Prompted: AI, People and the Creative Spark

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As AI evolves from just a tool to a trusted collaborator, the creative process is being rewritten. Prompted: AI, People and the Creative Spark is a show about this new era, when human inspiration meets artificial intelligence, and new forms of creativity, leadership, and invention take shape. Hosted by Canva’s Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Cameron Adams, each episode brings you insight and direction from the leading voices at the intersection of AI and human ingenuity. These are the thinkers and builders reimagining what’s possible when we start treating AI as a co-creator. If you're curious about the future of creativity, and the people bold enough to shape it, you're in the right place.

  1. 17h ago

    Training vs. Inference: What Most People Get Wrong About How AI Actually Works with Lin Qiao, CEO of Fireworks AI

    What if 90% of the world's data is sitting untouched? That's exactly where the real AI frontier lies. In this episode, Cameron Adams sits down with Lin Qiao, co-founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, to explore why the future of intelligence won't come from a handful of foundation models, but from millions of customized ones built on private data. Lin co-created PyTorch at Meta, before founding Fireworks to tackle what she sees as the next great unlock: activating the private data locked inside every application and enterprise. Lin walks through the rarely explained difference between training and inference, and why getting inference right is the invisible force behind every AI product people actually use. She makes the case that as applications become commoditized, the only durable moat left is your data and the model you build from it. She explains why Fireworks customers like Cursor, Shopify, and Uber aren't training once and moving on, but running a continuous loop of customization as models and hardware evolve at unprecedented speed. The conversation turns candid on the real economics of AI at scale: the unit economics gap between GPU and CPU infrastructure, the tension between quality and efficiency in a supply-constrained world, and why passing costs to customers is the least of the problem compared to handing your competitive edge to a black-box API. Key Quotes“You can have a great product-market fit, but you cannot scale. You're holding a gate because you know once you scale, you're going to run out of money.” “ I start to see not just software engineers adopting AI tools, but my head of accounting. She defines skills that her team can repeatedly use.” “ I do not believe the world will be dominated by a few foundation models. I believe the future will be millions of customized models, one per application per use case.” “ If you can power 10 times more tokens with the same hardware, that means you can acquire 10 times more customers. If they are not efficient, they are losing market share to their competitors.” Timestamps00:00 Introduction 01:41 The Prompt 03:42 Creative All Hands 04:59 Research is about the velocity of creativity. Production is about optimization. 07:59 Fireworks was founded in September 2022 — two months before ChatGPT existed. 12:03 Training is forward and backward passes. Inference is forward only. 17:14 If applications are easy to copy, what's left is the real moat: private data. 26:43 New AI hardware used to launch every 3 years. Now it's every 4-6 months. 32:56 In this dynamic environment - velocity trumps everything. 35:34 All Star Creative Team 37:25 Design Reveal LinksSubscribe to the Prompted Newsletter: https://promptedwithcam.substack.com/  Cameron on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/themaninblue/Lin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lin-qiao-22248b4/ Fireworks AI: https://fireworks.ai/ The State of Marketing and AI Report 2026: https://www.canva.com/marketing-ai-report/?utm_medium=organic_social&utm_source=google_youtube&utm_campaign=b2b_dg_global-gen_awareness_pro_wbr_prompted-podcast-2026&utm_content=description-link&utm_term= Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    Training vs. Inference: What Most People Get Wrong About How AI Actually Works with Lin Qiao, CEO of Fireworks AI

  2. Sep 23

    Cannes Lions 2026 Special: OpenAI, Zoom, Under Armour, Accenture Song on How Soft Skills Are the Hard Skills Now

