AI News for End of September 2026

0:08Brandon Whichard: Good morning, good evening, love you, Aaron. Welcome back to the Enterprise AI Show. This is your host, Aaron. And for this Sunday's show, we have AI news for the second half of September. It's hard to believe it's October already. What happened to 2026? It's just crazy. But Brian and Brandon talk about Oracle and data center builds, the new wave of agents that have been released, and the trend of consumer AI companies really trying to cross over into the enterprise and how they often start at disadvantage. And all of that is coming up right after this break.

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2:22Brandon Whichard: And we're back. And Brandon, it's good to be with you, man. I have been off and about. I've been slacking my duties of trying to hold down the Enterprise AI show. But you and Aaron have been doing a good job. You've been doing a great job. Good to be with you. We are doing the second iteration of this half-month AI news of the month because stuff is kind of coming fast and furious. And we want to try and keep up. How have you been, man? How are you keeping up with all this crazy stuff?

2:45Brian Gracely: I'm doing fantastic. I have now 17 different personal agents running my life, telling me what to do, what not to do. They're arguing. So it's just chaos. But I feel eventually, if I get enough email or enough agents, they're going to work it all out for me.

2:57Brandon Whichard: Yeah, I do feel listening. You guys had a good show this past week. You were talking about all the new agent announcements over on Software Defined Talk. I do feel like at this point, you need to start. I always feel like you're always like, somebody's going to figure out this calendaring thing. Somebody's going to figure out forms. I feel like you need to have a show that's just entirely about agents and forms and agents and calendars. And you're just, I think you're going to surface a whole bunch of people that are going to be like, oh, I've been waiting for like a place to center our things.

3:23Brandon Whichard: And you may end up figuring out that you started with calendars and then you become like the next Slack, right? Like they started off doing some weird thing. And then people were like, hey, what if we turn this into a multi-billion dollar communication channel? And there you go.

3:35Brian Gracely: Absolutely. That is, it's true. People like to give me a hard time talking about the calendaring and the scheduling things. But I do often like to, every time there's like a new thing and people are like, this is going to change the world. I like to bring it back to the simplest use case that I personally experience every day. And Brian, sometimes I do it with you. Like we have to schedule some times to talk, right? And like record. And it's amazing to me that over the entire duration of my career, it's generally been the same when you're outside your organization. Of course, like when you're inside, you're all on the same calendar, you can usually schedule a meeting.

4:05Brian Gracely: But, and I just think to myself, it's always like, everyone's like, this is it. This is gonna take over. Okay, will I still have to email or Slack my friends and colleagues to be like, scheduling. So I remain. There's the Turing test, of course, created by a famous mathematician. And then I guess we'll just call this the calendar test, which is just when will a corporate task be very easy to accomplish with all of this new technology? I'm still waiting. And I still haven't got my Muse agent to talk to my Anthrop or OpenAI dot to work with Claude to schedule anything. I'm still doing that manually.

4:36Brian Gracely: But maybe that's my fault. Maybe I'm just not good enough at using agents.

4:38Brandon Whichard: I think you're not spending enough time on it. I think you need to spend all of your time on it. That's what Dave told me. Which is the great irony.

4:45Brian Gracely: I'm not working hard enough with my agents to get them to do what I want. It's my fault, which is exactly what we want with our new technology. That's right. That's right.

4:54Brandon Whichard: We do have to, we are obligated by law to talk at least for a couple minutes about college sports, especially about college football. What's your take on the year? So far, my take on the year is even the best teams that are out there stink. I think Texas stinks. I don't think anybody has shown themselves to be really good yet, but we still love it. We're not going to not watch it, but I do feel like this is a year where we're going to have a lot of mediocre teams that people say are pretty good, but I don't feel like they're that good this year.

5:19Brian Gracely: I think that's generally true, but I also put this in the category of this is the year that the college coaches just all complain constantly. It used to be very clear that lever's like a pecking order. The top teams basically hoarded all the best talent. They were the best, and for the most part, they beat everyone else. And at the end of the year, somewhere between, let's say, four and eight of them that we kind of always knew was going to they're going to work out what the national championship is. But now you can pay people and the talent is like much more dispersed. And suddenly it's like all the great coaches are suddenly like all mad because they everything is wrong with the system because they can't essentially keep all the talent and they have to like actually go out and play much more competitive games.

