Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, 43,000 words on AI and human dignity, and Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was at the Vatican for the unveiling. Paul and Mike break down what the church's entry into the AI debate means for global public perception, then cover the PR emergency building among young people, the token cost crisis hitting corporate budgets, Claude Opus 4.8, competing AI jobs narratives, Illinois's landmark safety bill, Microsoft's agent data, and Anthropic's $65B Series H.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

AI-Pulse Survey: Fill out this week’s AI-Pulse Survey here.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:02:49 — AI-Pulse Survey

00:05:40 — The Pope's AI Encyclical

00:25:35 — AI's PR Emergency

00:38:25 — The Soaring Cost of Intelligence

00:54:12 — Claude Opus 4.8

00:58:23 — The Narrative Around AI and Jobs

01:06:22 — AI and Politics Updates

01:11:04 — Microsoft's Work Trend Index on Agents

01:14:23 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:19:34 — 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

Receive our weekly newsletter

Join our community:

Slack Community

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Looking for content and resources?

Register for a free webinar

Come to our next Marketing AI Conference

Enroll in our AI Academy 

Google I/O dropped dozens of announcements this week, including Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini Omni, the "biggest upgrade to search in 25 years," and a closing statement from Demis Hassabis that we are at the foothills of the singularity. 

Paul and Mike unpack it all: what the Karpathy-to-Anthropic move really means, why the Musk v. OpenAI verdict matters beyond the headlines, and what to make of profitable companies like Cloudflare and ClickUp publicly announcing AI-driven workforce restructuring. They also cover the Gallup data showing Americans oppose data centers more than nuclear power, and what that means for the political landscape ahead.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

AI-Pulse Survey: Fill out this week’s AI-Pulse Survey here.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:02:49 — AI-Pulse Survey

00:04:41 — Google I/O 2026

00:21:12 — Musk v. OpenAI Verdict

00:27:43 — Karpathy Joins Anthropic

00:37:17 — Meta Layoffs

00:46:52 — Cloudflare CEO on Replacing Employees with AI

00:59:34 — American Opposition to Data Centers

01:09:34 — AI's Political Civil War

01:14:37 — Anthropic v. the Department of War (Again)

01:17:35 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:23:24 — 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

Receive our weekly newsletter

Join our community:

Slack Community

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Looking for content and resources?

Register for a free webinar

Come to our next Marketing AI Conference

Enroll in our AI Academy 

Three big stories define this week: the Musk v. OpenAI trial wraps with the jury advising but the judge deciding. Then: why did every major AI commentator publish the same argument in the same week that AI won't kill jobs? And: Forward Deployed Engineers: are they the future of enterprise AI adoption or just consultants with a better name?

Rapid fire covers the AI hate wave showing up across the country, Anthropic's two-scenario roadmap for the US-China AI race, cybersecurity threats that give organizations just three to five months before attackers catch up, and a full product update roundup including Anthropic's $950B valuation, the Gates Foundation partnership, and the launch of Recursive Superintelligence.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

AI-Pulse Survey: Fill out this week’s AI-Pulse Survey here.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:03:46 — AI-Pulse Survey

00:06:27 — Musk v. OpenAI Round 3

00:12:13 — "Forward Deployed Engineers" Are AI's Hot New Job

00:30:17 — The AI Jobs Apocalypse Debate

00:48:49 — An AI Hate Wave Is Here

01:00:34 — Two Scenarios Could Unfold in the US-China AI Race

01:05:19 — AI Threats Have the US Government (and Labs) Worried

01:09:04 — The Rise of "Headless" Software

01:14:53 — Publicis Acquires LiveRamp

01:16:36 — How AI Is Changing the Way We Work (Second Brains, Apprenticeships, and More)

01:24:39 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:29:30 — 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

Receive our weekly newsletter

Join our community:

Slack Community

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Looking for content and resources?

Register for a free webinar

Come to our next Marketing AI Conference

Enroll in our AI Academy 

The second week of Musk v. OpenAI delivered texts, secret Tesla AI plots, and backstage chaos around Sam Altman's 2023 firing. Paul and Mike also break down Coinbase's AI-native restructuring memo, the White House's very brief flirtation with model vetting, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark's prediction that AI will autonomously train its own successors by 2028, and the bizarre Anthropic-SpaceX compute deal that emerged from out of nowhere. Rapid fire covers GPT-5.5 Instant, Claude Managed Agents updates, Sierra's $950M raise, and more.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

AI-Pulse Survey: Fill out this week’s AI-Pulse Survey here.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:37 — Musk v. OpenAI Round 2

00:23:27 — Coinbase AI Layoffs

00:33:09 — AI "Soft Nationalization"

00:47:10 — State of AI for Business Report Preview

00:54:14 — xAI Folds Into SpaceX, Does Compute Deal with Anthropic

01:00:49 — Has Recursive Self-Improvement Arrived?

