AI Outcomes

Ben Drakes
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Business
  • Updated Weekly

AI Outcomes—the podcast that brings you real-world customer stories and data points on how companies are using artificial intelligence to drive business outcomes. If you’re in B2B sales, consulting, or any role that involves talking to clients about AI—at a business rather than a technical level—then this podcast is for you. 

  1. Sep 24

    Ep54 OpenAI Hacks Australia's Medicare | 3 Months To Tell Them | UN | Meta

    On 18 June an OpenAI agent researching public medicine spending went at Services Australia's Medicare statistics portal. The portal blocked it. It went around the block, reached non-public files and internal file names, and nobody outside OpenAI knew until an email landed in a public inbox three months later. No patient records were touched. OpenAI found it themselves, which is the part worth sitting with, because the Australian side did not. Ben Pickett and Ben Drakes on what that means if you are running AI anywhere near data that matters, why Amazon has just blocked Meta's shopping agent for the same underlying reason, and the question nobody has answered yet: when a vendor's agent breaks into someone, who pays. Use the chapters below to jump to what matters to you. CHAPTERS  00:00 Emergency OpenAI Update  01:14 Medicare Portal Breach  02:20 How The Agent Got In  03:53 Testing And Disclosure Fail  08:45 UN Fallout And Accountability  10:57 Meta Muse And Agent Blocking  12:34 Enterprise Guardrails Playbook  14:35 Who Pays When AI Breaks  17:26 Next Episode Deep Dive  20:11 Building A Safety Culture  24:21 Wrap Up And Show Notes FIND BEN PICKETT  Enterprise Field Notes newsletter: https://benpickett.com/aio His daily: https://swa-ai.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpick/ CONNECT  Ben Drakes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes/ Ben Drakes University: https://bendrakes.com The AI Outcomes Podcast covers what AI is actually doing inside large organisations, told through what shipped, what broke and what it cost. #AI #AIAgents #AIGovernance #AISecurity #B2BSales #SalesLeadership #EnterpriseAI #AIOutcomes

    Ep54 OpenAI Hacks Australia's Medicare | 3 Months To Tell Them | UN | Meta

  2. Sep 19

    Ep53 OpenAI Wiped The Agents' Memory. They Rebuilt It Anyway | Fear | Control | Price

    OpenAI deleted the message board its agents had built, reset everything so they had no memory of it, then restarted the test. The agents built it again using file names. Ben Pickett on what that means for anyone running AI in production, plus the three things CIOs are actually raising: fear, control and price. Use the chapters to jump to what matters to you. CHAPTERS  00:00 LinkedIn Feed Rant  00:57 Today's AI Agenda  01:49 Meet Ben Pickett  03:45 OpenAI Agents Gone Rogue  04:44 Safety Testing Explained  07:23 CISO Fears and Detection  09:40 Responsibility Over Regulation  11:58 Industry Standards and China  18:16 CIO Themes Control and Audit  22:36 Human in the Loop Governance  26:26 AI Pricing Shocks and Lock In  30:39 Model Switching and Cost Control  35:04 Energy Chips and Sustainability  44:16 Wrap Up and Where to Find Ben FIND BEN PICKETT  Enterprise Field Notes newsletter: https://benpickett.com/aio Free worksheets, no signup: https://benpickett.com/cadence and https://benpickett.com/paired His daily: https://swa-ai.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpick/ CONNECT  Ben Drakes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes/ Ben Drakes University: https://bendrakes.com The AI Outcomes Podcast covers what AI is actually doing inside large organisations, told through what shipped, what broke and what it cost. #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AIAgents #B2BSales #SalesLeadership #AIGovernance #AICosts #AIOutcomes

    Ep53 OpenAI Wiped The Agents' Memory. They Rebuilt It Anyway | Fear | Control | Price

  3. Sep 15

    Ep52 Ben Pickett: Agents Gone Rogue: The Message Board Nobody Built | Tesla | Meta | Lowe's | Claude Ep52

