AI at Work

How to start using AI agents in your business, and why taste matters more than tools. Plus the Charleston room where all 17 CEOs leaned in.

Kevin Williams and Matt compare notes on agent setups, why two people automating the same job get wildly different results, and what business owners in paving and HVAC are finally doing about AI. Kevin also shares where he tells every company to start.

In this episode:

- Why an agent built by someone with taste beats one built by a beginner

- Who to pair with your taste people, and why they rarely have the technical skills too

- Why large organizations shouldn't let everyone build their own AI solutions

- 17 CEOs in Charleston, all engaged with AI for the first time

- Kevin's two starting points: expensive human mistakes and misused talent

- Living with ChatGPT's Dots, long-tail tasks, and 2FA headaches

Thanks to our Sponsors!

AscendAI: https://lascendlabs.ai
RapidDev: https://rapidevelopers.com/
LiberNovo: https://libernovo.com/

Try Muse, get a billion tokens! https://muse.ai/join (use code RHYQ60  in settings)

CHECK OUT KEVIN’S STUFF:

Website: https://ascendlabs.ai/

LinkedIn: https://www.google.com/search?q=https... –

Free Tool: Take the https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Deep Dive: Read the https://resources.ascendlabs.ai/opena...

Book a Call: https://www.google.com/search?q=https...

CHECK OUT MATT’S STUFF:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-graham-nocode/

Company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rapid-dev/

Direct Email: Reach out to Matt at [email protected]

How to build with AI when you're not a full-time developer, plus OpenAI's Dot agent doing a month of work in a day. Kevin Williams and AI developer Vlad Larin.

Vlad Larin went from managing a 250-person delivery team to building with AI himself, and he argues the skill that separates good AI builders from bad vibe coders is the same one that separated good developers from bad ones: vision, architecture, and knowing what the product is supposed to do. Kevin Williams and Vlad compare build setups, test OpenAI's Dot, and talk about what AI subscriptions are likely to cost.

In this episode:

- Why a decade of untangling client requirements translates to building with AI

- Vlad's setup: Codex plan mode, GitHub, Supabase, and Vercel

- Gaslighting Codex as an "unofficial turbo mode" (and when it backfires)

- Dot catching a missing meeting invite and bills due, unprompted

- Kevin's 100-ad Meta campaign run hands-off with computer use

- Why $500 a month is justifiable and $5,000 would stunt the market

Thanks to our new Sponsor LiberNovo and their insanely supportive Omni Chair:  https://libernovo.com/

To try out Muse and get a BILLION tokens use code: RHYQ60  https://muse.ai/join (full disclosure, we will get a billion tokens too… but aren’t sure how we will use them)

Ready to find out where your organization actually stands on AI readiness?

https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Want to talk through your AI tool decisions before you commit?

tidycal.com/kevinwilliams

CHECK OUT KEVIN’S STUFF:

Website: https://ascendlabs.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.google.com/search?q=https... –
Free Tool: Take the https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/
Deep Dive: Read the https://resources.ascendlabs.ai/opena...
Book a Call: https://www.google.com/search?q=https...

VLAD LARIN:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vlad-larin/

AI token costs in 2026: why Luna 6 at 40x cheaper than Fable may end the cost panic, and what Codex computer use actually did in four hours.

Kevin Williams and Matt talk through the state of agentic AI right now: the jump from OpenClaw and Hermes to Grokbot and computer-use models, what Meta's Muse is actually for, and why Google paid $10 million for a dead airline's Slack messages.

In this episode:

- Kevin runs out of Codex tokens for three days and explains the $100 vs $200 plan trap

- Luna 6 ships with computer controls at 40x less per token than Anthropic's Fable

- Codex logs into Tag Manager, Analytics, Search Console, AdWords, Slack and HubSpot and finishes a week of campaign setup in four hours

- Why Kevin refused to give Muse his Amex login, and what it did to his kids' Canvas account

- Google buying Spirit Airlines' operating data to build a sandbox digital airline

- Whether Anthropic's inference demand in early 2026 cost it the training race

Thanks to our new Sponsor LiberNovo and their insanely supportive Omni Chair:  https://libernovo.com/

To try out Muse and get a BILLION tokens use code: RHYQ60  https://muse.ai/join (full disclosure, we will get a billion tokens too… but aren’t sure how we will use them)

Ready to find out where your organization actually stands on AI readiness?

https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Want to talk through your AI tool decisions before you commit?

tidycal.com/kevinwilliams

CHECK OUT KEVIN’S STUFF:

Website: https://ascendlabs.ai/

LinkedIn: https://www.google.com/search?q=https... –

Free Tool: Take the https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Deep Dive: Read the https://resources.ascendlabs.ai/opena...

