AI Outcomes

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.

AI Outcomes is a business podcast hosted by Ben Drakes, with 54 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Ben Drakes hosts AI Outcomes, a business show with 54 episodes published.

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  AI Outcomes

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

  Sep 24, 202625 min

  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

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  Episode #53

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

  Sep 19, 202645 minS1

  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

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  Episode #52

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

  Sep 15, 202634 minS1

  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

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  Episode #51

  Ep51 Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough | Bots Overtake Humans | Rickard Hansson

  Sep 6, 202632 minS1

  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

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  Episode #50

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

  Aug 24, 202645 minS1

  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

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