Everyone's Running AI. Nobody's Getting More Done.

Your whole team is using AI. You're generating more than ever. So why isn't anything shipping faster?

That's the uncomfortable question this episode lands on — not as a critique of the tools, but as an honest accounting of what happens when AI accelerates the top of the funnel (ideas, drafts, content, code) without changing anything at the bottom (decisions, reviews, trust, shipping). Cameron Adams, CPO of Canva, put it plainly in a recent LinkedIn post: everyone's individually humming along, but none of those conversations are talking to each other. And neither really are the teams.

This week Dave, Matt, and Richard unpack why the AI productivity paradox is actually a data engineering and trust problem — not a tool problem. Matt's building his own bespoke CRM from scratch because no off-the-shelf system lets agents and humans share the same interface. Richard traces it back to the information island problem of the PC era. Dave burned $50 of free API credits in half a day running his own workflows and had to ask himself whether he's busy or actually productive.

Plus the moment that hit hardest: a developer quote about AI turning learning into a slot machine — where each failed attempt now costs less than reading the documentation. What happens to craft when avoiding the pain is always a click away?

Also in this episode: the Forward Deployed Engineer role emerging at AI-native companies, IBM's finding that 76% of enterprises now have a Chief AI Officer, and the first AI Operators IRL event coming to Northwest Sydney in June.