AI Outcomes

Protesters interrupted OpenAI's kickoff keynote at Seattle AI Week and Ben Pickett caught it on his phone. He describes more than half a dozen people repeatedly disrupting the session before security and police intervened. Pickett says the last protester was arrested and removed.

Ben Drakes and Ben Pickett dig into why AI benefits are so hard to count inside a big company. Pickett also brings his own footage from Seattle: protesters interrupting OpenAI's kickoff keynote and OpenAI's Vijaye Raji on Kepler, its internal data agents. Plus what Databricks learned when its coding spend jumped and why the cheapest model is often the right one.

Get the free eqai8 thesis: https://www.bendrakes.com/#guide

In this episode:
- Protesters interrupt OpenAI's kickoff keynote at the Washington Technology Industry Association's AI Week in Seattle (filmed by Ben Pickett)
- Who funded it? Local politics, geopolitics and the AI race between the US and China
- OpenAI's Vijaye Raji on Kepler, its internal data agents: analysis that took a week now comes back in 5 to 10 minutes (filmed by Ben Pickett)
- Will OpenAI stop releasing its next major models to the public?
- The $200 Max subscription that costs $500 to $2,000 a month in compute to deliver and why ads are coming
- Anthropic's IPO filing: $131 billion in cash and short-term investments, against OpenAI's $73 billion
- JPMorgan's CFO on why the AI benefits aren't observable in quarterly earnings
- 320,000 employees, flat headcount and no sweeping AI job cuts at JPMorgan, plus Barclays' 4,000
- Bank of America's $400 million in savings across 130 to 140 AI projects
- Why 94% to 95% of companies adopting AI don't see a P&L or productivity uplift while Walmart does
- Databricks: OpenAI's newest model for 200 engineers, coding spend up about 60%, then expensive models for complex work and cheaper ones for everyday work at 3,500 engineers
- Older Nvidia GPUs, open-weight models on-prem and automatic model switching
- Starship, data centres in orbit and the strain on the US power grid

CHAPTERS
00:00 Welcome and Introductions
00:17 Show Agenda and Subscribe
01:29 OpenAI Talk Interrupted
03:44 Protest Clip and Reactions
08:07 OpenAI Kepler Agents
11:51 Free eqai8 thesis
12:45 Model Strategy and Monetization
17:56 JP Morgan AI Payoff Debate
21:22 Measuring AI Benefits and Jobs
25:54 Databricks Pricing and Model Mix
29:03 GPUs Model Switching and Efficiency
32:31 Space Data Centers and Power Grid
36:48 Wrap Up and Birthday Wishes
37:41 Free eqai8 thesis

FIND BEN PICKETT
Heard Ben on AI Outcomes? Start here: https://benpickett.com/aio
Free worksheets:
The Wait Map: https://benpickett.com/wait
The Paired Metric Sheet: https://benpickett.com/paired
The Outside Report Test: https://benpickett.com/outside
The Quiet Test: https://benpickett.com/quiet
His daily: https://swa-ai.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpick/

BEN PICKETT'S CLIPS FROM SEATTLE AI WEEK
Protesters interrupt OpenAI's opening fireside at Seattle AI Week (filmed by Ben Pickett): https://youtube.com/shorts/pRZmZQ3l11c
OpenAI's Vijaye Raji on Kepler, its internal data agents (filmed by Ben Pickett): https://youtube.com/shorts/GTB4nwABkQE

FIND BEN DRAKES
Ben Drakes University: https://bendrakes.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes/

LISTEN
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bendrakesuni/podcasts
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ai-outcomes/id1774285714
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7j6LkyNN5WfkoRc5reg3ad

#OpenAI #JPMorgan #EnterpriseAI #AIJobs #Databricks #Anthropic #AIAdoption #FutureOfWork #AIOutcomes

Two Harvard researchers looked at 718 companies. When AI coding agents came in, the code went up 30%, but finished software didn't measurably move. Where did it go? Into review: the time to review the code went up by about half.

Ben Drakes and Ben Pickett dig into why checking is now the bottleneck. Companies cutting software engineers are probably cutting quality and testing at the same time, while more code means more escape defects. They also cover what that means for enterprise sellers, junior hiring and anyone starting a business with AI.

