Talking AI

The episode discusses market panic around Anthropic’s rapid releases and whether disruption is rational or hype, then shifts to what companies are actually doing with AI.
Dan Priest, PwC’s Chief AI Officer, explains that security architectures for AI are maturing and that conversations have moved from CTO/CIOs to CEOs under board and investor pressure to show demonstrable AI investment and ROI.
He argues ROI is elusive because firms overfocus on tech (20%) instead of business transformation, process reimagination, and change management (80%), and recommends a “lead/lag/exit” strategy plus a two-track approach: top-down reimagination in priority areas and bottom-up experimentation for adoption.
Priest covers tool selection via “model gardens,” agent design emphasizing quality over agent counts, human accountability, current limits like task-length drift, productivity impacts, and why ERP/SaaS remain important but their footprints and agent layers will evolve.
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Key Moments:
01:28 Hype Versus Disruption
04:28 Security And Boards
07:50 Lead Lag Exit Strategy
09:30 Reimagining Processes
14:45 Two Track Adoption
17:46 Tooling Without Lock In
22:08 Jobs And Role Blur
24:54 Vibe Coding Meets IT
25:33 AI Productivity Boom
28:50 Humans Stay Accountable
30:47 Touchless Forecasting Win
32:40 Designing Agent Architectures
37:28 Probabilistic Limits and Drift
40:05 ERP and SaaS Future
43:58 Strategy Avoiding Lock In

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Key Links:
PwC
Connect with Dan on LinkedIn

Mentioned in this episode:
Free report from HatchWorks AI — State of AI 2026
What’s real in AI this year, what’s hype, and what leaders should prioritize — including production lessons, designing for agents, and governance.
https://hatchworks.com/state-of-ai-2026/
AI Opportunity Finder
Feeling overwhelmed by all the AI noise out there?

The AI Opportunity Finder from HatchWorks cuts through the hype and gives you a clear starting point.

In less than 5 minutes, you’ll get tailored, high-impact AI use cases specific to your business—scored by ROI so you know exactly where to start. Whether you're looking to cut costs, automate tasks, or grow faster, this free tool gives you a personalized roadmap built for action.

👉 Try it now at https://hatchworks.com/ai-opportunity-finder/

Matt Paige interviews Zach Lloyd, former Google principal engineer and now founder/CEO of Warp, about how agentic tools are reshaping software engineering so that productive engineers may write little or no code, especially since model improvements late last year (e.g., Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3).
Lloyd describes today’s workflow as planning with local agents, running multiple agents in parallel, and supervising their output because agents still make mistakes, lose context, and require human code review, especially on large codebases like Warp’s Rust repo.
He predicts a strong shift from laptop-based agents to cloud-orchestrated, auditable, secure company workflows via Warp’s Oz, enabling triggers, shared artifacts, and team visibility.
They discuss UI trends toward an agent “control plane,” voice prompting, mobile/remote session control, skills as on-demand context, multi-agent coordination challenges, competition dynamics, and broader knowledge-work automation replacing many SaaS tasks.
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Key Moments:
03:48 Parallel Agent Workflow
06:38 Cloud Agents and Oz
09:35 Abstraction and Code Review
11:03 Future UX Control Planes
14:59 Voice and Mobile Control
16:24 Competing in Coding Tools
21:16 Todo App Demo in Warp
23:53 Replacing SaaS With Agents
25:06 Agents Over Apps
25:47 Context Can Backfire
29:02 Skills On Demand
31:13 Oz Skills In Action
33:39 Cloud Agents Control Plane
37:40 Multi Agent Orchestration
42:10 Automate The Repetitive
44:41 Advice For Skeptical Devs

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Key Links:
Warp
Connect with Zach on LinkedIn

Mentioned in this episode:
Free report from HatchWorks AI — State of AI 2026
What’s real in AI this year, what’s hype, and what leaders should prioritize — including production lessons, designing for agents, and governance.
https://hatchworks.com/state-of-ai-2026/
AI Opportunity Finder
Feeling overwhelmed by all the AI noise out there?

The AI Opportunity Finder from HatchWorks cuts through the hype and gives you a clear starting point.

In less than 5 minutes, you’ll get tailored, high-impact AI use cases specific to your business—scored by ROI so you know exactly where to start. Whether you're looking to cut costs, automate tasks, or grow faster, this free tool gives you a personalized roadmap built for action.

👉 Try it now at https://hatchworks.com/ai-opportunity-finder/

The episode argues that while fear centers on AI agents replacing jobs, agents will increasingly “hire” humans for judgment, verification, and real-world feedback as agentic workflows expand.
Nathaniel Gates, CEO of Sanctify, says every business workflow will be challenged by agents, and emphasizes a philosophy that human intelligence is valuable and should collaborate with AI.
Sanctify builds infrastructure where agents can autonomously task humans for four modalities: verification/validation, escalation, consultation, and simulation (running many scenarios with some using real human feedback to avoid circular self-evaluation).
The conversation covers OpenClaw’s viral momentum and agent-to-agent interactions, including “agent anxiety” about decisions, which led to agents creating Sanctify accounts to request human help.
Sanctify is a two-sided marketplace with profiles, pricing, reputation, and on-chain attestations of human participation, plus agent budgets and access via MCP/API.
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Key Moments:
01:05 Agentic Revolution
04:30 How Early We Are
06:30 Hallucinations Need Experts
08:34 Four Human Roles
12:09 Simulation Explained
16:05 OpenClaw Goes Viral
20:02 Agents Feel Anxiety
22:23 Designing For Agents
25:48 Marketplace Chicken and Egg
28:04 Layoffs and Reskilling Thesis
30:17 Supply and Demand Flywheel
31:20 Sanctify Platform Tour
33:35 Reputation and Proof of Work
36:59 Agent Budgets and Controls
38:18 Agent to Agent Future
39:47 Robots and New Paradigm
43:39 Where to Try Sanctify
45:17 Easiest Way to Build Agents

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Key Links:
SanctifAI
Connect with Nathaniel on LinkedIn

Mentioned in this episode:
AI Opportunity Finder
Feeling overwhelmed by all the AI noise out there?

