Beyond the Prompt dives deep into the world of AI and its expanding impact on business and daily work. Hosted by Jeremy Utley of Stanford's d.school, alongside Henrik Werdelin, an entrepreneur known for starting BarkBox, prehype and other startups, each episode features conversations with innovators and leaders to uncover pragmatic stories of how organizations leverage AI to accelerate success. Learn creative strategies and actionable tactics you can apply right away as AI capabilities advance exponentially.
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Christian believes the AI era will be defined less by generating outputs and more by evaluating them. As intelligence becomes cheaper and more accessible, the people who create the most value may be those who can distinguish good work from exceptional work and help guide increasingly capable systems. The conversation explores verification, judgment, and why expertise still matters in a world where AI can perform many tasks at a high level. Christian explains why today's experts are both highly v...
Chantel Prat studies how different brains make sense of the world. Her work starts from a simple idea: every experience leaves a mark. The inputs we consume shape how we think, what we notice, and ultimately who we become. The conversation explores why people often choose familiar rewards over uncertain opportunities to learn. Chantel explains the tension between exploration and exploitation, why curiosity is essential for growth, and how fear can prevent us from engaging with new technologies l...
Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and the newly released Incorruptible , joins Beyond the Prompt to explore why most companies drift from their original mission over time. The conversation dives into governance, shareholder primacy, Anthropic’s unusual structure, and why AI makes these questions more important than ever. Eric Ries argues that most companies are built on a contradiction. Founders say they care about customers and impact, but legally, the company is structured to serve shareho...
Bestselling author Ryan Holiday discusses how AI, while powerful, cannot outsource wisdom, comparing it to exercise where the value is in becoming the person who does the work. He explains that AI amplifies existing human tendencies, making critical thinking, skepticism, and the ability to question paramount. Drawing on Stoicism, the conversation emphasizes that change is a historical constant, and adapting to new technologies requires focusing on agency and inner response rather than panicking or disengaging, ultimately recommending education and a "bullshit detector" as core skills for the AI era.
Laura Jones explains that generative AI is raising the bar for creativity. When everyone can produce “pretty good” content, the real challenge is creating something that actually stands out. The risk is not poor output, but settling too quickly for what already works. She argues that as products become more similar, brand becomes a signal of trust. Not in a visual sense, but in the experience behind it. At Instacart, that shows up in details like how a banana is selected. With over a billion ban...
Dan Klein, professor at UC Berkeley and CTO at Scaled Cognition, explains that AI systems generate answers based on patterns in language rather than verified knowledge. This makes them highly capable across many tasks, but also means they can produce confident answers even when they are not fully accurate. He introduces the “jagged frontier,” where AI performs very well in some areas and less reliably in others. Because responses are fluent and convincing, it is often hard to see where those lim...
Melissa Cheals leads Smartly, a payroll and people management platform serving 24,000 small and medium businesses in New Zealand. In this conversation, she shares how AI is reshaping product development, leadership, and how organizations operate. A key moment comes when her team estimates new features will take 12 months and $1M to build. Instead of accepting it, Melissa pushes back, using AI to better understand her team’s perspective and communicate the need for change more effectively. This b...
Greg Shove describes a growing gap between individual and organizational AI adoption. A small group of employees are already using AI effectively, while most companies are still early. AI is generating real productivity gains, but those gains are not being captured at the company level. Instead, they are absorbed by individuals who use AI to work faster, often without changing team outputs or structures — raising a central question: if AI creates time, where does that time go? The conversation e...
Leidy Klotz has spent years studying a simple but overlooked phenomenon: when we try to improve something, our first instinct is to add rather than remove. He shares the Lego bridge experiment that sparked his research and explains how this additive bias scales from small design decisions to entire organizations. Over time, companies accumulate reporting lines, meetings, software, and policies without questioning what no longer serves them. Henrik and Jeremy explore how AI tools intensify this p...
Fathom was built on the assumption that transcription would become commoditized and generative models would steadily improve. Rather than training proprietary models, Richard focused on building the infrastructure around them and waiting for model capabilities to reach the right threshold. In this conversation, he explains why AI has made effort and impact harder to predict, and why that shifts product development from roadmap execution toward experimentation. He describes separating an explorat...
