Five companies are about to decide the future of the economy, geopolitics, and your career… and two of them have been locked in a deeply personal feud since 2016.

This week, Paul and Mike dig into a Wall Street Journal investigation tracing the OpenAI vs. Anthropic rivalry back to broken promises and a San Francisco group house, explore what Anthropic's accidentally leaked "Mythos" model means for cybersecurity and the next leap in AI capability, react to Uber's CEO admitting AI will replace 70-80% of human work, and unpack nearly $300M in political money now flowing into AI deregulation. Plus: agent security risks, Apple's Siri overhaul, a new SmarterX use case spotlight, and an AI Academy deep dive on AI for Sales. 

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Click here to take this week's AI Pulse.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:03:15 — AI Pulse Survey Results

00:05:30 — OpenAI vs. Anthropic

00:26:02 — Details Leak on Anthropic’s New Hyper-Powerful Model

00:35:34 — Brutally Honest CEO Perspectives on AI

00:48:29 — Anthropic Granted Preliminary Injunction in Fight Against the Pentagon

00:51:06 — This Week in AI Politics

00:56:55 — AI Agent Nightmares

01:02:15 — Apple's AI Reboot

01:05:21 — SmarterX Use Case Spotlight

01:17:53 — AI Academy Spotlight

01:22:59 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This episode is brought to you by AI Academy by SmarterX.

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Not a single company leader Paul has spoken with is fully prepared for what AI is about to do to their workforce. In this AI Answers episode, Paul and Cathy work through 15 real questions from a recent Scaling AI class, covering everything from the AI divide inside companies to why most AI strategies fail before they start.

Topics include job displacement and underemployment, why enterprises handed AI to IT and get stuck, the automation-vs-augmentation spectrum by seniority level, what knowledge work looks like in three years, and why showing a skeptical CEO results beats showing them prompts every time.

00:00:00 — Intro

00:06:09 — Is Amazon slowing its AI rollout a sign of maturity?

00:08:58 — Are large enterprises structurally disadvantaged in the AI era?

00:12:14 — Who owns the AI adoption and data readiness problem?

00:14:56 — Is there a growing AI divide between power users and everyone else?

00:21:16 — What AI take do most people disagree with?

00:22:47 — Can companies automate too much too fast?

00:26:19 — Does automation eventually take over or do we land in the middle?

00:28:24 — What does the average knowledge worker's job look like in three years?

00:35:02 — What are companies still getting wrong about AI strategy?

00:36:27 — How should leaders should decide what matters versus what’s noise?

00:40:21 —  What separates AI councils that drive progress from ones that don't?

00:41:47 — Where is governance necessary and where does it get in the way?

00:45:17 — Should you show leadership the AI system or the results?

00:47:19 — What's the no-brainer AI use case most companies still haven't tried?

00:49:36 — Why do people wait to be told how to use AI instead of experimenting?

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

This episode is brought to you by AI Academy by SmarterX.

AI Academy is your gateway to personalized AI learning for professionals and teams. Discover our new on-demand courses, live classes, certifications, and a smarter way to master AI. Learn more here.

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Claude Code didn't just change one company's trajectory, it triggered a chain reaction across every major AI lab. In this episode, Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput break down how OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and Microsoft are all scrambling to catch up in the agent and enterprise race, and why the next three to six months could look radically different from anything we've seen. 

In rapid fire: Microsoft shakes up Copilot leadership, a Meta AI agent goes rogue and causes a security breach, the Anthropic-Pentagon legal battle intensifies, Google DeepMind proposes 10 traits for measuring AGI, and more.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Click here to take this week's AI Pulse.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:04:04 — AI Pulse Survey Results

00:05:50 — AI Labs Refocus on Agents and Enterprise

00:29:07 — New Polling on AI and Trump National AI Framework

00:45:46 — Company Transformation with AI (Offsite Recap)

00:59:52 — Nadella Takes Over Microsoft Copilot

01:06:06 — Meta's Rogue AI Agent

01:10:01 — Anthropic vs. Pentagon Continues

01:14:42 — DeepMind’s New AGI Scorecard

01:18:40  — What 81,000 People Want from AI

01:26:01 — AI Academy Spotlight

01:30:47 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This episode is brought to you by AI Academy by SmarterX.