01:09:38 — Anthropic and OpenAI Enterprise Joint Ventures

01:15:11 — Stripe's New Forward Deployed AI Accelerator Role

01:20:48 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:24:15 — 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

Receive our weekly newsletter

Join our community:

Slack Community

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Looking for content and resources?

Register for a free webinar

Come to our next Marketing AI Conference

Enroll in our AI Academy 

Leadership wants AI everywhere. IT security can't keep up. Marketing is racing ahead while legal and finance dig in. And every week brings another story of an AI agent doing something nobody told it to do. Paul Roetzer and Cathy McPhillips answer 15 listener questions on how to actually move organizations forward and where the real opportunities lie for individuals, SMBs, and enterprises right now.

00:00:00 — Intro

00:07:01 — How do you move a company out of AI policy paralysis?

00:08:54 — How should regulated, hands-on teams introduce AI?

00:12:30 — When companies are stuck, what tends to get them moving?

00:15:00 — Should IT security evolve to adopt AI quicker or should businesses slow down?

00:17:43 — What changes an AI-skeptic employee's mind?

00:21:18 — How should early-career professionals prioritize what to learn?

00:23:29 — Is there a point where you should stop learning and start building?

00:27:29 — Where do companies get stuck scaling AI across departments?

00:29:42 — Where is AI having the highest impact in HR?

00:33:04 — Do SMBs need a different AI playbook than enterprises?

00:35:55 — What should AI never take over?

00:39:43 — Who should be setting AI guardrails?

00:44:01 — If building software is commoditized, where is the real opportunity now?

00:47:48 — Could companies win by marketing themselves as AI-free?

00:50:15 — As generations grow up with AI, what different kinds of intelligence or capabilities do you think they’ll develop?

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

This episode is brought to you by the 2026 State of AI for Business Report webinar. 

We surveyed more than 2,000 professionals on how they're actually using AI, what's working, and what's keeping them up at night. Join Paul Roetzer, Mike Kaput, and Taylor Radey on Thursday, May 14 at noon ET for a live walkthrough of the findings, plus Q&A. \

Register at smarterx.ai/webinars for live and on-demand access — and you'll also receive the ungated report.

Visit our website

Receive our weekly newsletter

Join our community:

Slack Community

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Looking for content and resources?

Register for a free webinar

Come to our next Marketing AI Conference

Enroll in our AI Academy 

Elon Musk's federal trial against OpenAI opened this week, and he admitted under oath that xAI distills OpenAI's models. That's just where Episode 212 starts.

Paul and Mike cover the full story: the Musk-OpenAI trial and its implications for every company built on ChatGPT, the abrupt rewrite of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership and the removal of the AGI clause, blockbuster Big Tech earnings (Google Cloud up 63%, Azure AI at $37B run rate), an AI agent that wiped a startup's entire production database in nine seconds, Anthropic eyeing a $900B valuation, a real and growing populist AI backlash, and a powerful segment on former Senator Ben Sasse's terminal cancer diagnosis and what his parting words on AI and Congress mean right now.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

AI-Pulse Survey: Fill out this week’s AI-Pulse Survey here.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:04:45 — Elon Musk vs. OpenAI Trial Begins

00:14:49 — OpenAI and Microsoft Revise Their Partnership

00:30:33 — Big Tech Earnings

00:39:39 — Anthropic Eyes $900B Valuation

00:43:53 — Trump's Anthropic Reversal and Mythos Fight

00:52:48 — Agents Gone Wrong

00:56:47 — Myths We Tell Ourselves About AI and Jobs

01:06:15 — Why Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke Says “Saying The Thing Matters”

01:11:20 — AI's Public Backlash Problem

01:15:16 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:22:59 — AI Academy Spotlight

01:25:58 — Ben Sasse's Parting Words on AI

01:31:56 — 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

Receive our weekly newsletter

Join our community:

Slack Community

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Looking for content and resources?

Register for a free webinar

Come to our next Marketing AI Conference

Enroll in our AI Academy 

Three major AI companies launched agent products in the same 48 hours. The announcements were confident. The questions enterprises actually have remained mostly unanswered.

