Latest / 1 to 100 / E54: Become AI Native with Jim Benton from Adapt
Transcript
- 0:00I, I guess the thing that I'm most curious about, because
- 0:02Jeremiah, like mentioned organically in the, in the last
- 0:04conversation, that at this point, it's like the bill of his
- 0:08that's going up the fastest because of how much it's getting
- 0:11used inside of the company. And so the, the like the meta
- 0:15question that I have is, do you, do you find the way that?
- 0:19And, and of course you can like quickly describe the product,
- 0:22but I, I think the, the bigger learning that I'm most curious
- 0:25about for other SAS operators is or software operators is do you
- 0:30find that it is significantly more important to have that
- 0:35expansion, those expansion moments versus the land moment?
- 0:39And then how do you organize your company internally to
- 0:43mirror which side of it do you believe to be more important?
- 0:46Yeah, I think. Hey, Jeremiah, good to see you
- 0:48on that. Yeah.
- 0:49And actually, Jim, can you jump into and just tell, tell
- 0:51everybody a little bit about adapt and, and what it is that
- 0:54you do, because that'll, that'll help with this answer.
- 0:55Too, Sure, sure. So Adapt is essentially your
- 0:58company brain, but it's built and powered by the Adapt AI
- 1:01computer. And that is a very fundamentally
- 1:03different part of how we've approached things by being an AI
- 1:05computer versus just an LM call and using MCPS.
- 1:09And I think that the, you know, the key is once you connect all
- 1:12of these tools, so we'll see companies connect, you know,
- 1:14they'll start with five to 10 tools.
- 1:16Next thing you know, they've got, you know, 20 plus
- 1:18integrations, GitHub and linear and HubSpot and Google
- 1:21Analytics, you name it. Once you put those together at a
- 1:24team basis, it's this pretty insane thing where this, this,
- 1:27this computer has access to all of your knowledge, It can take
- 1:31action on the tools. It's all at the API basis.
- 1:33And So what you find is that people can know anything, do
- 1:36anything. And now it's just about how do
- 1:38you leverage that computer to do work that you just never thought
- 1:41was even possible before. And so I think to answer your
- 1:43question about what you, what's more important, landing or
- 1:45expanding? I think in the AI space, I mean,
- 1:47it is busy right there out there today.
- 1:49I mean, we see it, right? It's a, it's a fast space we're
- 1:52in, specially coming out of the SAS days.
- 1:54So landing is important. You got to break through the
- 1:56noise. You got to find that thing
- 1:57that's different, that resonates and I would say the big thing is
- 2:01just being frictionless. You know, the old SAS approaches
- 2:03of heavy salesmanship and you know, Click to sign up and talk
- 2:07to sales and go through the the full process.
- 2:09The best AI companies we see out there are the ones that are
- 2:11moving really quick, reducing the barriers, getting people
- 2:14right in on a self-service motion, and then having like
- 2:17wickedly strong sales assist motions to engage at the high
- 2:20levels, senior level, CE OS. But again, staying frictionless
- 2:25with them until we get those first types of tools connected
- 2:28and then we can hit on the expansion.
- 2:30OK, OK, so I'm going to try to say back to you like roughly 3
- 2:33steps that you think are it sounds like you have learned are
- 2:36really important. One is you want people to find
- 2:40that first magical moment without necessarily talking to
- 2:43someone on your team. When you because you you you
- 2:46said a few things, you said self-serve, you said they start
- 2:48with maybe 5 connections. So there was a few things you
- 2:50said that kind of triangulate to when they see that when they
- 2:54hear about a use case and when they set it up on their own,
- 2:56they have a starting point where they get that aha moment on
- 2:58their own pretty quickly. And then then, So now I have a
- 3:02question because you said sales assist.
- 3:04Yeah. Do you ask your sales team upon
- 3:06that aha moment to e-mail the CEO or the user who got the AHA?
- 3:11Like like yeah help help me understand what this where the
- 3:15Step 2 happens from that first moment?
- 3:19Makes sense. We went GA last month so that we
- 3:21moved from sort of this early access mindset where we were
- 3:23with design partners. You would sign up our sales team
- 3:26and reach out. We would do a, you know, a Zoom
- 3:27call and then we would connect. You literally live in the call.
- 3:29So in the 30 minutes we would have you up and running and
- 3:32connected, which is which is powerful, I think to to go
- 3:35deeper with GA. Yeah, CEO can get in.
- 3:37I saw one happen this weekend. CEO got in connected several
- 3:41tools over the weekend, started to run different queries against
- 3:44them and sort of got to their own aha moment and put a credit
- 3:47card in before sales could even reach out.
- 3:49And then at that point sales able to reach out and sort of
- 3:53paint the bigger picture really talk about an org wide piece.
- 3:55But that yeah, that is a massive change for us to get somebody in
- 3:59literally connecting linear, you know, I think it was Notion and
- 4:03different systems without talking to sales.
- 4:05That was a moment when I came in Monday that was like, we are, we
- 4:09are, we are doing the right foundational pieces to be one of
- 4:11the great AI companies out there.
- 4:13So, Jim, I'm going to do you a favor.
- 4:15Yeah. Could you save her?
- 4:17Because because your, because your sales team won't love to
- 4:20hear it directly from you. But CEO's play with stuff on the
- 4:24weekends. Like that's what we do.
- 4:26That's our play time. And so you're going to like,
- 4:29and, and, and so I don't know that you will see this
- 4:32consistently, but maybe you will see over weekends just like you
- 4:36just saw CEO's playing with your tool and then having that
- 4:39magical moment. And now the sales team is going
- 4:42to reach out on Monday. Yeah, I just wonder.
- 4:46Well, it's different. It's like, it's like, it's like,
- 4:48it's like in the restaurant industry, you would never have
- 4:50restaurants closed on the weekends.
- 4:51Yeah, it's interesting. At the end of the day, I don't
- 4:54know if the CE OS are really looking to have a human reach
- 4:56out to them at, you know, 10:00 PM on Saturday night in the old
- 4:59classic SAS way, right where it would either be a sequence or
- 5:02kind of a lightweight. Hey, saw you signed up That that
- 5:05that you're a of is over. I think that the human ear is
- 5:09not, but just sort of the generic, just a fast, quick
- 5:11touch of like, Hey, we're here. So I do think that getting them
- 5:14in and getting them to the aha moment in a self-serve way is
- 5:17such an unlock for an AI company and that the great companies we
- 5:20all know did that. I mean, think about the first
- 5:22time you used cursor. Nobody reached out.
- 5:25You literally downloaded it. You did a few things and within
- 5:27an hour you're like, holy crap, I have to tell every friend I
- 5:29know how cool this is. I think that's the experience
- 5:32now for us to get the AHA, just using adapt to do a search,
- 5:35similar to how you might be using, you know, Quad or
- 5:38ChatGPT. Although we actually do really
- 5:40remarkable things on that. That's an experience most people
- 5:42are used to, which is I didn't connect it to anything.
- 5:44I'm going to do a search. It'll look similar unless you
- 5:47really push us hard and, and leverage the computer aspect.
- 5:49It's when you connect a tool that we get a very big aha
- 5:52moment. And so connecting Slack is maybe
- 5:54a first use case and then doing deep analysis of your
- 5:57conversations and then you connect and then you quickly
- 5:59realize with a couple clicks, I can connect a couple more tools,
- 6:02maybe pop an API key in. And that is usually the quick
- 6:05aha. They ask something and they
- 6:07it'll cook and, and chew and 10 minutes later they're getting
- 6:10something that they just have never seen before.