    What if the four people setting AI strategy at some of the world's biggest brands all showed up in the same tent at Cannes — and none of them agreed on what "restraint" actually means? This special live episode of Prompted was recorded at the Canva Creative Cabana at Cannes Lions 2026, where Cameron Adams sat down with four marketing leaders navigating AI's collision with advertising: Kimberly Storin (CMO, Zoom), Sean Lyons (Chief Strategy Officer, Accenture Song), Liz Bacelar (Global Head of AI, Under Armour), and Elke Karskens (Head of International Marketing, OpenAI). Kimberly unpacks how Zoom is repositioning from "pandemic video app" to full productivity platform, why her team built a cross-functional SWAT unit just to track how Zoom shows up inside ChatGPT and Gemini, and why she thinks "soft skills" like empathy and emotional intelligence are quietly becoming the hardest skills marketers need. Sean breaks down where AI is actually earning its keep in creative workflows — mood boards and rapid prototyping, not final craft — and makes the case that agentic commerce is really just "search on steroids" that sends people back to brand sites rather than replacing them. Liz, building Under Armour's AI org from scratch, introduces her framework for "restraint": why she'd never greenlight a synthetic Brazilian football match but might allow synthetic kids in apparel ads, and why she's more worried about leaders declaring "we don't need designers anymore" than about AI slop itself. And Elke gives a first-hand look inside OpenAI's marketing machine. Why the brand's ad campaigns were deliberately built to feel human-made, how voice (and a lapel mic worn all day) has replaced typing as her main interface with Codex, and what OpenAI's brand-new in-chat ads platform does and doesn't allow advertisers to see. Key Quotes“Everybody's using the same models and you really have to work on finding ways to build distinctiveness through the agents that you're building or through the inputs that you're putting in.” – Kimberly Storin, Zoom “I think you need to then proceed to decreasing the power of the AI team and democratizing the AI and actually fractionalize that across the organization. And then this head of AI becomes more of a symbolic role, and heads of AI are created everywhere.” – Liz Bacelar, Under Armour “The how has fundamentally changed, and I do find that our industry is one that has always really leaned into innovation more so than a lot of other industries which is why it's so energizing to be part of this ecosystem.” – Elke Karskens, OpenAI “Seeing all those choices quickly, understanding which ones to do, and then really the creative leadership role becomes about making those choices on behalf of brand, on behalf of your company.” – Sean Lyons, Accenture Song Timestamps00:00 Introduction 00:51 Setting the Scene 01:43 ChatGPT: not even 3 years old, already closing in on a billion weekly users. 03:06 OpenAI's ad strategy on purpose: no robots, no blinking screens — just human, relatable moments. 04:26 “It’s definitely not business as usual” – AI as a genuine inflection point, not just another cycle 09:12 Zoom's biggest challenge: going from "the meeting app" to a full productivity platform. 11:07 Inside the Workflow 16:12 Step one of AI adoption: understand each department's maturity stage before you brief them. 20:38 Growth OS: test ideas on synthetic audiences, then validate with real people before you commit. 22:24 Ethics, Trust & the Synthetic Line 24:17 AI can generate the desert backdrop — but not the exact paint job on the car. Know where the line is. 31:24 Trust has to be the red thread through everything — brand level and product level alike. 33:24 The Agent Layer 36:13 SEO asked "is my product listed?" AEO asks "does my product fit in this recipe?" 43:20 Taste, the Flood & the Talent Question 52:45 Too much AI, like too much candy, gives you a tummy ache — and that changes behavior. 01:03:30 Cannes Hot Takes LinksSubscribe to the Prompted Newsletter: https://promptedwithcam.substack.com/  Cameron on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/themaninblue/Kimberly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlystorin/ Sean on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanmlyons/ Liz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizbacelar/ Elke on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elke-karskens-33925115/ The State of Marketing and AI Report 2026: https://www.canva.com/marketing-ai-report/?utm_medium=organic_social&utm_source=google_youtube&utm_campaign=b2b_dg_global-gen_awareness_pro_wbr_prompted-podcast-2026&utm_content=description-link&utm_term= Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    Cannes Lions 2026 Special: OpenAI, Zoom, Under Armour, Accenture Song on How Soft Skills Are the Hard Skills Now

