliminate all of the CRM data entry and

**[44:37]** try to take the things that the more senior people are doing, like so and so and so and so,

**[44:42]** and get the more junior people doing that stuff too. And maybe also let's do some prospecting in

**[44:50]** the West Coast because those are newer territories, we don't have enough leads there.

**[44:54]** And you're sitting there and you're like, well, that sounds great. What would that cost? And it

**[44:58]** can tell you. And the way the whole thing is designed is not to be extractive. So if you don't

**[45:07]** need a certain tier or access, you'll never hear about it. It's only at the moment that you want

**[45:16]** to do something. So if you're on like our lowest tier and you never try to like manage opportunities

**[45:22]** in a pipeline, you know, you never try to like create internal documentation, etc. You're just

**[45:28]** like doing meetings and you're getting your notes, you're managing your to do's and all this kind of

**[45:31]** stuff. You're good. You're never going to hear about it. The minute you try to do something,

**[45:36]** let's say you get promoted, you know, and now you're supposed to be doing, you know, have

**[45:41]** oversight and you're responsible for the hygiene of this part of the system, your agent will tell

**[45:47]** you that and will actually tell your boss, which is pretty cool and say, hey, listen, Christopher is

**[45:52]** in here. And, you know, his title just changed. And he's trying to do X, Y, and Z, which like,

**[45:58]** I think you want him doing. And so you can click here to approve this. And I will be able to do X,

**[46:04]** Y, and Z. So anyway, that like the ergonomics in the dynamism of as a vendor being able to deliver

**[46:12]** the value, like just in time, we would say, not trying to oversell a package or undersell something

**[46:19]** and like be too cute about it. Because here's the thing, these models are going to tell you what you

**[46:24]** should be using. And they should just be able to tell you exactly how to think about it, keep it

**[46:28]** super clean top to bottom. So there are no surprises and you're just good. Where do you think

## 46:37 — Where GTM is going: OTEs double, sellers become marketers

**[46:37]** this is all going in the next couple months? I won't even ask you to forecast out more than a year,

**[46:43]** but what are we going to see coming soon? Listen, I think that we will see some jobs

**[46:54]** get really affected in a negative way. I really think we do. I don't think it's the end of the

**[46:59]** world. I do think particularly the very largest enterprises are looking for a lot of efficiency.

**[47:07]** And there are certain roles where they're going to get hit hard, and that's going to suck. And

**[47:10]** we're all going to have friends that get hit. My recommendation to everybody is like, just get into

**[47:16]** this AI stuff. And if you have a period, and I've had lots of friends have periods of not being,

**[47:22]** you know, in a role at a given time, use that time to just train, train, train, take a hobby,

**[47:29]** take an interest, whatever it is, your softball team, your church, anything, and use these frontier

**[47:35]** models to get super deep. And that is the way to feed your family long term, 100%. Like I think

**[47:42]** we're all going to be okay, but we're going to have to rescale a bit. That said, you know, and go to

**[47:48]** market, we will see reps basically doing a lot more business straight up. And Mark Roberge is

**[47:58]** out there, you know, I'm sure you know Mark well. He's doing a very clever thing talking about the

**[48:05]** number of active opportunities being worked by a rep going up by, you know, could be 30% at a

**[48:11]** company could be 60% at another company. And that, you know, you don't have to squint too,

**[48:17]** too much to see that that turns into higher OTEs, you know, I think OTEs for sales reps are going

**[48:23]** to double. My finance plan has OTE doubling over 24 months here. So, you know, these reps,

**[48:32]** they come in, they make 200k, they're going to make 400k, even at the same level, just through

**[48:38]** the efficiency through not having to waste their time doing stuff, you know, they don't need to be

**[48:41]** doing these inside sales reps, if they're doing two quality calls a day, you know, 2.5 or something

**[48:46]** like that. They're happy to do four. They're happy to do four. And the company is happy to pay them

**[48:53]** the OTE to close twice as much business. Sales management, you know, I'm in the territory of

**[49:00]** what is starting to be consensus forecast. Sales managers will go from seven direct reports to

**[49:09]** twice that. That'll be really interesting. Sales managers have a tough job. A lot of them are new

**[49:15]** to management. That's one area where I think we internally want to be locking arms with them and

**[49:21]** thinking what we can do to help their careers, give them lenses, tools, content, you know,

**[49:26]** encouragement. I think some of those folks are, you know, going to hit a tough patch. Some of them

**[49:36]** will just be given a lot more work. The ones who really embrace this stuff, I think, will have a

**[49:42]** great quality of life and make a bunch more money. Beyond that, I think that we'll see roles start to

**[49:48]** merge. I see a senior seller, for example, starting to do a lot more marketing as we specialize.

**[50:00]** What do I want as a buyer? I want to, you know, ask a question about whatever it is that I'm

**[50:06]** interested in. I want to get a great answer from Claude or Chachi B.T. or Perplexity. You know, go

**[50:12]** to some citation. See a great offer or piece of content with somebody's name and face on it as

**[50:20]** the author. And then when I talk to that company, I want to talk to that person. And I want to work

**[50:27]** with that person the whole time I work with that company. I mean, this is like, if you're Coca-Cola,

**[50:31]** this is what life is like as a buyer. We've always, in SMB mid-market scale-ups, always wanted that

**[50:38]** to be the buyer experience. I think that becomes the buyer experience. We get specialized in sales

**[50:44]** and we start doing a lot of the customer marketing, the case study stuff, the testimonial stuff,

**[50:50]** because why not? You're a rep, you have a book of business. Now maybe you know this type of company

**[50:56]** within that book of business. That's your whole job. You can make a landing page, dude. You can

**[51:00]** make an ebook. You can do a webinar. That's no problem. And as a buyer, oh, it's wonderful.

**[51:07]** I think those people become indispensable for any company. That's a really interesting take.

**[51:13]** And I haven't heard that one yet. And it's one that, you know, as a business, we've leaned very,

**[51:21]** very heavily into content. A lot of companies have, especially your alma mater HubSpot. We just had the

**[51:27]** VP of media on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. And it's an unbelievably powerful tool that also