- 6:12And at that moment, we've got a customer.
- 6:14Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, just to touch on this as
- 6:16somebody who is a customer, I think that that was the big
- 6:19thing for me is the ease of integrations, which actually
- 6:21Jim, at some point I think I want to come back to this, but
- 6:24integration piece is really compelling and one of the things
- 6:26you all have done and I, I'm curious, this is something I
- 6:29wish I could replicate. I don't know how to do it.
- 6:32Eventually the like the way integrations work is you
- 6:34literally take an API key and you give it to adapt and adapt
- 6:39there. There's some like something like
- 6:40a Slack connect, but a lot of like a lot of the tools use our
- 6:43smaller companies with their own AP is.
- 6:46And so we basically really just grab the API key, give it to
- 6:48adapt and adapt. We'll go figure out how to
- 6:50connect and get the information, which is incredible.
- 6:54So my team of non-technical people, like our technical
- 6:57people use or by and by technical engineers, they're all
- 6:59using clock code. They're not actually, they
- 7:01basically don't use adapt. Adapt is used by our more of our
- 7:04customer facing and, and internal teams.
- 7:06But in that context, those people with no training can
- 7:09actually go and give give adapt an API key and adapt just goes
- 7:13and figures out how to pull the data.
- 7:14Which to me that was one of the biggest things is within
- 7:18minutes, basically you have all these different things connected
- 7:20and you can start asking questions in Slack.
- 7:22And then for me, what I did with my team was when they would ask
- 7:25me questions, once I got this stuff connected, I would just
- 7:27say, hey, adapt and then give it the question, effectively a
- 7:30different version of it and show the team like, look, you can
- 7:33just get this. And so now the behavior in our
- 7:35company like very quickly has shifted.
- 7:37It's not 100% there, but has very quickly shifted towards
- 7:40that being the default where people actually just ask the
- 7:42question. And because it's so easy to
- 7:44connect to the integrations, it's been really easy to also
- 7:47drive the adoption. And so I think that's to me,
- 7:49that's actually, I agree with that as like the, the thing
- 7:53that's most compelling. And I'm curious like how, how
- 7:57did you come to I, I guess that that way of doing things,
- 8:00because I think typically what would have happened in the past
- 8:02is you would go in and there'd be a whole process.
- 8:05You would need a custom integration, you would need all
- 8:07this kind of stuff. But you've been able to say,
- 8:09just give us the API key and we'll figure it out.
- 8:11Yeah, I think it was a moment it was a little bit of a moment in
- 8:14the early days of of building adapt.
- 8:17One of my, you know, Co founders, incredibly strong
- 8:19technically had a had a lot of experience before adapt both on
- 8:22the database side as a founder building just a wickedly fast
- 8:25database, but also in the sandboxed containers and, and
- 8:28spinning up, you know, virtual machines for, you know, past
- 8:31work. And so when you, when you
- 8:33thought about how do we enable AI to have these special powers
- 8:36and to do incredible things with APIs by giving it its own
- 8:39computer, it means that the, the AI can figure out how to make
- 8:42sense of that API or you could give it its own instructions and
- 8:45adds it to the knowledge base that everyone in the company now
- 8:46has that. But essentially, AI knows how to
- 8:49make sense of these API keys of all these different tools out
- 8:51there. It can write custom scripts to
- 8:53make it work. It can write the custom code.
- 8:54And so instead of us preconfiguring thousands of
- 8:58integrations as the old SAS model would have been right,
- 9:00you, you go through and the engineers build it and it's
- 9:02very, very structured and rigid. We're able to give AI the key
- 9:07and say, what can you do with this thing?
- 9:09What's all the magic you could do?
- 9:10What's custom code would you want to write?
- 9:11So you could do exactly what the user wants.
- 9:13And every time the user asks a question, whether it's through
- 9:15Slack or a web app, it'll write that custom code to make that
- 9:18sense. And most importantly, it can
- 9:21spin up lots of these different, you know, swarm of different
- 9:25connection request at the same time.
- 9:27So unlike an MCP, like I get Claude, where you're going to go
- 9:29through one request at a time, It'll schedule a tool call, then
- 9:32a tool call, then a tool call. We'll swarm out and say, hit
- 9:35linear HubSpot, grab something from Notion and then pull the
- 9:38data back together in a very precise surgical way.
- 9:40Then run Opus, you know, 4.7 against it.
- 9:42And that's the magic why people say we've just never seen an
- 9:45answer like a DAP. Like how is it that you're
- 9:48generating such a different than what we're seeing even when we
- 9:51use Opus 4.7, you know, directly in cloud and that's the reason
- 9:55you give it a computer. It's writing surgical pieces.
- 9:57It's not having context issues and it's not scheduling one
- 10:01after the other. It's swarming.
- 10:02I got to ask, I imagine this is something that a lot of people
- 10:06building and specifically in e-commerce stats are hearing and
- 10:08thinking, oh, that would be nice because they just set up the
- 10:11meta MCP or CLI and they're like, it doesn't work right?
- 10:14Or they set up marketing API and they get their account banned.
- 10:17I'm like, why? Right.
- 10:17That's the number one question I just keep seeing on X my whole
- 10:20feed. Why is my account banned right?
- 10:22I set up the integration wrong and now I, you know, my ad
- 10:23account is banned or something. So integration stresses probably
- 10:27something that a lot of people can relate with.
- 10:28But why, why did you call it adapt?
- 10:30Like right now it, you know, I imagine there's a few people
- 10:32like me that are like monkey brain listening to this and
- 10:35going, wait, I I still don't get it.
- 10:36What why adapt? You know, good integrations,
- 10:38good context from all my different apps for the LLMS to
- 10:41use. But like what?
- 10:42What is adapt? Like, what does it actually do?
- 10:44And why would I sign up and get that aha moment from Adapt?
- 10:47You know, my side after we after Chorus dot AI was acquired back
- 10:51in 21, I was CEO, of course, we were leading AI pre LLM motion.
- 10:55I spent the last few years down at Stanford start X.
- 10:57I'm a mentor, lead mentor for the, the the Stanford start X
- 11:00accelerator, working at that just a lot of great teams and I
- 11:03was building myself. So I'm in it.
- 11:04I'm with these young and, you know, more seasoned
- 11:07entrepreneurs. And I do remember, you know,
- 11:09about a year and a half ago. So it's very early.
- 11:11One of the teams across from me mentioning are using cursor and
- 11:14I wasn't. I think our team was using some
- 11:15web flow and some other, you know, kind of previous
- 11:17generation tools. And a friend I was working with
- 11:20at the time said, let's let's get you into cursor, especially
- 11:22as a non engineer. I've always been leading a lot
- 11:25of great product teams and very close.
- 11:26And I love the front end. But I got into cursor myself
- 11:30with the guidance of like Acto that it's weird in production
- 11:33work. It wasn't just, you know, vibe
- 11:34coding something. It was it was tied to an old
- 11:36legacy app. And within 24 hours, I had that
- 11:38moment of, wait a second, there's two AIS out there.
- 11:41I had no idea that the developers had one AI.
- 11:44That's the greatest product market that I've ever seen.
- 11:47And everybody else I know and see at social events is using a
- 11:50completely different AI, like a ChatGPT experience, which was
- 11:54special and remarkable, nothing like the AI that developers had
- 11:59that actually did work for them. And so I had this moment of, Oh
- 12:02my gosh, the world is about to fundamentally change.