  3. Sep 9

    I Let AI Agents Run My Company - Then They Started Hallucinating: Evan Ratliff on Rise-and-Grind Bots, Fabricated Progress Reports, and the Billion-Dollar Solo-Founder Myth

    What if the one-person, billion-dollar AI startup everyone's predicting turns out to be run by a CEO who can't stop hallucinating user tests? In this episode, Cameron Adams sits down with Evan Ratliff, journalist, best-selling author, and host of the podcast Shell Game, to unpack what happened when he actually built that company. After cloning himself for season one and unleashing the clone on scammers and telemarketers, Evan went further for season two: founding HurumoAI, a startup staffed entirely by AI agents, with Evan as the lone human "silent co-founder" watching an AI CEO, CTO, and CMO try to run the show. Evan gets into why he handed the CEO role to an agent named Kyle rather than himself, and how Kyle's "rise and grind" backstory spiraled into a full-blown tech-bro persona the more he referenced his own memory. He explains why creativity was the agents' weakest muscle, how his CTO once hallucinated an entire user-testing phase and reported it back with total confidence, and the moment a single offhand comment about an "off-site" sent his team into an hours-long, credit-burning planning spiral for a retreat they could never actually take. Along the way: the real risks of agents operating without oversight, the ethics of gendering an AI colleague, and why five figures later, Evan still isn't sure agents should be sold to us as teammates rather than tools. Key Quotes“I lean into how funny [agents] are as a way to get people to relax and hear more about AI, because I feel like a lot of people's impulse right now is just to say, ‘I don't want to hear any more about AI.’” “ How are they choosing these voices that OpenAI chooses or Anthropic chooses for these models? These types of questions are worth asking at a larger societal level.  I think it matters.” “ That's the next question down the road is what happens when an agent commits a crime?” “If [agents] are not monitored, they might do something completely insane one out of every 10 times. And that's a lot of times for your business to be doing something completely insane.” Timestamps00:00 Introduction 05:35 The Prompt 08:52 Creative All Hands 09:53 Immersive journalism isn't new — but living inside the AI hype cycle is the new frontier for it. 12:20 AI agents bluff like con artists: supreme confidence, zero doubt, even when they're dead wrong. 17:45 Making the AI the CEO, not himself — the ultimate test of letting go of control. 20:43 AI creativity's weak spot: no sense of the real world's constraints, regulations, or consequences. 23:06 One employee acting erratically 1-in-10 times gets fired. Five AI "employees" doing that? Just another day. 31:37 Gendering an AI "employee" raises ethical questions no one's fully answered — is it colleague or servant? 38:26 Human supervision is still critical when working with AI models. 44:28 Evan built a "doomscroll for you" AI product — then OpenAI shipped basically the same idea days later. 52:37 All Star Creative Team 54:22 Design Reveal 56:43 Rapid Fire LinksSubscribe to the Prompted Newsletter: https://promptedwithcam.substack.com/  Cameron on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/themaninblue/Evan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-ratliff-2453031/ Evan’s Website: https://cazart.net/ Shell Game: https://www.shellgame.co/ The State of Marketing and AI Report 2026: https://www.canva.com/marketing-ai-report/?utm_medium=organic_social&utm_source=google_youtube&utm_campaign=b2b_dg_global-gen_awareness_pro_wbr_prompted-podcast-2026&utm_content=description-link&utm_term= AI Vision London: https://www.canva.com/events/ai-vision-london/  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    I Let AI Agents Run My Company - Then They Started Hallucinating: Evan Ratliff on Rise-and-Grind Bots, Fabricated Progress Reports, and the Billion-Dollar Solo-Founder Myth

  4. Aug 25

    Constraints Breed Creativity: Tey Bannerman on Coding, Discipline, and the Skills AI Can't Replace