6:00Brian Gracely: which is I think great for us as a fan because of what you're saying before it gives a sense there isn't a dominant team every week you kind of feel like something interesting can happen and of course it just reminds me of I just if you think of college football coaches as executives it's like yeah exactly like you remember all the things you were talking about how great you were and your culture and everything else it's like suddenly that doesn't matter as much when you don't have these natural advantages so I always like that when it happens I like watching college football through the lens of applying it to like the real world and of course the games have been fine and they will continue to be fine.

6:31Brandon Whichard: Yeah. Yeah. No, I, yeah, no, it is. It is interesting to watch that for anybody who's paying attention. Apparently there's some new legislation that's just going to fix everything. It's going to get all the money thing back in order. You'll feel good about your team again, but we'll see where that goes. Apparently that may get signed sooner than later. I do want to talk about one thing and I was supposed to be on your show over on software to find talk this past week. And the, the thrill, the real kind of highlight of being on your show is being able to give a recommendation. The rest of the show is fine.

6:55Brandon Whichard: We cover a lot of it here as well. But I think giving the recommendation is the most important thing anybody ever does. And I felt bad because I wanted to give the recommendation to go watch this. The trailer's out. I think the real movie doesn't come out for a couple of weeks, but there's a new movie about the blood lady, Elizabeth Holmes. She's getting ready to go to jail. And apparently she invited this documentarian person to come live in her house for three weeks before she went off to jail. And it is, at least from the trailer, and again, maybe the movie's going to stink, But from the trailer, it is such a good look into some of these just absolutely insane Silicon Valley people that think they are like bigger than the world.

7:33Brandon Whichard: And so I highly recommend it because I do feel like maybe three, four years from now, we're going to be seeing a similar one for Dario or Sam Altman or something along these lines. But just watching this lady abjectly just lie to this person over and over again and him just being like, are you lying to me? Are you insane? That was my recommendation is to at least just go watch the trailer.

7:51Brian Gracely: Somehow you've given a great recommendation there, but I think you even somehow undersold it a little bit. It's not just a documentarian. It's Nathan Fielder, who's this performance artist slash documentary. And he's done a bunch of crazy things about being a pilot. And you have to go see his works. He himself, it's hard to even explain what he makes. He makes this like awkward kind of like real life things. And so he's the one doing it. That in itself makes it interesting.

8:19Brandon Whichard: Yeah.

8:19Brian Gracely: But then when you watch the trailer, I feel like they have two people, you know how they say, especially on a podcast, you don't want there to be dead air. Like human beings will feel dead air. But you watch these two talk and they seem to be both masterful as I'm not going to say one word. I'm just going to hold it. And even when you're just watching the trailer, you're like, you feel like you want to say something. You're like, this is getting awkward. So, yeah, I don't know. It looks fascinating. I'm going to have to see it. We have to watch it. That's the bottom line. We'll come back in a few weeks.

8:47Brian Gracely: We'll give you our official recommendation on it.

8:51Brandon Whichard: We might have to do one of those things that I know other, what is it? Like Y2K. It's not Y2K, but there's other podcasts that do this where they're like, okay, everybody, we're all going to watch the movie. And we're all going to be like, all right, 3, 2, 1, start watching YouTube right now. And then we go. Oh, group watch? Okay, there we go. Yeah. All right. We have to rewatch or just like a live watch just to be like, what is going on right now?

9:11Brian Gracely: All right. I like it. We're doing it. We'll figure it out.

9:14Brandon Whichard: We'll figure it out. I think it's in the movie festivals right now, so it probably won't come out for a little while. But yeah, put that on your list of things to watch. Maybe around Christmas time. Could be coming out around then. All right. Let's see what's family. Let's dive into some news. First thing, we do actually have a cloud news this month, even though we're doing mostly AI news. And you threw this in there, so you might know a little more about it. The headline is Oracle Sends Force Majeure, which I had to remember to go look up. I think that sort of means like act of God, but it means something you can't control.

9:41Brandon Whichard: Oracle sends force majeure notice about data center project stock drops 3%. What's going on here? Is this Oracle trying to find ways to get out of these massive financial commitments they've made over the next three to five years?

9:54Brian Gracely: I think potentially. That's why I think we should have put it on here. It's one of these things that could easily go unnoticed. So they have this major data center project. I think it's in New Mexico. I think it's called Project Jupiter. And it's whatever. It's one of these major build-outs. And that's one of the reasons Oracle stock ran up quite a bit last year. I think I'm sure we talked about on the show. And then, of course, it's come down quite a bit since then. And it's, of course, like there's the perpetual, are we in a bubble? Like we don't have that conversation. But I think what's more interesting is we should just watch what people do, or in this case, what companies do.