- 12:04And I got 12 to 18 month period and no one knows it on the
- 12:08business side. The developers know it.
- 12:10And that's what when I, when I connected with Sean and John
- 12:12Andrew by the two other Co founders, I saw the early roots
- 12:15of what we were doing. I was like, we're about to bring
- 12:18the other AI, an AI that can not only understand, but take
- 12:21actions for people, like do the work to every other user in an,
- 12:26in a completely natural language way.
- 12:28So not, you know, detailed UX work streams for agents.
- 12:30No, just talk to it. You want to build an app that
- 12:33sits on top of site, Just talk to it.
- 12:35And you want to do incredibly complex things like scan every
- 12:38sales call for the last, you know, year and build a product
- 12:41road map based customer feedback.
- 12:42You can't do that with an LM. You can do that when you have a
- 12:44computer. And that's the part that led to
- 12:47why we're about to get make everybody AI native.
- 12:50And maybe to finish that point. It's so important.
- 12:53Like I, I, we've had fun in our, especially in the SAS days, a
- 12:55lot of fun building these things up.
- 12:57We're here in San Francisco, we're in the Presidio.
- 13:00I mean, we have front row seats to this.
- 13:02If you don't go AI native soon, if your leadership doesn't help
- 13:06your team, you know, the teams go AI native.
- 13:09Personally, I'm really sad thinking about the outcome of
- 13:11what that is. I mean, just think about your
- 13:12friends, your your parent, whoever it is, if they don't go
- 13:16AI native, which means they just don't embrace it.
- 13:18They don't learn to get the superpowers.
- 13:20They will get pushed out of the workforce.
- 13:21They're not going to get hired by the new AI native manager.
- 13:24They're going to retire early. And so just think about sitting
- 13:26around the dinner table with people that have been
- 13:29marginalized out of the workforce.
- 13:30They're kind of bitter now on AI.
- 13:32They're, they're young, they're too young to be retired and
- 13:34they've just killed their earning potential.
- 13:36And so if we could solve that with just a click, you know,
- 13:38Jeremiah, you mentioned just click of an integration.
- 13:40Everyone in Slack had your tool. So it wasn't that they had to go
- 13:43install it. You put it in once they said add
- 13:45adapt, we're now instantly making everyone AI native.
- 13:49And literally the next day they're going home saying I've
- 13:51never had so much fun at work. They're having a cursor quad
- 13:54code like moment. And I mean, what a gift, right?
- 13:57That's why I keep telling people work has never been more fun.
- 13:59But we need to get these superpowers to you.
- 14:02Otherwise, you know, we're not doing our jobs as leaders.
- 14:05I really like the name now. OK, there's a bunch of things
- 14:07that I would love to dig into, by the way.
- 14:09Let's do that. The most important one being I
- 14:12love John Andrew and did not realize he was your Co founder.
- 14:15Yeah. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 14:18I I don't know how I did not make the connection prior to
- 14:20literally right now. And he the source, I mean, the
- 14:23initial just to play on that John Andrews, a solo founder of
- 14:26Wander Teal fellow very unique special person.
- 14:29If as you know, meeting him just brilliant.
- 14:31And as a solo founder, I mean, it's yeah, Ronnie Wander, he
- 14:35wanted a better way to use AI to run the business.
- 14:38And that's the early origins of, wait a second, what if we built
- 14:41this thing called Adapt? He pulled in, you know, an early
- 14:44engineer he'd worked with that, you know, very brilliant
- 14:46engineer. I got connected in and was like,
- 14:49this is exactly the future I see, especially this blank
- 14:51canvas kind of UX approach. And that was the early origins.
- 14:54And then we took that out and did our seed round and so forth.
- 14:57That's amazing. Yeah.
- 14:59One of the things that you said, first of all, I, I, you can push
- 15:05back on this, but you said something like early retirement.
- 15:08And I want to push on that because I am not sure that age
- 15:12is correlated to whether or not people are becoming more AI
- 15:15native. And the reason is I am seeing
- 15:19this very weird phenomenon where candidly, like roughly people my
- 15:25age seem to be the most resistant.
- 15:28So I'm like, I'm 40. I also see a bunch of people who
- 15:31are resistant who are like 23, weirdly enough.
- 15:34And conversely, I've like shared the story before, but my my
- 15:38mother is like embracing it big time.
- 15:42And I and so I just am not like and maybe look, I have no idea
- 15:46what bias my sample has, but for the first, usually technology
- 15:51has this bias where the adopters tend to be younger.
- 15:54I'm just not sure this time. Yeah, I'm not sure.
- 15:57I'm not sure that actually it's age Coral, especially inside of
- 15:59companies, the number of stories and and now this comes to the
- 16:02corporate adoption point that I was, I was curious about second.
- 16:06But I am actually seeing that the people who are like the best
- 16:11executives and they tend to be a little old, like they tend to be
- 16:14a little older. They're not 24 are the ones who
- 16:17are adopting at the fastest and they are having trouble getting
- 16:21their teams to adopt quickly. And and it's very unusual that
- 16:25this is like how these things would would play out, right,
- 16:29Especially for the non-technical teams.
- 16:31I'm seeing executives like your CEO story is actually exactly on
- 16:38point to this point. It's like you're seeing the more
- 16:41senior people be more hungry to learn and roll their sleeves up
- 16:45really fast. And it's just not obvious to me
- 16:47that that's happening in the more junior roles that tends to
- 16:50be aged lower. I'm curious if you're seeing
- 16:53that. I agree with your point that it
- 16:55can be across the spectrum for sure.
- 16:57And there there's been a, you know, a very young cohort that's
- 16:59been, you know, very much driving some of the cutting
- 17:02edge. I mean young, meaning 1920, I
- 17:04mean a little bit younger than what we saw even in the SAS
- 17:06days. And then you have a senior
- 17:07cohort that is great managers, managers learned how to use AI
- 17:10earlier. They know how to do leverage.
- 17:11They know how to ask, you know, something to do something for
- 17:14them. You know, they're not
- 17:14necessarily individual tasks. So I think we've seen a
- 17:17spectrum, but I do think in general there is a group that
- 17:20just hasn't latched on or found the magic moment or chose early
- 17:23to kind of fight it and say it doesn't actually help.
- 17:25I, I just met with a, a very strong engineer just the last
- 17:29couple weeks working at one of the large great companies out
- 17:32there. Yeah, publicly traded and you
- 17:35know, not there anymore. But I, when I asked about just
- 17:38using the new code editing tools, I, I sensed that there
- 17:41was a, a push back that surprised me.
- 17:43And I was like, and feedback was, hey, look, I would dig into
- 17:45that. I know you've just been doing it
- 17:47your way and you've been an incredible career.
- 17:48But I would, instead of saying you just use it as like a light
- 17:51review, I would really embrace it because what I'm seeing is
- 17:54that it's fundamentally different.
- 17:55And just last night that individual pinged me and said,
- 17:57hey, it was like 2 weeks later, I went deeper on what you said
- 18:01and I'm genuinely impressed and surprised by what I'm saying.
- 18:04And so it's a small example of if people don't do that, they're
- 18:07not getting hired. And I think the last point is
- 18:09the managers getting promoted over the next 24 months are not
- 18:12non AI natives. There's just no way the person
- 18:15that didn't lean into AI is going to be the one that gets
- 18:17promoted by the CE OS, etcetera. So what will happen is we'll see
- 18:21a very fast acceleration of people that have really embraced
- 18:24AI and learn to use it the right way are only going to want to
- 18:27surround themselves with high agency AI native people.