**[51:36]** feeds the LLMs so well. And I think you're right. And the best sellers

**[51:44]** do already have a personal brand and they bring that personal brand between companies. They start

**[51:49]** to concentrate in a particular industry or on a particular type of solution. So I think the

**[51:55]** evolution of sellers going into marketing makes a ton of sense. And now I think before they were

**[52:02]** just held back by sheer bandwidth. Oh, well, who's going to design my webpage and who's going to edit

**[52:10]** what I write and who's going to come up with ideas for my posts or whatever it is.

**[52:15]** Now they can have an entire marketing agency underneath them that could power the entire process.

**[52:23]** A hundred percent. I mean, just the amount and the way in which I'm in touch with our customers,

**[52:32]** it's just so much more scalable than it used to be. You know, it's easier for them to write me

**[52:38]** with a question they have. It's easier for me to respond to them with, you know, documentation,

**[52:45]** let's say, or something, you know, it's just a wonderful interaction now. I mean, somebody that,

**[52:50]** you know, I talked to in the sales process six months ago, nine months ago, I got an email from

**[52:54]** from a guy over the weekend and he said, oh, we're trying to do this thing with, you know, the API.

**[53:00]** And, you know, we're have a question about how to do the auth. And I go to just take this GitHub link

**[53:08]** and just tell cloud code about it. And he writes me back. He's like, okay, wow.

**[53:14]** But, you know, and so he and I just get to have this wonderful touchpoint. It's like, by the way,

**[53:19]** how you been? You know what I mean? We have like cloud code and codecs and all this stuff. Like,

**[53:25]** I ran into that question one time. I created, you know, resources, example apps, all of this kind

**[53:33]** of stuff. And all I ever have to do if somebody asked me a similar question is go, hey, just tell

**[53:38]** cloud code to go look here. And any question it could possibly have on the topic, it's going to

**[53:43]** find reference examples, solve the thing. And now this other human and I, we get to talk about our

**[53:48]** kids. We get to talk about that trip he took to Europe. You know what I mean? Work is getting

**[53:53]** really fun, I will say. It's getting really fun that we're focused on the creative side 100% of

**[54:00]** the time. Yeah, I agree. And I think it's tough unless you've really unlocked certain things. But

**[54:07]** I think about running lean scale as an agency, some of the things that I would have to do,

**[54:13]** I'd have to have tons of one on ones where they're just regurgitating information back to me.

**[54:19]** We would spend hours handwriting documentation after a meeting. So we've become I would,

**[54:29]** it's fair to say we're at least twice as productive now. And all of those things that used to take so

**[54:35]** much time, or if I wanted to model out some type of thing, I would open up Google sheets and I'd

**[54:40]** manually type in everything or download data and try to like dedupe it, restructure it for myself.

**[54:46]** Now I can just connect the MCPs and get things running. I agree. I get to do more fun work. I

**[54:53]** can do more podcasts. I can do, I could create more content. I can spend time ideating with the team.

**[55:02]** Also another thing that's just opened up, like let's just hop on a meeting. It's going to get

**[55:05]** recorded. Even you mentioned this earlier in the conversation, when we have off-sites,

**[55:11]** we can spend more of it just doing fun stuff together and just getting to know each other

**[55:15]** as humans. And then when we're having meetings, just throw a recorder in the middle and then

**[55:19]** just talk. We don't have to worry about, no one has to describe it, no one has to take notes,

**[55:22]** no one has to be worried about anything. Just let the ideas free flow and then we'll get it

**[55:26]** all structured later. It's made my work day way more enjoyable. I think you bring up a very

**[55:35]** very important image of the before and after that had not occurred to me.

