Boxing, Bubbles and Bruno

Hi there,

Tuesday was a public holiday in Melbourne, so we went boxing.

Integr8 Martial Arts - best boxing gym in Melb

Quick one: we started a weekly Hourglass newsletter. Every Thursday: one skill, two lessons and three things we're reading, the practical stuff from inside the company. Subscribe here.

What I'm Seeing in AI

Money is fast, humans are slow

Last week, Google’s parent company Alphabet had its worst day since it listed in 2004: down 13%, roughly $500B gone. Chip stocks followed on Monday, with AMD down 7.5% and Nvidia now 15% off its October high.

Alphabet share price over the past month, falling sharply on 29 October

This raises the question: are we in an AI bubble?

Financially, probably. Ken Griffin, who runs Citadel, reckons there are "almost certainly bubbles". There's overspending and overhype, and there'll be plenty more market corrections like this one.

But a bubble in the share price isn't a bubble in the technology. Unlike the dot-com bubble, there's already real, measurable ROI when AI is used properly. I use it every day and see it inside businesses every week. I believe the technology is a once-in-a-generation shift.

However, the value doesn't come from the models. It comes from people actually using them: putting AI in the right places and changing how they work. That's the slow bit. The markets move fast; people don't. Getting a team to use AI every day is a ten-year job, and it doesn’t move like stocks do.

My opinion: this dip is a great time to buy. Long term, I think the gains will be massive. (Not financial advice, obviously.)

Granola vs. Wispr Flow

Two of my favourite AI apps are at war. Wispr Flow, the dictation app, launched a Granola-style meeting notetaker and now has a help page for people moving from Granola. Granola hit back last week with free voice typing, which is Wispr's whole product.

They’re fighting over your habit: the app you open without thinking. It highlights the fact that making new products or features is easy with AI, and the importance is now behaviour, marketing and customers.

What I'm Building

Bruno joins the talent army

Last week I spent a full day in person with Charlie, the CEO of Cadence, one of our longest and most AI-forward clients. He's always asking the same thing: "What should I actually be doing? How should I be using AI?"

We’ve now given them full-time, in-person care from someone who sits inside their team and takes them to the next level.

That's the start of what we're calling the talent army: AI-native builders who work inside our clients' businesses, every day. Our first member is Bruno, who started on Wednesday. His job application was a 3D room you can walk around in, with every project he's built on the shelf. He's cracked.

Bruno's job application

We stopped doing in-person work a while ago because it didn't scale. That was a mistake. The more AI does, the more having a human face behind it matters.

Reshaping the audit

So much of how a business actually works lives in people's heads. Our audit is how we get it out, and we're rethinking it.

We used to interview everyone. Great context, but it doesn't scale past a certain size. A questionnaire scales, but misses the stuff nobody thinks to write down, and literally no one can be bothered to fill out a form.

What we're testing now: interviews with leadership and team leads, plus an anonymous survey for everyone else. The personal touch where it matters, and the whole company's context without a hundred meetings.