10:22Brian Gracely: So I thought this was a little interesting. It was like, they've basically cited, I don't know what's interesting in the articles. I was like, what actually happened? Did it rain a lot? What was the, like, what was the actual thing? But it's a little unclear to me what exactly is going on. There's some pipeline problems and some environmental issues. So anyway, they're just citing this as, hey, if this doesn't finish on time because of like reason, force majeure, whatever the reasons there, we may need to delay our payments. Okay. So that's the part that I thought was interesting. And I just think it's, okay, we should just watch this, right?

10:52Brian Gracely: This is maybe nothing. It's almost like the onset of a cold. You know, sneezing a little bit, could be nothing. You're just going to get through, maybe it's a little allergies. Or it could be like a little bit of like, this could be the, because this is what normally, this is how this stuff goes. I don't have to tell you. It's like, yeah, the companies don't want to pay this money back. And then all the things people have been saying about how like it wasn't on the balance sheet and it's held in this other company and the lawyers get involved and all this weird Latin phrases get involved, like force majeure and like somehow they're not paying.

11:22Brian Gracely: And then that's a sign that like we could be in a little bit of trouble. So I don't I'm not saying anything's happening now. I think this is just like I wanted to put it on here and be like, we should note this. Right. We should know exactly whatever, wherever October 2026. just be like, okay, we saw a little thing here that gave us a little bit of trepidation and let's watch it. And now we see another, either Oracle or another company kind of do this. It's like, that would be a trend. If not, we'll just, we'll say it's a one-off thing.

11:48Brandon Whichard: Yeah, this is, I feel like, and I always get the letters wrong. Is it XKCD that always has that picture that's here's the enterprise stack. And then there's one little thing at the bottom that's a random guy. Holding everything up, right? I feel like there's been a lot of people who have gotten real fancy and built these charts that show all the sort of circular financing between NVIDIA has sells to these companies, but also find, and those are all cool. And whether or not people understand circular financing or not, who cares? I do think we need, somebody needs to make the great diagram that is like, whose money is holding up other people's money, right?

12:20Brandon Whichard: Because I think that's the one that's more interesting because if this is one where you go, okay, Oracle has money in these data centers and that money is propped up and how much of that money is propping up these other things that are, like, I think we need a propping up chart. And I don't know what the exact name for a propping up chart is. Maybe it's like a Jenga chart or something along those lines. Kote would probably know. He always knows the names of all the charts. But I feel like that's what we need, right? The same way that there's like the clock in Times Square that tells you what the national debt is.

12:46Brandon Whichard: I think we need some sort of Jenga thing. And maybe that's, maybe we actually, maybe that is something that the Enterprise AI show should try and patent the same way that the Magic Quadrant has a thing. But we should have the Jenga chart of AI, try and come up with something. And then people can beat up and say, no, that's wrong. This block is more important than that block. But I feel like that's the thing people want to understand, less than the sort of fancy circular charts, because that doesn't really tell them anything.

13:08Brian Gracely: I really like what you're going there, because it's almost like outside of all the circular financing, it's like you probably have the prop is probably like a boring construction company. It's like, this company has poured concrete and bought this land and hired these contractors and they don't have any stock and they don't care. They actually have invoices where they have to pay for the physical things. Because that's probably on the other end of this is like what it is, right? It's like all the people that are actually building the things, which are probably like boring contracting type companies.

13:36Brian Gracely: And no, like we need money to buy, to build the thing. And if you stop paying us and like, we're leaving, we're not like, we're not going to build.

13:44Brandon Whichard: It would be the great irony that like everyone talks about like the Mag 7 and stuff, which Oracle is not really part of the Mag 7. If Oracle ended up taking down the entire AI industry and you were like, man, nobody was looking over there. Nobody was, I don't even feel like Ed Zitron really yells about Oracle all that much. But maybe this is, maybe you have uncovered sort of the beginning of the Jenga board. We'll watch.

14:05Brian Gracely: We'll continue to watch. We'll see if this actually loosens the Jenga tower or if it was just nothing.

14:10Brandon Whichard: That's right. So if CNBC wants to have you on or Jim Cramer or any of those folks, you are available. I'm available, absolutely. For interviews. It does feel like these last two weeks, because again, we're trying to do this in two-week chunks. It feels like the last two weeks has been all about people launching new agents. And it's like there, we've been talking about agents this year. Everyone's like, this is the year of agents and there's lots of agents and stuff. But it does feel like there was a new, I don't want to say like a whole new paradigm of stuff, but it does feel like some new interesting stuff came out.