- 18:30And once that happens, you know, like it's a different world and
- 18:34and it accelerates as such a faster clip that I'm worried it
- 18:37really threatens people that are out of it.
- 18:38This is just moving faster than other innovations we've seen.
- 18:41And it makes me sad because nobody wants to be your friends
- 18:44or others to be outside of this. It's too good.
- 18:47It's too easy actually, once you get into it.
- 18:49You just need someone to help get you in it.
- 18:52I said exactly what you just said.
- 18:54I was at a reporter dinner yesterday.
- 18:56So there were folks from like Bloomberg, TechCrunch, whatever,
- 18:58and I made exactly this point about the AI natives will not
- 19:01want to work with the non AI natives.
- 19:03And there's a big sort happening and most of the table did not
- 19:10understand that. I think what you're, I mean, I
- 19:13understand it. Trust me, I am living it.
- 19:15I deeply understand it. I am as worried as you are.
- 19:20I don't even think most people have fully internalized that
- 19:23yet. And that's my like big yes.
- 19:25And, and and that makes it even scarier.
- 19:28You know, I think it's the closest comparison to, you know,
- 19:31the AI native people not wanting to work with the non AI native.
- 19:34People is when you meet people. Who say you can't about anything
- 19:37that you know that you can do. You know, I'm sure you people
- 19:40you've met people like this that are like, oh, you can't do that
- 19:42or that's not possible or this person can't do that.
- 19:45And you hear the conversation, you're like, oh, I know this
- 19:47isn't true. Why have you got stuck on this?
- 19:49The idea that like, everything is a red light and everything
- 19:51isn't possible. And I think it's you, just
- 19:54you're sort of living in two fundamentally different
- 19:56realities. 1 is super pessimistic and negative, right?
- 20:00It feels bad to be around. 1 is more optimistic, right?
- 20:03And more of a green light than a red light.
- 20:05The speed you, you find that the AI natives go fast, right?
- 20:10They, they just see things as like, well, I can quickly just
- 20:12spin these things up and get a, a first Rev or a, a detailed
- 20:15view of it faster. So there's a speed aspect.
- 20:17The second part is, and, and we're seeing changes, but when
- 20:20you see somebody come to you that did not use AI for some
- 20:23deep thinking on something. So maybe they're building out a
- 20:25new Commission plan or a new way of designing yourself service
- 20:29pricing. And you see that they just sat
- 20:30there and did it all by themself.
- 20:32Clearly we want the human side and I think we're all seeing it
- 20:34right now. We, we can't lose human thinking
- 20:36like it is so valuable, but you need to also then leverage AI to
- 20:41see what the gaps were. What did we miss?
- 20:43What other new external thinking can I mix in?
- 20:45And when you see a human do both, which is, hey guys, here's
- 20:48a new messaging strategy. And you know, I've run this
- 20:51through adapt, which knows our entire business incredibly well
- 20:55and does the external world incredibly well.
- 20:57And here's what it thought about my new messaging and how it
- 20:59rated it and what it also recommended.
- 21:02Well, then we're aligned. You basically are superhuman.
- 21:04You are incredible for who you are.
- 21:06You've used the best AI and you've used all the company
- 21:09knowledge, which I want, I want, I want everybody's mind
- 21:11involved. But when you just send me a
- 21:13Google Doc of your thoughts, you're not AI native.
- 21:16What I need to then go ask the AI.
- 21:19And again, I don't want the AI to do the thinking for us all
- 21:22the way. I wanted to review, identify,
- 21:24help make us better. On the point of people being
- 21:27resistant, I wonder how much that comes down to how worried
- 21:32are you about it taking your job.
- 21:34And I, I think that when you look at senior leadership in
- 21:35companies, you're not actually worried about that at all
- 21:38because your job is not delivery oriented.
- 21:39It's strategy oriented. It's focused on the you, you are
- 21:43used to saying, here's the thing that needs done.
- 21:45I'm going to go give that to somebody else to go do.
- 21:47If you are a software engineer who has been a software engineer
- 21:50for 30 years and your job has always been shipping code, it is
- 21:53a bigger threat to you than it is the, the, the C-Suite person
- 21:58who is used to delegating. And I think that's part of the
- 22:00problem here. I also think what Jack said is
- 22:01probably part of the problem too.
- 22:02But ultimately I think that makes sense.
- 22:04And there's your natural, it's the fight or flight, right?
- 22:08Like as soon as there's something that threatens you,
- 22:09that's, that is our natural reaction.
- 22:11And so I think that's a lot of what we see here is like, if
- 22:14you're closer to the, the, the delivery of it, of the actual
- 22:17like in product, I think that there's more risk to you
- 22:20ultimately on these things. And, and I think that's valid,
- 22:22actually, But the irony is that those who aren't willing to try
- 22:27end up being the ones most at risk.
- 22:29Can I can I make a a provocation and then ask a question on that
- 22:33point? OK my EA directly told me
- 22:38because we do this like we're doing this like big AI
- 22:40challenge. I think I've shared this story
- 22:42before, but my E directly told me I'm going to make sure that
- 22:46100% of my job is done by Claude and nothing has made me want to
- 22:51keep her more than when she stated that objective.
- 22:55Obviously right? Like every.
- 22:57This is like a CEO's dream that that's what someone would come
- 23:00to them and say. Word of We'll come back to it.
- 23:02OK, OK, so because, because now I'm sitting there thinking she
- 23:06has high initiative as she's automating these things.
- 23:09She's showing me that she was thinking about the outcome, the
- 23:12versus just arbitrary delegation.
- 23:14And now I'm like, Oh my God, I can trust her with all of these
- 23:16other things that I like previously would not have like
- 23:19even thought to trust her with, right?
- 23:20So she's showing me like the skills and attributes that I,
- 23:23that I care most about in, in terms of like more tasks and
- 23:27other projects and things like that.
- 23:28So at least for me, that is like my view of that.
- 23:33The question that that begs is first of all, and I'm curious,
- 23:37Jim, it sounds like you have a provocation on this, but is that
- 23:40generalizable, right? Because I don't know if it's
- 23:43generalizable and perhaps we will say it's not generalizable
- 23:45globally. The other thing I wonder though
- 23:48is how much of this is just what is around you.
- 23:51So like I've recently been asking my team to come spend
- 23:55some time in San Francisco. And I think it's because if you
- 23:58walk around in San Francisco, it's really hard to not become
- 24:02AI native. Like I can't see a billboard
- 24:05that is not something AI oriented like a cab, a bus, a
- 24:10train. Like I'm like no matter what I
- 24:13do, I cannot escape it. And so I'm wondering and, and so
- 24:19there's like this cultural question that I'm very curious
- 24:21about. It's like I can tell that this
- 24:23city, something special is happening right now, but I am
- 24:26wondering inside of organizations, what is the
- 24:29cultural setup in Jeremiah? One thing you are saying is
- 24:31people are worried about whether or not their job is going to be
- 24:33taken. But I think that's it gets a
- 24:35much harder question of what is the culture in your company as
- 24:37to whether or not that person is afraid that their job will be
- 24:39taken. Right, I mean, I think I've,
- 24:42I've 2 two thoughts on that. I'll start on Jeremiah's because
- 24:44talking about the coders word that, you know, suddenly cloud
- 24:47code can take their job. Clearly the way that we do our
- 24:50work has changed like on that role.
- 24:51Absolutely, But you're also seeing challenge right now where
- 24:54people are hiring engineers that don't actually fundamentally
- 24:56know maybe what great code looks like.
