After meeting the client in real life, the first job for an Athena Intelligence client-facing leader is to “build a carbon copy of themselves in the product for the customer”...If that doesn’t capture your undivided attention, go to the 19 min and 12 second mark and listen to Brendon unpack this concept in 175 seconds. For laughs, watch my reaction...AI with Alec Episode #16 is with Brendon Geils, founder + CEO of Athena Intelligence.While everyone is now talking about enterprise AI Agents, my man has been doing it in highly regulated environments because “we want our brand to reflect the security and sensitivity of some of the most important institutions” (i.e.) Financial Services. “We're building an enterprise analyst, or as we like to say, an AI employee for regulated industries.”Gnarly.Top 3 takeaways:1: Athena is a horizontal play focused on enabling clients to solve the hardest problems, the ones they don’t see coming but need to read and react to, fast“I think we shine best when there's some brand new thing that hits someone's desk and there's not an off the shelf solution for it.”2: Brendon believes it’s “better to be small in this business” because you can “scale in other ways by building agents to do the job that maybe historically you would have to hire people for”“Because for this thing to work well, it's gotta live in less people's heads. The more heads you live in, the more it becomes a Google PM’d project, a Microsoft PM’d project. So I think for us, we have to stay small as long as we can.”3: Technology, no matter how powerful, is only one leg of the stool.“What I found was most of the time the technology wasn't the rate limiter for a successful pilot, either at Scale or at Palantir. It was your ability to introduce change management to an organization.”

What if the data opportunity on the business side of Sports is bigger than what was profiled in Moneyball on the team / athlete side?

I had a fascinating conversation with Josh Walker, co-founder and CEO of Sports Innovation Lab during an AI with Alec podcast episode who revealed the answer to that question and more.

1️⃣ Data Fragmentation + Silos: Teams sell rights to business partners handling concessions, merchandise, media and ticketing, creating massive blind spots and fragmented data that prevents unified fan understanding.

2️⃣ AI Enabled Hyper-Personalization is Coming: We’re heading to a world where “this is literally about you having a different SportsCenter than I have.”

3️⃣ Derivative Data Advantage: SIL connects dots to enable leagues, teams, sports etc to see things about their fans that they didn’t already know.

4️⃣ Advanced Data Infrastructure + Architecture: Anything knowledge graph, ontology etc captures my undivided attention so Josh and the team had me at “modeling that provides the most comprehensive fan intelligence, accurate targeting, 1P+ enrichment, and personalization at scale.”

Hope you enjoy the episode. I know I did!

What’s the first thing you think when you hear about a start-up launching data centers into outer space?For me, it went like this: “Wait, what? Why outer space…ohhhh wow, the AI energy issue. That’s a massive idea…”Watch this AI with Alec episode with Philip Johnston, co-founder + CEO of Starcloud who is doing exactly that and has “the best space engineers in the world working on it.”1: A bunch of “firsts” coming up“By the end of August we'll have an announcement out about the demonstrator satellite that's going up. So that will have the first terrestrial data center grade GPUs in space. So about a hundred times more powerful GPUs than are currently in orbit.”“We'll be the first to train an AI model in space, the first to run high-power inference, first to do fine tuning of a model in space. Lots of firsts are coming up on that mission.”2: Yes it’s hard but “nothing is against the laws of physics.”“But like we're heading to a world where the launch cost is insignificant compared to everything else. And I think people just have a hard time getting their heads around that. mean, yes, space is hard. Yes, we have to figure out the cooling challenge of building an enormous radiator. Yes, we have to figure out radiation and other things. But all of that, nothing is against the laws of physics. You just have to be really dedicated and figure it out.”3: Swim like a dolphin on the moon? I’m +10000 in.“If you're swimming on the moon, you could basically swim like a dolphin so you can propel yourself out of the water. And like you could actually, you could do the reverse of a dive. Like you could propel yourself so far out of the water you could land on a diving board. Anyway, yeah, you could basically swim like a dolphin on the edge of a crater with earth rising in the background, 24 seven sunlight…”Speaking of dolphins, I might have to finally start watching White Lotus…