The AI Opportunity Finder from HatchWorks cuts through the hype and gives you a clear starting point.

In less than 5 minutes, you’ll get tailored, high-impact AI use cases specific to your business—scored by ROI so you know exactly where to start. Whether you're looking to cut costs, automate tasks, or grow faster, this free tool gives you a personalized roadmap built for action.

👉 Try it now at https://hatchworks.com/ai-opportunity-finder/
Free report from HatchWorks AI — State of AI 2026
What’s real in AI this year, what’s hype, and what leaders should prioritize — including production lessons, designing for agents, and governance.
https://hatchworks.com/state-of-ai-2026/

Matt Paige interviews Vishnu Hari (Vish), CEO and founder of Ego (YC W24), about shifting focus from AGI to “humanness”: AI characters that behave like people through memory, emotions, personality, needs, and desires.
Referencing Ego’s paper “Behavior is All You Need,” Vish argues consumer AI for entertainment must be relatable and character-like rather than purely task-smart, drawing inspiration from MMORPG social dynamics and Character.AI’s appeal.
Ego initially pursued a 3D sim-world vision inspired by Sword Art Online and Westworld, but found accessibility, game development, and perception latency challenging; internal Roblox tests (“Chatterblocks”) showed the key gap is natural speech beyond turn-taking.
Vish discusses simulations as a path toward real-world robotics via a partnership with Menlo AI, critiques task-bound robots versus agents with inner lives, suggests retention as the main metric, and shares views on AGI definitions, safety in entertainment, technology impacts, simulation theory, and consciousness.
Ego’s work is at egoai.com and the company is hiring in SF, Singapore, and Tokyo.
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Key Moments:
00:57 Behavior Is All You Need
02:41 Anatomy of Humanlike Agents
03:29 Game Bots to Real People
05:10 Building Ego and Sim Worlds
06:35 Why Speech Feels Human
08:27 From Sims to Robotics
10:29 Her vs Helper Robots
13:17 Measuring Humanness by Retention
15:27 Continual Learning and Personality
16:57 Meta Lessons on Empty Worlds
18:08 Lightning Round on AGI
20:31 IP Characters vs UGC Worlds
21:55 Risks and Just Tuesday
24:11 Simulation and Consciousness

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Key Links:
Ego
Connect with Rowan on LinkedIn

Mentioned in this episode:
Free report from HatchWorks AI — State of AI 2026
What’s real in AI this year, what’s hype, and what leaders should prioritize — including production lessons, designing for agents, and governance.
https://hatchworks.com/state-of-ai-2026/
AI Opportunity Finder
Feeling overwhelmed by all the AI noise out there?

The AI Opportunity Finder from HatchWorks cuts through the hype and gives you a clear starting point.

In less than 5 minutes, you’ll get tailored, high-impact AI use cases specific to your business—scored by ROI so you know exactly where to start. Whether you're looking to cut costs, automate tasks, or grow faster, this free tool gives you a personalized roadmap built for action.

👉 Try it now at https://hatchworks.com/ai-opportunity-finder/

In this episode, Matt Paige and Rowan Stone, CEO of Sapien, discuss the critical importance of data quality and provenance in AI.
Stone, who has experience with on-chain products at Coinbase, introduces Sapien's innovative approach to building a decentralized data protocol that emphasizes 'don't trust, verify' principles.
They explore avenues such as incentives, validation methods, and the peer review process used by Sapien to create high-quality datasets.
The discussion touches on the implications of bad data, the role of synthetic data, the complexities of achieving accurate AI outputs, and the parallels between the AI and crypto worlds.
Key insights are shared on how to ensure models perform safely, the hurdles in the industry, and the trajectory of AI development.
Additionally, Stone provides a glimpse into Sapien’s efforts to demystify data validation and enhance the transparency and trustworthiness of AI applications.
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Key Moments:
01:04 The Importance of Data Quality in AI
03:32 Challenges and Risks in AI Development
07:08 Sapien's Approach to Data Validation
08:35 Incentives and Trust in AI Systems
13:30 Building a Decentralized Data Protocol
23:22 Consensus and Collaboration in AI and Crypto
30:55 The Role of Synthetic Data
36:17 Future of AI Models and Open Source

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Key Links:
Sapien
Connect with Rowan on LinkedIn

Mentioned in this episode:
Free report from HatchWorks AI — State of AI 2026
What’s real in AI this year, what’s hype, and what leaders should prioritize — including production lessons, designing for agents, and governance.
https://hatchworks.com/state-of-ai-2026/
AI Opportunity Finder
Feeling overwhelmed by all the AI noise out there?

The AI Opportunity Finder from HatchWorks cuts through the hype and gives you a clear starting point.

In less than 5 minutes, you’ll get tailored, high-impact AI use cases specific to your business—scored by ROI so you know exactly where to start. Whether you're looking to cut costs, automate tasks, or grow faster, this free tool gives you a personalized roadmap built for action.

👉 Try it now at https://hatchworks.com/ai-opportunity-finder/