14:37Brandon Whichard: Meta launch Muse, OpenAI launch Dots, OpenClaw Enterprise got launched, which was interesting because OpenClaw sort of rolls up. The guy, Peter, who invented Claw, OpenClaw now works for OpenAI. So it feels like OpenAI has their proprietary version with Dots. and now they also have OpenClaw Enterprise. I know you've been obviously around the agent space quite a bit. Any thoughts out of all these things that jumped out at you amongst any specific one or all of them as a whole?

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15:47I don't know.

15:48Brian Gracely: Now, is it too simple to say I find it all a bit confusing? There's so many different agents and things like that. And I watched several of the keynotes. I watched the meta keynote with Zuckerberg. And they went through the whole Muse thing. And the big thing there was all about the glasses. And now they have this charm thing that you're going to be talking to it all. But if I was just a step back, it puts inside this idea of everybody wants a chief of staff in their life, right? That's kind of the metaphor that keeps coming up where it's like you have this chief of staff. and the chief of staff can just do things for you and you just tell it what you want it to do and life will be great.

16:23Brian Gracely: But then when you start using these things, I don't know, man, this is a lot of work, right? I got to go in and keep my news agent. I got to name it. I got to kind of tell it what I want it to do. I got to make sure it stays on track. I'm supposed to give it goals, but then that causes me to do like more self-reflection. I'm just like, this is just a lot of work. I don't know if I want to sign up for all of this. That was my, and then of course it's, I don't know. I'm not against the glasses thing at all, but it's Zuckerberg wearing it. And the glasses do look a lot more normal. So that's one thing.

16:51Brian Gracely: That's the one thing. It's like you could wear these glasses and it'd be like, look like a normal human being, right? Not like you're walking around with a giant Vision Pro on your head. I mean, it would have been one of those things.

17:00Brandon Whichard: It is one of those things where you look at it and you go, anytime they come out with stuff that you're supposed to wear, there's a certain part of it. You're like, is it functional? And since it's a piece of wearable, is it sexy? Is it fashionable? And you would have thought at some point, instead of coming out with the big honking black nerdy glasses that have been the stereotype of nerd, like he would have at least just come out with like the Tom Cruise Ray-Bans and just been like, yeah, like this is universally accepted as cool. And then there's some, there's some nerd technology behind it, but I don't know.

17:30Brandon Whichard: I feel like every time there's a wearable thing, there is a certain aspect of it as it functional, but also what I want to wear that thing. And I still don't think Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg seems to feel like every couple of years, he's like, I'm going to come up with the new fashion thing. Like I got the big chain, now I got the glasses. And you're just like, dude, nobody's ever thought of you as like a fashionable person. Why do you keep putting yourself out in front of this thing? And I think part of it's like, I'm the CEO, so I'm going to do what I want to do. But like, he doesn't seem to get that part of the, or actually none of the technologists seem to get that part of the thing.

18:01Brandon Whichard: So I don't know.

18:01Brian Gracely: But yeah, I think they, because they're built, I think what they're trying to do is they're taking, this is like what I was talking about in product management, though. The classic mistake is to, you assume you're the customer. Right. And you kind of take what you want and then you, then you build it and you're like, nobody wants, people don't know what you're doing. And you're like, we should have talked to them earlier. We needed to talk. And I do think it is, and it's just interesting in general, because I just kind of watch it all the time. I'm like, I don't know, man, I have this phone, I have AirPods.

18:23Brian Gracely: I can talk to it. It's like, do I, I don't know. Do I need these glasses? Like, why exactly do I need all these glasses? What am I doing with it? And they show all these different, I don't know, contrived use cases. And you're like, yeah, I guess I could do that, but I probably won't do that. You know what I mean? I mean, I'll probably just walk around with my AirPods on and listen to stuff and talk to my agent, at least initially that way. But I guess the big thing that, you know, that they maybe did figure out, maybe this is a little bit to OpenClaw. We have to have your colleague.

18:48Brandon Whichard: I'm going to do an OpenClaw Enterprise show here pretty soon. I've got a good contact for that. All right, yeah, you've got it because you have contacts here.

18:54Brian Gracely: But I was feeling part of me, the opening question I would have asked them would have been like, it feels like all of these agents are just taking the ideas from OpenClaw, right?