AI Academy is your gateway to personalized AI learning for professionals and teams. Discover our new on-demand courses, live classes, certifications, and a smarter way to master AI. Learn more here.

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Billable hours are in the past, human creativity gets its strongest case yet, and Paul explains what happens when ten AI agents start collaborating like a marketing team. Paul and Cathy tackle 16 real questions on career pivots into AI, the risks of over-reliance on productivity gains, enterprise training personalization, labor replacement pricing, whether AI actually reasons, and what leaders should do with the time AI is giving back.

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:05 — How do you transition into AI without a coding background?

00:06:03 — What are the best AI skills to learn while job searching?

00:08:56 — Should consultants bill for time spent experimenting with AI?

00:11:44 — How do we make sure AI productivity isn't quietly weakening our thinking?

00:14:17 — What's the best reframe for creatives who see AI as a threat?

00:19:04 — How do you wrangle a Wild West AI free-for-all at your company?

00:20:45 — How do you personalize AI training at the enterprise level?

00:23:41 — How do you get legal stakeholders to enable AI adoption instead of blocking it?

00:28:06 — How will AI adoption pick up in traditional industries like manufacturing?

00:31:24 — Can companies behind on digitalisation leapfrog ahead with AI?

00:34:33 — Will AI companies eventually price based on the labor they replace?

00:37:55 — What is a swarm of agents and why does it matter?

00:43:34 — Do reasoning models actually reason or just predict the next word?

00:46:54 — Should AI companies be regulated to preserve diversity of thought?

00:49:34 — If AI can solve advanced math, why can't it solve technological unemployment?

00:52:40 — How do we make sure AI gives us time back instead of just more work?

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

This episode is brought to you by Google Cloud: 

Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimized AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organizations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.

Learn more about Google Cloud here: https://cloud.google.com/  

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Anthropic has filed two federal lawsuits to block the Pentagon's supply chain risk designation and the back-and-forth on X between the Pentagon CTO and AI policy experts is revealing what this fight is really about. Paul and Mike unpack the politics, the implications, and why a deal is inevitable.

Then: 86,000 people took the NYT's AI writing quiz and most preferred the machine. Paul shares his human-to-machine writing scale and asks the question that actually matters: not whether AI can write, but when should we let it? Plus Atlassian's 1,600 AI-driven layoffs, Amazon's AI-caused outages, McKinsey's chatbot getting hacked in two hours, and more.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Click here to take this week's AI Pulse.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:03:11 — AI Pulse Survey Results

00:07:48 — Anthropic vs. Pentagon Round 3

00:30:02 — New York Times Releases Controversial "AI Writing Quality" Quiz

00:46:18 — Atlassian Layoffs and Job Loss Dashboard

00:58:49 — Adobe CEO Stepping Down

01:07:14 — Amazon AI-Related Outages and Engineering Struggles

01:14:28 — McKinsey AI Chatbot Hacked

01:19:49 — AI Politics Update

01:24:06 — Grammarly AI "Expert Review" Controversy

01:30:51 — Andrej Karpathy's Autoresearch Agent

01:34:47 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This week’s episode is sponsored by our 2026 State of AI Report.

This year, we’re going beyond marketing-specific research to uncover how AI is being adopted and utilized across the organization, and we need your help to create the most comprehensive report yet.

It’s a quick seven-minute lift. In return, you’ll get the full report for free when it drops, plus a chance to win or extend a 12-month SmarterX AI Mastery Membership. Go to smarterx.ai/survey to share your input. That’s smarterx.ai/survey 

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A VC-backed startup just admitted its strategy is to clone incumbent software using Claude Code and sell it for 90% less. Entry-level marketing roles are vanishing as leaders realize they can generate entire campaigns in minutes. And agent swarms that function as out-of-the-box marketing teams could arrive by year's end.

Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput answer 15 questions from business leaders across marketing, sales, and customer success covering everything from AI's environmental impact to how to prove efficiency gains to skeptical teams.

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:18 — How should a CMO get started with AI?

00:09:57 — What is the difference between an AI agent and a regular prompt?

00:12:47 — Will AI labs fix their environmental impact?

00:17:04 — How to convince skeptics that AI can help improve performance?

00:19:55 — How to deal with AI sycophancy when using it as a thought partner

00:22:06 — What efficiency gains are people seeing from generative AI in marketing?