- 24:58And so there's a lot of vibe coding and it's creating some
- 25:00friction and some thrash. And let me give you an example.
- 25:02Take the thing that we each know really well.
- 25:04Like, what is the thing that you are literally an expert at after
- 25:07all these years of experience? When you ask AI on one shot to
- 25:12build that thing that you're an expert on, it does not get it
- 25:15right because you know, you know what the right answer is and
- 25:18you're like, whoa, whoa, this is wrong.
- 25:19But you know, this is good, but change this, change that and
- 25:22you'll do a few Revs basically teaching AI and it'll be like,
- 25:24yes, you're right. You know, I need to do better.
- 25:26But when you do things that you don't know very well, AI looks
- 25:29Florida State perfect. So when you take the coder that
- 25:32doesn't know coding that well, then the vibe code is perfect,
- 25:36right? What what are we going to do
- 25:37with it? And so my point that is that as
- 25:39you see people that are really strong technically and then they
- 25:42learn to use these tools in incredibly special ways.
- 25:45I think they have a very large unfair advantage over everybody
- 25:49else right now and can do magic with these tools that I don't
- 25:52think the tools are right now doing on their own.
- 25:53So that's one one point of it that the second quick point on
- 25:56the EA using 100% caught completely love AI native, but
- 26:00there is like a a balancing act of the human like we want
- 26:03ultimate humans to win. And they know that if you're EA
- 26:07use quad to write the most perfect, you know, AI response
- 26:11to me when I e-mail you. I'm now over it.
- 26:13I don't want it. That's not it's it's it was cute
- 26:15a month ago. It was cute maybe three months
- 26:17ago. I want an actual human response
- 26:19now. If the quad helped her to, you
- 26:22know, AI enabled her to be fast, to have some data points, to do
- 26:26something really authentic, it's great.
- 26:27But I think we're all starting to realize that human
- 26:30communication, there's a lot of trust built in the words we use,
- 26:33and there's a lot of noise that's coming.
- 26:35And so we want to use the deep thinking, yeah, that this
- 26:37company brain to help people think.
- 26:38But we still want them, you know, critically putting pieces
- 26:42together, putting their own stamp and touch on it.
- 26:44And I think people are begging for that right now.
- 26:46OK, I definitely agree with you. So I will amend my statement.
- 26:51The things that she are she is doing is actually all of the EQ
- 26:55parts of the job she is doing herself because that's what
- 26:59she's exceptional at right and everything else.
- 27:03But like the task organization Rich like the annoying me to
- 27:06remember to that way I actually do what I'm supposed to do.
- 27:10Like have you done these things? Here's what you promised people.
- 27:12You've not done it for four days.
- 27:15All of that is all automated. And and so like she has struck
- 27:20this like exactly the balance that you're describing, which I
- 27:25think is critical and and totally underappreciated.
- 27:28Jack, I don't know if you remember, but we made this joke
- 27:30in a previous episode around like humans should just worry
- 27:33about like the interaction with other humans and the like, human
- 27:37level thinking. But there's a lot of thinking
- 27:40that computers are are better AT and, and, and computers should
- 27:43do the computer thinking. So.
- 27:46Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think the EQ is a great way to
- 27:50think about that is that people really do need the EQI think
- 27:53you're, you're, if you talk to friends looking for jobs right
- 27:55now, what's challenging for them is that everyone's looking the
- 27:57same. They have a perfect cover
- 27:58letter. They got this whole
- 27:59presentation. And as a hiring manager, I
- 28:01can't, I don't know what it is. It's like there's a middle man
- 28:03that literally delivered their career to me.
- 28:06I, I need to see how they write what they do and I want them
- 28:08using AI, but not necessarily to be synthetic on their voice.
- 28:14And so I even I've been training AI.
- 28:15Don't, don't write. If you're going to try to take a
- 28:17stab at something, don't write something fake like, oh, I loved
- 28:20your XYZ. Give it to me straight.
- 28:22You signed up. I noticed this.
- 28:23I want to do this. Let's let's be really functional
- 28:26about this, but the IQ side, the ability to do special powers and
- 28:30EA plus AI should be able to do so much more and see a bigger
- 28:33thing and reason differently. And that's the magic and to
- 28:36understand your workload. I mean, if if you have a company
- 28:38brain and she had access to these tools that you're in, the
- 28:41speed in which she could react would be dramatically faster
- 28:44than waiting to connect with you.
- 28:45And the ability to build triggers of like, oh, if this
- 28:47meeting happened and you looked at the transcript and here's the
- 28:49notes. Now use your EQ to have the
- 28:51perfect follow up or gift, etcetera.
- 28:53It's magical. We just need the human touch
- 28:56though. Yeah, I I totally agree, Jeff.
- 28:59I'm really curious. Another thing that I think a lot
- 29:01of software founders are thinking about right now is what
- 29:07are modes that will persist? And so I'm curious how you think
- 29:09about that in the context of adapt and then how do you think
- 29:14about the I I get very curious right now about how to think
- 29:20about capitalization and like what are outcomes that are
- 29:26possible because the mark the shape of the market has never
- 29:29been stranger of the of the capital markets has never been
- 29:32stranger. And so, yeah, I'm two totally
- 29:35unrelated questions, but I am very curious on both, Yeah.
- 29:39How do you think about modes and defensibility?
- 29:41And then totally separately, how do you think about what is the
- 29:43right way to capitalize a business like yours?
- 29:46Yeah, it's, it's, it's and what if?
- 29:48I mean, how lucky are all of us to be in this right now?
- 29:50I mean, honestly, I've seen different ways, but I mean, just
- 29:52think about what we're doing right now.
- 29:54We are just at an epic, epic time of innovation and nobody
- 30:00knows where it's going. I, I talk to every friend, the
- 30:02smartest people that are in it and you say, where's it going?
- 30:05You talk to friends from open AI, etcetera.
- 30:06There is a sense of we're not even sure what that next open
- 30:10claw moment is in three weeks that might happen.
- 30:11Like there's this really fun early stage that we're in.
- 30:14I saw it back in the 99 era when we were doing, you know,
- 30:17evite.com and those startups. But this one's different and it
- 30:20is moving at a different speed because it's just it just
- 30:22there's so much more capability in it.
- 30:25And so when I think about when I think about the moats, when I
- 30:28think about the space one, how neat to know that you're working
- 30:32on something that is going to be an inevitability.
- 30:33Every single company will have a company bring not a bunch of AI
- 30:37tools, you know, not a license where hey, everybody here's like
- 30:40an individual AI tool that you can use to do your work.
- 30:42That was neat. That was like a 2025 era.
- 30:45No, hey, we run. I think the first interview
- 30:48question you will ask in about two years.
- 30:50Is he, before I even go, what's the AI?
- 30:54What is the company brain AI that we're using?
- 30:55Because I, I've been working at adapt companies and it has been
- 30:58the most insane experience. But I've heard friends are at
- 31:00these other companies running on the XYZ and it's miserable.
- 31:03It's a surveillance state. It's counting mouse movements.
- 31:05It's, it's some of the stuff we just heard about with meta doing
- 31:08right where they're, they're training off of this and these
- 31:10are decisions we need to make. And I, I talked to our team
- 31:13about this, like, I really want us to be on the side of making
- 31:17it so that our friends and family when they go to work,
- 31:20don't say you just screwed up work.
- 31:21I mean, it used to be great. Now all of a sudden, no, I want
- 31:24them to say we literally threw on adapt or I joined an adapt
- 31:27company and I've never had so much fun.