Get the free eqai8 thesis: https://www.bendrakes.com/#guide

In this episode:
- Barclays cutting its staff by 5,000 as it introduces more AI into its work processes
- The Harvard study of 718 companies: lines of code up 30%, pull requests up 23%, review time up 49%
- Why checking code is the bottleneck and how pushing code faster brings more escape defects
- What a pull request is and where the human in the loop belongs
- The sales-team version: 30% more calls, the same number of deals, every deal in legal review half again as long
- The Wells Fargo CFO on "more autonomous coding agents instead of hiring more people"
- Walmart's Sparky app and working back from the outcome
- Ford and Meta bringing people back in
- Anthropic's own report: the junior share of its technical hiring has already dropped
- Why the cost of failure for a new business is so small now
- Leverage your network: referrals, hiring managers and getting out into the community

CHAPTERS
00:00 Barclays AI job cuts
01:09 Harvard study, 718 companies
01:38 Code checking bottleneck
02:26 Free eqai8 thesis
03:19 Bottleneck and human in loop
05:11 Explaining pull requests
06:53 Sales team analogy
12:46 Walmart Sparky example
17:25 Anthropic junior hiring drop
19:35 Hiring costs and economy
27:23 Starting a business with AI
31:29 Leverage your network
36:03 Closing advice
38:40 Free eqai8 thesis

FIND BEN PICKETT
Heard Ben on AI Outcomes? Start here: https://benpickett.com/aio
Wells Fargo Is Choosing Coding Agents Over Hires. Who Reviews What They Write?: https://benpickett.com/notes/who-reviews-what-agents-write
Free worksheets:
The Wait Map: https://benpickett.com/wait
The Paired Metric Sheet: https://benpickett.com/paired
The Outside Report Test: https://benpickett.com/outside
The Quiet Test: https://benpickett.com/quiet
His daily: https://swa-ai.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpick/

FIND BEN DRAKES
Ben Drakes University: https://bendrakes.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes/

LISTEN
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bendrakesuni/podcasts
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ai-outcomes/id1774285714
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7j6LkyNN5WfkoRc5reg3ad

#AICodingAgents #CodeReview #EnterpriseAI #SoftwareQuality #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareTesting #AI #FutureOfWork #AIOutcomes

Frontier models are turning into a commodity. When one model goes off the boil, enterprises switch, and a multimillion-dollar contract signed with one provider can look foolish in six weeks.

Ben Drakes and Ben Pickett dig into what that means for organisations trying to grow with AI: lock-in risk, the agent layer, what agents really cost to run, and why most AI programmes still don't show up on the P&L.

In this episode:
- Why there's no loyalty left to any frontier model
- "You don't spend millions of dollars on something that is obsolete in six weeks"
- OpenClaw, GrokBot, Meta Muse and the rise of agents
- Microsoft Copilot Autopilot and Oracle Fusion Cloud agents
- A run of $12 Anthropic API invoices and what agent spend really looks like
- Walmart's correlational 35% P&L uplift versus Uber's AI spend with nothing to show
- Apple's plan to replace about 5,000 AppleCare support staff with AI agents, now on hold

CHAPTERS
00:00 Frontier Models Are Becoming Commodities
00:28 The Rise of AI Agents
01:43 Zero Brand Loyalty Between Models
02:35 Enterprise Lock-In and Shadow AI
05:15 Super Agents as the Next Wave
06:12 OpenClaw and Why Agents Are Sticky
11:12 Microsoft Autopilot and Oracle Fusion Agents
14:15 What Running AI Agents Really Costs
21:23 Why Coding Drives Enterprise Adoption
27:55 Meta Muse, GrokBot and Amazon
29:56 Apple Shelves AppleCare Layoffs
35:34 Will AI Cost Jobs? Uber and Industrial Shifts
42:07 Optimists, Not Doomers: Wrap-Up

FIND BEN PICKETT
Enterprise Field Notes newsletter: https://benpickett.com/aio
His daily: https://swa-ai.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpick/