19:03Brandon Whichard: Oh, yeah.

19:04Brian Gracely: And what was it? I can't remember. What was the thing called before OpenClaw? I forgot the name. I can't believe I forgot the name.

19:09Brandon Whichard: Well, it was OpenClaw. And then you had NemoClaw. And then you had all the other stuff. Yeah, so whatever it was. All of this.

19:15Brian Gracely: But this idea that you just need to have a computer dedicated to you to do stuff, it does feel like they've all taken that. Muse, that's the one thing you can. Muse, you basically get a computer in the cloud, right? And you can just have it do stuff, which is nice, which is like you don't have to mess around. If there's something you do every day, scan these articles and send me a summary or anything like that. That's kind of nice. but it's been around for a while. So if you haven't done it, it's new to you, but it's also a lot more convenient. But a lot of that, I was just getting, where I was going with that.

19:43Brian Gracely: And that's what would be interesting when you have the person on, right? Talk to them is, yeah, a lot of these ideas are just being lifted in a good way, I think, out of OpenClaw and let's make it easier. Like human, regular people aren't going to have a computer at home dedicated to OpenClaw. So let's give them a computer in the cloud. So that part I kind of like, because it's kind of normalizing some stuff we've been talking about.

20:01Brandon Whichard: Yeah, I feel like there's three pieces to this whole thing, right? I think the Muse thing was interesting to me. I'm a little bit like Matt Ray. I don't necessarily want to trust Facebook with a whole lot of things. But anyways, I think the one thing that was interesting was they are essentially like we're giving, to a certain extent, everybody on the planet their own virtual machine. And you're like, okay, that's one good thing. Because in theory, you're like, okay, it's in the cloud. That should allow a lot of different things to interconnect to it. So whether I'm on my laptop or I'm on my phone or sometime I'm somewhere random, but I'm like, I wish my agent would do something.

20:35Brandon Whichard: So I think like that's a step forward is you're like, okay, you don't have to think about, do I, do I have to have a machine running at my house? And how do I get that out onto the internet and all sorts of like complex nerd stuff? You're like, okay, that's a step forward. Now is Facebook the best company to do that? I don't know. Right. But like you look at that and you go, that feels like a step forward because people don't want to manage their own computers, at least in the masses. And, oh, and by the way, if you're thinking about this long-term, you're like, that probably means that AMD and Intel stock is probably going to go up a lot.

21:06Brandon Whichard: Cause if they just literally gave out a billion computers to people that are basically running on CPUs, somebody is going to make a lot of money on that. So you're like, okay, maybe those two things will go together, not financial advice. The second thing I feel like is nobody's quite answered the thing that says, okay, so I have an assistant. And I feel like the thing that you always have when an assistant, whether it's a personal assistant or now a bot assistant, is you're like, who do I blame when it screws stuff up? And that always is the thing that's like, do I want to give this access to my bank account?

21:35Brandon Whichard: Do I want to give it access to my credit card? Because you're like, I know what I want, but if I'm, and I guess it can learn and figure out those sorts of things, but you're like, I also don't want it to screw up and then all my money is gone or something. And I don't think they've quite captured the essence of what should that experience be, right? It's still super, super open-ended and so on and so forth. And like, they don't really get into being like, yes, we have all these security controls, but you're like, yeah, but that's 50 different knobs and stuff. I don't really know how to do that.

22:04Brandon Whichard: And then the third thing, which I think is the ultimate question is they always go, this is going to let you focus on the important stuff, right? But it's like, don't worry about the other stuff. This is going to help you focus on the important stuff. And I feel like that's a, that's like the big open-ended question that most people don't really think about. And I don't even know how you go about thinking about that question. Okay, let me take my entire life. What's the most important things? And then I want to give everything else to this thing to do. And I feel like that open-ended question, which obviously can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, that feels like something Apple would work through for you.

22:39Brandon Whichard: And the rest of them are all just, well, if you give them 57 different nerd knobs, they'll sort out what's important in their life and they'll figure it out. And it feels a little bit like Android versus Apple at this point for those big things. But I do think that giving everybody their own computer, and I think others will emulate this, is a big step just because it's, oh, that's a thing. It's probably secure. I don't have to manage it. I can get to it from anywhere. It'll figure out things like MCPs and other stuff for me, and I'll pay some nominal fee per year, 50 bucks a year, 20 bucks a month, or whatever it is.

23:11Brandon Whichard: I think that feels like a big step that might not feel huge, but does feel like a huge thing if you want this to work for the masses.

