When Tair Asim helped build Sage, an AI-powered networking tool for builders, the team had the tech working... but building something usable is not the same as building something people will use.

In this clip, Tair reflects on what made Sage successful inside the buildspace community, and what he learned about trust, traction, and what early users need.

He shares how the product changed from a long onboarding process that only worked because early users believed in the brand, to something more approachable as the product matured.

It’s a rare inside look at the early-stage moments most people skip over when telling their "how we built this" story.

💡What you'll hear in this episode:

• Why Sage worked best when users already knew and trusted the team
• How the buildspace brand helped users stick around through friction
• What it felt like to build something people showed up for even when it wasn’t polished
• How starting with a narrow, familiar niche helped the team grow beyond it

What happens when you combine brand, community, and AI, not just to automate tasks, but to create real human connection?

In this episode, Daniel sits down with Tair Asim, creator of Sage, the AI-powered networking tool that helped thousands of builders connect through natural language, and Head of Product at Sync, where he’s now leading vertical integration in AI-powered video editing.

Tair shares lessons from both worlds: why Sage worked because of the community behind it (not just the tech), how vertical integration creates defensibility in a fast-moving AI market, and why focusing narrowly on a niche often leads to the biggest breakthroughs.

🔑 What You’ll Learn in This Episode

📌 For Founders & Product Builders:

• ✅ How brand, community, and AI combined to make Sage stand out
• ✅ Why vertical integration matters when foundational models evolve fast
• ✅ How to spot the difference between a feature and a defensible business

📌 For Business Leaders Adopting AI:

• ✅ What spontaneous, unstructured AI interactions can unlock in your product
• ✅ How to prioritize quality inputs to get high-value AI outputs
• ✅ Why narrowing your niche can be the best way to scale later

🔗 Resources & Links

• 👨‍💻 Connect with Tair on X: @tair
• 🎥 Check out Sync’s latest product launches: sync.so
• 📩 Subscribe to the Artificial Insights newsletter for episode recaps and key takeaways

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When's the right time to partner with sales and marketing? Alex's journey was to build and validate a prototype with a small group of customers, then bring in distribution experts. If you can build it, you can validate it! But what got you here might not get you there.

Are you more comfortable asking your colleagues a question, or ChatGPT? GovAI found that people preferred using AI over connecting with each other to ask questions. They liked the ease, speed, and anonymity compared to asking each other.

In this episode, Daniel sat down with Alex Millar, co-founder of GovAI and former co-founder of Bonfire, which he scaled and sold for $108M after working with hundreds of public sector teams. Now he’s building AI tools for a sector known for strict requirements and slow adoption—by focusing on usage first, and letting that usage show the path to revenue.

🔑 What You’ll Learn in This Episode

📌 For Founders & Product Builders:

• ✅ Why starting with free usage—before charging—can unlock adoption in high-trust environments
• ✅ How failed queries can reveal what to build next, and which features your users are asking for without saying it
• ✅ What it looks like to serve a niche so well that pricing, onboarding, and training become part of the product

📌 For Business Leaders Adopting AI:

• ✅ Why a flat-fee pricing model works better than per-seat licenses in the public sector
• ✅ Why you should put humans in the loop as a resource the AI can recommend, not just an override for edge cases
• ✅ How to roll out AI tools with training and change management—not just logins

🔗 Resources & Links

• 👨🏻‍🦲 Connect with Alex!
• 🌐 Learn more about GovAI
• 📩 Subscribe to the Artificial Insights newsletter for episode summaries and founder takeaways

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When deciding what product to pursue and build a business around, it turns out you can't just ask ChatGPT for advice. Join Daniel and Bijan in this bonus short as they discuss how Merchkit got to where it is now, and what it really means to iterate and innovate.

Key takeaways:

• ✅ Start with a large market: the more potential customers, the more ideas you can try before running out of people to try them with.
• ✅ Generative AI will disrupt a lot, so pick the biggest problems that excite you. You'll spend a lot of time working on them
• ✅ To find something worth building, you need to dig into the specific workflows and day-to-day of your customer and keep asking, "why didn't that work for you?"
• ✅ Knowing what the boundaries of what AI are and what it can and can't do will allow you to create the bridge for that workflow gap for your customer.

AI is moving fast. Too fast to just pick a tool and hope it works long-term. The companies that get it right aren’t just buying software—they’re building relationships with the right AI partners.

In this episode, Daniel sat down with Bijan Vaez, CEO of Merchkit, 3x founder, and former co-founder of EventMobi, where he helped scale event technology to millions of users. He’s seen mobile, SaaS, and AI revolutions firsthand—and now he’s tackling what makes an AI business actually last.