The enterprise AI playbook doesn’t exist. We’re all just trying to figure it out as we go. But thanks to AI leaders like Will Croushorn of Wendy’s, we get to hear insights from those doing the work.Will joined me again on an AI with Alec podcast and just like last time, he delivers with a refreshing amount of clarity. The kind that comes from hands in the dirt, enterprise AI experience.1: “There's no playbook for this. I think that every company, every organization, every, every employee, every person is trying to figure out how do I operate in this new world?”2: "If it can be automated, it probably will be…the things that are the most human, those are the things that get highlighted and everything else gets automated."3: “The question for me is how do we get from A to B and can we do it with these tools in a way that's never been done again that serves the customer in a way that we couldn't do otherwise.”If you’re into AI and aren’t following Will, today is most definitely the day to fix that.Hope you check it out and enjoy it. I know I did.Chapters & Timestamps0:00 - Introduction to Will Croushorn and his work at Wendy's2:00 - "No playbook exists" - Navigating the new AI landscape5:27 - The shift from selecting products to being chosen by AI agents8:59 - Human creativity and remarkable experiences in an AI world12:20 - Context-aware retail: Merging physical and digital experiences15:43 - Building trust and user opt-in for data sharing19:39 - The future of personalized marketing and advertising21:18 - Transforming everyday experiences like drive-throughs24:51 - Starting with consumer needs before technology28:16 - Making sense of data and asking the right questions31:35 - Focusing on human connection in an AI-augmented world

In AI, there’s only one “Igor” and I am SO STOKED to share that he joined me for an AI with Alec interview.

Please find time to hear legendary AI pioneer Igor Jablokov, founder + CEO of Pryon, move through all sorts of fascinating topics.

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction to Igor Jablokov

00:53 - Igor's Journey: From IBM to Siri and Alexa

02:24 - Understanding Pryon and Enterprise AI

04:47 - Working with JD Vance and Rise of the Rest

07:18 - The Three Acts Post-ChatGPT

09:04 - Critical Take on AI Company Practices

11:04 - Lessons from Social Media

12:27 - Thoughts on DeepSeek

15:08 - AI and the Arts: The Opera Analogy

19:07 - Future of Work and AI (2030 Vision)

22:53 - Enterprise AI Adoption

25:35 - The Evolution of AI: From "Punk Rock Days" to Mainstream

27:48 - Closing Thoughts: AI's Role in Solving Global Challenges

Key Highlights:

- Igor reveals how Pryon was the original codename for what became Alexa

- Discussion of the three phases of enterprise response to ChatGPT

- Unique perspective on AI's relationship with creative arts, comparing AI to opera

- Insights on augmented intelligence vs. replacement of workers

- Vision for 10x productivity growth through AI augmentation

- Candid discussion about AI companies' practices and ethics

Guest: Igor Jablokov

- Founder and CEO of Pryon

- Former IBM AI team lead

- Pioneer behind technologies that became Siri and Alexa

- Early AI innovator, pioneer and absolute legend aka AI OG

Since ChatGPT launched 2 years ago, a lot of sophisticated AI investors, entrepreneurs etc have suggested it’s not an “if” but a “when” a solopreneur will build a unicorn.

Could Josh Mohrer, founder of Wave: AI Note Taker for iOS and Android, become that unicorn?

What Josh has built by bootstrapping is incredible and a massive inspiration.

If you don't know about NotebookLM, now you know. It has ben described as "the next ChatGPT" and once you give it a shot, you'll experience the AI magic and know why.

During the episode, we cover:

1: Re: AI, we're past "why" and all in on "how," especially within the Enterprise.

2: This isn't a promise to change the way you work, it's a tangible reality available to anyone. Right. Now.

3: The discipline to build a great product is what it's all about. Reminds me of what the legendary Rick Rubin refers to as the "ruthless edit"...

The 12 minute conversation was fascinating as we covered a lot including the following questions: