001 AI for Operators

Hi there, 

Thanks for joining AI for Operators!

Our goal is to be the most tactical, actionable AI resource for you every week by bringing you interviews with top operators, reviews of AI tools, and useful AI updates from around the ecosystem.

If it’s useful, we’d love it if you shared it with another operator you think highly of.

This week, here’s what we’ve got:

The Operator

Antoine Buteau, Head of Business Operations at Shakepay

Antoine has been one of the operators at the forefront of the AI wave for quite some time now - as Head of Business Operations at Replit he was early to creating AI workflows and vibe coding. 

Now, he’s helping to bring Shakepay (a fintech company that helps you earn Bitcoin) up the AI curve as Head of Business Operations. In our inaugural episode of the AI for Operators podcast, Antoine breaks down concepts and use cases including:

• The difference between AI “brains” and “pipes” and why the best systems for operators combine both

• His prioritization of “ops-heavy” workflows

• The challenges and opportunities of implementing AI in a highly-regulated space 

• Cross-functional use cases that span finance, engineering, customer success, and more

• The pushback he received when implementing an AI system in their customer success function, and how he overcame it (and saw big ROI)

Here’s one of the slides he shares during the podcast. For more of this plus a demo of one of the AI uses cases he’s deployed, check out the podcast (under 15 minutes if you listen at 1.5x speed).

The Review

In this section, we’ll try to bring you quick, useful review of tools that you may not have encountered (or highlight use cases that may be new to you). If we ever do sponsored reviews, we’ll be very clear that they're sponsored.

elvex: creating enterprise-ready AI assistants with a no-code interface

What It Does

elvex is an enterprise AI platform that lets you build powerful AI assistants (custom GPTs) via a no-code interface, while prioritizing security, auditability, and collaboration.

Why Ops Leaders Should Care

elvex hands you the power to use numerous AI models in 1 place, automate workflows & data analysis, and enable AI adoption across your org, without writing a single line of code.

Key Features (Pros & Cons)

• Pro: Build custom AI assistants just by telling elvex what you want, no code needed.

• Pro: Enable your team to access numerous models in one place, in a secure and compliant manner.

• Con: The workflows product is nascent and cannot yet integrate to 3rd party tools.

Bottom Line

elvex is a compelling shortcut to compliant AI adoption and faster creation of collaborative, customized AI assistants. Worth a spin if scaling AI across your teams is a top priority

• The Coming Age of Hyper-Mediation: Anthropic Chief of Staff Avital Balwit argues that in an AI-saturated world, winning operators will be those who can orchestrate ever-thicker layers of algorithmic “middlemen” to translate chaos into clear action (but that it might not feel so good along the way). 

• CharacterAI Opens a Back Door to Free-Speech Rights for Chatbots: A novel legal twist hints that conversational agents could soon claim First-Amendment protections - put “AI policy” on your risk dashboard before the regulators do. 

• Timelines: Dwarkesh Patel cools the AGI countdown hype slightly, laying out why breakthrough timelines may stretch just long enough for smart operators to build defensible moats.

• ChatGPT Introduces Meeting Recording and Google Drive Connections: The battle for enterprise usage continues.  

• Pope Leo XIV on AI: When the new Pope names artificial intelligence as the Church’s defining challenge, you know tech governance is top of mind for all leaders and regulators around the world. 

• How many jobs are being lost to AI? It’s nuanced, but there are fewer losses in jobs that typically employ college graduates (software engineers), and more in jobs that don’t (call centers). 

• Anthropic’s $61 Billion Sprint: Whether his prediction of 10-20% unemployment in the next couple of years is right or not, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is someone worth learning more about, and this profile has some interesting insights. 

Thanks for reading,

Tom Guthrie