Kaizen + Agentic AI: The Enterprise AI Transformation Playbook

Kaizen + Agentic AI: The Enterprise AI Transformation Playbook

AI won't fix a broken process — it just helps you run it faster. That's the trap most organizations are walking into: pointing powerful agents at workflows that were never worth doing in the first place, and cementing the waste in place. In this episode, Chris Bradley makes the case that Continuous Improvement is the non-negotiable core of agentic AI. Recorded from Veritiv's Customer Service center in Jacksonville — the day before a three-day Kaizen — he lays out a simple model for bringing AI to any process: three levels, Automate, Improve, and AI-Native Rebuild. Level one paves the cow path. Level two strips the waste with Lean before automating. Level three rebuilds the process from scratch around what agents can now do — and you can't earn it without doing level two first. He's specific about what an AI-native process looks like in practice: work no human could do, running headless and multithreaded, an agent dropping into an API to do in half a second what a person never could. And he shares the design rule that's mattered most — have agents meet people where they already work, in Salesforce, Slack, or Teams, rather than building a new app nobody wants to learn. The argument is grounded in McKinsey's finding that workflow redesign is the single biggest driver of AI's bottom-line impact — and that only twenty-one percent of organizations have actually done it. This opens a new arc — from individual fluency to transforming the operational workflows the enterprise runs on. Two things to try this week included.

Your Agentic DNA — The Portable Layer That Travels With You

Four years of ChatGPT history. Two years of Claude projects. Custom instructions, saved memories, accumulated context built up across thousands of conversations. And then a new harness ships — Cowork, Claude Code, Codex — and suddenly the question isn't which AI do I use. It's how do I move what I've built up, without starting over. That's the problem this episode solves. Chris Bradley walks through the discipline of building your Agentic DNA — the portable layer of identity, standards, and skills that travels with you across models and harnesses. The system has three phases: Extract what's already there, Consolidate it into a small set of files you own, Deploy those files into every environment where you work. He's direct about what actually moves and what doesn't. Saved memories, in-app history, harness-specific automations — trapped. Files, skills, written context documents, structured prompts — free. The job is moving everything you can to the free side of that line, so the next time a new model or harness drops, you're productive in it within the hour. The episode introduces the Portability Test — three questions for deciding what belongs in your DNA — and closes the Tools That Changed How I Work sub-series. Five episodes on tools. One episode on the layer that survives them. Three things to try this week included.

Tools That Changed How I Work — OpenAI Codex

On April 16th, OpenAI shipped a capability expansion that turned Codex from a coding tool into a true agentic super app. Computer use, in-app browser, GPT Image 2.0, persistent memory, and a plugin ecosystem of ninety-plus integrations — layered on top of the desktop release from February. The practical effect was a step change. Codex stopped being a tool that helped me code and became the environment where most of my work now happens. In this episode, Chris Bradley walks through the seven capabilities that define Codex today, the prompt bake-off practice that drives his tool decisions, and where Codex pulls ahead — particularly on slide and visual work powered by GPT Image 2.0. He's also direct about the limits: Claude Code is still his primary IDE for heavy builds, NotebookLM still wins on source-grounded research, and both Codex and Claude have shown growing pains as the labs push harder at the frontier. The fourth episode in the Tools That Changed How I Work sub-series. The through-line across all four — NotebookLM, Antigravity, the Claude desktop app, and now Codex — is the same: match the tool to the work, and stay willing to move when the picture changes. Three things to try this week included.

Tools That Changed How I Work: Anthropic’s Claude Desktop (Code, Cowork & Chat)

The big three AI labs are all building superapps — but each is packaging them differently. Google blurs everything together inside Antigravity. OpenAI is consolidating into Codex. Anthropic took a third path: three distinct surfaces inside one Claude desktop app — Chat, Cowork, and Code. In this episode, Chris Bradley walks through how Anthropic's approach actually plays out in practice. When to use each surface. Why Claude Code desktop has become his go-to for vibe coding. How Cowork turns Claude from an AI chat into a real workspace that produces documents, spreadsheets, and decks. And why specialization with seamless switching solves the context-switching problem differently than pure consolidation does. Episode 6 in the Tools That Changed How I Work sub-series. Episode 7 goes deep on OpenAI Codex. Chris Bradley is CMO at Veritiv and head of Veritiv's AI Transformation Lab.

Tools That Changed How I Work: Google Antigravity

In Episode 1, I mentioned a competitive analysis I ran in thirty minutes that would have taken two weeks. A global network analysis — fifty-plus competitor locations, fifteen manufacturing hubs, proximity calculations, coverage gaps, and a full action plan for leadership. I never finished that story. The output wasn't a report. It was a functioning Node.js application with an interactive map my team still uses today. Google Antigravity didn't just run an analysis. It built a tool. In this episode, I break down exactly how that happened — and why Google Antigravity produces results that most agentic AI tools can't match. We cover the three capabilities that make it different: its multi-agent architecture, its deep Google ecosystem integration, and its best-in-class browser control — including the audit trail that lets you review every browser session after the fact. We also get into vibe coding — why Google Antigravity is my preferred environment for building knowledge worker applications, and what it means that non-technical professionals can now describe a dashboard or internal tool and have it built in a single session. Plus: the Handoff Test — a simple three-question framework for knowing when Google Antigravity is the right tool to reach for, and when something else is a better fit. What you'll learn: * Why Google Antigravity was built as a developer IDE — and why that matters for knowledge workers * How multi-agent parallel execution works and why it produces results in minutes that would otherwise take days * What browser control actually means, and why the audit trail separates Google Antigravity from every other tool doing it * How to vibe code a production-quality knowledge worker application without writing a single line of code * The Handoff Test: three questions that tell you when to reach for Google Antigravity AI Transformation Lab is hosted by Chris Bradley, CMO at Veritiv — a practitioner-focused series for leaders navigating the shift from generative to agentic AI.