🔑 What You’ll Learn in This Episode

📌 For Founders & Executives Building AI-Enabled Businesses:

• ✅ Why AI features don’t make an AI business—and how to avoid the trap
• ✅ How to stay ahead when AI capabilities change every week
• ✅ The AI-powered future: what happens when systems start talking to each other without APIs

📌 For Business Leaders Adopting AI:

• ✅ What it means to choose an AI partner instead of just buying tools
• ✅ How AI is reshaping business relationships—making them more human, not less
• ✅ How to evaluate AI vendors when everything is changing so fast

🔗 Resources & Links

• 📖 Connect with Bijan
• 📩 Subscribe to the newsletter for more AI insights
• 👉 Check out Merchkit!

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Join Jennifer and Daniel in this bonus clip as they discuss how AI anxiety is changing the world in big ways.

Key takeaways about AI Anxiety:

• 🕴️It makes business leaders rush into solutions without understanding consequences (and sometimes the problems they think they're solving)
• 👩‍🔧 It makes professionals lose hope for their future (especially young professionals and first time job seekers)

Is AI about to replace your job—or is it your biggest opportunity? In this special episode, Daniel sits down with Jennifer Moss, a globally recognized expert on workplace culture, leadership, and mental health, to tackle one of the biggest concerns of our time: How will AI reshape our work, and what should we do about it?

Jennifer brings stories from all walks of life and insights from the largest studies that help whether you're worried about your own future in an AI-driven world or you're a leader wondering how to navigate change without losing your best employees.

🔑 What You’ll Learn in This Episode

📌 For Workers Wondering About Their Future:

• ✅ AI isn’t replacing all jobs—but it’s changing them. Learn how to future-proof your career by working with AI instead of competing against it.
• ✅ Work should fuel your life, not just be a grind. Redefine what success means for you and align your job with your personal goals.
• ✅ Take control—don’t wait for your company to figure it out. Find out how to audit your workload, initiate conversations with your boss, and use AI as a tool for career growth.

📌 For Company Leaders Wondering How to Adapt:

• ✅ The biggest risk isn’t AI—it’s losing your top talent.
• ✅ Discover why some CEOs are choosing flat growth years to prevent long-term damage to their workforce.
• ✅ Employees don’t just want higher salaries—they want flexibility, growth, and purpose in their work.

🔗 Resources & Links

• 📖 Jennifer’s latest book: Why Are We Here?
• 📩 Subscribe for more AI insights

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The magic of AI is that it no longer requires learning a new language, like how to program. AI moves computers from data machines to cognitive companions. The best part? There's never been a better time to start using it.

Is AI just another tool, or is it transforming into something much bigger? In this episode, Daniel Manary sits down with Atif Khan, Chief AI Officer at MessagePoint, to explore what it really means to be an AI-first company, how AI is evolving into a cognitive companion, and why the future of AI lies in multi-agent systems rather than single-task automation.

With over 25 years of experience in AI and data science, Atif has led the development of transformative AI platforms in Customer Communication Management (CCM) and Customer360 solutions. He also mentors startups at Communitech, helping them scale their AI capabilities. If you’re a business leader, AI practitioner, or just curious about where AI is headed, this episode is a must-listen!

🔑 What You’ll Learn in This Episode

📌 AI in Business: From Hype to Reality

• ✅ Why AI is not just automation—it’s an extension of human cognition
• ✅ The biggest misconceptions about AI in the workplace
• ✅ How AI should be measured for real business impact

📌 What It Means to Be AI-First

• ✅ AI-first is more than a buzzword—it’s a mindset shift
• ✅ Why integrating AI into workflows is more about strategy than technology
• ✅ The key difference between using AI and rethinking business operations around it

📌 The Future of AI: Multi-Agent Systems & Cognitive Companions

• ✅ Why the future of AI isn’t a single assistant—it’s teams of AI agents working together
• ✅ How AI is evolving from task automation to thought processing and decision-making
• ✅ Practical use cases of multi-agent AI systems in business

🔗 Resources & Links

• 📖 Connect with Atif: https://www.linkedin.com/in/atifikhan/
• 🤝 Check out Communitech's P2P Groups here: https://www.communitech.ca/start-and-grow/yourself-and-your-teams/peer2peer.html
• 👉 Atif's GenAI Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/generative-ai-p2p/
• 🤖 Learn more about Agentic AI:
  • Gaming, Goats & General Intelligence with Frederic Besse Google DeepMind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64pndvbbokA
  • Gemini 2.0 and the evolution of agentic AI with Oriol Vinyals Google DeepMind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78mEYaztGaw
• 📩 Subscribe for text summaries: https://manary.haus/podcast#haus

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