Cloud Dialogues

The Agentic Series 2#: Pitch Please! Startups Meet Reality with Pete Sbarski

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In the second instalment of our Agentic AI series, Georgia and Matt are joined by returning friend of the pod and AI product expert, Pete Sbarski, to put our AI-generated startup ideas under some very real scrutiny.

But first… the news:

⚖️ Legal & Regulatory Shakeups A US court ruled that training AI on legally purchased books = OK, pirated books? Not so much.

Germany's taking on DeepSeek, pressuring Apple and Google to block the app over privacy concerns.

⚡️ Infrastructure Watch

Amazon's going big in Australia, announcing a massive $13B investment in data centers and solar by 2029.

Cloudflare and Google Cloud had a rough week, with outages reminding us that even hyperscalers aren’t immune to single points of failure.

💡 Back to Business: Can AI Actually Build a Startup?

Last episode, Claude and Gemini pitched six startup ideas.

This week, we brought in Pete to roast them (constructively). Here’s what made the shortlist:

  1. 📝 AI RFP Assistant
  2. ✅ Compliance Monitor for SMEs
  3. 🔍 B2B Data Quality Tool
  4. ⚖️ AI Paralegal for Small Firms
  5. 💰 Grant Guru for Nonprofits
  6. ✍️ Content Copilot for Solo Creators

    7. 🧠 Key Takeaways from Pete

    • “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” — some use cases (like legal AI) come with huge liability baggage.
    • Data hygiene does not necessarily mean fancy tools — a lot of orgs want AI, but what they really need is cleaner, more structured data.
    • AI isn’t the bottleneck — people are — from resistance to change to unclear ownership, it’s often human systems holding us back.

      • ✅ What We’re Testing Next

      We’re moving ahead with two experiments:

      The Content Copilot – using AI to repurpose and summarise our own podcast archive.

      RFP / Grant Assistant – trialing real-world applications with a friend’s health tech startup.

      We’ll be back soon with some early results — and hopefully a winner. 👀 📩

      Want early access and exclusive insights from our experiments?

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      Cloud DialoguesBy Georgia Smith and Matthew Gillard