Full Show Notes
https://www.theintelligenceagepodcast.com/839

Mark Smth speaks with Ashish Bhatia about how his move from Microsoft to Audible changed the way he thinks about customers, AI, and product design. The conversation centers on personal AI, running OpenClaw locally, and why owning your memory, workflows, and data matters more as AI systems become more capable.

They also explore Audible’s role in learning, the future of interactive audio, and how agents are beginning to replace clunky app-based workflows with more direct, personalized experiences.

Key topics

• Ashish explains the shift from B2B at Microsoft to B2C at Audible, and how that changes the way you learn from customers
• He shares why personal AI matters to him more than ever, especially when it involves health data, finances, and memory
• Mark describes building a large OpenClaw setup with 26 agents, including a nine-agent DevOps team and automated bug fixing
• They discuss why running AI locally teaches real systems thinking through failure, debugging, and repeated iteration
• Ashish talks about using OpenClaw to manage daily life, including lunch ordering through Grubhub as a mission-critical workflow
• The conversation highlights the importance of owning your memory and being able to move your AI system across machines and platforms
• They explore the idea of the death of UI, where agents increasingly bypass app interfaces and handle tasks directly
• Mark raises concerns about AI companies ingesting books and content, leading to a discussion of copyright, hypocrisy, and cultural attitudes toward books
• Ashish shares how Audible supports different learning styles, especially for commuters, slow readers, and people who learn better through audio plus text
• He outlines Audible’s direction toward interactive, multilingual audiobooks with AI-powered recall, discovery, and personalization

Resource Recommendations:

1. The Infinity Machine - Demis Hassabis - Amazon.com: The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence: 9780593831847: Mallaby, Sebastian: Books
2. The Thinking Machine - Jensen Huang - The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip: Witt, Stephen: 9780593832691: Amazon.com: Books
3. Sapiens - Yual Noal Harari - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind eBook : Harari, Yuval Noah: Amazon.ca: Kindle Store
4. The Apple Podcast that I have curated - https://podcast.ashish-bhatia.com/feed.xml
5. Ashish Bhatia's website - ashish-bhatia.com

If you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.

Thanks for listening 🚀 - Mark Smith

Full Show Notes
https://www.theintelligenceagepodcast.com/838

AI is about to replace bloated SaaS, and most businesses are still only playing with chatbots

Sean G Muller says the next wave of AI is not about better prompts or prettier copilots. It is about rebuilding business around context, agents, and what actually creates value - before your software stack becomes the expensive middleman.
Mark Smth and Sean unpack why the last six months have been a genuine shift: agentic loops are now good enough to handle real business work, not just experiments. Sean explains how he moved from traditional technical architecture into building full application pipelines, MCP servers, and background agents that review email, track social signals, draft responses, and keep business moving without adding more human overhead.

You'll discover why context is the missing ingredient in almost every failed AI project, how Sean uses a simple meal-planning example to explain it, and why companies that scatter knowledge across laptops, SharePoint, Google Cloud, and people's heads are sitting on hidden risk. Sean also breaks down the difference between AI as a feature and AI as a business transformation engine, including the mistake many firms make when they bolt chat onto old workflows and call it progress.

We also get into the coming SaaS pocalypse - the idea that tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Xero, Slack, and Atlassian may face a serious reckoning as businesses realize they can build leaner, custom, agent-first systems for less than the cost of endless licenses and modules. Sean shares how he built a headless, agent-driven CRM and why he thinks greenfield builds will replace expensive transformation projects much sooner than most executives expect. This conversation matters if you lead a business, run operations, own a small or mid-sized company, or simply suspect your current software is forcing you to work the wrong way. If you want to understand where AI is actually delivering leverage right now - and how to avoid wasting money on shallow pilots - this episode is essential listening.

Mark Smth hosts the conversation and brings the enterprise and product lens, pushing Sean to get specific about what success looks like for real businesses in New Zealand.

Sean G Muller is an AI and enterprise architecture specialist based in New Zealand, known for helping organizations build practical AI systems, implement agentic workflows, and rethink business process from the ground up.

Resources
1. The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage - https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/0385249462?ref_=mr_referred_us_au_nz

2. Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models — 2312.11805.pdf ⁠https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.11805

3. On the Measure of Intelligence — 1911.01547.pdf - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.01547

If you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.

Thanks for listening 🚀 - Mark Smith

Get featured on the show by leaving us a Voice Mail: https://bit.ly/MIPVM

AI adoption fails when it stops at access to tools. This episode introduces a practical model that bridges the gap between AI tools like Copilot and measurable business outcomes. The focus shifts from technology to people, addressing key blockers such as time, confidence, and relevance. By grounding AI in real workflows, tailoring role-specific use cases, and measuring outcomes, organisations can move from low usage to meaningful impact fast.

🎙 Full Show Notes
https://www.microsoftinnovationpodcast.com/837

👉 What you’ll learn

• Identify the real blockers stopping AI adoption in teams
• Shift from tool access to measurable business outcomes
• Design role-specific AI use cases that drive daily value
• Build AI training that fits real work, not theory
• Measure AI adoption with practical KPIs and usage data

✅ Highlights

• "These two things are very, very different"
• "Some things really need to happen in between those two places"
• "This is not about the tech. This is about the people"
• "They didn't know how to use the tool"
• "They didn't know what they were allowed to do"
• "When would they sit and just learn a link"
• "To actually tailor use cases that are relevant"
• "We have to measure how they are moving"
• "We moved a department from 15% to 83%"
• "It shifts how you are working"

🧰 Mentioned

• Microsoft Copilot (https://copilot.microsoft.com/)
• Copilot Notebooks (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/get-started-with-microsoft-365-copilot-notebooks-0775e693-11c6-4d80-8aba-fcc81a737a06)
• ChatGPT (https://chatgpt.com/)
• AI Boost Academy (https://hannabergstrom.com/) [
• Vattenfall (https://group.vattenfall.com/)
• Microsoft MVP YouTube Series - How to Become a Microsoft MVP - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzf0yupPbVkqdRJDPVE4PtTlm6quDhiu7

✅ Keywords
ai adoption, copilot, generative ai, ai training, business transformation, ai use cases, digital productivity, ai skills, organisational change, ai strategy, workplace efficiency, ai literacy

If you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.

Thanks for listening 🚀 - Mark Smith