**[55:44]** If one were to listen to the hallway conversations or see the internal slacks and email threads,

**[55:55]** here, I will say here because it's what I know because I work here and we're very far down this

**[56:00]** path ourselves. One would very quickly notice the density of the questions, answers, the

**[56:13]** very very high value information exchange. I don't have to take 90 minutes with the head of sales

**[56:24]** to see a PowerPoint presentation of here's how the reps are doing and here's the thing

**[56:29]** and here's the thing. I know all of it. I know all of it, Anthony. Somebody puts a meeting on

**[56:37]** the calendar. When you and I first met, Sam didn't have to grab me and be like, "Let me explain who

**[56:43]** Anthony is." I know who you are. I know your relationship with him and this other person and

**[56:50]** this other person. I've gone and checked this stuff out. I know all of that. I don't need to

**[56:57]** be given a PowerPoint presentation. I'm pointed to one very key question about here's a rep who

**[57:08]** had a deal and that deal didn't go our way. Now, you could make the case that he ought to have

**[57:16]** positioned it this way as opposed to that way. I go, "Oh, well, that's interesting to me as a CEO.

**[57:22]** That's extremely interesting." I dive in. I'm watching clips. I learn everything about this

**[57:29]** one deal. I spend maybe 10 minutes. I know everything about this deal in 10 minutes

**[57:35]** and then I draft up an email with my agent to the head of sales and I say, "Should we talk about

**[57:41]** this? Is there a debate to be had here? Is this a simple matter of coaching? What's going on with

**[57:46]** this one?" I get back minutes later an equally dense and high-value explanation of the entire

**[57:56]** topic of whether to position it this way or that way. What's hard about it? This type of prospect,

**[58:02]** our overall go-to-market, everything, dude, everything. It's just like unbelievably good and

**[58:07]** I read it and I'm like, "Ha." Then I go back and with that new lens from a colleague, I look at it

**[58:14]** again and I write her back and I go, "You're completely correct." I won't say you're absolutely

**[58:22]** right, but I'm like, "I completely agree with you. Thank you." That whole interaction was

**[58:31]** so much less stressful and so much higher density for everybody involved than it ever would have

**[58:38]** been. We can spec out entire modules of software we want to build just sitting around the couches

**[58:46]** with marketing, engineering, sales, just talking about it. We've done this entity three or four

**[58:52]** hours and then you take the recording of that and you start to shape that into the very detailed

**[59:00]** picture of what you want to build. Once you have that, coding is like ironing that on the code base,

**[59:06]** like a sticker. You know what I mean? That part's easy, free. I'm enjoying work and people here

**[59:14]** often say, like our head of product is famous for saying, "I'm never working again without

**[59:20]** working this way." No, you get to do the most enjoyable things. You get to connect with people,

**[59:26]** share ideas, you get to talk, you have conversation, you can make it enjoyable, grab coffee together

**[59:30]** and just make sure it's recorded and then dump everything in and you get higher value outputs.

## 59:37 — Mathematicians with calculators: the atrophy question

**[59:37]** One question I have, flip side, I'm not sure where I stand on this one. We are at a unique time where

**[59:45]** we've done all of the work in manual mode, so we have an appreciation for the depth that things

**[59:52]** should go and then we're equipped and powered with automation and things that can just

**[59:57]** supercharge us. I would compare it to we are mathematicians that just got handed calculators.

**[1:00:05]** Now, fast forward 10 years or so. Are there any concerns around

**[1:00:12]** atrophy and the ability to leverage these models if you don't have some baseline of skill

**[1:00:21]** as the foundation in the first place? I think it is a genuinely brilliant question

**[1:00:29]** and extremely relevant. This is outside of the one year time frame, I would say really the question.

