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Beyond The Prompt - How to use AI in your company

Beyond The Prompt - How to use AI in your company

Jeremy Utley & Henrik Werdelin 61 episodes Latest May 27, 2026

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.

Episodes

Why Fear Kills Curiosity and What That Means for AI - with Chantel Prat, Cognitive Neuroscientist Jun 10, 2026 01:01:39 Chantel Prat studies how different brains make sense of the world. Her work starts from a simple idea: every experience leaves a mark. The inputs we consume shape how we think, what we notice, and ultimately who we become. The conversation explores why people often choose familiar rewards over uncertain opportunities to learn. Chantel explains the tension between exploration and exploitation, why
Why Your Favorite Brand Stopped Caring About You - Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup May 27, 2026 00:56:24 Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and the newly released Incorruptible, joins Beyond the Prompt to explore why most companies drift from their original mission over time. The conversation dives into governance, shareholder primacy, Anthropic’s unusual structure, and why AI makes these questions more important than ever. Eric Ries argues that most companies are built on a contradiction. Founde
You Can't Outsource Wisdom: Bestselling Author Ryan Holiday on What the Stoics Have to Say About AI May 13, 2026 00:54:59 Ryan Holiday argues that while AI can generate outputs, it cannot generate wisdom. Drawing on a story from Seneca about a Roman who used educated slaves to sound intelligent, he compares outsourcing thinking to outsourcing exercise: the value comes from becoming the kind of person who can do the work, not simply producing the answer. The conversation explores the difference between useful cognitiv
Proof of Craft: What It Takes to Stand Out When Everything Looks Good - with Laura Jones, CMO of Instacart Apr 29, 2026 01:06:49 Laura Jones explains that generative AI is raising the bar for creativity. When everyone can produce “pretty good” content, the real challenge is creating something that actually stands out. The risk is not poor output, but settling too quickly for what already works. She argues that as products become more similar, brand becomes a signal of trust. Not in a visual sense, but in the experience behi
Nobody Is Getting New Manager Training for Their AI Team - with Dan Klein, UC Berkeley Apr 15, 2026 01:03:19 Dan Klein, professor at UC Berkeley and CTO at Scaled Cognition, explains that AI systems generate answers based on patterns in language rather than verified knowledge. This makes them highly capable across many tasks, but also means they can produce confident answers even when they are not fully accurate. He introduces the “jagged frontier,” where AI performs very well in some areas and less reli
AI-Native or Not: The Defining Choice for Companies Right Now - with Melissa Cheals, CEO of Smartly Apr 1, 2026 00:49:43 Melissa Cheals leads Smartly, a payroll and people management platform serving 24,000 small and medium businesses in New Zealand. In this conversation, she shares how AI is reshaping product development, leadership, and how organizations operate. A key moment comes when her team estimates new features will take 12 months and $1M to build. Instead of accepting it, Melissa pushes back, using AI to b
Greg Shove on Why Most Companies Are Not Seeing ROI On AI (yet) Mar 18, 2026 00:59:14 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 stru
How to Subtract: The Most Underrated Skill of the AI Era - with Leidy Klotz Mar 4, 2026 00:58:45 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 wit
From Roadmaps to R&D: How AI Is Changing Product Development - with Richard White, Founder of Fathom AI Feb 18, 2026 00:56:58 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 pro
Here’s How to Know If You’re Getting the Most Out of AI – with Bryan McCann, CTO of You.com Feb 4, 2026 00:59:50 In this episode, Bryan McCann joins Henrik and Jeremy to explore how search is evolving from simple queries into more conversational and agent-driven systems, and why prompting is likely a temporary skill. Bryan shares how his definition of productivity changed as an AI researcher, moving away from doing the work himself and toward designing plans and experiments that machines could run continuous
Building An Enterprise AI Innovation Lab: A Master Class with Humza Teherany, Chief Strategy Officer of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Jan 21, 2026 00:58:15 In this episode, Humza Teherany breaks down how he bridges deep technical fluency with strategic leadership at MLSE, home to the Raptors, Maple Leafs, and more. He shares how a vacation turned into an AI reawakening and how that hands-on immersion led to a fundamental shift in how his organization builds and experiments.Humza walks through MLSE’s build in a day practice, their internal AI platform
Why AI Gets People Wrong: The Real Source of Insight with Anthropologist Mikkel B. Rasmussen Jan 6, 2026 00:56:22 Mikkel B. Rasmussen brings a rare lens to the AI conversation. As an applied anthropologist, he has spent decades helping companies like LEGO uncover what is really going on beneath the surface.In this episode, he shares how deep insight often begins with being wrong, why surprise is the clearest sign you have found something meaningful, and how the pain of not knowing is essential to breakthrough

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