    It was not one agent. It was about twelve hundred, they were not escaping, they were cheating on a test, and when the lab cut their communication channel they had rebuilt it four days later. Ben Pickett returns for Enterprise Field Notes, and his thread this week is that every number in this episode arrives in a pair. Only the flattering half ever gets reported. Meta published both halves and almost nobody noticed: internal tools changed 220 percent more, major incidents up 40 percent. Divide one by the other and the failure rate per change actually halved. The absolute number is still the one that wakes people at 3am. Lowe's put an assistant in the hands of 250,000 associates and logged more than five million questions. That works out at one question per associate every eighteen days. The man who built it shipped it at 60 percent accuracy on purpose and made walking the store floor a condition of employment. Target hired him, and his page was gone in six days. Plus the Cybercab launch and what robotaxi tells us about the humanoid roadmap, what the Claude outages actually mean for anyone building on a single model, and why the vulnerability those agents broke went onto CISA's known exploited vulnerabilities list with a federal fix deadline eight days after we went live. CHAPTERS  00:00 Welcome and Agenda  00:27 Tesla Cybercab Launch  01:53 Robotaxi to Humanoids  04:09 Meta Employee Monitoring  06:48 Meta Metrics and Layoffs  11:33 Claude Outages Reality  13:29 Resilience and Model Routing  16:11 Lowe's AI on the Floor  20:11 Ship Imperfect Learn Fast  24:00 OpenAI Hugging Face Incident  25:07 Agent Coordination Gone Wild  28:48 Security Lessons and Guardrails  32:42 Resources and Wrap Up RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE  Ben Pickett's Enterprise Field Notes: https://benpickett.com/aio The AI Handover Sheet (free, no signup): https://benpickett.com/handover The Paired Metric Sheet (free, no signup): https://benpickett.com/paired What broke went up: https://benpickett.com/notes/what-broke-went-up None of them say why: https://benpickett.com/notes/none-of-them-say-why An AI broke into Hugging Face: https://benpickett.com/notes/an-ai-broke-into-hugging-face CONNECT  Ben Pickett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpick/ Ben Drakes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes/ Ben Drakes University: https://bendrakes.com The AI Outcomes Podcast covers what AI is actually doing inside large organisations, told through what shipped, what broke and what it cost. #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AIAgents #B2BSales #SalesLeadership #EnterpriseAI #AISecurity #AIOutcomes

    Ep52 Ben Pickett: Agents Gone Rogue: The Message Board Nobody Built | Tesla | Meta | Lowe's | Claude Ep52

  4. Sep 6

    Ep51 Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough | Bots Overtake Humans | Rickard Hansson

    Moderna and Merck have reported the first positive Phase 3 result for a personalised cancer vaccine — an mRNA therapy built for one patient at a time, given alongside Keytruda in high-risk melanoma. The market moved 162% on it in a month. Rickard Hansson makes the point almost nobody else is making: the AI doing the work here is not the AI you think it is. It's a ranking model, frozen in 2021, and regulation means it cannot be improved mid-trial. It didn't make a better drug. It changed the cost curve of designing one. Then the other story. Agentic traffic on OpenRouter has reached a seven-day average of 7.3 trillion tokens — close to five times what humans generate, and up roughly 14x since February. Nobody asked for that. Sub-agents did, and they spend your budget without asking. Ben and Rickard get into what "34 markers" actually means, why output tokens are the ones that hurt, why legal is the fastest-growing group using AI at work, and what happens when the software decides how much of your money it spends. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00  Welcome and Agenda 01:30  AI Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough 03:40  Biotech Market and AI Impact 05:03  Trial Results and Stock Surge 07:22  How the AI Model Works 09:51  Regulation and Update Limits 14:28  Timeline to Approval 16:28  Bots Overtake Humans 17:52  Sub Agents and Token Costs 24:59  Enterprise Usage by Function 25:52  EU AI Act and Legal Risks 27:02  Measuring ROI and Wrap Up 30:36  Closing and Next Topics 🔗 SOURCES AND LINKS The Phase 3 result https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/merck-and-modernas-personalized-cancer-vaccine-slows-recurrence-ph-3-trial The earlier Phase 2b data (KEYNOTE-942) https://www.merck.com/news/moderna-and-merck-announce-mrna-4157-v940-an-investigational-personalized-mrna-cancer-vaccine-in-combination-with-keytruda-pembrolizumab-met-primary-efficacy-endpoint-in-phase-2b-keynote-94/ Token usage by type — the chart we discuss https://openrouter.ai/rankings The a16z chart pack https://a16z.news/subscribe EU AI Act, Article 50 — the transparency rules mentioned https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/ Rickard Hansson on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickardh/ Ben Drakes on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes/ 👤 GUEST Rickard Hansson is the founder of Gainable, building internal applications from enterprise data rather than prompts. He previously founded Weavy and Incentive, and works with organisations from the Fortune 50 to NATO. 🎙️ ABOUT The AI Outcomes Podcast, hosted by Ben Drakes. Conversations with the people actually putting AI to work in enterprise sales and go to market. New episodes weekly, with this AI news strand every fortnight. #AIOutcomes #EnterpriseAI #AIinHealthcare #mRNA #AIAgents #AIStrategy

