Beyond The Prompt - How to use AI in your company: Daily Summaries Delivered

Why Fear Kills Curiosity and What That Means for AI - with Chantel Prat, Cognitive Neuroscientist

Chantel Prat studies how different brains make sense of the world. Her work starts from a simple idea: every experience leaves a mark. The inputs we consume shape how we think, what we notice, and ultimately who we become. The conversation explores why people often choose familiar rewards over uncertain opportunities to learn. Chantel explains the tension between exploration and exploitation, why curiosity is essential for growth, and how fear can prevent us from engaging with new technologies like AI. They also discuss theory of mind, cognitive offloading, and what happens when we increasingly rely on AI for thinking. The goal is not simply to do better work, but to use AI in ways that help us become better versions of ourselves.Key Takeaways: Curiosity requires safety When people feel threatened, they become defensive rather than exploratory. Fear gets in the way of learning. Better inputs create better outputs Every experience leaves a footprint on the brain. The ideas, conversations, and information we consume shape how we think and who we become. We naturally favor certainty over exploration Our brains are biased toward familiar rewards, even when something new may offer greater long-term value. Curiosity starts with admitting you might be wrong Learning requires recognizing that you do not already have the answer. Without that openness, exploration never begins. Use AI to become better, not just produce more The most important question is not what AI can do for you, but what you still want to get better at yourself. Chantel Prat: linktr.ee/chantelprat The Neuroscience of You: The-Neuroscience-of-you/book 00:00 Curiosity Versus Threat00:31 Meet Chantel Prat01:02 Why Input Shapes Brains04:08 The Output Pressure Trap05:52 Exploration Versus Exploitation10:05 Average Brains And Teams15:35 Theory Of Mind Defined22:12 Practicing With AI Feedback24:31 Offloading Thinking To AI29:50 Humans In The Loop35:16 Age And Tech Reactions42:15 Why Curiosity Requires Safety48:15 Personal Codex And AI50:54 Becoming More Yourself54:34 The Debrief 📜 Read the transcript for this episode: For more prompts, tips, and AI tools. Check out our website: https://www.beyondtheprompt.ai/ or follow Jeremy or Henrik on Linkedin:Henrik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/werdelinJeremy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyutley Show edited by Emma Cecilie Jensen.

Why Your Favorite Brand Stopped Caring About You - Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup

Corporate governance is not a bureaucratic afterthought but the most consequential decision founders make; misaligned structures inevitably lead to mission drift, betrayal of customers and employees, and value extraction over value creation. True long-term trust and innovation require legally binding governance that aligns incentives with purpose, not just profit.

You Can't Outsource Wisdom: Bestselling Author Ryan Holiday on What the Stoics Have to Say About AI

The core takeaway from this conversation is that while AI offers unprecedented efficiency and capability, it cannot replace the uniquely human qualities of wisdom, judgment, and agency. True wisdom comes not from outsourcing thinking, but from the internal work of reflection, decision-making, and moral clarity — much like how physical fitness cannot be outsourced to a trainer. The real challenge in the age of AI is not technological adaptation, but preserving and cultivating our humanity, particularly through Stoic practices that emphasize self-mastery, resilience, and ethical clarity in the face of constant change.

Proof of Craft: What It Takes to Stand Out When Everything Looks Good - with Laura Jones, CMO of Instacart