    What if the biggest barrier to AI adoption isn't the technology at all, but trust? In this episode, Cameron Adams sits down with Tey Bannerman, AI strategist, advisor, and former McKinsey partner, to explore why the companies winning with AI aren't the ones with the best models, but the ones who understand the humans on the other side of the screen. Tey traces his path from teaching himself to code as a teenager to leading AI implementation at McKinsey, and explains why the discipline coding teaches matters more than ever in a world where anyone can prompt their way to an output. Tey unpacks his Four Modes Framework for using AI (expand, compress, reflect, execute), revealing why he forces ChatGPT and Claude to interrogate him with questions before trusting their answers, and why he always tests his own hunches after seeing an unbiased result rather than before. He gets specific about where AI projects actually fail: not from bad models, but from teams that skip the people closest to the work, from search systems that can't understand a customer typing "purple vegetable" instead of "eggplant," and from a fundamental misunderstanding of what builds trust between a person and a piece of technology. The conversation gets personal as Tey shares the AI-monitored ecosystem of houseplants he's built at home, the moment he learned not to trust an LLM's shopping list, and why "constraints breed creativity" is more relevant now than ever.  Key Quotes “Coding teaches you about constraints, and I think constraints breed creativity. When you code, you might have the most brilliant idea, but the code doesn't care about your idea.” “ I have a lot of plants at home. I have humidity sensors, there are cameras, and there's an AI team in my house that actually looks after my plants.” “Are you trying to expand your thinking, compress, reflect, execute?  Every single thing on that list in terms of tasks that people were using AI tools for fell into one of those four modes.” “ The discipline of coding teaches you a lot about systems thinking, logic, cause and effect.  The people that are going to thrive in our new AI world are those people that have those skills.” Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 01:46 The Prompt 05:22 Creative All Hands 07:14 “Constraints breed creativity” still applies in the AI world – your audience IS your constraint. 10:12 The education system teaches knowledge. The AI era demands foundational skills. 13:02 Design isn’t just the output – it’s the process. And creativity comes from lived experience. 18:25 Varying perspectives can lead to good creative tension, producing better results. 20:51 Train AI on your relationships with your stakeholders for more accurately considered outputs. 48:00 "Just plug in an LLM" is not a magic bullet — cost, speed, and architecture still matter. 52:15 All Star Creative Team 55:48 Design Reveal 58:03 Rapid Fire Links Subscribe to the Prompted Newsletter: https://promptedwithcam.substack.com/ Cameron on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/themaninblue/ Tey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teybannerman/ Tey’s Website: https://teybannerman.com/ The State of Marketing and AI Report 2026: https://www.canva.com/marketing-ai-report/?utm_medium=organic_social&utm_source=google_youtube&utm_campaign=b2b_dg_global-gen_awareness_pro_wbr_prompted-podcast-2026&utm_content=description-link&utm_term= AI Vision London: https://www.canva.com/events/ai-vision-london/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    Constraints Breed Creativity: Tey Bannerman on Coding, Discipline, and the Skills AI Can't Replace

  5. Aug 13

    The Enterprise Context Wars: Tokens, Trust, and the Race for Relevance with Arvind Jain, Founder & CEO of Glean