- 31:29And the way that you've sort of non emotionally brought our
- 31:32teams together, the way you sort of review analytics in a way
- 31:34that has no politics, the way that you've just augmented
- 31:37everybody. And so the first part of that is
- 31:39we're playing in just the most massive market.
- 31:41I mean, there is trillions of dollars of transformation.
- 31:44Every single company is going to have a single AI brain.
- 31:48And I've just watched SAS companies chase market share it,
- 31:50it goes to many different flavors on it.
- 31:52And I think this will be a horizontal play.
- 31:54I think there's a lot of vertical AI.
- 31:55They've done quite well right now.
- 31:56They'll continue to have grid growth, but this one's
- 31:59different. Once you start to put in the
- 32:01horizontal layer and what we see and Jeremiah, you, I'm curious,
- 32:04you start to realize, I'm not quite sure I need this other
- 32:06thing that just ties into this one silo of, of marketing or
- 32:10finance. And over the next, you know, 12
- 32:12to 18 months, you're going to see this like virus, this
- 32:15productivity virus of hey, why don't we connect more tools to
- 32:18the brain? The brain just got smarter.
- 32:19Let's have more knowledge in it. How do we create a reasoning
- 32:22engine that's always on and persistent behind the scenes,
- 32:24which is a whole new way to think about AI than just ask,
- 32:27query and generate, no, we're about to move.
- 32:30You know, this is stuff we're working on into a far more
- 32:33proactive, always on system of intelligence that truly starts
- 32:38to understand patterns that the teams would not be on the spot
- 32:40on their own and they're not even asking for.
- 32:43And so the Moat that these are the moats is removing from a
- 32:46tool. You ask, you get an answer, you
- 32:48know, add adapt. What do you think about this?
- 32:49I love it. That's what we do and it's
- 32:51powerful. At what point does Adapt see the
- 32:53bigger picture, bigger than ACEO could see start to cross
- 32:56reference patterns of why did we lose that deal?
- 32:58That's not just a query right now where you go to HubSpot and
- 33:01a few other pieces. It's already identified a
- 33:03product decision six months ago that had a chain reaction and
- 33:06it's identifying and bringing this to us.
- 33:08That's what we're about to see. And those engines, that
- 33:11reasoning engine is going to be different modes that are
- 33:14different than just the frontier models.
- 33:15And how we apply the frontier models to these extra reasoning
- 33:19will be a big deal. But if you're model agnostic and
- 33:22tool agnostic, then you really have the ability to tap into all
- 33:25the best models. So as you know, ChatGPT image 2
- 33:28comes out and you're like, that's amazing.
- 33:29Boom, top it in. And so I think that the mode is
- 33:32being agnostic. We know that the enterprise
- 33:33likes flexibility, likes to be able to make bets and make sure
- 33:36that it'll always be the most intelligent enterprise.
- 33:39And then two, it's what we do with this that goes far beyond
- 33:43ask and get a quick answer back that I think is going to be the
- 33:46next iteration that we see. I mean, we'll be launching this
- 33:49at the end of the month. It's a very powerful extension
- 33:51of what we're doing. I think the, one of the things I
- 33:55appreciate as a user is adapt is the the 1st, it's actually like
- 34:02a really good response. Half the time, the first
- 34:04response, right? And then as when you're asking
- 34:07something new that you haven't done before.
- 34:09And then the other half of the time there's something missing.
- 34:10There's missing context. There's there's information that
- 34:13needed that adapt didn't have to be able to give the right
- 34:15answer. But what I love is you basically
- 34:17just look at me like, OK, well, that's not quite right.
- 34:18Hey, Adapt, can you add this piece of context?
- 34:21And then you save it and it's done.
- 34:23And then every time after that, it has that context and it's,
- 34:26it's getting better. And I think that's one of the
- 34:28things that's going to be really interesting to see.
- 34:30I mean, honestly, Jim, I wasn't thinking about it.
- 34:33I am not thinking about this problem the same way you are.
- 34:35So just to even hear what you were describing there, I think
- 34:37it's really cool. Like I see the, I see that
- 34:40vision, I see what that can be. I think it's really interesting.
- 34:43And one of the things I, I would love to talk about, I love
- 34:46talking about pricing. And I think this is a really
- 34:48interesting thing when it comes to not just adapt, but any sort
- 34:51of AI where it's token based, basically like how you think
- 34:55about that. And, and just like, to be fully
- 34:57honest as a user, I mean, our spend is about four times as
- 35:01much right now as I thought it was going to be when we signed
- 35:04up. And that's not because it's like
- 35:08you're charging me more. It's because it just keeps
- 35:11compounding, right? The more people start using it,
- 35:13the more like it just keeps going and going and going.
- 35:15But there's an upper limit. There's a day in which I'm going
- 35:17to wake up and be like, wow, this is such a massive line
- 35:20item. Can I justify that?
- 35:22And I, I think the, this is something I'm thinking about
- 35:25with AI in general is what, what does that look like?
- 35:27I mean, Claude, for example, just got way more expensive.
- 35:29There's a world in which like token costs could rise to the
- 35:33point where we start to look at things and say, I'd rather just
- 35:35have a human do that or I'm not going to do that at all because
- 35:37it's just too expensive. So I'm, I'm curious how you're
- 35:41thinking about that and, and the future.
- 35:43And obviously if you're the brain, there's a premium that
- 35:45you can charge there that you couldn't charge if you are in a
- 35:48silo. But I just think this is a
- 35:50really interesting piece of the puzzle.
- 35:53I think this is going to be the hot topic.
- 35:55You know, we are in a six month window where you know, AI was
- 35:58very inexpensive, right? We were paying 20 bucks per
- 36:00employee or discounted on maybe an enterprise plan.
- 36:02And you know his joke, like if if the average employee pick
- 36:05round numbers, you know, 1020 thousand a month, just using a
- 36:07ballpark, you know, examples and then to give them $20.00 of
- 36:10intelligence. We all knew that was very
- 36:13undervalued for what we were seeing, at least if it was being
- 36:16used COD code and cursor showed you when AI actually creates
- 36:20value and does and increases productivity dramatically by
- 36:23doing work, you will pay far more for it.
- 36:25And with very little friction on that.
- 36:26I don't, I still don't think CE OS are pushing heavily back on
- 36:31that. They're concerned they're
- 36:32consuming budget way faster, but I don't think they're willing to
- 36:35say, you know what, I think that was a neat experiment.
- 36:37Let's go back and the second, and this will get into the
- 36:41trend. We can all just use less smart
- 36:44AI if we want. I mean, we can make this very
- 36:46inexpensive and have a high school or do your work for you
- 36:49instead of a PhD. And I kind of kid when I say
- 36:51that, but it's like, boy, to use the absolute best AI on these
- 36:55things and know that we're still, I don't know, I mean,
- 36:57what's your average per? And maybe I'll use general
- 37:00numbers. Let's say your average per
- 37:01employee went from 20 bucks a month to even 500 or 250 or 500
- 37:06if you averaged it across your team.
- 37:07That's about where we are. Think about how small that is.
- 37:10I mean, could you pay anybody on this planet to do this kind of
- 37:13work for 500 bucks a month and what time it would take?
- 37:15I think that we're kidding ourselves when we think it's
- 37:17expensive. I do think there is a limit and
- 37:20there's going to be a huge focus on efficiencies and new ways to
- 37:23do pricing. So I, I hear you on that.