**[1:00:39]** So in software engineering, we've had this kind of magical level of living available to us now for

**[1:00:47]** a little while. It has not caused people to work less. It has not caused people to be

**[1:00:58]** less stressed. We are not getting twice as much done in 60% of the time and then going and touching

**[1:01:08]** grass and throwing football with her daughter in the backyard or whatever. I mean, I'm starting to,

**[1:01:15]** and four or five months ago, I think I started forcing myself to. The article started hitting

**[1:01:21]** around brain fry and that becomes very real. When you get exposed to this stuff and you learn these

**[1:01:32]** best practices and ways of multi-threading and kind of hypercharging your work, the tendency is to do

**[1:01:40]** five times as much work in 140% of the time. You know what I mean? Yep. I do think we will see a

**[1:01:50]** lot of people from this era who went really deep early just run because I don't know the neuroscience

**[1:02:01]** behind it, but boy, I mean, you just end up just kind of catatonic. If you really are doing

**[1:02:08]** everything, because think about it, it's like I'm doing landing pages, I'm doing this, I'm going to

**[1:02:11]** make another offer and then let me go over here and do a feature. Oh, why would I ask engineering

**[1:02:16]** for this feature when I can write this back with quad code? If I have the spec, then the automated

**[1:02:22]** sandbox thing is going to pick it up and just code it and then somebody's going to do a pull request

**[1:02:27]** and this thing's live. There's all this stuff to be checking in on and you're leaving Thanksgiving

**[1:02:36]** dinner halfway through to check on your quad code processes and keep them going and unblock them.

**[1:02:41]** And it's like sneaking away to unblock stuff on your phone. I think we'll get tired of it.

**[1:02:48]** I think we will. And I don't think it's a good thing. And it's something I've tried to really

**[1:02:55]** change in my own behavior. So I don't know. My hope and what I say internally is for people to

**[1:03:02]** be twice as productive in 80% of the time, I want to see a salesperson work 80% of the hours they

**[1:03:09]** work today have all of that time be what they consider their value add and make twice as much

**[1:03:18]** fun. Great. That's our kind of North Star on this thing. I think a lot of roles will get there.

**[1:03:26]** Some roles will go away and we don't quite know which is which. So it's definitely something to

**[1:03:33]** stay really close to and something that I'm a student of and I don't know where we're going

**[1:03:38]** to land, but I think we're going to see a lot of goat farmers, bro. Well, I'm also thinking one

**[1:03:45]** quick parallel. Like if you go back 100 years ago, industrial revolution, really picking up steam,

**[1:03:53]** something that wasn't around was a fitness center and gym on every single corner of the world

**[1:04:03]** because you just did the fitness throughout your work. Like you're, you're lifting things. You're

**[1:04:08]** moving things. And then we go into the knowledge era where you're actively like, I'm doing

**[1:04:16]** relatively complicated math problems throughout the day. I'm structuring my thoughts by manually

**[1:04:21]** typing them out throughout the day. I'm reading, you know, dense material or going through research

**[1:04:26]** process and I'm using my brain quite a bit. I'm wondering if there's a world where you fast

**[1:04:31]** forward, we're going to need to do some math by hand and read books on paper just to keep our

**[1:04:38]** brains fresh and productive for leveraging the AI we have access to.

**[1:04:44]** I mean, listen, I think I carve out time to understand as well as I can what this all means

**[1:04:56]** for creative pursuits that have nothing to do with our jobs, you know, our day jobs.

**[1:05:07]** I, I seek to understand this in depth. My instinct is that the upshot of all of this,

**[1:05:16]** in the good case, is we get to do art. We get to play music. We get to sit around a campfire,

**[1:05:25]** you know, lazily for long periods of time and tell stories to each other. I mean,

**[1:05:29]** this is a very optimistic rose-colored glasses, you know, it's been said there's a band I really

**[1:05:38]** like. They describe it as nostalgia for the future. But so sue me. I mean, what else am

**[1:05:44]** I going to do? I'm not going to be a doomer about the whole thing. So what does it mean for us to,

**[1:05:50]** can the AI help us, you know, learn an instrument? It can help a 13 year old, you know, write a song

**[1:05:57]** that they have in their head. We all know that we have Suno, you know, that's great.

**[1:06:02]** But can it help us learn to play cello and in our 40s? Absolutely it can. Can, can it help me

**[1:06:11]** improve my tennis serve so that I can be good enough to get, you know, calls from people I

**[1:06:18]** meet at tennis clinic? It, you know, it absolutely can. Then what happens? Well, then 20 years from

**[1:06:25]** now in my 60s, I'm playing tennis and I have a social network and, you know, the stats say

**[1:06:30]** I'll live 10 years longer. So I'm spending a lot of time outside of work thinking about what are

**[1:06:36]** the proxy, you know, impacts that this could have that are less obvious, that improve quality of

**[1:06:43]** life and health outcomes and all the rest of that. Not trying to, you know, offer a product and build

**[1:06:50]** a business and raise money and, you know, grow revenue, but just trying to see what's going to

**[1:06:55]** happen. You know, what does it mean for education? Do my kids go to college? Like is college useful?