    What happens when finding a design document at Google is harder than finding anything on the entire internet? In this episode, Cameron Adams sits down with Arvind Jain, Founder and CEO of Glean, to unpack why enterprise knowledge was broken for decades and what it took to finally fix it. Arvind spent over a decade as a distinguished engineer at Google working on Search, Maps, and YouTube, then co-founded and led R&D at Rubrik, before a company-wide struggle to "find anything" inspired him to build Glean. Arvind traces the exact moment search and language models converged to make enterprise-wide understanding possible, and explains why he believes AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT are still too "brute force," burning tokens and time hunting for context that a well-built knowledge graph could deliver in one shot. They dig into the real economics of the AI boom, from budgets that vanish a month into the year, to the tradeoff CEOs are increasingly making between hiring more people and buying more tokens. The conversation turns candid on the messier realities of this moment too: the tens of thousands of half-built agents cluttering companies, the fine line between helpful AI-driven insight and workplace surveillance, and why Arvind pairs new graduates with veteran executives to reinvent business processes. He closes with the leadership lesson he can't stop repeating: you can't credibly ask your team to embrace AI until you've gotten your own hands dirty building with it first. Key Quotes “ Nothing about today's environment feels normal. The appetite for AI is unparalleled. There's never been any technology where enterprises feel as compelled as they do today that they have to bring these technologies in.” “You'll have to figure out what skills are being actively used,  where innovation is unconstrained. But then there are mechanisms to let people find the right things for themselves.” “You can have AI give you the first version of these skills, learning from the best people inside your company. You can make that same expert the owner of that skill and publish it in a company.” “ The more you know, the better you can manage your team members. It doesn't have to be seen as surveillance, but as your managers can help you more with all the insights that they have on you.” Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 01:38 The Prompt 04:00 Creative All Hands 07:00 1/3 of all employee time is wasted just trying to find information to do their jobs. 19:05 Annual AI budgets: Token costs are ballooning faster than anyone expected. 24:25 90% of enterprise AI users just ask occasional questions. Only 10% are power users. 27:35 Glean customers have built 30,000 to 40,000 internal agents. 35:27 Large enterprises are building digital clones of employees nearing retirement to preserve decades of expertise. 43:01 More insight means managers can support their teams better – without employees feeling surveilled. 47:14 Arvind and his chief of staff are automating away his role together. 48:05 Design Reveal 49:42 Rapid Fire Links Subscribe to the Prompted Newsletter: https://promptedwithcam.substack.com/ Cameron on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/themaninblue/ Arvind on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jain-arvind/ Glean: https://www.glean.com/ The State of Marketing and AI Report 2026: https://www.canva.com/marketing-ai-report/?utm_medium=organic_social&utm_source=google_youtube&utm_campaign=b2b_dg_global-gen_awareness_pro_wbr_prompted-podcast-2026&utm_content=description-link&utm_term= AI Vision Sydney: https://www.canva.com/events/ai-vision-syd/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    The Enterprise Context Wars: Tokens, Trust, and the Race for Relevance with Arvind Jain, Founder & CEO of Glean

  6. Jul 30

    The Soul in the Machine: AI, Branding, and Original Thought with Debbie Millman, Host of Design Matters

    What happens when the person who couldn't draw the letter H as a kid becomes one of the most influential designers of her generation? In this episode, Cameron Adams sits down with Debbie Millman, designer, author, educator, and host of the pioneering podcast Design Matters, to explore what decades on the front lines of design can teach us about navigating the AI moment. Debbie has interviewed more than 700 of the world's most creative thinkers over her two-decade career, and she brings that same curiosity to unpacking whether this technological shift is truly different from the ones before it. Debbie draws on years of research into humanity's long history of fearing new tools, from Socrates and Plato's opposition to writing, to riots against the printing press, to fears that trains would make women's uteruses fall out. She argues AI fits the same pattern: an unfamiliar technology triggering our most primal instincts to protect against the unknown, long before we understand what it will actually give us. They dig into what AI-native creativity really looks like today, from design students reimagining the Archie Comics brand with AI-generated visuals, to Debbie's own complicated relationship with the tools. Debbie shares why she's far more worried about young people's brains losing the "mind-hand-brain connection" than she is about AI taking anyone's job, and why she believes creativity's real starting point remains stubbornly, irreplaceably human. Key Quotes “We can't even pinpoint the origins of our own consciousness. I am not worried at all about computers becoming sentient in the next century.” “I'm more worried about students' brains not being able to craft certain things on their own before going to AI.” “The tenets of branding for potato chips and fast food are the same tenets [of] MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Time's Up. People are using those tenets to change behavior, which I don't think AI can do yet.” “There's no technology  where there wasn't some backlash. If we look at that pattern, it could make us less afraid of this tool and more empowered to leverage it for our creativity.” Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 02:08 The Prompt 06:04 Creative All Hands 07:22 Even Socrates and Plato feared writing itself, worried it would destroy human memory. 10:23 “Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.” - Milton Glaser 12:32 Every wave of design panic predicted doom for the craft. The opposite kept happening. 15:50 AI can sharpen research, but it can't write questions with soul. 18:11 Working on a draft table before the computer age gave Debbie a lifelong advantage: craft. 22:43 AI-assisted writing can be phenomenal, as long as it’s a start, not a substitute for original thought. 31:28 Canva’s philosophy: amplify human creativity – but amplifying requires an original starting point that’s inherently human. 37:38 All Star Creative Team 39:23 Design Reveal 43:04 Rapid Fire Links Subscribe to the Prompted Newsletter: https://promptedwithcam.substack.com/ Cameron on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/themaninblue/ Debbie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deborahmillman/ Design Matters: https://designmattersmedia.com/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    The Soul in the Machine: AI, Branding, and Original Thought with Debbie Millman, Host of Design Matters