Laura Jones explains that generative AI is raising the bar for creativity. When everyone can produce “pretty good” content, the real challenge is creating something that actually stands out. The risk is not poor output, but settling too quickly for what already works. She argues that as products become more similar, brand becomes a signal of trust. Not in a visual sense, but in the experience behind it. At Instacart, that shows up in details like how a banana is selected. With over a billion bananas delivered and millions of orders including notes on ripeness, customers are expressing very specific preferences. That behavior led to both new product features and the creative idea behind their Super Bowl campaign. The conversation also explores how teams should work with AI. While it can automate repetitive tasks and speed up iteration, it can also create a tendency to agree with what’s generated, especially when working alone. Laura emphasizes that the best ideas still come from people challenging each other, building on different perspectives, and pushing beyond the first acceptable answer.Key takeaways: Mediocre is easier than ever, which raises the bar for originality When AI gets everyone to “pretty good,” the work that stands out has to go further. The bar is not lower. It is higher. Brand becomes trust when products converge As functionality becomes easier to replicate, the question becomes who you trust to get it right. Brand is the answer to that. Only do what only you can do Use AI to take on repetitive work, then spend your time on judgment, insight, and decisions that require a human point of view. Need-finding still requires real people Synthetic research can help, but it cannot replace observing real behavior. The banana insight came from what customers actually did. Human plus bot plus human Working only with AI makes it easy to agree and move on. The best ideas come from people challenging each other, with AI in the middle, not as the whole process. Instacart: instacart.com Super Bowl ad: Super Bowl (Instacart ad) Laura LinkedIn: linkedin/laurajones ro's post: ro.co/perspectives/super-bowl-economics 00:00 Intro: Originality vs AI Complacency00:27 Meet Laura Jones01:23 Brand as trust when products converge03:50 Personalization and reducing mental load06:24 What still matters in marketing10:33 Why need-finding cannot be shortcut14:09 Using AI without losing judgment16:33 New channels and where customers actually are21:35 Why “dopey ideas” matter25:42 Human plus bot plus human28:44 Inside the Super Bowl ad31:47 From banana insight to product34:49 Taking creative risks at scale37:34 Fear, pressure, and team chemistry46:24 AI and faster prototyping53:26 The debrief 📜 Read the transcript for this episode proof-of-craft-what-it-takes-to-stand-out-when-everything-looks-good-with-laura-jones-cmo-of-instacart/transcript For more prompts, tips, and AI tools. Check out our website: https://www.beyondtheprompt.ai/ or follow Jeremy or Henrik on Linkedin:Henrik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/werdelinJeremy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyutley Show edited by Emma Cecilie Jensen.

Nobody Is Getting New Manager Training for Their AI Team - with Dan Klein, UC Berkeley

Dan Klein, professor at UC Berkeley and CTO at Scaled Cognition, explains that AI systems generate answers based on patterns in language rather than verified knowledge. This makes them highly capable across many tasks, but also means they can produce confident answers even when they are not fully accurate. He introduces the “jagged frontier,” where AI performs very well in some areas and less reliably in others. Because responses are fluent and convincing, it is often hard to see where those limits are, which makes it important to stay engaged when using these systems. The conversation also explores hallucinations as a natural part of generative systems. In some cases, this is what makes them valuable, especially for creative or open-ended tasks, while in other cases reliability becomes more important. Finally, Dan highlights that working effectively with AI is a skill. As more people start using these systems in their daily work, knowing how to guide them, evaluate outputs, and apply them in the right contexts becomes increasingly important. He also shares how his team at Scaled Cognition is tackling this challenge by building AI systems with fundamentally different architectures, focused on determinism and reliability — aiming to ensure systems follow rules, reflect underlying data accurately, and behave predictably in high-stakes, policy-driven use cases. Key Takeaways: AI is designed to sound right, not to know it’s right Models generate fluent answers without knowing whether they are correct, which means users need to actively evaluate outputs You have to learn where AI works and where it doesn’t Capabilities are uneven, and understanding those limits is key to using AI effectively Working with AI shifts your role from creator to editor Instead of starting from scratch, you are reviewing, refining, and validating what the model produces Most people are using AI without knowing how to manage it Skills like delegation, verification, and judgment are becoming essential, but are not widely taught Dan's LinkedIn: linkedin/dan-klein/ Scaled Cognition Website: scaledcognition.com Scaled Cognition LinkedIn: linkedin/company/scaledcognition/ Scaled Cognition X: x.com/ScaledCognition 00:00 Intro: Fluency vs Truth00:34 Meet Dan Klein02:53 Why Fluency Misleads05:11 How LLMs Guess07:30 What Is Hallucination08:54 Deception and Alignment11:22 Why Agents Break12:48 Chaining and Determinism16:01 When Hallucination Helps22:33 Beyond Scale for Reliability30:40 Synthetic Data Training31:10 Enterprise Agent Use Cases33:44 Healthcare Risks39:13 Enterprise Literacy Gap41:27 Delegation and AI Management54:37 The Debrief 📜 Read the transcript for this episode: nobody-is-getting-new-manager-training-for-their-ai-team-with-dan-klein-uc-berkeley/transcript For more prompts, tips, and AI tools. Check out our website: https://www.beyondtheprompt.ai/ or follow Jeremy or Henrik on Linkedin:Henrik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/werdelinJeremy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyutley Show edited by Emma Cecilie Jensen.

AI-Native or Not: The Defining Choice for Companies Right Now - with Melissa Cheals, CEO of Smartly

Greg Shove on Why Most Companies Are Not Seeing ROI On AI (yet)

How to Subtract: The Most Underrated Skill of the AI Era - with Leidy Klotz