018 AI for Operators

Hi there, 

Welcome back to AI for Operators. Here’s what we’ve got for you this week:

• The Operator: Diane Sadowski-Joseph, Co-Founder & Head of Product at ApplyAI

• The Essay: Where are the use cases???

• The Links: 8 links, including OpenAI’s productivity boost from using its own product, Deloitte goes all in on Claude, and “vibe working” comes to Excel.

I’ll admit it, this is a bit of a hobby horse of mine. It’s the raison d’etre of this newsletter, after all. CEOs of the major AI labs love nothing more than to hype up AI progress, telling us that AI is going to transform (or destroy) the economy, change the way we all work, hell - maybe even make it so that we don’t have to work at all!

Wow, cool! Or terrifying!

And then you ask them how their company uses AI.

Crickets.

To be fair, Dario from Anthropic said that he uses Claude to help him brainstorm before he writes essays. (That’s right - not to write the essays themselves, just brainstorm)

And maybe Sam has a deal-making agent pulling overnight shifts to lock down all of these partnerships-slash-financings-slash-circular-deals that he’s been striking with the likes of Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and - well - every company that touches the ecosystem.

But beyond that, it’s been all too rare to hear anyone from these companies talk about how they’re actually using their own products to move faster, ship more, grow faster. Maybe they don’t need to - after all, more money than any of us have ever seen before keeps finding its way into their coffers, and all of their growth charts are up and to the right. But at some point, it seems disingenuous to say that AI is going to change everything when it hasn’t even changed how they run their own companies, except for the Investor Relations function.

That’s why it’s so heartening to see the tweet in The Links below from an OpenAI employee claiming that their coding tool Codex is how they managed to ship their no-code agent builder so quickly. And to see them publish an internal blog post about building an inbound sales assistant with their own tools.

These are droplets, though, when there should be a flood.

Hammer us with examples. Inundate us with playbooks. Drown us in use cases. You don’t have them or don’t want to share them? Source them from your customers and your developer ecosystems.

Because CEOs, execs, and plain old regular people around the world need to start seeing how AI can make their lives better every day, beyond AI slop videos and slightly more useful Google searches. This should be a win for you.

But if you don’t want to do it - or can’t - I guess we’ll have to through newsletters like this one.

Join Chief of Staff Network and Lindy

At a hand’s-on workshop on building agents on October 15 at 2pm ET