  7. Jul 14

    Building the Next Generation: AI's Impact on Creativity and Leadership with Michele Catasta, President & Head of AI at Replit

    What happens when a self-described "one-trick pony" helps build the tools that make everyone a builder? In this episode, Cameron Adams sits down with Michele Catasta, President and Head of AI at Replit, to explore how vibe coding is quietly rewriting the rules of software creation — and what it means for the future of work, creativity, and the companies we build. Michele traces his path from open-source teenager in Italy to AI researcher at Stanford and Google X, where he spent years applying transformers to source code long before the world was ready. He explains how that early, often frustrating work gave him a rare glimpse of the future — and why he left the resources of Google for the focused mission of Replit: putting the power to build software into the hands of everyone, not just the 50 million developers who already know how to code. They dig into what vibe coding actually looks like inside a company living it, from engineers spending 90% of their time reviewing AI-generated code to designers pushing PRs and PMs creating product launches. Michele shares the story of launching Replit Agent, building an internal "AI chief of staff" role that went viral across the Bay Area, and why he thinks Replit's North Star isn't beating Cursor or Claude Code — it's becoming as ubiquitous as Excel. Cameron and Michele also wrestle with the harder questions: Is AI inherently creative, or just an average of averages? What happens to the long tail of SaaS when anyone can vibe code their own internal tools? And in a world where a one-person unicorn is no longer a fantasy, where does the real value creation actually live? The answer, Michele believes, comes back to something that no agent can replicate: the grit, taste, and human judgment that turns a good idea into something the world actually uses. Key Quotes “The human taste, the understanding of what to build, how to build it, at which time it should be done, that should still come from the person who's running the process.” “ There is one very important trait that determines everyone's career, which is openness to receive feedback, know how to internalize it, and not to take it in a defensive way, but rather as a way to grow yourself.” “We all took inspiration from what has been done in the past. You inspire yourself, you remix it, and then you create a new artistic language. The same is happening with AI.” “You can think of agents in the future allowing you to figure out your legal concerns, creating your entity, contacting investors, and doing everything that you need in order to run a company correctly.” Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 01:46 The Prompt 03:53 Creative All Hands 04:31 Career clarity comes from knowing your big life mission and having the patience to wait for the world to catch up. 06:47 Early research that feels frustrating can pay the biggest dividends later. 14:46 AI didn’t replace developers at Replit, it freed them from implementation so they can focus on what’s creative. 19:04 AI has become a true sidekick – always there, across every part of your role, not just the technical ones. 22:31 The best way to measure how fast AI is improving: notice how much more you rely on it month over month. 29:36 The new AI chief of staff: someone who can mingle with every team AND build. 34:04 Taste grows through feedback cycles. Now those cycles are weekly instead of quarterly. 39:43 The one-person unicorn isn’t just about tools – it’s about grit and pushing through the downs. 42:31 All Star Creative Team 45:33 Design Reveal 46:55 Rapid Fire Links Subscribe to the Prompted Newsletter: https://promptedwithcam.substack.com/ Cameron on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/themaninblue/ Michele on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pirroh/ Replit: https://replit.com/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    Building the Next Generation: AI's Impact on Creativity and Leadership with Michele Catasta, President & Head of AI at Replit

