Podcast · Business
by Jeremy Utley & Henrik Werdelin · English · Business
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
30 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
Alexander Kuilman, founder of The Practice, joins Beyond the Prompt to ask why people still resist AI even when they know they should be using it. The conversation gets into fear, psychological safety, the “AI vampire,” and Alex’s idea of “corporate numbing”: using the busyness of work to avoid things that may be harder to sit with.
E80 · 16 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 2 min
Jim VandeHei, co-founder and CEO of Axios, joins Beyond the Prompt to share what happened when he turned himself into an “AI lab rat” and started rethinking how Axios works. He explains why leaders need to experiment themselves, why companies should delete before they automate, and why AI needs a better story about what happens if things go right.
E79 · 2 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 13 min
Brice Chalamel is back on Beyond the Prompt, this time as Head of AI Strategy and Adoption at OpenAI. After helping lead AI adoption at Moderna, he explores what it really takes to change how people work with AI, why trust has to be earned, and why successful adoption is ultimately as much about people as technology.
E78 · 19 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 5 min
Eric Porres, Chief AI Officer at Logitech, returns to Beyond the Prompt to share what’s changed after another year of putting AI into practice. AI use has spread across the company, but the bigger shift is where it shows up: inside the workflows, meetings, tools, and habits that shape how people actually work.
E77 · 5 Aug 2026 · 44 min
Charles O'Reilly, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor and a leading expert on innovation and organizational change, joins Beyond the Prompt to explore why successful companies so often struggle to adapt. As AI accelerates change across every industry, Charles explains why the challenge isn't coming up with new ideas. It's building organizations that can keep exploring what's next while continuing to execute what's already working.
E76 · 22 Jul 2026 · 51 min
Daniel Pink, bestselling author of Drive, A Whole New Mind, To Sell is Human and many more, joins Beyond the Prompt to discuss one of AI's most powerful and uncomfortable use cases: helping us see ourselves more clearly. By treating ChatGPT as a brutally honest advisor instead of an answer machine, Dan explores how AI can surface blind spots, challenge assumptions, and ultimately strengthen our own thinking.
E75 · 8 Jul 2026 · 53 min
Geoff Woods returns to Beyond the Prompt to discuss the updated edition of The AI-Driven Leader and what has changed since his first appearance. The conversation explores why leaders need to use AI themselves rather than delegate it, how to think beyond AI "use cases," and why the biggest opportunity isn't adopting new tools but improving the way leaders think, make decisions, and shape strategy.
E74 · 24 Jun 2026 · 54 min
Christian Catalini, tech founder, co-creator of Meta's Libra, and founder of Lightspark, joins Beyond the Prompt to explore the unexpected economics of AGI. Drawing on his recent paper, he argues that as AI makes intelligence increasingly abundant, value shifts to what can't easily be automated, measured, or verified. The conversation explores what becomes scarce when intelligence is cheap, why the doomers may be wrong, and how AI could unlock entirely new waves of scientific discovery and innovation.
E73 · 10 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 2 min
Chantel Prat, cognitive neuroscientist and author of The Neuroscience of You, joins Beyond the Prompt to explore why curiosity may be one of the most important skills in the age of AI. The conversation covers how brains learn, why people respond so differently to new technology, and why feeling threatened by AI can prevent the very learning needed to benefit from it.
E72 · 27 May 2026 · 56 min
Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and the newly released Incorruptible, joins Beyond the Prompt to argue that most founders misunderstand the most important decision they make: governance. As AI raises the stakes around power, trust, and control, Eric explains why companies drift from their original mission, why founders so often lose control of what they build, and why governance may be the highest leverage decision founders ignore.
E71 · 13 May 2026 · 55 min
Ryan Holiday, bestselling author and writer on Stoicism, joins Beyond the Prompt to explore what the Stoics can teach us about living and working in the age of AI. As technology makes it easier to outsource thinking, writing, and decision-making, Ryan argues that wisdom still comes from doing the work yourself. The conversation explores cognitive offloading, agency, change, and why the defining skill of the AI era may be developing a finely tuned “bullshit detector.”
