Dan Westgarth has spent 7 years helping build Deel from a contractor invoicing tool into one of the most valuable HR and payroll platforms in the world, and he did it after cutting his teeth as an early operator at Revolut. As COO, he sits across nearly every function the AI conversation touches: finance, sales, engineering, and the sheer operational load of running a company at global scale.

In this conversation, Dan gets specific on AI and Ops. He walks through the internal tool that takes a bug ticket, writes the fix, and opens its own pull request for an engineer to review. He talks through what he actually looks for when hiring, and the future of SaaS isn't dead, but there is about to be a lot more competition.

We traverse through a funny detour into Dan's own weekend coding habit (his laptop did not enjoy….), a rundown of which AI tool he reaches for and when, and an answer to "what would you build this weekend”

Listen for a leading operator's view of AI adoption at scale

CHAPTERS

00:00 Cold open, the AI agent that writes its own code

00:46 Show intro, Deel's sponsorship, and what's ahead

02:03 Sponsor break, Deel

02:30 What Deel actually does

03:14 Rapid AI hot takes, finance roles, human oversight, hardware, sports, and the World Cup

09:29 Why Deel keeps winning after seven years

10:00 How the product evolved from contractor invoicing to a full HR platform

11:28 What Dan looks for when hiring

13:06 Leaving Revolut for Deel

14:17 Sponsor break, Deel

14:57 The YC Winter 2019 connection

15:49 Setting targets and building momentum

16:43 Where AI helps the sales team, and where it can't

19:20 Should AI handle your email

21:03 AI meeting assistants, pros and cons

22:53 What makes an A+ engineer in 2026

23:37 Inside DCA, Deel's self-writing code agent

25:55 Breaking into new international markets

28:34 B2C versus B2B expansion

30:16 The cost of not using a platform like Deel

33:01 What keeps Dan up at night about AI agents

33:29 Akai, and scaling operations without growing headcount

36:15 Dan's own weekend coding experiment

37:26 Rapid fire, is the SaaS apocalypse real

39:48 The physical Deel Card and crypto payroll

42:23 What is a stablecoin

43:02 Which AI tools Dan actually reaches for

44:51 If Dan built one AI project this weekend

46:45 Closing thoughts and where to find Dan

47:08 Deel's new Arsenal FC sponsorship

48:41 Georgie's weekly AI newsletter

Lucas Cantor has an unusual claim on the AI conversation. In 2019, Huawei asked him to finish Schubert's Unfinished Symphony using artificial intelligence, and he did it. He's an Emmy-winning composer who has worked on every Olympics since 2002, produced a cover of Everybody Wants to Rule the World with Lorde, and now invests in music technology. His new book is Unfinished: The Role of the Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

In this episode Georgie Healy gets Lucas to take apart the story we're all being told about AI. Why he thinks nobody actually knows what the term even means. Why every single person he asks assumes AI can do the job they're not an expert in, and can't do the job they are. Why the claim that AI democratizes creativity is a fallacy sold by AI companies, and what it actually democratizes instead. Why B2B SaaS isn't dead, and who benefits from you believing it is. And why the music industry, supposedly murdered by Napster, is bigger now than it was before.

If you build, market, or operate anything, this is a useful hour of pressure testing. Lucas isn't a doomer and he isn't an evangelist. He's someone who has been inside the technology long enough to tell the difference between what it does and what it's sold as.

Recorded ahead of his first trip to Australia for BIGSOUND - which is September 1st - 4th in Brisbane!

Chapters:

00:00 Cold open

00:54 Welcome, and who Lucas Cantor is

02:49 The AI hack: stem separation

04:14 Taylor Swift's wedding

04:55 BIGSOUND, and the fear around AI in music

06:23 Why the purist argument falls apart

07:25 Tuning has drifted since the Renaissance

10:02 Composer, producer, author, investor

11:16 What Suno is, and the ethics problem

12:20 Why all music sounds better now

15:33 What it actually means to have your music stolen

16:56 Covering Everybody Wants to Rule the World with Lorde

19:19 Source Connect, Audio Movers, and remote studios

20:22 The fallacy that AI democratizes creativity

22:38 Black Swan, conductors, and the war on expertise

24:26 The doctor who said AI could write a pop song

27:38 Why he called himself a Luddite

30:18 Hans Zimmer's studio, and saying yes to Huawei

32:34 Finishing Schubert's Unfinished Symphony

37:00 "I don't think anybody knows what AI is"

38:49 Every AI agent ad shows something nobody needs

42:14 Hot take: is B2B SaaS dead?

45:13 AI is a story, and that's the problem

46:25 What actually wins in music tech

49:28 Amusing, but not amazing

50:20 Ben Affleck, Scorsese, and AI in the creative process

53:30 Two Emmys and a coach of the year award

55:36 The one takeaway from Unfinished

57:33 Georgie's Substack, Attention Is All I Need

Robin O'Connell spends his days inside LinkedIn's marketing and advertising team in Australia, working with founders and brands on content strategy - which makes him a rare voice on where AI genuinely helps marketers, and where it still falls flat. In this episode, Robin makes the case that the smartest move for any marketer right now is trying to replace parts of your own job with AI, just to find out fast what it can't do. His answer: strategy. AI can automate tactics at scale, but it still can't replace the judgement that comes from genuinely understanding a customer.

Georgie and Robin get into how brands actually stand out on LinkedIn (hint: it's not by looking like Apple), why comments and DMs are a better growth signal than impressions, and how to tell when AI-written content is quietly killing your credibility.

The standout story, though, is personal: Robin's dad Dennis, a serial entrepreneur in Dublin who lost his retail business during COVID, now runs a landscaping venture - and uses AI image generation on an iPad to show clients exactly what their garden will look like before a single spade hits the ground. It's one of the clearest, most human examples of AI actually changing how someone runs a small business.

Find Robin on LinkedIn for more on marketing, AI, and content strategy.