23:19Brian Gracely: I agree with you. And this kind of brings up something I've been thinking about, like maybe the agents are just in the wrong place. Because right now it's like the thought is like you, Brian, have a personal agent and you delegate like SAS to. And I think sometimes like if you invert the idea, it's like, no, what you really want is when you're taking action on something, you want at that moment an agent to maybe offer to do some things for you. And then you can decide to do it. And if you think about that, the idea is you're at the doctor's office and they hand you a form, right? And it's like what you would like at that moment to be something to be like, do you want me to just fill this form out for you?

23:53Brian Gracely: Do you want me to just put all the information on there and look at it for you?

23:57Brandon Whichard: Yeah, just point your phone at it. It goes up.

23:58Brian Gracely: And yeah, because at that moment, like that's, you know what I mean? It's like you want all that to just work, right? Because you know at that moment, like you writing the form down, at least when I get forms, like half the time I will mess it up, right? but it's like you and it's the same idea as like you just when i'm like because i just want to i don't want to be thinking about all the things i want to delegate as i'm doing things what i would like is this things to jump in and be like i can take this from here if you want it because because at that moment you have the context to be like yeah this is an easy thing or it's an unimportant thing just do it or vice versa you may be like imagine you're at home details like no i want to select the paint color i actually because i have an opinion about it but then once i've selected that maybe I want, yeah, go out, have the paint mix, get it ordered and all that.

24:42Brian Gracely: And so I think the idea of just us being like, like you're the center and the agent, you have to work on the agent versus like just having these agents either be around you or like, even from someone else. It's like, Hey, I see you're doing all this. Let me take it from here. And then you've looking at it and be like, yep. Just like you would work with a, usually like a someone on your staff, right? Like you kind of get to a point that that person you think knows exactly what needs to be done. And you're like, just do it. You're like, I don't want to hear, I don't, I don't want to hear anymore.

25:08Brian Gracely: I want to just please finish the task for me. I'm not worried about it anymore. But that may, there was a point where you're like, there's maybe 20 minutes of conversation before you got to that, right? So I like the idea. And I think maybe that's just, it's like the agent should be around us, not maybe like with us all the time, if that makes sense.

25:23Brandon Whichard: Yeah, and that's the piece I feel like we're, we haven't quite figured that out yet, right? So like you do a whole bunch of stuff and you probably have a hundred skills sitting in your Claude account, but they're in Claude, but they're local to you. and you can only do it, but like, there's not necessarily an easy way to be like, oh man, I just talked to my friend and he's running the same problem I have. Here's my skill. Like you just, you want some easy way to just be like, Hey agent help Mike out. Right? Like you don't want to have to be like, all right, let me go in my skills folder and transfer it to you so that you can do a thing.

25:53Brandon Whichard: And yeah, I don't think we've quite figured out the interaction for it yet. Whether it's like on a personal level with like you and home Depot or you and your doctor's office, or even just, hey, you've got six people that you work on work projects with. How do you make that work? So you're like, all right, the right people go to the right meetings. If you don't really have to be at the meeting, but you do need to get the status update, like your listening agent goes to the meeting and it figures out those sort of things from, I don't know, from the agenda or from the action item list of the last one or whatever.

26:23Brandon Whichard: I don't think we haven't quite figured out the way to do the thing that we would do as humans, which would be like, hey, I got to send somebody an email or send them a slack and we'll work out like, Hey, do you have some time to work on this? But yeah, I do like that idea that you're just like, it's there, but you don't have to think about it necessarily being there or you don't have to think about being like, I got to manage the thing. And I don't know what that structure is yet, but it does feel like on the individual level

26:46Brian Gracely: for all the people that are using any type of coding agent. And even if you're not doing a coding project, like this is how I feel like you get better at using this agents. It's like, because I will often start with like, just do the slash plan, describe kind of what you want to do, build a plan for it. But then you start talking to the agent and then start, because it's not always obvious about like what it can do and what you should do. And I have these conversations with the agent all the time. Okay, highlight the things I need to do. And then highlight, and then sometimes I'll go back and like, do you think you can do that?

27:14Brian Gracely: And it'll be like, I can, but you got to give me an API key and do this and this. And then maybe I make the decision. I'm like, like, if it's something that's going to happen a lot, I'm like, maybe I should tend to spend a little time trying to make this automated and let the agent do it. Other times I'm like, oh, it doesn't matter. I'll just like, it needs me to click on a box here. I'll just do that real fast. And it's in that, but that's like we're working together versus like I have to think about the agent all the time and like the agent's in the cloud and what's it doing now and stuff like that.