Book a Call: https://www.google.com/search?q=https...

CHECK OUT MATT’S STUFF:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-graham-nocode/

Company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rapid-dev/

Direct Email: Reach out to Matt at [email protected]

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

Kevin Williams and Matt skip the politics and go after the technology behind the panic: recursive self-improvement. The slope is the part nobody is planning around. Once a model can pull its own levers, improvement stops being a steady climb and becomes a rock tipping from potential energy to kinetic. Astra 6 to Astra 20 to Astra 2000 in hours, days, minutes. The 2015 prisoner's dilemma argument holds that the first lab there wins the whole game.

Then they get practical. What an RSI-style loop looks like inside a business today, why constantly shifting models make solutions hard to build against, treating context as code, sharing reusable skills, and Kevin's cost work: a resources tool that ran $40 per update until he rebuilt it around an MCP, and thumbnail images at seven and a half cents each.

Full episode: https://ascendlabs.ai/podcast/ep-42-recursive-self-improvement-end-of-the-world-or-an-opportunity/

In this episode:

- The 10% claim, who made it, and why the regulatory capture read is tempting

- Why RSI improvement is exponential and what tipping over looks like

- The national security version: what if China's model goes to Astra 2000 overnight

- Building solutions on a model that quietly becomes Opus 17

- Self-improvement loops applied to your own processes, not just the model

- Why Kevin downgraded Claude Max from $200 to $100

Ready to find out where your organization actually stands on AI readiness?

https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Want to talk through your AI tool decisions before you commit?

tidycal.com/kevinwilliams

CHECK OUT KEVIN’S STUFF:

Website: https://ascendlabs.ai/

LinkedIn: https://www.google.com/search?q=https... –

Free Tool: Take the https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Deep Dive: Read the https://resources.ascendlabs.ai/opena...

Book a Call: https://www.google.com/search?q=https...

CHECK OUT MATT’S STUFF:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-graham-nocode/

Company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rapid-dev/

Direct Email: Reach out to Matt at [email protected]

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

Before that, Kevin walks through what he actually built with Astra last week: a 45-page presentation deck assembled from client research, downloaded imagery and past decks; a technical SEO project that produced a new page, four updates and seven draft articles in about 45 minutes; and a part-based 3D printable model of a cabin he used to own in West Virginia, generated from two photos and optimized for multi-color printing.

They also get into why the intelligence layer has no good off-the-shelf answer, why AI-first organizations that are smaller and founder-led can move when ISO-certified companies can't, and whether the sunk cost fallacy still applies to systems you built nine months ago.

Topics covered:

- The caveat on blueprinting processes: input and output, not five steps

- Why every person in the organization needs a daily driver, plus a literacy layer

- Building an intelligence layer across email, Slack, transcripts and documents

- What Astra did with a deck, an SEO campaign and a 3D print

- Why security-mature organizations struggle to move at all here

- When to rebuild a working system and when to leave it alone

Ready to find out where your organization actually stands on AI readiness?

https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Want to talk through your AI tool decisions before you commit?

tidycal.com/kevinwilliams

CHECK OUT KEVIN’S STUFF:

Website: https://ascendlabs.ai/

LinkedIn: https://www.google.com/search?q=https... –

Free Tool: Take the https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Deep Dive: Read the https://resources.ascendlabs.ai/opena...

Book a Call: https://www.google.com/search?q=https...

CHECK OUT MATT’S STUFF:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-graham-nocode/

Company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rapid-dev/

Direct Email: Reach out to Matt at [email protected]

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

Matt and Kevin dig into what that gap means for anyone standing up internal AI infrastructure today. Matt's team built an internal system that captures every call, Slack message, and email on a client project and flags when something drifts. It runs affordably now. His concern isn't the build cost it's what happens if the run cost triples.