In this episode, Bryan McCann joins Henrik and Jeremy to explore how search is evolving from simple queries into more conversational and agent-driven systems, and why prompting is likely a temporary skill. Bryan shares how his definition of productivity changed as an AI researcher, moving away from doing the work himself and toward designing plans and experiments that machines could run continuously. The conversation expands to leadership and organizational design. Bryan explains why helping oth...
In this episode, Humza Teherany breaks down how he bridges deep technical fluency with strategic leadership at MLSE, home to the Raptors, Maple Leafs, and more. He shares how a vacation turned into an AI reawakening and how that hands-on immersion led to a fundamental shift in how his organization builds and experiments. Humza walks through MLSE’s build in a day practice, their internal AI platform, and why speed to prototype now unlocks more than just efficiency. It changes who gets to shape th...
Mikkel B. Rasmussen brings a rare lens to the AI conversation. As an applied anthropologist, he has spent decades helping companies like LEGO uncover what is really going on beneath the surface. In this episode, he shares how deep insight often begins with being wrong, why surprise is the clearest sign you have found something meaningful, and how the pain of not knowing is essential to breakthrough thinking. He also explains how AI is transforming his own research, from pattern recognition to vi...
Diarra Bousso returns to Beyond the Prompt to share how she's reprogramming the fashion industry using AI, math, and a relentless spirit of experimentation. From selling AI-generated products before they exist to cutting out waste and wait times, she walks us through a radical new approach to design and operations. She explains how her team uses scientific rigor to test marketing ideas, create on-demand collections, and rethink the traditional fashion calendar. Diarra also opens up about the ori...
In this episode, Illia Polosukhin joins Henrik and Jeremy to trace the origins of transformers and how practical constraints inside Google led to a breakthrough that reshaped modern AI. He explains why recurrent models were hitting limits, how parallel attention opened the door to scale, and why he believed a major jump in capability was imminent long before the rest of the world saw it. The conversation then turns to the risks and responsibilities of today’s AI systems. Illia describes how mode...
In this episode, Christian Keller joins Henrik and Jeremy to explain how world models are shaping the next stage of generative AI. He talks through how AI learns using different types of inputs, and why video adds a sense of continuity, change, and cause and effect that text alone does not provide. Christian shares vivid analogies and clear examples to show what multimodal models make possible. The conversation moves into how AI is now used throughout the research process, from generating synthe...
Generative AI is moving fast, but most organizations aren’t. Tim Creasey and Paul Gonzalez have spent their careers studying why. As leaders at Prosci, they’ve worked with thousands of teams navigating complex change, and in this episode they share what their research says about the human side of transformation. They discuss why traditional tactics like comms and training break down in the face of rapid AI adoption, and how successful organizations create the conditions for people to actually ch...
Applied Intuition builds the kind of AI you don’t see, but can’t live without. Co-founders Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig share how their $15 billion company powers vehicle intelligence across cars, trucks, tanks, mining equipment, and defense systems operating in some of the most demanding conditions on earth. They explain why combining AI with safety-critical systems raises the stakes, how a single mistake can destroy an entire company, and why so many autonomy startups ended up in the “graveya...
As Head of IBM Consulting, Mohamad Ali led one of the most ambitious enterprise AI transformations to date. By making IBM its own “Client Zero,” his team tested every AI solution internally before bringing it to market. The effort began with massive hackathons involving 150,000 employees, turning curiosity into capability and belief at scale. Mohamad shares how leadership alignment, process redesign, and broad employee engagement drove $3.5 billion in cost savings and renewed growth. Jeremy and ...
Martin Reeves has spent decades advising CEOs on how to think about strategy. As head of BCG’s Henderson Institute, he has built a career challenging leaders to balance efficiency with imagination and to prepare for the next disruptive shift. In this conversation, Martin tells Henrik and Jeremy why AI alone will not give companies an edge and might even strip them of advantage. He unpacks the “two jobs of business”: playing the current game better than anyone else while simultaneously asking wha...