OpenAI dropped GPT-5.5 and Workspace Agents in ChatGPT. Google rebranded its entire enterprise AI stack as the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform at Cloud Next '26. Microsoft made Copilot agentic across Office. Meta got caught planning to track employee keystrokes for AI training data and cut 10% of its workforce in the same breath. Plus Jeff Dean on AGI timelines, the SmarterX State of AI for Business report built in a day, Apple's CEO transition, and a full rapid-fire round.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

AI-Pulse Survey: Fill out this week's AI-Pulse Survey here.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:06:45 — GPT-5.5 Launches

00:17:28 — Workspace Agents in ChatGPT

00:27:13 — Agent Usage: Separating Fact from Fiction

00:46:31 — Google Cloud Next '26

00:55:07 — Meta's AI Employee Surveillance + Layoffs

01:03:46 — Apple Leadership Transition

01:09:59 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:16:28 — AI Academy Spotlight

01:21:41 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This week’s episode is brought to you by MAICON, our 7th annual Marketing AI Conference, happening in Cleveland, Oct. 13-15. The code POD100 saves $100 on all pass types.

For more information on MAICON and to register for this year’s conference, visit www.MAICON.ai.

Visit our website

Receive our weekly newsletter

Join our community:

Slack Community

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Looking for content and resources?

Register for a free webinar

Come to our next Marketing AI Conference

Enroll in our AI Academy 

OpenAI is "deeply unfocused," says one of its own early investors. And that's only one of many threads pulling at the company this week.

Paul and Mike dig into OpenAI's reorg, IPO drama, and valuation pushback, Stanford's 2026 AI Index, the real implications of AI agents in the enterprise, Tim Cook's Apple exit, Anthropic's White House thaw, the Dwarkesh-Jensen Huang debate, Claude Design's launch, and rapid-fire updates across Claude Opus 4.7, Cerebras, Harvey Agents, and more.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

AI Pulse Survey: Fill out this weeks AI Pulse Survey here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:41 — The 2026 AI Index Report

00:19:10 — OpenAI Shifts and Shakeups

00:34:27 — The Business Implications of Agents

00:50:56 — Apple’s Tim Cook Stepping Down

00:54:11 — Anthropic Launches Claude Design, Targets Canva and Figma

01:01:26 — Anthropic's Possible Reconciliation with the White House

01:06:02 — Dwarkesh vs. Jensen

01:15:08 — Gen AI Traffic Share

01:17:36 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:25:20 — AI Academy Spotlight: AI for Manufacturing

01:30:05 — 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

Receive our weekly newsletter

Join our community:

Slack Community

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Looking for content and resources?

Register for a free webinar

Come to our next Marketing AI Conference

Enroll in our AI Academy 

An Anthropic AI model powerful enough to trigger emergency government briefings. A source code leak. A $122 billion OpenAI funding round. A Ronan Farrow exposé. Physical attacks on Sam Altman. Paul and Mike are back with two weeks of AI news and the analysis you need to make sense of it all.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:44 — Claude Mythos and Project Glasswing

00:32:03 — Claude Code Leak + Anthropic Subscription Shakeup

00:42:35 — Major OpenAI Updates

00:59:30 — AI for Writers Summit

01:01:41 — Mercor Breach

01:06:25 — Karpathy's LLM Knowledge Bases Go Viral

01:10:20 — AI and Jobs Update

01:19:34 — AI and Politics Update

01:25:32 — HubSpot Shifts to Outcome-Based AI Pricing

01:30:51 — SmarterX AI Use Case Spotlight

01:36:25 — AI Academy Spotlight

01:40:23 — 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

Receive our weekly newsletter

Join our community:

Slack Community

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Looking for content and resources?

Register for a free webinar

Come to our next Marketing AI Conference

Enroll in our AI Academy 

150+ stories distilled into 10 trends: ranked, contextualized, and ready to make your head spin.

In this special episode, Paul and Mike distill 150+ topics from 12 weekly episodes into 10 ranked trends. From the nonstop model release frenzy and OpenClaw's rise to AI-driven layoffs going mainstream and a cultural "vibe shift" around AGI, this episode is your fastest path to catching up on everything that mattered in the last three months.

We will be back with regular weekly news episodes April 14th.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:14 — The Model Release Frenzy

00:11:20 — Big AI Becomes Big Lobbying

00:16:15 — Anthropic vs. the U.S. Government

00:22:37 — The Rise of OpenClaw

00:28:32 — Enterprise AI Adoption: The People Problem

00:36:22 — SaaSpocalypse

00:43:11 — Labs Pivot to AI Agents

00:50:58 — AI-Driven Layoffs Go Mainstream

00:55:54 — We’re Seeing More Move 37 Moments

01:02:38 — The Vibe Shift

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

Receive our weekly newsletter

Join our community:

Slack Community

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Looking for content and resources?

Register for a free webinar

Come to our next Marketing AI Conference

Enroll in our AI Academy 

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.

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

Receive our weekly newsletter

Join our community:

Slack Community

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Looking for content and resources?

Register for a free webinar

Come to our next Marketing AI Conference

Enroll in our AI Academy