The Artificial Intelligence Show

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.

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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 

Visit our website

Receive our weekly newsletter

Join our community:

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Looking for content and resources?

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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/  

Visit our website

Receive our weekly newsletter

Join our community:

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Looking for content and resources?

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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

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