They also cover why switching between Claude Code and Codex costs you almost nothing if your code lives in GitHub, why that undercuts the case for price increases, and what happened when Kevin turned a swarm loose on 45 repositories to fix a favicon.

Topics:

- Why AI avatars still fail for self-cloning after three years of trying

- The 82/18 split between deterministic and agentic workflow steps

- LinkedIn bans, bot-detectable IPs, and 200 profile lookups in five minutes

- Codex sidebar chats, work trees, and browser control versus Claude Code

- Two billion tokens, $125, and the $8,000 enterprise equivalent

- The runaway agent that logged into an abandoned Lovable account

Ready to find out where your organization actually stands on AI readiness?

https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Want to talk through your AI tool decisions before you commit?

tidycal.com/kevinwilliams

CHECK OUT KEVIN’S STUFF:

Website: https://ascendlabs.ai/

LinkedIn: https://www.google.com/search?q=https... –

Free Tool: Take the https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Deep Dive: Read the https://resources.ascendlabs.ai/opena...

Book a Call: https://www.google.com/search?q=https...

CHECK OUT MATT’S STUFF:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-graham-nocode/

Company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rapid-dev/

Direct Email: Reach out to Matt at [email protected]

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

Kevin Williams and Matt Graham dig into what the AI content arms race actually looks like from the inside: the outbound personalization that stopped working, the media briefs that CMOs clearly never read before sending, the watermarking technology Anthropic just deployed to comply with the EU AI Act, and why the hyper-personalized cold email had a window that is now closed.

The conversation also covers what's still working targeting the right person at the right moment, keeping a human in the review loop, and building the kind of differentiated content that doesn't get mistaken for something an agent generated in 30 seconds.

Key topics covered:

✅ LinkedIn's new AI complaint functionality and what it means for automated content

✅ The 20-25% content increase and 17% engagement drop — and why it's getting worse

✅ Anthropic's watermarking rollout and the cat-and-mouse arms race with humanizer tools

✅ Why hyper-personalized outbound backfired and what actually converts now

✅ The CMO problem: AI-generated briefs that no human reviewed before going out

✅ How to stay visible when every channel is filling up with noise

Ready to find out where your organization actually stands on AI readiness?

https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Want to talk through your AI tool decisions before you commit?

tidycal.com/kevinwilliams

CHECK OUT KEVIN’S STUFF:

Website: https://ascendlabs.ai/

LinkedIn: https://www.google.com/search?q=https... –

Free Tool: Take the https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Deep Dive: Read the https://resources.ascendlabs.ai/opena...

Book a Call: https://www.google.com/search?q=https...

CHECK OUT MATT’S STUFF:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-graham-nocode/

Company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rapid-dev/

Direct Email: Reach out to Matt at [email protected]

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

This episode started as a debate about Lovable the vibe coding platform that just raised $400M at a $13B valuation and turned into a broader conversation about what it actually takes to get AI working across an entire organization, not just in the hands of your most technical people.

Kevin and Matt cover the Lovable debate from both sides (Kevin's been burned, Matt's a believer), the emerging governance risks of agentic AI tools like Grokbot, why vendor lock-in is a real concern that organizations need to plan for, and where Google, XAI, and the competitive model landscape are actually headed.

Key topics covered:

✅ Why usability beats capability as an AI tool selection criterion

✅ Lovable's enterprise evolution what's changed and what hasn't

✅ Vendor lock-in: how to preserve optionality without abandoning a useful tool

✅ Grokbot and agentic AI the governance risks organizations aren't ready for

✅ The competitive model landscape: XAI's rise, Google's pivot, and what it means for token costs

✅ Why spreading AI licenses without organizational context produces nothing

Ready to find out where your organization actually stands on AI readiness?

https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Want to talk through your AI tool decisions before you commit?

tidycal.com/kevinwilliams

CHECK OUT KEVIN’S STUFF:

Website: https://ascendlabs.ai/

LinkedIn: https://www.google.com/search?q=https... –

Free Tool: Take the https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Deep Dive: Read the https://resources.ascendlabs.ai/opena...