- 37:25And that's something we'll be thinking about.
- 37:27But I think we're still in an era that if it's used
- 37:28thoughtfully. So you're going to see heavier
- 37:30inspection, heavier accountability on ROI, which
- 37:33would be very easy. Even just ask, I mean, I could
- 37:35just ask adapt for your account, build the ROI case study and
- 37:39really help to make sure Jeremiah realizes the value
- 37:41we're creating and it'll have it in an hour and that.
- 37:46I'm not. I'm not questioning the value.
- 37:48There's a reason we're spending four times as much as I
- 37:49initially budgeted as value. But actually one of the things I
- 37:53think it's really interesting, like when in the things that
- 37:54we're building for our customers, I'm thinking about
- 37:57how where we sit, we can actually help reduce their token
- 38:00cost and clot or whatever they're going to use to connect
- 38:02to this by being smarter with the way we pull the information
- 38:06for them and that kind of stuff. And I, I think if you're the
- 38:08brain, you actually have a massive ability there to where
- 38:10like overtime, there's probably a world in which you can
- 38:13actually deliver better outcomes for less tokens than you then
- 38:18you would be able to get with just connecting Claude or
- 38:20whatever directly into a system because you actually have more
- 38:23context and more ability to that's.
- 38:25Exactly right. To tune those the the inputs to
- 38:29get the right outputs. So I, that's, that's how I think
- 38:31about what I'm hoping that ends up becoming ultimately, but I
- 38:34don't know if that's part of how you're seeing it too.
- 38:36It's exactly right that as you start to have all that context
- 38:38and restoring, you know, this context and doing things with
- 38:41it, we don't have to do all these tool calls every single
- 38:43time. I mean, there's a different way
- 38:44to pull this context and share that in general, it's an ROI
- 38:47game. How much value are we creating?
- 38:49You know, that we can tune these things, right?
- 38:50I mean, it's all a tuning game of how much how much of the good
- 38:53stuff to put in. But I think that most people are
- 38:55pushing us towards keep it going like and we pride ourselves.
- 38:58We always ourselves by saying we want to have the single best
- 39:01answer, like we won't price optimize right now.
- 39:03We don't even give you an option to say use the dumb model.
- 39:06No, we want to actually give you the single best models we can
- 39:09find. Now there's there's work you can
- 39:10do on on on tuning this, but I think the world still is on his
- 39:14own of actually give me the best answer possible for this.
- 39:17And then help me maybe understand if there's use cases
- 39:19that we could maybe not use AI as aggressively on.
- 39:22But I think we're still in the zone of lean in and unlock and
- 39:26accelerate how people achieve their missions because it's just
- 39:29it's been too slow and we're in a massive productivity
- 39:32acceleration and most CEOs I talked to don't want to slow it
- 39:35down. And I would also say the best
- 39:37still isn't good enough actually in a lot of cases.
- 39:39So may as well just keep pushing that until you get to the point
- 39:42where it is good enough and then figure out how do you make it
- 39:45more efficient, more cost effective, whatever that is.
- 39:48There are people using code code for free right now because clock
- 39:51code leaked their entire thing online.
- 39:53And there's now like a repo that's like super popular of
- 39:56people using clock code for free.
- 39:57And then there's all the Chinese models.
- 39:58And these things are becoming so cheap so rapidly.
- 40:02There's going to be people, you know, there's no coercion.
- 40:04They're choosing to use the very best models, always up to date
- 40:08because they want the best result.
- 40:09But man, like the AI we're using now is going to feel like the AI
- 40:13that was available in like November.
- 40:15Last year in just a few months and we're not going to want to
- 40:17use it. You know, we're blown away by it
- 40:19now, but like in a couple months time we're going to be like, I
- 40:21can't imagine using anything apart from mythos.
- 40:22All right, I'm only going to use Mythos from now on, right?
- 40:25I mean, so I don't know. Someone put you on Sonnet or put
- 40:28you on a, you know, 5.4 when you knew that there was this magical
- 40:32thing that literally cost what, 100 bucks more a month for?
- 40:34I mean, when you actually think about how much we spend in these
- 40:37companies, I don't know if this actually is that big, especially
- 40:40if you look at the productivity gain.
- 40:41They'll be areas that need to be more efficient.
- 40:43And this will be very easy for the industry to solve.
- 40:45It'll just start to build more audits and actually, we'll just
- 40:49use AI to solve it. Hey, adapt.
- 40:50Is this a good use? Is this a good ROI positive
- 40:53query? How would you think about this?
- 40:55And there's a lot of ways to just use AI to manage AI.
- 40:59One of the things that we spoke about earlier was driving
- 41:01adoption in teams or even people, you know, outside.
- 41:04One of the awesome things that adapters doing is bringing
- 41:07people who are not AI native could be AI resistant for
- 41:09whatever reason. This, you know, thousands of
- 41:11reasons, but making it so that they can feel what we all felt
- 41:15when I'm not sure what tool it was for you.
- 41:17I feel like the tool changes fairly often for me, but right
- 41:20now it's just called Code and Terminal.
- 41:21But like, first it was Codex. And it's this amazing feeling
- 41:24when you're like, OK, all these complicated things.
- 41:25I used to have different specialists do the sequence of
- 41:28baton passes and it would take a week or longer to get done.
- 41:31Suddenly I can get done every day in the background and not
- 41:34think about them anymore. How incredible was that?
- 41:36I mean, yeah, I wonder what you guys think about gamification
- 41:40and bringing that experience to your teams.
- 41:43I've heard some people talk about like token maxing right at
- 41:45their teams where they're saying, hey, use as much tokens
- 41:47as possible. Yeah.
- 41:48How do you guys think about? That one of the use cases that I
- 41:51think just brings a lot of joy to people is if you connect to
- 41:53all the tools you use. So let's say you use a HubSpot
- 41:55or Linear, all these, all these different platforms using we
- 41:58have a, we have a product called adapt apps, which is like a
- 42:01cursor cloud code type experience.
- 42:02But when you let just like we have an AE on the team that
- 42:06decided to just a natural language build a new type of way
- 42:09to manage his accounts when he gets on a call.
- 42:11So instead of logging into HubSpot, which we don't want to
- 42:13vibe code HubSpot, that that would not be a good use of time.
- 42:15I wouldn't. I don't think any systems of
- 42:17records should be vibe coded right now.
- 42:18But to add a new UX layer that is very visual, that has trend
- 42:21charts of usage, that has the building data from Stripe, that
- 42:24has the usage data from Big Query, so we can see who's using
- 42:27it and is like a really full functional app and then has
- 42:30adapt intelligence of like signals.
- 42:33We never log into HubSpot. It writes back.
- 42:35And that's the example where Jack, I think that when people
- 42:37start to build their first apps, they have this like huge smile.
- 42:41They never thought they could do this.
- 42:42They in the past, they'd have to have an engineering team working
- 42:44with them. And then when they can share it,
- 42:46which is what adopts about it's team powered AI.
- 42:48This isn't the this isn't like a clod coworker.
- 42:50You're just very siloed. You share it.
- 42:53So then someone else uses the app to do their work or edits
- 42:55it. It's a pretty insane experience
- 42:58of just how it changes how you work.
- 43:00You basically have the most perfect UX for any situation you
- 43:04want. We have ATV on the wall like a
- 43:05frame TV in the office. That's just an adapt app that
- 43:08visualizes all of our usage in a funnel flow.