27:36Brian Gracely: So I don't know, it's just interesting going forward. We'll see where the agent actually lives.

27:39Brandon Whichard: The other thing I'm wondering, it does feel like if we look at some of these things from the perspective of, okay, so this new one's named Muse and then you've got Dots. It does feel like they, there is some group of people who are like, okay, we asked the engineers what we should call this thing and they came back with things like death hammer and goes are the goesarian and blunt force or what and they're like all right we can't do that because people are afraid that ai is going to kill us i need to get some people to go out and just go hang out in like the soft cuddly section of ebay or etsy or whatever and just figure out some names come up with some things that make people think this thing won't be so scary it feels a little bit like when people were like oh hey i'm watching ghostbusters and hey there's the Stay Plough and Rick Moranis thought about the Stay Plough Marshmallow Man.

28:20Brandon Whichard: People were like, oh yeah, he's totally cute and cuddly and all that sort of stuff. And then he became the Stay Plough Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters and destroyed the city. But it does feel like there was a conscious effort to be like, let's not make something that sounds like it might kill people.

28:32Brian Gracely: Well, it's funny because they've really largely outsourced it. That's the onboarding experience for Muse is you see the weird Teletubby person. They're like, what should I call you? I'm like, I'm not going to be creative here. I'm just going to call you Muse. But people give her different names. And Sam Altman, he named his dots. I can't remember. He gave them names. And So it's kind of like pets. But again, I guess we're so far down, like making a human being, trying to make all this look like human beings and pets and stuff. It's like, it's a weird metaphor.

28:56Brandon Whichard: But it does feel like we're on the sort of second layer of this. Cause it was like, all right, version one was Surrey and Claude and people were like, oh, those don't feel that cuddly.

29:03Brian Gracely: Yeah, everybody. That's true. They're definitely the people that design funny looking mascots that look like children's toys. They're making a ton of money right now. The dots kind of look like the muse mascot and they all have all colorful and squishy and friendly. So it's, I don't know. It's almost like we're all back in preschool. We're playing with our squishy agents.

29:20Brandon Whichard: Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, that'll be interesting to watch. It'll see if Anthropic comes out with something soft and squishy. I don't know what, Apple seems to still be stuck on Surrey, but it does feel like there's an opportunity for them to come up with something different. In potentially happy news for the AI CMO, Anthropic, Dario, did put out an X post that they discovered a new enzyme in some sort of DNA. So as much as we've been saying like, hey, could you guys invent something that would be like good for humanity? It does feel like they figured out something, but it's like, it doesn't seem to have gotten any news whatsoever.

29:53Brandon Whichard: So I think people are, it feels like people are like, oh yeah, okay. Yeah. That science stuff. I guess maybe you'll figure it out, but let's get back to the killing people sort of thing. But I thought it was interesting that they published this. He made a long post about it pre IPO. I feel like there's not enough of these things coming out of Anthropic, but maybe there are a bunch.

30:09Brian Gracely: Like I guess it was more open. There's that, that week where they solved all the hard math problems. Oh yeah, that's true. And it's, I think the problem is, it's back to the CMO stuff. It's not like the stuff isn't important. It just doesn't, you know, it's like, it is if you're in the CMO meetings, like, listen, I know what you did was really important, but I'm not sure anybody will really care about this. They'll see about it. Because like, first you have to explain the math problem. And that, of course, as soon as you do that, 75 % of the audience is listening. And then you explain how it was solved.

30:34Brian Gracely: And now five people are listening. And so can we just, I don't know, like just make everyone like more rich or something? Is there something simple we could do? Yeah. So there's some way like people don't have to eat less and they can still stay in shape or that's because that's the kind of stuff people want. They don't want us to be like, oh, the really hard math problem that you didn't really understand is now solved.

30:53Brandon Whichard: Yeah. I think if you ask most people, you'd be like, hey, math, is it solved? They'd be like, I don't know. Yeah. They put people on the moon. I'm sure they've solved math. So yeah, that was interesting. But yeah, you would think they would be like, hey, just a good news. You can have a Snickers every day and you're going to lose weight and you're going to live five years. They'd be like, fuck yeah. Good job. High five. High five.

31:11Brian Gracely: Let's get more of that AI stuff. Let's get more data centers out here.

