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Beyond The Prompt - How to use AI in your company

Beyond The Prompt - How to use AI in your company

By: Jeremy Utley & Henrik Werdelin
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Beyond the Prompt dives deep into the world of AI and its expanding impact on business and daily work. Hosted by Jeremy Utley of Stanford's d.school, alongside Henrik Werdelin, an entrepreneur known for starting BarkBox, prehype and other startups, each episode features conversations with innovators and leaders to uncover pragmatic stories of how organizations leverage AI to accelerate success. Learn creative strategies and actionable tactics you can apply right away as AI capabilities advance exponentially.2024 - Jeremy Utley & Henrik Werdelin Economics Leadership Management Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • Greg Shove on Why Most Companies Are Not Seeing ROI On AI (yet)
    Mar 18 2026

    Greg Shove describes a growing gap between individual and organizational AI adoption. A small group of employees are already using AI effectively, while most companies are still early. AI is generating real productivity gains, but those gains are not being captured at the company level. Instead, they are absorbed by individuals who use AI to work faster, often without changing team outputs or structures — raising a central question: if AI creates time, where does that time go?

    The conversation explores why enterprise AI adoption remains uneven. Many organizations lack a clear point of view on AI, and workflows take time to adapt, making it difficult to turn individual gains into coordinated results. At the same time, AI is breaking capability boundaries, allowing people to take on work across roles while companies remain structured around existing ways of operating.

    From a leadership perspective, Greg emphasizes that the challenge is not just efficiency. AI creates capacity, but without clear direction on how to use it, that capacity disappears. Leaders must decide how to reinvest the time AI creates if they want to capture real business value.

    Key Takeaways:

    • AI’s ROI is leaking, not missing
      Companies are generating value from AI, but it’s being captured by employees rather than the organization.
    • A small group drives most of the impact
      Roughly 10–15% of employees adopt AI early and use it effectively, creating an uneven distribution of gains.
    • AI is breaking capability boundaries
      Individuals can now take on work across roles, but organizations are still structured around fixed responsibilities.
    • Most companies lack a clear point of view on AI
      Without direction from leadership, adoption becomes fragmented and employees are left to figure it out themselves.
    • Leaders must decide what to do with the time AI creates
      Efficiency gains alone don’t create value. Organizations need to define new, higher-value work or the gains disappear.

    Greg's LinkedIn: linkedin/gregshove
    Section LinkedIn: linkedin/company/sectionai
    Section AI: sectionai.com
    Prof AI: prof.ai

    00:00 Intro: Entering the Era of AI Chaos
    00:31 Meet Greg Shove
    01:32 Enterprise AI Is a C Minus
    01:51 AI’s ROI Is “Leaking” to Employees
    03:04 When Individuals Outrun the Organization
    05:44 When AI Breaks Workflows
    06:47 Disposable Software and New Ways of Building
    09:10 Cut vs Create
    12:01 Using the Calendar as a Lever
    16:24 Why Enterprises Don’t Move
    17:32 When Customers Force Change
    21:31 AI Breaks Capability Boundaries
    25:44 The Productivity Firehose
    27:49 Who Actually Captures the Value
    28:45 Why Everyone Needs Good AI
    32:00 Adoption Beats Buying More Tools
    40:17 Teaching the 90 Percent
    43:48 Where Humans Still Matter
    48:09 The Debrief

    📜 Read the transcript for this episode: greg-shove-on-why-most-companies-are-not-seeing-roi-on-ai-yet/transcript

    For more prompts, tips, and AI tools. Check out our website: https://www.beyondtheprompt.ai/ or follow Jeremy or Henrik on Linkedin:

    Henrik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/werdelin
    Jeremy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyutley

    Show edited by Emma Cecilie Jensen.

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    59 mins
  • How to Subtract: The Most Underrated Skill of the AI Era - with Leidy Klotz
    Mar 4 2026

    Leidy Klotz has spent years studying a simple but overlooked phenomenon: when we try to improve something, our first instinct is to add rather than remove. He shares the Lego bridge experiment that sparked his research and explains how this additive bias scales from small design decisions to entire organizations. Over time, companies accumulate reporting lines, meetings, software, and policies without questioning what no longer serves them.

    Henrik and Jeremy explore how AI tools intensify this pattern. When generating ideas, launching projects, writing code, or producing content becomes effortless, the temptation to add grows stronger. The cost of producing information drops, but the cost of consuming it rises. Without guardrails, organizations risk what Leidy calls “organizational indigestion.”

    The discussion moves from insight to implementation. Leidy outlines practical ways to counteract additive bias, including stop-doing lists, default kill dates on projects, and designing environments that make subtraction visible and acceptable. In a world of accelerating AI output, leaders must intentionally decide what to remove, what to protect, and what truly matters.