00:25:42 — How to track and measure time saved by AI

00:27:47 — How to manage information and prompts across multiple AI platforms

00:33:59 — How to balance AI adoption with data privacy and security

00:36:17 — Which roles will be most disrupted by AI?

00:43:51 — Will AI sales calls just feel like spam robocalls?

00:46:29 — How to reinvest time saved by AI into growth and innovation

00:49:33 — When to buy software versus build it yourself with AI

00:54:35 — How to protect yourself from others using AI agents irresponsibly

00:55:58 — Why IT should not be the one driving AI adoption

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

This episode is brought to you by Google Cloud: 

Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimized AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organizations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.

Learn more about Google Cloud here: https://cloud.google.com/  

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The data is in, and it's harder to ignore. Anthropic's new "observed exposure" study reveals AI can handle 94% of knowledge work tasks in theory and the gap between theory and reality is narrowing fast. Paul and Mike unpack what that means for your career, your company, and the broader social contract around work.

This week: the Anthropic vs. Pentagon saga escalates, a Sequoia partner predicts AI will replace entire service industries (not just software), GPT-5.4 drops and outperforms professionals on economic benchmarks, a Polish mathematician has his "personal singularity" moment — plus rapid fire on AI journalism, OpenClaw security risks, AI copyright law, and Meta's smart glasses privacy scandal.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Click here to take this week's AI Pulse.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:04:32 — AI Pulse Survey Results

00:07:00 — Anthropic vs. US Government Round 2

00:19:43 — Anthropic Analyzes AI Job Impact

00:35:30 — Services as the New Software

00:49:19 — Barriers to Enterprise AI Adoption

00:54:54 — GPT-5.4

01:00:55 — The Move 37 Moment for Math

01:05:39 — AI and Journalism Update

01:10:03 — NVIDIA CEO Calls OpenClaw “Most Important Software Release Ever”

01:13:35 — AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted

01:16:08 — Meta Sued Over Smartglasses Privacy Concerns

01:19:21 — Microsoft Copilot Cowork

This week’s episode is sponsored by our 2026 State of AI Report.

This year, we’re going beyond marketing-specific research to uncover how AI is being adopted and utilized across the organization, and we need your help to create the most comprehensive report yet.

It’s a quick seven-minute lift. In return, you’ll get the full report for free when it drops, plus a chance to win or extend a 12-month SmarterX AI Mastery Membership. Go to smarterx.ai/survey to share your input. That’s smarterx.ai/survey 

Visit our website

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Join our community:

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Episode 200 arrived in the midst of a very dramatic week in AI and we recorded it live with AI Academy Mastery members for the first time!

This week, Paul and Mike discuss an eventful 72 hours beginning with the Trump administration’s ultimatum to Anthropic. Eventually Anthropic refused, got blacklisted, and hours later OpenAI stepped in to take the deal. Paul and Mike unpack every twist, including why Peter Thiel's fingerprints on both sides make this even wilder.

Also: OpenAI's $110B funding round, Claude Code creator Boris Cherney on why coding is "effectively solved" (and what that means for your job), Block laying off 4,000 people and naming AI as the reason, and a doomer economic essay that actually moved Wall Street.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Click here to take this week's AI Pulse.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:03:30 — AI Pulse Survey Results

00:07:08 — Anthropic vs. US Government

00:44:55 — OpenAI Funding, Amazon Partnership, Response to DoD

00:51:19 — Interview with the Head of Claude Code

00:59:38 — Block AI Job Cuts

01:04:41 — AI Doomer Essay from Citrini

01:10:54 — Politics of Data Centers

01:15:15 — Anthropic Fluency Index

01:18:29 — Anthropic Distillation Attacks

01:21:46 — NVIDIA Earnings

01:24:19 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This episode is brought to you by AI Academy by SmarterX.

AI Academy is your gateway to personalized AI learning for professionals and teams. Discover our new on-demand courses, live classes, certifications, and a smarter way to master AI. Learn more here.

Visit our website

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There is no shortcut for AI verification, and that's a good thing. 

Paul Roetzer and Cathy McPhillips answer 15 questions business leaders continue asking again and again. They unpack why AI output verification has no shortcut, where agent-building tools like Claude Code and Lovable actually stand, and the uncomfortable math behind which roles get disrupted next. Paul explains why enterprises are moving painfully slow even as the technology races ahead, how early adopters are creating burnout by doing the work of entire teams, and why situational awareness is the AI superpower most leaders are missing.

