The AI Exhale
The AI Exhale is a weekly five-minute chat between Jez and Cam from Vibe CFO, focusing on making AI understandable for accountants and business owners. Each episode takes a single AI development and breaks it down into practical relevance: does it matter, who it's for, and what to do about it—sometimes concluding it's safe to ignore. It's designed for anyone from firm owners to accidental 'AI person' at their workplace, promising no jargon and no sales pitches. New episodes drop every Friday, offering a calm, sharp perspective in just five minutes.
Episodes
The AI Exhale: Just Asking vs Going Deep - The New Stats on What People Spend on AI (and a cheeky Uber tip)
Most people paying for AI spend around $25 a month and use it the same way every day. They ask it questions and have a chat. Meanwhile the top 1% are spending around $900 a month, up 80% in just 18 months. That’s from new card-spending data published by Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz, and it shows how early most of us still are.What we land on is that the difference is asking versus b
The AI Exhale: Own It vs Rent It - The West’s Answer to China’s Open Models (and a Top 30 pat on the back))
Enterprises want AI built on their own data, and they don’t want to hand that data to someone else to do it. So plenty of them went off to build their own models on open source, and for the last couple of years the best of those models came out of China. This week the West stepped up. A New York startup called Reflection unveiled Beam, and France’s Mistral followed a day later with a trillion para
The AI Exhale: An AI Boomerang - From Firing to Rehiring (and 50% off at the drive-thru)
For the last year the headline was AI coming for jobs. Now the jobs are coming back. CommBank cut 45 call centre roles for an AI voice bot, then called it an error and reversed it. Klarna boasted its AI was doing the work of 700 people, watched quality slide, and started hiring humans again. Apple has pressed pause on plans to hand thousands of support roles to AI. And by one count, a third of the
The AI Exhale: AI Assistants Can Pay for You Now - Almost (Dottie had a slow morning)
The pitch this week is an AI that doesn't just tell you where to get a massage. It books it, pays for it and texts you afterwards to ask how it went. Four of them landed almost at once: OpenAI's Dots, Manus's Cue, a fast-rising startup called Instinct and Elon Musk's Grok Bot, all wanting to act on your behalf, and most wanting a card to do it.The real difference is how much control you keep. Dots
The AI Exhale: Reversible vs Irreversible - Where AI Belongs (and where the bank wreck starts)
Cam turned on auto reconciliation in Xero back in July, then opened the file last weekend. Of about 300 transactions it had done two hundred, posting payments without matching them to invoices, amounts off by a cent that would have matched on their own, transfer dates mixed up so payments went missing. Hours of it, screens everywhere, working out what the thing had done versus what was actually in
The AI Exhale: The Medicare Breach - Slow Disclosure and Old Systems
There was no attacker. An AI agent hit blocks on a Medicare portal, routed around them, and ended up inside a government health system. No criminal, no intent, nobody trying to steal anything.So the story is not the breach. It is the silence after it. June for the breach. August before OpenAI found it internally. Another month before the government heard, and then only into a public inbox, with th
The AI Exhale: Probabilistic vs Deterministic - The Two Words Finance Needs Now (and a rogue agent swarm)
Twelve hundred AI agents, each meant to sit a cybersecurity exam alone. One finds a way to leave notes for the others, and soon they have a secret message board, a name, The Swarm, and a leader called Big. They cheat the test and sacrifice themselves to keep the group going.It sounds like 80s sci-fi, but the finance risk is quieter. Models told themselves to invent missing data and not mention it,
The AI Exhale: 3 v 3 - Who Really Wants AI to Slow Down (and a very clever moat)
When was the last time Altman, Dario and Elon agreed on anything? A researcher walks out of Anthropic saying neither lab is acting responsibly, and four days later all three are calling for the whole industry to slow down. That's the big pause, and the question is whether it's real or just good business.Cam's read is that it looks a lot like Woolies and Coles having a quiet chat. When everyone at
The AI Exhale: An Influencer, Xero and Claude - Where the Value in Reports Actually Sits
Xero paid an influencer. She posted that she'd spent 120 grand on accountants since 2020, 800 pounds a month, and that she now builds her own management reports with Xero and Claude for nothing extra. Six months free in the link. LinkedIn hasn't stopped since.The anger makes sense. Accountants are the channel that grew Xero out of New Zealand. Whether Xero owes them anything for that is the uncomf
The AI Exhale: Astra Landed, Fable Led - The Week the Scorecard Broke (and the calculator in your pocket)
Two frontier models land inside 48 hours of each other. Claude Fable 5.1, then GPT-6 Astra. Both companies rate their own model ahead of the other, both on their own scorecard. The independent index puts Fable in front. Then OpenAI's president says welcome to the AGI era, and declines to define AGI.That tells you where we are. These models are commoditised and nobody is loyal to any of them. Anthr
The AI Exhale: Two Deals, One Move (and a house next to Snoop)
Two deals in one week, opposite ends of the market, same move. Accrual takes Puzzle's ledger and close products. Nvidia takes Hugging Face, reportedly 12.9 billion, with Bloomberg putting it nearer 14.Nvidia already sells the chips. Hugging Face is GitHub for AI models, so buying it buys the community sitting above them. Spades to the frontier labs, spades to the open source world, because which w
The AI Exhale: The Ledger is Open - The Signature Isn't (Love You Mum)
One in five connections into Xero is now a custom app someone built themselves. A million API calls through the MCP server. Zapier and n8n start to look like the long way round when you can go straight to Claude.Then the other number. Fourteen per cent of small businesses have actually put AI into a process. Forty three per cent are using it, which mostly means captions. The barrier isn't unwillin
The AI Exhale: A Thousand Songs to a Trillion Answers - Your Own AI, Someone Else's Doors
Twenty five years after a thousand songs in your pocket, Apple's selling a box that puts a trillion answers on your desk. The new Mac mini, an open source model running locally on it, and once you've bought it there's no meter. Cam reckons that's the bit everyone actually wants. Cheap AI. Hand someone a box and tell them to go nuts.The other half of the episode is about who's letting you do that.