    Key Takeaways:

    • We default to adding, not subtracting
      When faced with a problem, our instinct is to introduce something new. Subtraction rarely occurs to us, even when removing something would improve clarity and performance.
    • Generative AI amplifies additive bias
      AI makes producing content, code, and ideas easier than ever. Without constraints, this frictionless creation can accelerate complexity instead of progress.
    • More organizations die from indigestion than starvation
      Over time, companies accumulate tools, processes, and policies that quietly slow them down. The real risk is often not too few ideas, but too many unexamined additions.
    • Architecture beats willpower
      Rather than relying on discipline alone, leaders can design systems that encourage subtraction. Stop-doing lists and default expiration dates make removal expected instead of exceptional.
    • Protect what matters before adding more
      Before introducing new tools, workflows, or AI systems, leaders must define what is already working and worth protecting. Subtraction requires clarity about what should stay, not just what should go.

    Subtract: amazon/Subtract-Untapped-Science-Leidy-Klotz
    In a Good Place: amazon/Good-Place-Spaces-Where-Thrive/
    Leidy's Speaking: https://leidyklotz.com/
    Clip from Bear: Subtract - this is how you do better

    00:00 Intro: Our Instinct to Add
    00:28 Meet Leidy Klotz
    01:15 The Subtract Idea
    02:56 Organizations Get Bloated
    03:49 Scandinavian Design Mindset
    04:32 New Book: In a Good Place
    05:59 AI Abundance and Indigestion
    08:12 Curate Context, Not More
    11:38 Cues and Stop-Doing Lists
    15:00 Default Debt and Kill Dates
    17:10 Odysseus Contracts and Biases
    21:28 Reengage the Physical World
    29:17 Bike Shedding and Priorities
    36:10 Making Is Thinking
    49:16 The Debrief

    📜 Read the transcript for this episode: how-to-subtract-the-most-underrated-skill-of-the-ai-era-with-leidy-klotz/transcript

    For more prompts, tips, and AI tools. Check out our website: https://www.beyondtheprompt.ai/ or follow Jeremy or Henrik on Linkedin:

    Henrik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/werdelin
    Jeremy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyutley

    Show edited by Emma Cecilie Jensen.

    Show more Show less
    59 mins
  • From Roadmaps to R&D: How AI Is Changing Product Development - with Richard White, Founder of Fathom AI
    Feb 18 2026

    Fathom was built on the assumption that transcription would become commoditized and generative models would steadily improve. Rather than training proprietary models, Richard focused on building the infrastructure around them and waiting for model capabilities to reach the right threshold.

    In this conversation, he explains why AI has made effort and impact harder to predict, and why that shifts product development from roadmap execution toward experimentation. He describes separating an exploratory AI team from core engineering, structuring that team to prototype and write specs, and expecting a meaningful portion of experiments not to work.
    Richard introduces his Jenga model for AI development, testing different models and use cases to find where resistance is lowest. He also discusses the operational realities of rapid model updates, hallucination rates, and what he calls the LLM treadmill.

    The discussion explores qualitative QA, organizational design, buy versus build decisions, and why leadership taste plays an increasingly important role as AI lowers the barrier to generating outputs.

    Key takeaways:

    • Estimating effort and impact is becoming harder
      As model capabilities improve quickly, features that require months today may take far less time in the near future. This makes traditional planning assumptions less stable.
    • Product development increasingly resembles R&D
      With shifting capabilities and uncertain outcomes, teams must experiment, prototype, and iterate rather than rely solely on long term roadmaps.
    • Organizational structure must reflect experimentation
      Separating exploratory AI work from core engineering can allow faster iteration while maintaining stability elsewhere.
    • Rapid model updates create operational pressure
      Frequent improvements and changing performance levels can require teams to revisit and adjust features more often than in traditional software cycles.
    • Qualitative judgment plays a larger role
      As AI lowers the cost of generating outputs, evaluating quality and deciding what to ship becomes increasingly important.

    Fathom: fathom.ai
    Fathom LinkedIn: linkedin/company/fathom-video/
    Richard's LinkedIn: linkedin/in/rrwhite/

    00:00 Intro: Why AI Breaks Roadmaps
    00:19 Meet Richard White (Fathom AI)
    02:16 From Roadmaps to R&D
    04:49 Designing AI Teams for Speed
    07:11 The Jenga Model
    09:56 Failing 50% & AI Team Psychology
    13:40 LLMs as Interns & Anti-Planning
    21:01 QA, Data Pain & Developing Taste
    24:59 Executive Taste & Culture Rules
    27:20 Reacting to AI Waves
    28:50 Fathom’s 4-Step Product Plan
    30:47 What New Models Unlock
    32:13 From Scribe to Second Brain
    40:32 Build vs Buy in AI
    45:32 The Debrief

    📜 Read the transcript for this episode: from-roadmaps-to-rd-how-ai-is-changing-product-development-with-richard-white-founder-of-fathom-ai/transcript

    For more prompts, tips, and AI tools. Check out our website: https://www.beyondtheprompt.ai/ or follow Jeremy or Henrik on Linkedin:

    Henrik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/werdelin
    Jeremy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyutley

    Show edited by Emma Cecilie Jensen.

    Show more Show less
    57 mins
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