- 43:11I mean literally in the last 24 hours all the messages,
- 43:13connections, users, bubbles are floating, it makes noises and
- 43:16it's just someone built an adapt app and said this would be a
- 43:19more fun way to manage our accounts.
- 43:21Yeah, I've started using those just to build, to prototype
- 43:24things for customers. I've got the information I need
- 43:26connected to be able to pull their information and build
- 43:29these things out. And, and I think hopefully this
- 43:33comes for you at some point, like actually being able to
- 43:34share this externally would be cool.
- 43:35But even for now, just being able to take screenshots and say
- 43:38like, Hey, what do you think about this?
- 43:39It's something I can just do from Slack over the weekends.
- 43:42I'll literally like, hey, I don't want to log into adapt at
- 43:45all. I'll just ask you to take a
- 43:46screenshot and send it to me. So adapt is literally taking a
- 43:49screenshot of the app that it's building.
- 43:50And then I'll look at him like, OK, cool.
- 43:51Like edit these things. Well, what it's become for me
- 43:54because we actually got started with adapt around the same time
- 43:57that all the open class stuff was really going viral.
- 44:00And I actually started playing around the open claw and I was
- 44:03like, wait a minute. And this thing's actually better
- 44:05for me because it's embedded into the business and in a way
- 44:08that I would never be comfortable trying to embed open
- 44:10claw because of the the risks of that.
- 44:13And it's, I don't think it's there.
- 44:15Like there's, it doesn't have the same level of flexibility,
- 44:17but I actually don't want that. I want a little bit more
- 44:19control. I want things to be done in such
- 44:21a way that is shareable across the team and all that kind of
- 44:23stuff. And and so it doesn't solve all
- 44:25the same problems, but I do kind of see to set this brain concept
- 44:29that set or computer, however you want to describe it, that's
- 44:31some type of your business. It definitely that is the future
- 44:33as far as I'm concerned. So for me, it actually, I
- 44:35actually stopped, I threw away the whole idea of using open
- 44:38cloud because it's actually not that useful for me in a business
- 44:40context and just that for me. Jim, just one closing questions
- 44:44before we wrap here. If I'm trying to figure out what
- 44:47is the thing that I need to do in order to get my organization
- 44:50to become more AI native like not not really tool based, but
- 44:54more culture shift, right, Because you guys are providing a
- 44:57tool that can help and but there's a there's a big other
- 45:01part, which is just to change management part, right.
- 45:03What is your top one or two things that you would suggest to
- 45:06like a CEO or a CIO, Whoever is responsible for this in there is
- 45:11usually the CEO is responsible for this.
- 45:12Like what is the thing that you are telling them?
- 45:14Like, hey, I know you're like, you feel like you're banging
- 45:17your head against the wall trying to get your team to be AI
- 45:19native. Here's like the top two things
- 45:21that we see across all the companies we work with.
- 45:23It's. An interesting, I'm thinking
- 45:25throughout the answer that thoughtfully, because when I
- 45:27hear that, I think like AI empowered, which is, oh, we want
- 45:30our, you know, if we don't talk about the tool, then what you
- 45:32are talking about is I just want people to use more AI to augment
- 45:35their thinking to maybe help them see it differently.
- 45:37But when it's all just done in silos and not connected, I'm not
- 45:41it's hard to use the word AI native with that, because all
- 45:44that really is is I use an AI tool to to do things and like a
- 45:46weird, not weird, but just in a very isolated way.
- 45:49And I think sorry. I'm I'm saying like the choice.
- 45:51I mean, the choice of a tool like happens in the course of
- 45:54doing that. But at some point someone has to
- 45:57have the desire to want to work in this new way, right?
- 45:59But that's that's I guess what I'm talking about.
- 46:01Think that it starts at that somebody has to have the
- 46:04initiative. In our world, it usually starts
- 46:06with, you know, VPS or CEO. I'll give you an example.
- 46:08Let's say you created a skill in Adapt that was like the most
- 46:12perfect way that you like to connect with people and build
- 46:14relationships for your EA. So you save the skill and then
- 46:17your EA starts. You said, oh, by the way, when
- 46:19you when every time I have a meeting, can you just run that
- 46:21skill or just even ask adapt like how I think about this and
- 46:24it does it. You've now just made this person
- 46:26far more AI native. You've codified a way of
- 46:29thinking and taught them that they probably could codify a lot
- 46:32of their thinking. So if they hire a second EA or
- 46:34expand the team, it goes. And so I guess it comes down to
- 46:37how do you create these magical moments that others see that
- 46:41expands it. And maybe the last point of
- 46:43Slack is a wonderful way we use we use a concept of being
- 46:46instantly a native because at Jeremiah mentioned he he took
- 46:49the time to connect, you know, AP is into his account, but it
- 46:52was done at the organization level.
- 46:54So as his team jumped into slack, all they had to do.
- 46:56And he just probably sent a message to say, ask adapt what
- 46:59it thinks, say adapt. How would you do this or adapt?
- 47:01This customer has this problem. What should we do?
- 47:04And suddenly they had an aha moment that everyone can see in
- 47:07a team powered AI. And so I think it's about the
- 47:10reason why I push a little bit is without the connection to
- 47:12tools, we're just in a little bit of like AI, consumer AI in
- 47:16the business world, which we've seen in past iterations.
- 47:19But when you connect it to the actual work we do and how we do
- 47:21it, it's like, it's like an experience that no one's had and
- 47:24that you couldn't ever imagine not having.
- 47:27So like if someone said, you know what, tomorrow we're going
- 47:28to turn off this connected brain experience and you're just going
- 47:31to have your team in Slack and your team by itself doing the
- 47:34work. It would feel like turning the
- 47:36Wi-Fi off. You still have your laptops.
- 47:37We're all together, but we're really like Hanford, like 90%
- 47:41down. I think that's what it connected
- 47:44intelligence feels like when it's connected to tools.
- 47:47And it's very different than everybody having a ChatGPT
- 47:49license where if that went down for the day, I think most people
- 47:51are fine doing their job for the day.
- 47:52It's painful, but they, they would, you know, the work would
- 47:55go on because at the end of the day, they were doing the work
- 47:57and they were simply asking another tool to whisper to them
- 48:00a better version of the e-mail or to create something that they
- 48:03then as middleware, like a human middleware would go add to other
- 48:07systems. And that's what we're
- 48:08fundamentally changing. We're getting rid of the human
- 48:10middleware and just letting the humans do the part they're so
- 48:12good at, like the EQ thing that you mentioned.
- 48:15How many people do you guys know that are passionate about Google
- 48:17Docs or Gmail sending emails? None right?
- 48:21Demand drive supply. I felt like you got to like ask
- 48:23for it right from the team. Right.
- 48:26Yeah, I got to jump here too. But Jim, can you just kind of
- 48:29give everybody like a little last thing on ADAPT and how they
- 48:33can find you and where to go if they're interested in it?
- 48:36Yeah. So adapt.com company brain
- 48:40powered by the Adapt AI computer and you can now just go to
- 48:42adapt.com, sign up and if you use a business domain, you get
- 48:46$300.00 of credits. Our team will reach out as well
- 48:48and we will help make your company AI native.
- 48:51Yeah, awesome. And so when you found us here
- 48:53too, because I think it'd be fun to to see if anybody decides
- 48:56that they're going to go use adapt, Yeah.
- 48:58We're going to set up a code or something of that that's.
- 49:00Great. Yeah, that's fun, Jim.
- 49:03This was great. I love hearing these stories.
- 49:06You're just you're out there doing it and helping lots of
- 49:09teams become AI native.