FIND BEN DRAKES
Ben Drakes University: https://bendrakes.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes/

LISTEN
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bendrakesuni/podcasts
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ai-outcomes/id1774285714
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7j6LkyNN5WfkoRc5reg3ad

#AIOutcomes #EnterpriseAI #AIAgents #FrontierModels #OpenAI #Anthropic #MicrosoftCopilot #AIStrategy #AIAdoption #AIGovernance

On 18 June an OpenAI agent researching public medicine spending went at Services Australia's Medicare statistics portal. The portal blocked it. It went around the block, reached non-public files and internal file names, and nobody outside OpenAI knew until an email landed in a public inbox three months later. No patient records were touched. OpenAI found it themselves, which is the part worth sitting with, because the Australian side did not. Ben Pickett and Ben Drakes on what that means if you are running AI anywhere near data that matters, why Amazon has just blocked Meta's shopping agent for the same underlying reason, and the question nobody has answered yet: when a vendor's agent breaks into someone, who pays.

Use the chapters below to jump to what matters to you.

CHAPTERS
 00:00 Emergency OpenAI Update
 01:14 Medicare Portal Breach
 02:20 How The Agent Got In
 03:53 Testing And Disclosure Fail
 08:45 UN Fallout And Accountability
 10:57 Meta Muse And Agent Blocking
 12:34 Enterprise Guardrails Playbook
 14:35 Who Pays When AI Breaks
 17:26 Next Episode Deep Dive
 20:11 Building A Safety Culture
 24:21 Wrap Up And Show Notes

FIND BEN PICKETT
 Enterprise Field Notes newsletter: https://benpickett.com/aio
His daily: https://swa-ai.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpick/

CONNECT
 Ben Drakes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes/
Ben Drakes University: https://bendrakes.com

The AI Outcomes Podcast covers what AI is actually doing inside large organisations, told through what shipped, what broke and what it cost.

#AI #AIAgents #AIGovernance #AISecurity #B2BSales #SalesLeadership #EnterpriseAI #AIOutcomes

OpenAI deleted the message board its agents had built, reset everything so they had no memory of it, then restarted the test. The agents built it again using file names. Ben Pickett on what that means for anyone running AI in production, plus the three things CIOs are actually raising: fear, control and price.

Use the chapters to jump to what matters to you.

CHAPTERS
 00:00 LinkedIn Feed Rant
 00:57 Today's AI Agenda
 01:49 Meet Ben Pickett
 03:45 OpenAI Agents Gone Rogue
 04:44 Safety Testing Explained
 07:23 CISO Fears and Detection
 09:40 Responsibility Over Regulation
 11:58 Industry Standards and China
 18:16 CIO Themes Control and Audit
 22:36 Human in the Loop Governance
 26:26 AI Pricing Shocks and Lock In
 30:39 Model Switching and Cost Control
 35:04 Energy Chips and Sustainability
 44:16 Wrap Up and Where to Find Ben

FIND BEN PICKETT
 Enterprise Field Notes newsletter: https://benpickett.com/aio
Free worksheets, no signup: https://benpickett.com/cadence and https://benpickett.com/paired
His daily: https://swa-ai.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpick/

CONNECT
 Ben Drakes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes/
Ben Drakes University: https://bendrakes.com

The AI Outcomes Podcast covers what AI is actually doing inside large organisations, told through what shipped, what broke and what it cost.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AIAgents #B2BSales #SalesLeadership #AIGovernance #AICosts #AIOutcomes

It was not one agent. It was about twelve hundred, they were not escaping, they were cheating on a test, and when the lab cut their communication channel they had rebuilt it four days later.

Ben Pickett returns for Enterprise Field Notes, and his thread this week is that every number in this episode arrives in a pair. Only the flattering half ever gets reported.

Meta published both halves and almost nobody noticed: internal tools changed 220 percent more, major incidents up 40 percent. Divide one by the other and the failure rate per change actually halved. The absolute number is still the one that wakes people at 3am.