Adam Brotman and Andy Sack sit down with Henrik and Jeremy to unpack their book AI First and the framework they have developed for leaders. They argue that AI is not just another technology wave but a leadership reset that demands new playbooks, new structures and new ways of thinking. They explain why AI should be seen as an augmentation of human intelligence, an “Ironman suit” for leaders, and how mindset, experimentation and governance are essential to adoption. The conversation also explores...
In a shift from the usual format, Henrik Werdelin steps into the guest seat—alongside Nicholas Thorne—for a live conversation with Jeremy Utley about their new book Me, My Customer, and AI . They explore what it takes for entrepreneurs to compete in the age of AI — from redefining resourcefulness to thinking like founders, even inside a job. The discussion dives into the book’s central frameworks, including the Five Ps (powers, passions, possessions, positions, and potentials) and the “it sucks ...
Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier, joins Henrik and Jeremy to talk about how AI is changing the company from the inside out. He shares the moment Zapier declared a “code red” on AI and the steps they took to turn urgency into action — encouraging more experiments, removing tolerance for inaction, and celebrating wins along the way. Wade discusses his own AI use cases, the importance of internal examples in driving adoption, and why duplication of efforts can speed up learning. He reflect...
In this episode, Evan Ratliff, journalist and creator of the podcast Shell Game , shares the wild and personal story behind his experiment in AI voice cloning. What began as curiosity turned into a six-month dive into building an AI version of himself—one that could answer phone calls, conduct interviews, and even fool friends and family. From scamming the scammers to testing AI therapy, Evan walks us through what it’s like to put a synthetic version of yourself into the world and watch how peop...
In this episode, Jeff Benjamin, Global CCO of Tombras, shares how AI helps him get unstuck, build confidence, and push bold ideas forward—even when self-doubt creeps in. From romcom scripts to Arby’s pitches, he shows how AI acts as a sparring partner: sharpening thinking, stress-testing ideas, and keeping momentum alive. We get into what separates distinct from generic, why affirmation can be a trap, and how the urge to share is still at the heart of creativity. If you're chasing big ideas—or j...
In this episode, Joshua To, VP of Product Design at Meta, shares how AI is reshaping how—and where—we interact with technology. He walks us through Meta’s evolving approach to AR and wearables, why notifications are still the killer use case, and how AI is becoming the “brain behind empathy.” We dig into what it means to build interfaces that understand you, why audio might be the future’s most underrated platform, and how designing for emotion changes everything—from form factor to function. Jo...
In this episode, Greg Shove, CEO of Section and founder of Machine and Partners, joins us for a "where are they now" follow-up—and doesn’t hold back. Greg walks through the rise of Pro AI, his new AI-powered coach, and why traditional upskilling is already obsolete. We explore the overlooked friction points in AI adoption, from cultural taboos (“it feels like cheating”) to failed enterprise rollouts. Greg challenges the prevailing mental models and warns that the real upheaval is still ahead: bu...
In this episode, John Waldmann, CEO of Homebase, shares how the 10-year-old SaaS company blew up its roadmap and rebuilt around AI—from culture to code. He walks us through the shift from 20-page PRDs to lightning-fast demos, reclaiming product leadership, and pushing teams into their “oh shit” moment with AI. We explore the leadership reckoning, cultural resistance, and practical playbook behind the transformation—and what it means for the future of SaaS, small businesses, and human-centered AI...
In this episode, Joshua Wöhle, co-founder and CEO of Mindstone, shares how AI can go beyond automation to truly augment thinking, strategy, and workflows. He walks us through the personal rituals and frameworks he uses to spot high-leverage opportunities, and why iteration—not speed—is the real unlock. We explore how non-technical teams can build custom tools without code, why HR is the real AI driver in most orgs, and how the shift from SaaS to tailored internal solutions is reshaping the futur...
In this episode, Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, shares a personal and expansive look at how AI is reshaping creativity, leadership, and human connection. From using ChatGPT in marathon training to rethinking journalism in the age of agents, Nicholas explores AI not just as a tool—but as a thought partner. We dive into cognitive offloading vs. augmentation, the ethics of AI-generated content, and why preserving “unwired” intelligence still matters. He also reflects on leading through dis...