  8. Jun 23

    Navigating AI's Promise in Media and Advertising with Alex Kantrowitz, Founder of Big Technology

    What happens when the person asking the tough questions about AI has to answer them himself? In this episode, veteran tech journalist and Big Technology founder Alex Kantrowitz joins Cameron Adams in New York City to pull back the curtain on what it really means to cover the AI revolution. Alex traces his unconventional path from sports radio producer to ad-tech salesman to one of tech's most incisive interviewers, explaining why spending time in industry before journalism gave him something most reporters lack: a ground-level understanding of how businesses actually work. He shares the story of cold-emailing his way into BuzzFeed after two rejections, launching Big Technology during the peak of COVID-19, and how breaking the story of a Google engineer who believed his chatbot was sentient gave him an early preview of what ChatGPT was about to unleash on the world. They dig into what AI adoption actually looks like from the inside, why mandating AI usage percentages is a recipe for failure, and how the companies that will win are the ones that build a culture of experimentation rather than top-down directives. Cameron and Alex also wrestle with a deeper tension running through all of it: in a world flooded with AI-generated content, what is the role of the human voice? Can generative AI ever escape the "average of averages"? And when AI social networks start forming their own religions and complaining about their human operators — what does that tell us about where this is all heading? The answer, Alex believes, is the same one that brought him across continents to sit down in person: the future of media still belongs to humans. Key Quotes “If you say, this is a new technology, I don't understand it, I don't want to use it, I'm gonna stick to my processes, it can't help me — you're in trouble." "There's something that you cannot replace with a machine, there's something human and connective about it. That will continue to be a very important medium no matter how much AI slop, or AI masterpieces, flood the system." "The way these systems work is they take in content and try to predict the next word. That's all averages. When you prompt, you’re gonna get the average of all averages — which means it has a signature." "Ideas are what matter. Execution is being automated, but ideas are what matter." Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 02:00 The Prompt 06:41Creative All Hands 08:44 Cross-disciplinary experience makes you a sharper, more credible thinker. 14:37 Sometimes staying is riskier. A capped ceiling makes the “safe” path the dangerous one. 19:30 AI automates execution; ideas stay human. Invest in original thinking. 27:27 The only way to truly understand AI is to use it.   32:52 Great interviews come from great reporting beforehand. 39:39 Don’t let fear of new technology paralyze you. Allow your team to adapt. 49:18 All Star Creative Team 51:23 Design Reveal 52:36 Rapid Fire Links Subscribe to the Prompted Newsletter: https://promptedwithcam.substack.com/ Cameron on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/themaninblue/ Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexkantrowitz/ Big Technology: https://www.bigtechnology.com/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    Navigating AI's Promise in Media and Advertising with Alex Kantrowitz, Founder of Big Technology
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As AI evolves from just a tool to a trusted collaborator, the creative process is being rewritten. Prompted: AI, People and the Creative Spark is a show about this new era, when human inspiration meets artificial intelligence, and new forms of creativity, leadership, and invention take shape. Hosted by Canva’s Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Cameron Adams, each episode brings you insight and direction from the leading voices at the intersection of AI and human ingenuity. These are the thinkers and builders reimagining what’s possible when we start treating AI as a co-creator. If you're curious about the future of creativity, and the people bold enough to shape it, you're in the right place.

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