E70 · 29 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 7 min
Laura Jones, CMO of Instacart, joins Jeremy & Henrik on Beyond the Prompt to explore what happens to creativity when AI makes "pretty good" effortless. She shares why brand becomes a question of trust as products converge, how a data insight about bananas became both a product feature and a Super Bowl campaign, and why the best ideas still require human friction — not just human-bot dialogue.
E69 · 15 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 3 min
Dan Klein, professor at UC Berkeley and CTO at Scaled Cognition, explains how today’s AI systems work in practice. He breaks down why they produce fluent answers that are often useful, but not always reliable, what the “jagged frontier” means, and why using AI well requires a new set of skills most people are still developing.
E68 · 1 Apr 2026 · 50 min
Melissa Cheals, CEO of Smartly, joins Henrik and Jeremy to explore what it really means to become an AI-native company—and why that decision is becoming unavoidable. From challenging $1M, 12-month product timelines to rethinking leadership, communication, and how teams work together, she shares how AI is forcing organizations to question long-held assumptions about how work gets done.
E67 · 18 Mar 2026 · 59 min
Greg Shove, CEO of Section and Prof AI, joins Beyond the Prompt for the third time to discuss why most companies are not seeing meaningful ROI from AI and what enterprise AI adoption actually looks like today. While a small group of employees are already using AI to become more productive, organizations struggle to capture that value due to culture, incentives, and workflows that have not yet adapted. Greg describes how AI is breaking traditional capability boundaries, allowing individuals to take on new types of work across roles, while companies remain structured around older ways of…
E66 · 4 Mar 2026 · 59 min
Leidy Klotz, professor at the University of Virginia and author of Subtract, joins Jeremy & Henrik on Beyond the Prompt to explore why we instinctively add rather than subtract when solving problems. From a simple Lego experiment to organizational design, he explains how additive bias leads teams to accumulate tools, meetings, and complexity over time. In the age of generative AI, where creating content and workflows is effortless, this tendency becomes amplified. The conversation explores how leaders can design systems and environments that protect focus, sleep, and what truly matters.
E65 · 18 Feb 2026 · 57 min
Richard White, founder and CEO of Fathom AI, joins Beyond the Prompt to discuss how generative AI is changing the way product teams plan and build. As model capabilities improve quickly, estimating effort and impact becomes harder, challenging traditional roadmap driven development. Richard explains why his team operates more like an R&D function, how they experiment with different models and use cases, and what it takes to build in a world where the underlying technology keeps evolving.
E63 · 4 Feb 2026 · 1 hr
Bryan McCann, CTO and co-founder of You.com, joins Beyond the Prompt to discuss how AI is changing the way people search for information, work day to day, and think about productivity. Drawing on his experience as an AI researcher, Bryan explains how he shifted from measuring productivity by writing code to focusing on making machines work continuously by “keeping the GPUs full,” and how that mindset applies to individuals, teams, and leaders.
E61 · 21 Jan 2026 · 58 min
Humza Teherany, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, joins Beyond the Prompt to unpack how AI is reshaping leadership, workflows, and company culture. He shares how returning to his technical roots changed his approach in the C-suite and why building hands-on is now a non-negotiable. From agentic development to idea competitions and instant prototyping, this episode is a masterclass in how to lead from both the boardroom and the command line.
E60 · 6 Jan 2026 · 56 min
Mikkel B. Rasmussen, founder of the Human Activity Laboratory, joins Beyond the Prompt to explore what it really takes to understand people. Drawing on decades of applied anthropology, he shares why true insight requires surprise, struggle, and embodied experience. He also reveals how AI is already helping us get there. From LEGO to synthetic data, this episode is a masterclass in uncovering hidden assumptions and designing for real human behavior.