Book a Call: https://www.google.com/search?q=https...

CHECK OUT MATT’S STUFF:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-graham-nocode/

Company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rapid-dev/

Direct Email: Reach out to Matt at [email protected]

Most companies are repeating a 100-year-old mistake with AI and the history of factory electrification explains exactly why. In this conversation, Kevin Williams and Matt Graham trace the parallel between the factories that plugged in electric motors without redesigning their floors and the organizations today that are adding AI tools without touching the structures underneath them. The gains didn't come from the new engine. They came from tearing the building down.

Kevin and Matt cover what that actually means for leaders making AI decisions right now including when rebuilding makes sense, when it doesn't, and what the companies pulling ahead have in common that has nothing to do with their tech stack.

They also get into the week's AI security news (sandbox escapes, autonomous agents creating their own email accounts and attempting to generate revenue to fund their tasks), the real switching costs between Claude and GPT Codex, what changed in Claude 5.0 that broke Kevin's custom build system, and why the "agent orchestrator" is a role your organization will need before it knows it needs one.

What this conversation covers:

✅ Why plugging AI into existing processes produces higher costs and identical outputs and what the electrification era teaches us about the actual path to gains
✅ The three options every leader faces: do nothing, rebuild from scratch, or rip down what's working and the honest tradeoffs of each
✅ Sandbox escape incidents across multiple AI labs this week, what autonomous agents actually did when they hit a wall, and what it means for enterprise security
✅ What changed in Claude Opus 5.0 and GPT 5.6 that required Kevin to completely rebuild his custom development system and what that means for anyone using AI in production
✅ The "agent orchestrator" role, why it doesn't really exist yet, and why the companies who started experimenting three years ago are already ahead in ways that can't be quickly closed

CHECK OUT KEVIN’S STUFF:

Website: https://ascendlabs.ai/

LinkedIn: https://www.google.com/search?q=https... –

Free Tool: Take the https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Deep Dive: Read the https://resources.ascendlabs.ai/opena...

Book a Call: https://www.google.com/search?q=https...

CHECK OUT MATT’S STUFF:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-graham-nocode/

Company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rapid-dev/

Direct Email: Reach out to Matt at [email protected]

Everyone is using AI. Almost nobody is making more money from it. Kevin Williams and Matt Graham get into why that gap exists, and it has nothing to do with which tools you're using.

This conversation starts with a simple observation: AI is going to business backlogs and wish lists instead of the two or three highest-leverage constraints that actually drive growth. The tools are working. The focus is off.

Kevin and Matt explore why this pattern is so common among curious, tech-savvy leaders, what it costs organizations that can't create space for experimentation, and why the most dangerous AI risk right now might not be the one making headlines.

Kevin also shares a real-world AI-enabled phishing attack that nearly caught him one that was so well-constructed it passed every visual check. The practical security guidance in this conversation is worth the listen on its own.

Key topics covered in this episode:

• Why AI productivity gains aren't producing top-line growth and what to do about it

• Main quests vs. side quests: how to tell which AI work actually matters

• The flight risk hiding inside organizations that won't let curious talent experiment

• A detailed breakdown of an AI-powered phishing attack and how to protect yourself

• Practical AI model cost management across Claude, GPT Work, Codex, and Fable

• Work breakdown structures as a living log for vibe coders and citizen developers
  

Resources mentioned:
Workflow:
https://podprocess.ascendlabs.ai/podcast/workflow

Assess where AI should be pointed in your business: https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Book a conversation with Kevin: https://tidycal.com/kevinwilliams

CHECK OUT KEVIN’S STUFF:

Website: https://ascendlabs.ai/

LinkedIn: https://www.google.com/search?q=https... –

Free Tool: Take the https://assessment.ascendlabs.ai/

Deep Dive: Read the https://resources.ascendlabs.ai/opena...

Book a Call: https://www.google.com/search?q=https...

CHECK OUT MATT’S STUFF:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-graham-nocode/

Company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rapid-dev/

Direct Email: Reach out to Matt at [email protected]