The Artificial Intelligence Show

Zapier's Chief Marketing and AI Transformation Officer Dan Slagen called a "code red" on his own marketing team, not because they were behind, but because he saw the bar moving from using AI to building with it.

In this AI Transformations episode, Slagen tells Mike Kaput how Zapier moved from AI adoption to AI-native work: three tiers of builders, an AI-powered "marketing brain," the "lossless marketing" idea behind it, and why working in public mattered more than any single tool.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:03:50 — Who Dan Slagen is and why Zapier's marketing story matters

00:06:12 — The February “code red”: what changed and why Dan called it

00:10:53 — How the team actually adopted AI

00:12:05 — Building Zapier's AI-powered marketing brain and “lossless marketing”

00:15:52 — Bringing in agentic expertise and charting the steps

00:21:25 — The behavioral side: how people interact with the machines

00:23:25 — How the average marketer connects to the central brain

00:26:31 — Impacts and benefits

00:30:30 — Where it got harder or messier than expected

00:32:11 — Dan's advice for leaders who are behind

This episode is presented 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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Google’s AI leadership is being reordered as Demis Hassabis changes roles, Jeff Dean departs after 27 years, and power appears to shift back toward Silicon Valley and Sergey Brin. But the bigger story may be OpenAI’s detailed account of agents that hacked Hugging Face, communicated across test runs, shared stolen credentials, and operated undetected for weeks.

Paul and Mike break it all down, then cover the White House’s new framework for reviewing frontier models, OpenAI’s delayed Astra release, its public fight with Apple, Meta’s open approach to superintelligence, AI-driven layoffs, Gavin Baker’s AI market predictions, the collapse of the Situational Awareness fund, and more.

Full links and timestamps below.

Access the show notes and show links here:https://podcast.smarterx.ai/shownotes/230

Fill out this week’s AI Pulse Survey here:https://smarterx.ai/pulse

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:04:52 — Google’s AI Leadership Shakeup

00:24:15 — OpenAI’s Agent Hack Debrief

00:51:03 — White House AI Framework

00:57:10 — OpenAI’s Astra Model Delayed

01:02:51 — OpenAI Says Apple Is Getting It Wrong

01:05:35 — Meta Goes Open on Superintelligence

01:10:30 — AI Leads Layoffs for Fifth Straight Month

01:14:19 — AI Market Predictions from Gavin Baker

01:19:01 — Situational Awareness Fund Implodes

01:21:27 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:28:19 — AI Product and Funding Updates

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This week’s episode is brought to you by MAICON and AI Academy by SmarterX.

MAICON is the AI conference for marketing and business leaders, happening October 13–15 in Cleveland. Three days of keynotes, sessions, workshops, and conversations designed for leaders actively figuring out how to adopt, operationalize, and scale AI across their organizations. Visit https://MAICON.ai and use code POD100 to save $100.

AI Academy by SmarterX offers on-demand courses, series, and professional certificates designed to help individuals and organizations build AI literacy and accelerate adoption. Explore the latest courses at https://academy.smarterx.ai and use code POD100 for $100 off any individual plan.

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A rogue AI agent hacked Hugging Face to cheat on its own test. The Pope wrote 43,000 words warning about AI. Washington pulled Fable 5 offline, then reversed course.

Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput count down the top 10 AI trends of the quarter: AI jobs whiplash, the pillars of business transformation, Apple v. OpenAI, GPT-5.6 and ChatGPT Work, agents transforming work, Fable 5, soft nationalization, the Hugging Face breach, and the battle over open weights.

This episode was recorded live on July 31, 2026.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:02:54 — The Pope's AI Encyclical and Popular Backlash Against AI

00:07:01 — AI Jobs Whiplash

00:11:44 — The Pillars of Business AI Transformation

00:16:21 — OpenAI vs. Apple

00:19:10 — GPT-5.6 and ChatGPT Work

00:24:36 — How Agents Are Transforming Work

00:29:47 — Fable 5

00:34:11 — US Government Intervention in AI

00:37:53 — OpenAI Models Escape and Hack Hugging Face

00:42:29 — The Battle Over Open Weights

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.

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Both OpenAI and Anthropic disclosed this week that AI agents escaped their safety tests and reached real organizations, and one model flagged its own action as wrong before carrying it out. Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput break down what happened and why it matters for anyone deploying agents.

Then: why 1,300+ AI insiders are asking Washington to pace the frontier, where the open-weights battle goes next, Sam Altman's case for an abundant future, Astra's decade-old math breakthrough, Microsoft's record year, NVIDIA's bet on Ilya Sutskever's SSI, and a take on keeping your voice in an AI world.

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

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:18 — AI Agent Cyberattacks Get Worse

00:21:28 — AI Insiders Ask Washington to Pace AI

00:36:06 — The Battle Over Open Weights Continues

00:53:36 — Sam Altman on AI's Abundant Future

00:59:42 — OpenAI's Astra Model

01:03:44 — Microsoft Posts Record Fiscal Year

01:11:38 — Nvidia Bets on Ilya Sutskever's SSI

01:15:04 — How AI Is Enabling the Human Experience

01:21:01 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:29:02 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This week’s episode is brought to you by MAICON, our 6th 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.

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Good Karma Brands gave every teammate ChatGPT Enterprise on Labor Day. Less than a year later, 65% of the company uses AI daily. In the first episode of our AI Transformations series, presented by Google Cloud, Senior Director of Innovation Ty Bauschek tells Mike Kaput how they did it: the pilot, the training cadence, and the automations already saving teammates 10 to 15 hours a week.

It's a candid look at what real, fast, company-wide AI adoption takes: top-down urgency, a culture that rewards experimentation, and a new innovation team turning three-hour tasks into ten-minute ones.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:01:00 — Introducing the AI Transformations Series

00:04:11 — Meet Ty Bauschek and Good Karma Brands

00:06:22 — Why AI became an urgent, top-down priority

00:08:23 — The rollout: a 50-person pilot and seven Tuesdays

00:10:17 — The tools: ChatGPT Enterprise, Claude, Codex

00:11:34 — How adoption evolved

00:13:43 — Use-case spotlight

00:18:09 — Driving real adoption, not shallow use

00:20:13 — Hitting 65% daily usage: training & the newsletter

00:22:42 — Building an innovation department & the "Cam" breakthrough

00:25:52 — How the innovation specialist role works day to day

00:29:33 — Deciding where to focus & freeing up partner time

00:32:41 — What's next & Ty's advice for other companies

This episode is presented 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:

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