Alright, let’s talk AI.
Some weeks it’s hype. Some weeks it’s history. This week is both.
A guy applied to be CEO of OpenAI with a plan to replace the exec team with ChatGPT and buy Google “just for the name.” Ridiculous and it went viral. Meanwhile, CMOs spent $1M on tradeshows no one will remember.
Safe work gets ignored. Bold work gets remembered. That’s why we let a Cloud Employee named Sloan run our summit follow-up. The result: 101 meetings in 10 days.
Let’s get into it.
No, But Seriously…
The $0 Marketing Lesson That Beat a $1M Tradeshow
Marketing’s biggest mistake isn’t bad ideas, it’s safe ones.
That’s why a rejection letter just went more viral than anything our combined teams have shipped all year.
This dude named Ömer Öztok had a ridiculous idea. He applied to be CEO of OpenAI. Not a joke. He literally sent it to them. Here were his highlights:
▸ Replace the C-suite with ChatGPT agents.
▸ Poach Meta’s AI team...payment: free lifetime ChatGPT Plus.
▸ Acquire Google...“just for the name”
▸ Train GPT-6 on his tweets...because who needs the internet when you’ve got hot takes.
▸ Take 50% ownership of the company...fair trade for his leadership, obviously.
Apparently OpenAI actually responded. No idea why...maybe Legal was asleep at the wheel, maybe HR just wanted the laugh but the reply was pretty funny (see picture).
So… he didn’t get the job.
What he got was better. He owned the internet...viral on LinkedIn, Reddit, everywhere.
Meanwhile, most CMOs were busy at a $1M tradeshow that won’t generate a dime, while their social person was back home pumping out “5 tips for AI success” posts that didn’t even get a like from their own interns
That’s the difference. Safe work gets ignored. Bold work gets remembered.
Which forces the real question… when was the last time your work pissed someone off enough to remember it?
The Drop
How our Cloud Employee booked 101 sales meetings in 2 weeks
Here is the setup. We ran the AI Revenue Summit. 2500+ registrants. Instead of handing the list to humans and hoping, we let a Cloud Employee named Sloan run the follow up.
What happened
101 meetings in 10 business days.
45 in week one, 56 in week two.
Strong show rates and real ICPs, not random tire kickers.
Why it worked
Omnichannel, not one-note. Sloan worked chat, email, and phone. People met her on the site, heard from her in the inbox, and even got a quick call when it mattered. Below you can see Sloane working chat on the sign up page. This wasn’t the most effective but she was there when people needed her.
Strike while it’s hot. As soon as someone registered, Sloan was there asking if you wanted to grab time to talk AI strategy. This was powerful. Why wait? Use Sloane’s built in calendaring capability to book strategy meetings right then and there.
Agentic email. Sloan didn’t stop at chat, she worked email too. She followed up when people registered and again after the event. The power of agentic email is that it writes back like a person, answers questions in context, and adds real personalization. That’s what makes it so powerful.
Calling campaign. We didn’t just stop at email, Sloan picked up the phone too. She called when people signed up and again after the event to keep them engaged and moving down the funnel. The phone shouldn’t run solo, but paired with email and chat it adds urgency, creates connection, and catches people who might slip through. In the mix, it’s rock solid.
You’re probably thinking, “Gabe, that doesn’t sound like anything special.” Exactly. That’s the beautiful part. We didn’t invent a new play. We just finally did what every SDR is coached to do — and actually executed it.
Timing matters. Sloan hit people the moment they were on the site, jumped into chat, and offered calendars the second they registered.
Every channel, not one. Chat, email, phone…Sloan worked them all in tandem.
Live during the event. She was in the sessions, offering a free trial so people could see a Cloud Employee in action.
Fast after the event. No waiting for lists to be “cleaned.” Sloan started outreach the minute the event ended.
Events are back, budgets are tight, and everyone’s under a microscope. The difference between a “nice event” and real pipeline isn’t a better keynote. It’s reliable, boring, relentless follow up. Humans can do it, but they get tired, pulled into demos, or buried in admin. Cloud Employees don’t.
We actually do a virtual session on this if you want to check it out here.
The Shortcut
Your AI Stack Will Kill You (If You Don’t Track Costs)
I normally don’t do this… but every founder is asking the same question right now: what’s my AI stack really going to cost me?
Forget the hype. Look at the numbers:
▸GPT-5 $1.25–$10.
▸Claude Sonnet $3–$15.
▸Gemini Pro $0.625–$10.
▸Llama and Mistral often under $0.05.
▸DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemma are cents per million.
The gap isn’t small. It’s 100x swings on what it costs to run your product. Founders who don’t track this are dead. Pricing isn’t an afterthought, it’s your margin. Ignore it and you’ll wake up with a beautiful product and a business model that collapses under inference costs.
This isn’t just a features race, it feels like an economics war.
The companies who are successful won’t be just the ones with the fanciest demos, they’ll also be the ones who can afford to run them at scale.
Tools I’d actually use
Quick Hits
Zoom just went full AI.
Companion 3.0 doesn’t just take notes, it shows up in any meeting — Teams, Meet, whatever. It tells you which meetings to skip, writes reports from everything you’ve said or searched, builds custom agents for your team, and even throws in photorealistic avatars with real-time translation. Free if you’ve got Zoom, $12/month if you want agents. Basically, your “why was this a meeting?” problem just got solved.
Bitrig is wild.
It’s an iPhone app that turns your napkin idea into a real app. No code, no dev team, just describe what you want in chat and watch it spit out the build. The App Store in your pocket.
The news that matters
The Weekly Wire
The End of Rectangles: Meta’s new Hypernova glasses signal the next platform shift: voice. Smartphones keep shrinking bezels and juicing chips, but the real disruption is AI-powered, voice-first interfaces that make touchscreens feel obsolete. Just like the keyboard, mouse, and touchscreen each defined an era, we’re entering the Voice era and Hypernova is only the opening act.
The $100K Brain Tax: The proposed H-1B fee hike isn’t protectionism, it’s a brain drain. Innovation doesn’t happen in isolation, it happens when talent, capital, and teams collide, the exact recipe that made Silicon Valley. A $100K surcharge tells the next generation of AI founders to stay home, cutting them off from the spark that turns ideas into companies.
The Death of CRM: Zendesk dropping Sell isn’t about one product, it’s about a category collapse. For decades, CRM was the system of gravity, hated but unavoidable. Now it’s being demoted to plumbing: a data layer for identity and history. The real action moves to Cloud Employees, where agents drive outcomes and humans orchestrate. The next decade won’t be defined by systems of record, but by systems of action.
AI Hits the Messy Middle: New Census data shows enterprise AI adoption isn’t just slowing, it’s slipping, proof that pilots are easy but production is hard. This isn’t collapse, it’s digestion, the same “trial years” we saw with the internet and cloud. The real question isn’t whether adoption dips, but which leaders push through the messy middle where hype ends and conviction begins.
996 and the New Work Contract
A Ramp study shows San Franciscans grinding 12-hour days and Saturdays, the so-called 996 schedule. It’s not good or bad, it’s a choice. It’s your choice.