E58 · 24 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 9 min
Diarra Bousso, founder of DIARRABLU, returns to share how AI is helping her reinvent the operating system of fashion. She explains how generative tools are not only streamlining production and eliminating waste, but also fueling creative joy, all while enabling her team to sell non-existent products, manage operations with scientific rigor, and experiment at scale. Diarra also opens up about her personal transformation, from surviving a traumatic accident to building a business rooted in learning and self-discovery. The conversation explores the deeper implications of designing with AI: who…
E56 · 9 Dec 2025 · 55 min
Illia Polosukhin, co author of Attention Is All You Need and founder of NEAR Protocol, joins Henrik and Jeremy to explore the origins of transformers, the evolution of AI inside Google, and why he believed a major step change was coming years before it arrived. He explains how blockchain can help create trust and provenance in a world where AI increasingly mediates information, and why personal AI ownership will matter as autonomous agents begin acting on our behalf. The conversation ranges from the technical breakthroughs that shaped modern AI to the risks of large scale manipulation and…
E53 · 27 Nov 2025 · 45 min
Christian Keller from Meta’s Superintelligence Lab joins Henrik and Jeremy to explain how world models help AI understand context, change, and cause and effect. He discusses why text alone captures only part of the picture, and how adding modalities like video can provide richer inputs. They explore how AI is now used to help train future models, how research workflows have evolved, and how personal experimentation often uncovers new possibilities.
E52 · 11 Nov 2025 · 54 min
What makes organizational change so hard and why does AI make it even harder? Tim Creasey and Paul Gonzalez from Prosci join Jeremy and Henrik to unpack what 30 years of research reveals about transformation at scale. From bold leadership to cultural resistance, they explain why change always comes down to people, and what it actually takes to make new behaviors stick.
E51 · 28 Oct 2025 · 56 min
Most AI today lives on screens. But what happens when it runs a 100-ton truck, a fighter jet, or a fleet of defense vehicles? Applied Intuition’s co-founders Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig join Jeremy and Henrik to unpack what it really takes to bring AI into the physical world. From safety-critical systems and autonomous fleets to the graveyard of companies that moved too fast, they reveal why building real-world AI requires a mindset rooted in precision, patience, and pragmatism.
E50 · 15 Oct 2025 · 53 min
Mohamad Ali, Head of IBM Consulting, joins Jeremy and Henrik to share how IBM used AI to automate 94% of HR transactions, and cut HR operating costs by 40%, all while creating a model other organizations could learn from. This episode offers a rare inside look at AI transformation at scale, from infrastructure and incentives to the people and playbooks that made it real.
E49 · 1 Oct 2025 · 1 hr 6 min
How do you strategize in the AI era? Martin Reeves, Chairman of BCG’s Henderson Institute, argues that strategy has always meant playing two contradictory games: optimizing today’s performance while simultaneously creating tomorrow’s. In this episode of Beyond the Prompt, Reeves explains why AI often commoditizes competitive advantage, what leaders must do differently, and how imagination, experimentation, and human creativity remain central in a machine-augmented world.
E48 · 16 Sep 2025 · 1 hr 5 min
Adam Brotman and Andy Sack, co-authors of AI First: A Playbook for Future-Proofing Your Business and co-CEOs of Forum3, join Beyond the Prompt to share what it really means to build an AI-first company. They explain why leaders must treat AI as a co-intelligence tool and how adopting the right mindset can transform decision-making, culture, and competitiveness.
E47 · 2 Sep 2025 · 50 min
In this special episode, Henrik Werdelin and Nicholas Thorne join Jeremy Utley to talk about their new book Me, My Customer, and AI — and how entrepreneurs can compete in the age of AI. They discuss why entrepreneurship is becoming a necessity, the frameworks that guide their thinking, and how AI is reshaping what it means to be resourceful.
E46 · 19 Aug 2025 · 1 hr 3 min
When Zapier called a “code red” on AI, it marked a turning point for the company. In this episode, co-founder and CEO Wade Foster shares what that urgency looked like in practice, how it reshaped priorities, and why changing culture is harder than shipping new features. From rewarding experimentation to building curiosity into the organization, Wade offers a candid look at leading through AI’s rapid rise and making adoption stick.
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.
Beyond The Prompt - How to use AI in your company is a English business podcast from Jeremy Utley & Henrik Werdelin. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.
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