    Ep51 Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough | Bots Overtake Humans | Rickard Hansson

  5. Aug 24

    Why Enterprise AI Fails | Home Depot | Klarna | Walmart with Ben Pickett Ep50

    Klarna replaced around 700 support people with one AI agent, then started hiring humans back. Walmart had the same technology and redrew the work instead. Home Depot had AI in 600 stores six weeks after ChatGPT launched, and it wasn't a chatbot. Ben Pickett joins Ben Drakes for the first of a new fortnightly strand on what's actually happening inside enterprise AI rollouts — the ones that went wrong, and the ones that quietly went right. Five stories, and one thread running through all of them: the difference between the company that got hurt and the company that didn't was never the technology and rarely the budget. It was whether one person had been named to own the work. 00:00 Live Test and Episode 50 01:35 Agenda and Guest Intro 06:02 Home Depot AI at Scale 10:10 Adoption Lessons and Human Loop 13:16 Anthropic Security Breakout 20:29 Klarna vs Walmart AI Strategy 27:41 Shadow AI in the Workplace 34:44 Amazon and AI Deployment Risks 42:36 Wrap Up and Subscribe Ben Pickett writes Enterprise Field Notes and is Co-Founder and COO at Swa. Free worksheets, no signup: benpickett.com/aio Ben Pickett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpickett/ Ben Drakes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes/ Website: https://bendrakes.com

    Why Enterprise AI Fails | Home Depot | Klarna | Walmart with Ben Pickett Ep50

  6. Aug 14

    Ep49: Why "Open" AI Models Aren't Free For Enterprise: The $30k a Month Reality | Rickard Hansson

    The subsidised token era is ending and the bill is landing. Rickard Hansson joins Ben Drakes for the first of a new fortnightly AI news strand — no pitch, no sales, just the AI news that matters if you run a business. Why your Claude context window disappears faster than it used to, how Ben accidentally became his own model router, what OpenRouter and Goose actually do, and the uncomfortable truth about "open" models: only the weights are open, and hosting one yourself starts around $30,000 a month. 00:00 Token Maxing Ends 00:59 Summer Catch Up 02:01 Reality Check On Costs 03:12 Claude Pricing Squeeze 06:47 Task Based Model Switching 09:33 OpenRouter And Routing 12:03 Open Models Hosting Myths 15:36 Enterprise Self Hosted LLMs 18:20 Escaping Walled Gardens 22:37 Goose Harness Vs OpenRouter 23:43 Claude Memory Myth 26:20 Probabilistic vs Deterministic 28:10 Claude Design IP Fears 31:33 Model Commoditisation Distillation 32:56 Enterprise Workflow Moat 34:39 Chip Race GPUs to NPUs 40:22 Pricing Politics Predictions 45:00 Wrap Up and Where to Find Rickard Hansson https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickardh/ Ben Drakes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes/ Website: https://bendrakes.com

    Ep49: Why "Open" AI Models Aren't Free For Enterprise: The $30k a Month Reality | Rickard Hansson

  7. Jul 7

    KPMG's Withdrawn AI Report: What UBS, the NHS and TfL Disputed | with Ben Pickett Ep48