**[1:07:00]** I have no idea. Is it twice as useful? Because now you actually more than ever need a four year

**[1:07:07]** sandbox as your prefrontal cortex develops to just meet people, fellowship and experiment

**[1:07:14]** intellectually. You know, I don't know which direction it goes, but I spent a lot of time

**[1:07:19]** thinking about it. And I think that whole area is very interesting. Yeah. And I'm not a,

**[1:07:28]** I'm not a doomer about it either. I just think there are going to be some interesting things that

**[1:07:32]** we will end up needing to solve for. And that's just one that I think about a lot as like, okay,

**[1:07:38]** I'm used to using my brain a lot. Now I don't have to use it as much, but I'm right at the point where

**[1:07:44]** I do have a well working brain, one that's been used to doing difficult things. And now I can

**[1:07:51]** use that plus the superpower, but I don't know if like, I mean, you've probably seen in a meeting,

**[1:07:56]** somebody show up with some AI built stuff, but they don't really know what they're talking about.

**[1:08:01]** And you're like, Oh, you just, you just prompted a few things. But if you don't actually know

**[1:08:08]** the subject, then you don't have taste for what good looks like in this area. So I just think

**[1:08:15]** we'll have to carve out some intentionality to work our brains. And I think I'm with you as well.

**[1:08:21]** The most enjoyable things are spending time with your family, spending time with friends,

**[1:08:25]** being active, being out in nature. And if we can carve out more time to do that, I'm all for it.

## 1:08:31 — The 12th draft: writing the blank page yourself

**[1:08:31]** I'll tell you one, one thing I found myself doing is, uh, the other day I was working on a document

**[1:08:36]** and, you know, a memo, like they used to say back in the day, I did, I think 11 versions of it,

**[1:08:44]** molding it, shaping it with Claude, come at it this way, take into account that stuff.

**[1:08:51]** And then the 12th version, I opened up Google docs, a blank document, and I looked at nothing.

**[1:08:59]** And I just sat and I just wrote. And so the first 11 versions and all of the AI and the web searches

**[1:09:07]** and the, you know, mashing concepts up and finding patterns and everything, that was, it turns out all

**[1:09:14]** to tease my imagination for a couple of weeks. After that, I'm like, I need to do this top to

**[1:09:23]** bottom myself. And it felt really good. And I felt ready for the blank page. Um, so that kind

**[1:09:31]** of stuff I think is fun too. I think it will surprise ourselves. I think so too.

**[1:09:37]** Christopher, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for spending so much time going through

**[1:09:42]** the world of AI as of mid July, 2026. We all know it's going to change and I appreciate

**[1:09:50]** any bit you're willing to forecast on it. But I think to recap some of the major themes that

**[1:09:56]** we talked about, everyone has been explosive with their creativity and things are building

**[1:10:03]** and building things that are really moving the needle, adding productivity and making the

**[1:10:07]** difference. The challenge is when you want to share that great work across an entire organization

**[1:10:14]** and when you want to enable multiplayer mode on specific capabilities. And I think what you're

**[1:10:20]** doing at day AI is really unlocking that for companies at scale and very, very exciting.

**[1:10:27]** And I'm also happy that you now share the positive view and outlook on the future,

**[1:10:32]** maybe not the near future. We'll have some bumps as every change brings, but I think all in we're

**[1:10:40]** building this for ourselves and expecting the benefit for us and our families. So, Christopher,

**[1:10:46]** thank you so much. Thanks for being on the show and can't wait to see what you build at day AI

**[1:10:53]** next. Can't wait to see what we do together. And until next time, yeah, this is a lot of fun. Thank

**[1:11:00]** you so much for having me on.