31:14Brandon Whichard: Exactly. So, all right, last story I've got. Meta apparently stole MongoDB's CEO, like right before their earnings call, to become the head of Meta Enterprise or rolling out Muse and other stuff into the enterprise. Why is Meta doing this? They are a gigantic consumer company. They have tons and tons of good consumer stuff. Why do they think they want to be in the, are they only going after the enterprise because they're like, oh, it seems like Anthropic and open AI are making a bunch of money in the enterprise. So we need to be over there, even though we really have no place in being in the enterprise.

31:47Brian Gracely: Yeah, I think that you just answered. It's the head of hubris. It's when you have so much money, you can do anything, right? You do whatever you want and they're going to definitely fail at this. I've already ranted on this other podcast, but to make the short story long, it's just to say it's when a consumer company tries to get an enterprise, they're basically at a deficit, right? Because all the things they're good at actually are like things that are not going to make it easy for them to be an enterprise companies. So it's better just to have nothing, to be nothing and start that way. Yeah, not my space.

32:13Brian Gracely: I don't know. It depends on where you work. I worked at several places that had Facebook workplace. It was always a weird thing to have at a workplace. And finally, this ended it. And it won't shock me. Here's a prediction I would put some money on. It's like, whatever, three years from now, this Mongo CEO will leave and they'll wind this division of this group down and it will have done basically nothing. And it will have wasted a ton of money because it makes no sense to me. And I guess I can only imagine how much money they must have had to offer him, right? Because to leave, this is the whole thing too, less about AI, it's just leadership.

32:47Brian Gracely: You're the CEO of MongoDB. You've been there a year, not even a year, right? And I'm sure you've given many speeches about culture and buy-in and you leave the week before, I think it's not earnings, I think it was actually their analyst day. The week before you've flown in your top analyst to show them why this company is positioned for greatness, you just walk out the door. I'm like, this is even at a lower level, an individual contributor level, that's kind of like, you would kind of look at the person and be like, you got to leave right now? You can't wait a week? It's crazy to me.

33:24Brandon Whichard: Yeah, you know how Steve Jobs famously went after John Scully when he was running Pepsi or he was running some division of Pepsi and he was like, do you want to change the world or do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life? I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg went to this guy and said, hey, do you want to do databases? Not even Larry Ellison cares about databases anymore. Do you still want to do databases or do you want to change the world with fuzzy, cute, bouncy agents and stuff? And he was like, I want to change the world, man. This is my chance. I'm going to change the world. He's drank the change the world Kool-Aid, which most people don't get to do.

33:56Brandon Whichard: But yeah, I suspect he made a statement like that. Nobody cares about databases.

33:59Brian Gracely: I think he probably made a statement like that, but he followed it up with, you want all this money? I have all this money in this stock. You want the MongoDB stock or you want the stock that I got tons of it. I'm minting billionaires over here in my division.

34:10Brandon Whichard: He was like, Hey, I don't know if you've recognized I burned through$80 billion. I changed the name of my company to Meta. Nobody cares. We're still making money. And no one blinked.

34:20Brian Gracely: Did you see how much money I just paid all these AI people? I'll make you one of them. So the part of me, like, listen, when the money truck shows up, like I get it. But like later on when this, when he's at face or Meta and he's giving this pitch about how important it is to buy in and the culture and stuff like that. We should be like, hey, didn't you spend 11 months at your last company and leave the day before the one of the biggest, most important days because of money? So let's just, it's kind of back to where we started this whole thing with the football coaches. It's like, whoa, whoa, Mr.

34:49Brian Gracely: Football Coach, like you just told us how important it was to buy in, but didn't you just quit your job like six months ago to come over here for some more money? Can't we all just have a little intellectual honesty before you start shoveling this down my throat that I'm not bought in enough. So that's just crazy. But anyway, I think the whole thing is just, it doesn't matter because it's a rounding error to what they're actually already spending. But I'm like, this seems like a absolutely a waste of time and money that Facebook or Meta will have any enterprise success.

35:17Brandon Whichard: Yeah. All right. That's a good place to wrap it up there, folks. When the money truck shows up, definitely get on board. But yeah, hold your hubris for yourself. Keep that to yourself. All right, with that, man, we're going to wrap it up. Good two weeks of AI news of the month and one little cloud news of the month. Folks, with that, we're going to wrap it up. Thanks for listening. Thanks for telling a friend. And we will talk to you next week.

35:37Brian Gracely: Thanks for listening. Check us out at theenterpriseaishow.com for past shows, newsletters, and all things enterprise AI.