@Pete Winn and I sat down with the one and only @Shawn on The @Good Stuff Podcast to chat about how AI is upending the billable hour in professional services.

Got into some awesome territory and covered things like:

➡️ Shawn's outer loop / inner loop framework - how to think about what to hand to AI and what to protect, with client relationships on one side, core IP on the other, and everything in between up for grabs.

➡️ The judgment sandwich - you need judgment to point the tools at the right problem and judgment to assess whether what came back is any good. AI handles the middle.

➡️ 1,000 true fans meets 10 agents - Shawn's reframe of Kevin Kelly's idea that you only need 1,000 real customers to have a real business. Now you also have 10 AI agents as your workforce. One person with the right clients and the right stack can do what used to require a small firm.

➡️ Enshittification - Shawn references Cory Doctorow's pattern where platforms first serve users, then extract from them. AI labs have the same structural incentive, which is why depending entirely on one of them is a trap.

➡️ The death of the commodity career - AI isn't just replacing tasks. It's replacing the career path that turned raw graduates into people with genuine judgment, through years of doing the work.

Definitely worth a listen!

Thanks for coming on @Shawn, already looking forward to the next one!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pVHZPwD5zw

Can anyone with a YouTube channel ELI5 how the YouTube algo works? I have no idea how we get two likes and six comments but still only 14 views

Just dropped the latest episode of the @Good Stuff Podcast

Pretty obvious by now that the barrier to making things has fallen dramatically, so we’ll get more stuff that probably didn’t need to exist.

But we’ll also get more genuinely useful niche things from people who deeply understand a problem or just want to see a thing exist in the world.

Was listening to DHH about building Omarchy and it feels like this is just such a good time to be a builder.

@Pete Winn and I chatted about this on the pod this week

Part of this weeks All In sounded like territory we covered a year ago in Episode 1 of the @Good Stuff Podcast

Friends of the pod knew this already 👀

@Pete Winn

@deadmanoz have I cooked? 👀

Just ignore that the text is off centre

Supply Drop 26

This week on @Good Stuff Podcast, @Pete Winn and I chatted about why companies shouldn't be quick to outsource AI to consultants or software vendors.

We recorded this right after a 3.5 hour workshop where about 30 non-technical people built and deployed their own web and mobile apps, so it seemed like the right time to explore this.

We’re seeing a lot of organisations trying to figure out how to create an AI strategy, but for many of them, I think this is the wrong place to start.

There's a big gap in first-hand experience with AI and this is where strategy tends to break down.

It's just really hard to create a strategy for something you don't deeply understand.

It's a bit like being asked to create a strategy for magic.

Brandon Sanderson wrote his Laws of Magic as a guide for fantasy authors. If magic has no rules and can solve any problem arbitrarily, readers feel cheated. But if magic operates within clear constraints that readers understand, then solutions feel satisfying.

AI probably looks a bit like magic to many businesses right now.

When people inside a business start experimenting with the tools themselves, rather than outsourcing AI to consultants or software vendors, the organisation makes much better decisions about where and how AI fits inside the business.

This is why developing internal capability should come before strategy.

Capability means three things.

➡️ It’s shared mental models about what AI can and can't do led by internal AI champions - people who understand the technology, adapt as the technology evolves, can answer questions based on experience, and can evangelise organically.

➡️ A safe environment where this capability can be nurtured and supported over time, alongside others facing similar challenges, where gains are methodical and compound over time, and

➡️ A way to deploy what is built directly into the organisation so that capability translates into productivity across the organisation.

That’s a flywheel for capability development. It means you own your strategy and allow it to organically form and evolve over time.

https://youtu.be/b9I28wnFiQ8