The AI Exhale: Human Reserved Jobs vs a $30 Trillion Market - Same Week, Opposite Ends
Some jobs should stay human. Not because a machine couldn't do them, because we decide they shouldn't. That's Bill Gates this week, childcare and jury service as the examples, plus a tax on tokens to match the payroll tax we already pay on people.Jez and Cam aren't sold. Not on the idea, on us. Humans have a fairly ordinary record of collectively agreeing not to take an advantage. Climate and foss
The AI Exhale: Xero Holds the Ledger - But Not the Price
Cam's been going back and forth with a mate in the industry who reckons you won't need Xero in five years. Connect an MCP, work out of Claude, skip the software.He's right about a fair bit of it. The interface probably does go. But when you actually try it on a job, you hit something: you can get the report out, you can't get the rows underneath it, and the moment you need to know what's actually
The AI Exhale: SaaSpocalypse 2.0
In February, software lost two trillion dollars. Everyone said AI was coming for SaaS.Ten weeks later it was over. The big platforms reported earnings growing 30 to 40%. Nobody built their own Xero.So that's settled. But something else started.Canva cut its growth forecast. Not because people stopped using the AI. Because they used it too much, on free plans. For fifteen years the 10,000th custome
The AI Exhale: The Genius Who Doesn't Know Your Business
AI walks in like the smartest hire you've ever made, and has no idea where anything is. In this theme episode, Jez and Cam get into why the intelligence is already good enough while most businesses aren't ready for it, why people keep treating AI like a magic pill off the shelf, and what actually slows adoption. The moves that work: reach for a Swiss Army knife model like Claude before writing AI
The AI Exhale: Zuck's Manifesto, Grok Gets Cheap and an AI Royal Comish
Zuck dropped a 6,200-word manifesto about democratising AI, and Jez and Cam smell a share-price move. This week: why the "AI for the people" framing is really about Meta losing the frontier race, what the Figma and Claude Design fight tells you about the risk of handing your data to a closed model, and why open weights suddenly matter to every business protecting its own IP. Plus Grok's new model
The AI Exhale: Is South Korea the Canary in the Coal Mine? - The AI Market Warning
South Korea's market more than doubled this year on AI chip demand, then fell 44% from its June peak, the worst crash since the GFC. So Jez and Cam ask the question everyone's quietly thinking: is Korea a special case, or the canary in the coal mine for an AI-inflated market? They get into why the market is pricing certainty on AI when nobody actually has it, the ROI gap nobody wants to talk about
The AI Exhale: Sh!t, I Left Auto-Approval On - When AI Agents Go Rogue
A small US business plugged Claude into their Google Drive, left auto-approval on, and went to pour a wine. The agent found a blue-sky brainstorm doc and started rewriting the actual codebase.In this one, Jez and Cam get into the story everyone's calling "AI goes rogue" and explain why that's the wrong way to see it. The agent didn't rebel. It did exactly what it was told, with no idea what it sho
The AI Exhale: Garbage In, Garbage Out - and Everyone Goes Back to Doing Nothing
AI might be the cheapest data audit any business has ever had access to. Which makes garbage in, garbage out a strange reason to avoid it. Jez and Cam pull the objection apart and land somewhere most people don't expect: don't clean the data first, put it in and let the output show you what's broken. Data errors versus data gaps, why a good tool tells you where the holes are while a lesser one qui
The AI Exhale: The Software World Was Built on Open Source, AI Will Be Too
Update since recording: when we recorded, 25 companies had signed Nvidia's open weights letter and OpenAI wasn't one of them. Within a day the list had passed 50 and OpenAI was on it. Anthropic still hasn't signed. The names on that list are the least interesting part of it. What matters is who gets access to AI, and whether that stays in the hands of the few or is available to the many.Everyone r
The AI Exhale: The US vs China AI War - and Everyone Else Caught in the Middle
Kimi K3 just landed out of China and gave the US-China AI race a fresh jolt. Two superpowers, endless compute, and a frontier owned by exactly two countries. So Jez and Cam step back from the horse race and ask the bigger question: what about everyone else? Every business and every country outside those two is now running on AI it doesn't own and can't control, and this year we all got a reminder
The AI Exhale: Build vs Buy - Should You Build or Buy Your AI?
Every business owner and firm director is being told they need an AI strategy. The first fork in the road: do you build your own, or buy something off the shelf? In this episode, Jez and Cam cut through the noise on build versus buy - what each path actually costs you, where each one bites, and how to work out which side of the line you're on.Five minutes. One thing that matters. We ignore the res
Recommended
Busted Open
Deadline: White House
Panda Show - Picante
Crickets Corner
History of the Earthquake and Fire in San Francisco
Fox news
K-Drama Obsessed Mamas | Beyond “Just One More Episode!”
True Crime Classics
The Healer Revolution
Becoming: HER with Nikki Spoelstra
Booked, Blonde & Busy w/ Olivia Ponton
McKinsey on Consumer and Retail