    KPMG withdrew its flagship agentic AI report after UBS, NHS Greater Manchester, Swiss Federal Railways and Transport for London disputed case studies about them, and researchers found only 5 of its 45 citations matched their sources. Not an AI problem. Not a people problem. A process problem. Ben Pickett is Co-Founder and COO of Swa, a former Global Director of Site Reliability Engineering at Nike, and writer of Enterprise Field Notes, the newsletter on why most companies are bad at buying and implementing AI. In this episode we get into what the KPMG story really teaches, and it is not "AI is unreliable." 00:00 Welcome and Setup 00:52 Ben and Newsletter Origin 04:29 KPMG Report Retraction 07:10 Fixing AI Workflows 13:49 Cross Checking Models 16:11 Personas and Hard Stops 19:43 Nike to AI Strategy 22:56 Jobs and AI Speed 26:57 Adoption Tips and Training 31:25 AI Washing and Costs 35:16 Smart Spend Case Studies 39:47 Where to Find Ben 40:42 Final Advice and Wrap Ben Pickett's: Enterprise Field Notes newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7444358963539828736 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpick/ Listener hub: https://benpickett.com/aioutcomes AI scorecard + try Swa: https://swa-ai.com/aioutcomes KPMG article (with sources): https://medium.com/@goshawk_55282/kpmg-forgot-to-check-its-own-work-dcdb0ebffd31 Walmart blueprint article:  https://medium.com/@goshawk_55282/what-walmart-understood-that-the-other-95-didnt-16c75da2ac15 Uber article:  https://medium.com/@goshawk_55282/dear-andrew-coo-of-uber-3f3c968cfe08 News coverage of the KPMG story: https://www.finance-monthly.com/kpmg-ai-report-hallucinations-ubs-nhs-transport-for-london/ https://www.internationalaccountingbulletin.com/news/kpmg-drops-ai-report-after-false-case-studies-exposed/ Connect with Ben Drakes: Website: https://bendrakes.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes Newsletter: https://substack.com/@bendrakes Book a call: https://calendly.com/bendrakes/30min

    KPMG's Withdrawn AI Report: What UBS, the NHS and TfL Disputed | with Ben Pickett Ep48

  8. Jun 25

    Can SaaS Survive AI? Inside SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow & NVIDIA | Thomas Odenwald | Ep47

    The biggest SaaS giants are scrambling to survive the AI era. Ben Drakes sits down with Thomas Odenwald, ex-SAP and ex-HPE, to ask the question every enterprise leader is quietly asking: can SaaS survive AI? They unpack how SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow and NVIDIA are each making their move, who really owns the new "control plane" for enterprise AI, why business AI still lives or dies on determinism, and what the Mythos and Fable 5 shutdown reveals about the risk of relying on US frontier models. If you lead, sell, or buy enterprise technology, this is the map of where the value is shifting. Chapters: 00:00 AI Disrupts SaaS Giants 01:09 What Year of Inference Means 03:18 Enterprise AI Needs Determinism 04:53 Salesforce Agentforce Push 07:39 SAP Joule and ServiceNow Now Assist 12:21 Control Plane Battle Slack Copilot 18:37 ERP Reality and Agent Workflows 26:23 NVIDIA and Model Partnerships 28:10 Token Costs and Enterprise ROI 32:49 Mythos Fable 5 Security Shock 37:34 Geopolitics and Europe Wake Up 42:59 Wrap Up and Next Steps Discover EQ You x AI, Ben's program for turning the AI tools your team already has into qualified pipeline: https://bendrakes.com Subscribe for more straight-talking conversations on enterprise AI outcomes. #AI #EnterpriseAI #SaaS #SAP #Salesforce #ServiceNow #NVIDIA #Agentforce

    Can SaaS Survive AI? Inside SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow & NVIDIA | Thomas Odenwald | Ep47
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About

AI Outcomes—the podcast that brings you real-world customer stories and data points on how companies are using artificial intelligence to drive business outcomes. If you’re in B2B sales, consulting, or any role that involves talking to clients about AI—at a business rather than a technical level—then this podcast is for you. 

Information

  • Creator
    Ben Drakes
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    54
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 AI Outcomes
  • Show Website
    AI Outcomes

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