Map before you build.
Conversations with the people who work out what should be built before anyone opens a tool. Every episode lives here in full — watch it, listen to it, or read the whole transcript. Distributed on YouTube and Spotify.
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Putting AI Agents to Work, With a Human in the Loop
A solo episode that closes the block after Susie Bulloch and Sandra Vergara. Ysi ranks the AI assistants she runs every day (Instinct AI, Grok Bot and Claude), explains why an assistant that prompts you beats one you have to remember to open, shows how she gives AI agents roles on an org chart, and marks where the human stays in the loop.
Watch, listen, or read →Before You Automate, Ask What Problem You're Solving
Sandra Vergara runs product operations for Zapier's revenue platform, at a company that sells automation. Before her team automates anything, she asks what problem it is solving and whether there is enough context. She explains how a happy-path automation failed, why AI should amplify operators rather than replace them, and the ops companion she recommends building this week.
Watch, listen, or read →Scaling CPG Operations When Demand Outruns the Plan
Scaling CPG operations is what Susie Bulloch had to learn after Hey Grill Hey's readers asked her to bottle the rub. Demand outran the plan on a December 23 sellout, again when AI cut food-blog revenue, and again when a Netflix month hit Amazon with no forecast, while a turkey kit her husband over-ordered filled the slow grilling season.
Watch, listen, or read →Where to Start With AI When Nothing Is Documented
A solo milestone episode that closes the block after Antonella Gioni and Marie-Claire Asseko. The business words behind AI explained in plain language, the five-step method Ysi uses with clients before any agent gets built, and what you can go build tomorrow.
Watch, listen, or read →Map How Work Actually Flows Before You Add AI Agents
Marie-Claire Asseko is a consultant and strategist working at the intersection of digital transformation and change management. She explains how she built her first AI agent without being technical, why she maps how work really flows before recommending any tool, and why AI on top of undefined processes just produces inconsistent results faster.
Watch, listen, or read →We Put AI in Operations First — Because That's Where You Can Prove It Worked
Antonella Gioni has run operations and sourcing at Novartis, L'Oréal Canada and now Earth Rated, where she is VP of Commercialization and Innovation. She explains why Earth Rated started AI inside operations, why the data lake had to come first, and why manufacturing belongs in the room before the design is final.
Watch, listen, or read →What It Takes to Build With AI for Other People
Building a tool for yourself and building one other people depend on are two different jobs. Hosting, run cost, maintenance windows, UAT — and the change I pushed to production while someone was still entering an order.
Watch, listen, or read →What Has to Be True Before You Just Add AI
Doneyli De Jesus is building the AI solutions practice at ClickHouse. He says nothing works without a use case, a motivated stakeholder and data the business already trusts — and he learned it the hard way at a date-night hackathon where the domain expert's app shipped and the software engineer's didn't.
Watch, listen, or read →Vibe Coding Is Easy, Scaling Is the Real Job
Rafael Angarita ran integrated marketing at SERHANT. and built the internal app his team now runs on. It crashed the first time four people logged into it at once. It runs for forty now — and the fix was never the process, it was the data structure underneath.
Watch, listen, or read →Clean Data Beats Company Size for AI Readiness
A three-year-old DTC brand and an enterprise supply chain platform, put in the same room. The brand passes the data-harmonization exam that most global manufacturers fail — and that, not headcount, is what decides whether an AI project works.
Watch, listen, or read →Why AI Projects Fail Inside Supply Chain Teams
Heather Sye runs go-to-market at Centrum AI. On the disruption you never see coming, why cleaning the data is step one and not a prerequisite, and why the person who buys the tool is almost never the person who has to use it.
Watch, listen, or read →How to Ship Chocolate in Summer Without It Melting
Mariela Katz had one week to solve heat-sensitive shipping, a hard rule that customers would not pay for it, and no supplier willing to sell her less than a truckload.
Watch, listen, or read →Fix Your Data Where It's Born
Not where it starts hurting you. A tool can only ever be as good as the process it sits on top of — and most forecasts are sitting on nothing.
Watch, listen, or read →What to Do When No Co-Packer Will Take Your Product
Emma Lukian spent five years being told her product was impossible to manufacture at scale. The fix was not finding a better factory.
Watch, listen, or read →What is a Forward Deployed Operator?
Phil Lakin, Director of AI Transformation at Zapier, on the role that sits between the consultant and the engineer, and the three questions to ask before you hire for it.
Watch, listen, or read →Don't miss the next conversation.
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