00:00:00 — Intro

00:07:00 — Question #1: Do you need to prompt AI the same way every time?

00:10:59 — Question #2: What problem do custom GPTs actually solve?

00:14:26 — Question #3: Are SaaS providers becoming model agnostic?

00:17:09 — Question #4: Why AI voice and tone change when models update.

00:20:36 — Question #5: AI output validation: why there's no shortcut for verification.

00:23:17 — Question #6: Tools for building AI agents: where to start.

00:26:11 — Question #7: Will knowledge workers face the same AI disruption as developers?

00:29:53 — Question #8: AI burnout: how leaders can prevent it during the AI transition.

00:36:21 — Question #9: Which roles and skills are most at risk from AI?

00:42:03 — Question #10: Traditional BI platforms vs. AI-first reporting systems.

00:45:22 — Question #11: Build vs. buy: AI decision framework for business leaders.

00:48:52 — Question #12: Competitive advantage for AI-forward agencies.

00:52:43 — Question #13: How to tell when someone just copy-pasted from ChatGPT.

00:54:39 — Question #14: Ads in AI platforms: what business users should know.

00:56:42 — Question #15: The one AI superpower every business leader needs.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

This episode is brought to you by Google Cloud: 

Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimized AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organizations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.

Learn more about Google Cloud here: https://cloud.google.com/  

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Microsoft's AI CEO just put a 12–18 month expiration date on most white-collar work. But after spending weeks with enterprise executives, Paul Roetzer sees a very different reality: most companies haven't even gotten past giving their teams AI access.

In Ep. 198, Paul and Mike unpack the growing disconnect between AI capability and AI adoption, share Paul's 7-point thought experiment on the future of work, and cover a massive week of news: Dario Amodei's warning about the AI exponential, AI productivity gains finally appearing in economic data, ByteDance's SeaDance 2.0 copyright crisis, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Open Claw's creator joining OpenAI, AI hardware moves from Apple and Meta, and a provocative editorial arguing journalism schools are failing students.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Click here to take this week's AI Pulse.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:38 — AI Pulse Survey Results

00:08:48 — Microsoft AI CEO Predicts White Collar Work Automated in 12-18 Months

00:20:42 — AI Productivity Evidence

00:33:23 —Dario Amodei on Dwarkesh

00:47:55 — Dor Brothers AI Movie and the Rise of Seedance

00:55:07 — Claude Sonnet 4.6

01:00:51 — OpenClaw Creator Goes to OpenAI

01:05:00 — OpenAI Devices and AI Devices

01:14:51 — AI in Journalism Controversy

01:25:05 — Meta Patents AI for the Dead

01:26:56 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This episode is brought to you by AI Academy by SmarterX.

AI Academy is your gateway to personalized AI learning for professionals and teams. Discover our new on-demand courses, live classes, certifications, and a smarter way to master AI. Learn more here.

Visit our website

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Is the AI disruption we’ve been discussing more prominent than ever? Hosts Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput dissect Matt Shumer’s viral "Something Big Is Happening" essay and a new sabotage report from Anthropic. We break down the latest departures from OpenAI and xAI, the delay of OpenAI’s device, and how AI is intensifying (not lightening) the modern workload.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Click here to take this week's AI Pulse.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:51 — AI Pulse Survey

00:07:58 — Something Big Is Happening

00:27:06 — Claude Safety Risks

00:46:37 — Academy Success Score

01:03:33 — High Profile AI Resignations

01:06:55 — OpenAI’s Changing Hardware Plans

01:09:17 — Does AI Actually Intensify Work?

This week’s episode is sponsored by our 2026 State of AI Report.

This year, we’re going beyond marketing-specific research to uncover how AI is being adopted and utilized across the organization, and we need your help to create the most comprehensive report yet.

It’s a quick seven-minute lift. In return, you’ll get the full report for free when it drops, plus a chance to win or extend a 12-month SmarterX AI Mastery Membership. Go to smarterx.ai/survey to share your input. That’s smarterx.ai/survey 

Visit our website

Receive our weekly newsletter

Join our community:

Slack

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

Looking for content and resources?

Register for a free webinar

Come to our next Marketing AI Conference

Enroll in our AI Academy