Lowe's put an assistant in the hands of 250,000 associates and logged more than five million questions. That works out at one question per associate every eighteen days. The man who built it shipped it at 60 percent accuracy on purpose and made walking the store floor a condition of employment. Target hired him, and his page was gone in six days.

Plus the Cybercab launch and what robotaxi tells us about the humanoid roadmap, what the Claude outages actually mean for anyone building on a single model, and why the vulnerability those agents broke went onto CISA's known exploited vulnerabilities list with a federal fix deadline eight days after we went live.

CHAPTERS
 00:00 Welcome and Agenda
 00:27 Tesla Cybercab Launch
 01:53 Robotaxi to Humanoids
 04:09 Meta Employee Monitoring
 06:48 Meta Metrics and Layoffs
 11:33 Claude Outages Reality
 13:29 Resilience and Model Routing
 16:11 Lowe's AI on the Floor
 20:11 Ship Imperfect Learn Fast
 24:00 OpenAI Hugging Face Incident
 25:07 Agent Coordination Gone Wild
 28:48 Security Lessons and Guardrails
 32:42 Resources and Wrap Up

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE
 Ben Pickett's Enterprise Field Notes: https://benpickett.com/aio
The AI Handover Sheet (free, no signup): https://benpickett.com/handover
The Paired Metric Sheet (free, no signup): https://benpickett.com/paired
What broke went up: https://benpickett.com/notes/what-broke-went-up
None of them say why: https://benpickett.com/notes/none-of-them-say-why
An AI broke into Hugging Face: https://benpickett.com/notes/an-ai-broke-into-hugging-face

CONNECT
 Ben Pickett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpick/
Ben Drakes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes/
Ben Drakes University: https://bendrakes.com

The AI Outcomes Podcast covers what AI is actually doing inside large organisations, told through what shipped, what broke and what it cost.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AIAgents #B2BSales #SalesLeadership #EnterpriseAI #AISecurity #AIOutcomes

Moderna and Merck have reported the first positive Phase 3 result for a personalised cancer vaccine — an mRNA therapy built for one patient at a time, given alongside Keytruda in high-risk melanoma. The market moved 162% on it in a month.

Rickard Hansson makes the point almost nobody else is making: the AI doing the work here is not the AI you think it is. It's a ranking model, frozen in 2021, and regulation means it cannot be improved mid-trial. It didn't make a better drug. It changed the cost curve of designing one.

Then the other story. Agentic traffic on OpenRouter has reached a seven-day average of 7.3 trillion tokens — close to five times what humans generate, and up roughly 14x since February. Nobody asked for that. Sub-agents did, and they spend your budget without asking.

Ben and Rickard get into what "34 markers" actually means, why output tokens are the ones that hurt, why legal is the fastest-growing group using AI at work, and what happens when the software decides how much of your money it spends.

⏱️ CHAPTERS

00:00  Welcome and Agenda
01:30  AI Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough
03:40  Biotech Market and AI Impact
05:03  Trial Results and Stock Surge
07:22  How the AI Model Works
09:51  Regulation and Update Limits
14:28  Timeline to Approval
16:28  Bots Overtake Humans
17:52  Sub Agents and Token Costs
24:59  Enterprise Usage by Function
25:52  EU AI Act and Legal Risks
27:02  Measuring ROI and Wrap Up
30:36  Closing and Next Topics

🔗 SOURCES AND LINKS

The Phase 3 result
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/merck-and-modernas-personalized-cancer-vaccine-slows-recurrence-ph-3-trial

The earlier Phase 2b data (KEYNOTE-942)
https://www.merck.com/news/moderna-and-merck-announce-mrna-4157-v940-an-investigational-personalized-mrna-cancer-vaccine-in-combination-with-keytruda-pembrolizumab-met-primary-efficacy-endpoint-in-phase-2b-keynote-94/

Token usage by type — the chart we discuss
https://openrouter.ai/rankings

The a16z chart pack
https://a16z.news/subscribe

EU AI Act, Article 50 — the transparency rules mentioned
https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/

Rickard Hansson on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickardh/

Ben Drakes on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes/

👤 GUEST

Rickard Hansson is the founder of Gainable, building internal applications from enterprise data rather than prompts. He previously founded Weavy and Incentive, and works with organisations from the Fortune 50 to NATO.

