Agents of Scale

Brand Is Back: Guy Yalif on Marketing in the Agent Era

Guy Yalif, Chief Evangelist at Webflow, joins Wade Foster on Agents of Scale to discuss what that means for marketers, how the playbook is changing, and why your SEO team is already your AEO team. Guy's point: AEO is a natural evolution of SEO, not a replacement. But the work is real. Content shifts from keywords to questions. Authority shifts from backlinks to consensus in plain text. Brand and PR are back because LLMs look for what shows up consistently. And agents are not here to read your site, they are here to take action. In this episode: * Why LLM traffic converts 6x better (and why it is not a blip) * The four shifts from SEO to AEO * Why brand is back in the AEO era * Google's WebMCP spec: when agents stop reading and start doing * Brand guidelines as AI guardrails, not static PDFs * Guy's six-level AI maturity model for marketing teams * Individual AI vs. institutional AI: why individual wins don't automatically scale Subscribe for more conversations with the operators and builders turning AI from experiment into infrastructure.

Lovable's Ryan Meadows on the New GTM Playbook

Ryan Meadows joins Wade Foster and Dan Slagen on Agents of Scale to talk about how his revenue org is being rebuilt from the ground up: no traditional BDR team, AI-assisted outbound, customer feedback shipped in minutes, and creativity as the new hiring signal. Ryan's point: when your product lets almost anyone build software, you can't run the old playbook. You have to throw away 70-80% of it. AI handles account ID and outreach. Humans handle quality, creativity, deployment, and change management. And pace becomes the only operating metric that matters. In this episode: - Why Lovable hasn't hired a traditional BDR team - The AI BDR workflow: human-in-loop → approval rate → autonomous - The 80% admin problem that turned Ryan into a Lovable customer - Hiring for creativity over function - Feedback to shipped feature in minutes - Enterprise adoption: governance, permissions, and the "co-founder" framing - Why executives moving into AI companies need to drop the old playbook - "Everything is pace" as the operating question Subscribe for more conversations with the operators and builders turning AI from experiment into infrastructure.

Eric Ries on Vibe Coding and Building Incorruptible Companies

Fifteen years after The Lean Startup, Eric Ries is watching a new generation of founders rediscover and stress-test the core ideas behind build-measure-learn. AI has made the build step radically faster. Code that used to take weeks can now appear in minutes. But Eric's warning is sharp: when building gets cheaper, measurement and learning become the new bottlenecks. Teams that use AI to close the learning loop are flying. Teams that use AI to outsource their judgment are building what he calls "slop factories." In this episode, Wade and Eric cover: * Why the Lean Startup feels more relevant, not less, in the AI era * The difference between vibe coding and engineering * Why LLMs can become dopamine machines that make you feel more productive than you are * How to use AI to learn instead of outsourcing your learning to the machine * Why token maxing is the wrong metric — and validated learning is still the right one * How AI may collapse old functional silos between product, design, engineering, and marketing * Why most founders have never read their corporate charter — and why that matters * Eric's new book Incorruptible, and how governance becomes the art of organizational soul craft * The Costco hot dog story, Cloudflare's free encryption decision, and why "harder is easier" Check out Eric's brand new book Incorruptible: https://incorruptible.co [https://incorruptible.co/]

Guru's Rick Nucci on Building AI Your Team Can Trust

Rick Nucci has spent more than a decade building AI-native knowledge systems at Guru, long before the current LLM wave. In this episode of Agents of Scale, Rick joins Wade Foster to explain why so many enterprise AI efforts get stuck in pilot purgatory. His core argument: the problem is not just which AI tool a company picks. It is whether the organization has trusted, governed context that every tool can rely on. As Rick puts it, today's models are "wonderfully brilliant" but know nothing about your company by default. Without verified internal knowledge, teams risk confident wrong answers at scale. Wade and Rick discuss what separates individual AI productivity from institutional AI transformation, how agentic systems expose the next operational bottleneck, why accountability still belongs to the person using AI, and how Guru's knowledge agents help teams find stale, conflicting, or unverified information before it spreads.

How Wistia started shipping nearly 10x feature releases per year

Most companies are scrambling to figure out AI. Wistia did the hard part first — a total culture reset that made a 188-person company operate with the efficiency of a 30-person startup. Then AI poured gasoline on it. Chris Savage co-founded Wistia nearly 20 years ago, grew it to serve hundreds of thousands of businesses, and took on $17 million in debt to buy out investors and stay independent. He joins Wade Foster to unpack what it actually takes to rewire a company's operating system — and why doubling headcount didn't make them ship any faster. One mandate changed everything: ship value to customers every two weeks. Features that had been sitting on six-month roadmaps launched in two weeks. Wistia went from 12 major product updates a year to over 100 — same team size. Chris explains why the bottleneck in software is shifting to taste, how Wistia's new agentic video editor Remix is turning 45-minute sales calls into 3-minute shareable highlights, and what the "ChatGPT moment for video" means for trust in the workplace. Plus: Wade and Chris riff on Block's AI-driven layoffs. Linked Resources 1. Chris Savage on the Economics of AI Avatars (Sacra) [https://sacra.com/research/chris-savage-wistia-economics-ai-avatars/] 2. Wistia "Complete Control" — AI-Generated Ad Campaign Deep Dive [https://wistia.com/learn/production/ai-generated-ad-campaign] 3. "The ChatGPT Moment for Video" — Chris Savage on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cjsavage_earthlings-weve-landed-at-the-chatgpt-moment-activity-7371955277052657665-7bri] 4. Wistia [https://wistia.com] 5. Chris Savage on LinkedIn [https://linkedin.com/in/cjsavage]