In the second instalment of our Agentic AI series, Georgia and Matt are joined by returning friend of the pod and AI product expert, Pete Sbarski, to put our AI-generated startup ideas under some very real scrutiny. But first… the news: ⚖️ Legal & Regulatory Shakeups A US court ruled that training AI on legally purchased books = OK, pirated books? Not so much. Germany's taking on DeepSeek, pressuring Apple and Google to block the app over privacy concerns. ⚡️ Infrastructure Watch Amazon's going big in Australia, announcing a massive $13B investment in data centers and solar by 2029. Cloudflare and Google Cloud had a rough week, with outages reminding us that even hyperscalers aren’t immune to single points of failure. 💡 Back to Business: Can AI Actually Build a Startup? Last episode, Claude and Gemini pitched six startup ideas. This week, we brought in Pete to roast them (constructively). Here’s what made the shortlist: 📝 AI RFP Assistant ✅ Compliance Monitor for SMEs 🔍 B2B Data Quality Tool ⚖️ AI Paralegal for Small Firms 💰 Grant Guru for Nonprofits ✍️ Content Copilot for Solo Creators 🧠 Key Takeaways from Pete “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” — some use cases (like legal AI) come with huge liability baggage. Data hygiene does not necessarily mean fancy tools — a lot of orgs want AI, but what they really need is cleaner, more structured data. AI isn’t the bottleneck — people are — from resistance to change to unclear ownership, it’s often human systems holding us back. ✅ What We’re Testing Next We’re moving ahead with two experiments: The Content Copilot – using AI to repurpose and summarise our own podcast archive. RFP / Grant Assistant – trialing real-world applications with a friend’s health tech startup. We’ll be back soon with some early results — and hopefully a winner. 👀 📩 Want early access and exclusive insights from our experiments? Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly executive takeaways from the edge of AI, cloud and innovation here: cloud-dialogues.com