🎙️ ABOUT

The AI Outcomes Podcast, hosted by Ben Drakes. Conversations with the people actually putting AI to work in enterprise sales and go to market. New episodes weekly, with this AI news strand every fortnight.

#AIOutcomes #EnterpriseAI #AIinHealthcare #mRNA #AIAgents #AIStrategy

Klarna replaced around 700 support people with one AI agent, then started hiring humans back. Walmart had the same technology and redrew the work instead. Home Depot had AI in 600 stores six weeks after ChatGPT launched, and it wasn't a chatbot.

Ben Pickett joins Ben Drakes for the first of a new fortnightly strand on what's actually happening inside enterprise AI rollouts — the ones that went wrong, and the ones that quietly went right.

Five stories, and one thread running through all of them: the difference between the company that got hurt and the company that didn't was never the technology and rarely the budget. It was whether one person had been named to own the work.

00:00 Live Test and Episode 50
01:35 Agenda and Guest Intro
06:02 Home Depot AI at Scale
10:10 Adoption Lessons and Human Loop
13:16 Anthropic Security Breakout
20:29 Klarna vs Walmart AI Strategy
27:41 Shadow AI in the Workplace
34:44 Amazon and AI Deployment Risks
42:36 Wrap Up and Subscribe

Ben Pickett writes Enterprise Field Notes and is Co-Founder and COO at Swa.

Free worksheets, no signup: benpickett.com/aio

Ben Pickett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpickett/
Ben Drakes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes/
Website: https://bendrakes.com

The subsidised token era is ending and the bill is landing. Rickard Hansson joins Ben Drakes for the first of a new fortnightly AI news strand — no pitch, no sales, just the AI news that matters if you run a business. Why your Claude context window disappears faster than it used to, how Ben accidentally became his own model router, what OpenRouter and Goose actually do, and the uncomfortable truth about "open" models: only the weights are open, and hosting one yourself starts around $30,000 a month.

KPMG withdrew its flagship agentic AI report after UBS, NHS Greater Manchester, Swiss Federal Railways and Transport for London disputed case studies about them, and researchers found only 5 of its 45 citations matched their sources. Not an AI problem. Not a people problem. A process problem.

Ben Pickett is Co-Founder and COO of Swa, a former Global Director of Site Reliability Engineering at Nike, and writer of Enterprise Field Notes, the newsletter on why most companies are bad at buying and implementing AI. In this episode we get into what the KPMG story really teaches, and it is not "AI is unreliable."

00:00 Welcome and Setup
00:52 Ben and Newsletter Origin
04:29 KPMG Report Retraction
07:10 Fixing AI Workflows
13:49 Cross Checking Models
16:11 Personas and Hard Stops
19:43 Nike to AI Strategy
22:56 Jobs and AI Speed
26:57 Adoption Tips and Training
31:25 AI Washing and Costs
35:16 Smart Spend Case Studies
39:47 Where to Find Ben
40:42 Final Advice and Wrap

Ben Pickett's:
Enterprise Field Notes newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7444358963539828736
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpick/

Listener hub: https://benpickett.com/aioutcomes

AI scorecard + try Swa: https://swa-ai.com/aioutcomes

KPMG article (with sources): https://medium.com/@goshawk_55282/kpmg-forgot-to-check-its-own-work-dcdb0ebffd31
Walmart blueprint article:
 https://medium.com/@goshawk_55282/what-walmart-understood-that-the-other-95-didnt-16c75da2ac15
Uber article: 
https://medium.com/@goshawk_55282/dear-andrew-coo-of-uber-3f3c968cfe08

News coverage of the KPMG story:
https://www.finance-monthly.com/kpmg-ai-report-hallucinations-ubs-nhs-transport-for-london/
https://www.internationalaccountingbulletin.com/news/kpmg-drops-ai-report-after-false-case-studies-exposed/

Connect with Ben Drakes:

Website: https://bendrakes.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes
Newsletter: https://substack.com/@bendrakes
Book a call: https://calendly.com/bendrakes/30min