Everyone agrees customer experience matters. Everyone agrees AI will transform business. So why is almost nobody actually doing anything about it? Dan and Matthew dig into new research showing that 93% of C-suite leaders say their digital CX needs improvement - even though they know it drives revenue. The problem isn't technology as much as it is imagination. While companies chase efficiency gains they can put in a spreadsheet, they're missing the bigger opportunity to fundamentally reimagine how they serve customers.

Details in the Show:

* Why 76% of enterprises feel behind on AI transformation

* The difference between efficiency gains and relationship innovation

* How ChatGPT's retro campaigns signal something deeper about consumer AI

* How autonomous lawn mowers help us think about CX

About ON_Discourse

ON_Discourse is a private community of C-suite leaders, investors, and innovators who come together to challenge assumptions, sharpen ideas, and drive transformation through discourse. 

As an experiment in modern discourse, the show’s hosts co-founders, Toby Daniels, Dan Gardner, and Head of Discourse, Matt Chmiel, explore how emerging technologies, such as AI are reshaping business, creativity, and culture, grounded in the real-world experiences that emerge from our community’s private Group Chats.

Learn more about becoming part of the community: ondiscourse.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

ChatGPT and Claude are going direct to consumers with nostalgic commercials and friendly interfaces, but underneath the marketing is a fundamental shift in how we interact with technology. Dan, Toby, and Matthew dig into what happens when AI systems become the primary interface for everything - and whether these platforms will be truly open or just feel open while quietly controlling distribution, data, and dollars.

Details in the Show:

* Why ChatGPT's retro marketing makes us want to watch Stranger Things

* The difference between open protocols and closed ecosystems

* How agentic systems change the attention economy (and who controls it)

* Why platform dependency always ends the same way

* What Amazon's playbook tells us about AI's future

About ON_Discourse

ON_Discourse is a private community of C-suite leaders, investors, and innovators who come together to challenge assumptions, sharpen ideas, and drive transformation through discourse. 

As an experiment in modern discourse, the show’s hosts co-founders, Toby Daniels, Dan Gardner, and Head of Discourse, Matt Chmiel, explore how emerging technologies, such as AI are reshaping business, creativity, and culture, grounded in the real-world experiences that emerge from our community’s private Group Chats.

Learn more about becoming part of the community: ondiscourse.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

AI is making predictions cheaper, faster, and easier at scale. But forecasting is still guessing, and NYU Stern Professor Jamyn Edis argues that what AI can't replace is human judgment. In this conversation, we dig into why defining "intelligence" matters, how business actually works versus how we pretend it works, and what happens when we confuse prediction with decision-making.

Details in the Show:

* Why judgment and intelligence aren't the same thing

* The difference between prediction and decision-making in business

* How AI changes what we measure, not whether we should trust the measurement

* Academic vs. business discourse (and why one is afraid of being wrong)

* Putting tomatoes in fruit salad

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ChatGPT just released Sora 2, a tool that lets you create videos starring your own digital avatar. Add that to last week's Pulse, and suddenly we're not just consuming content. we're becoming it. But who actually asked for this? And what happens when synthetic content floods the same feeds we're already exhausted by?

Details in the Show:

* The cameo feature and personalized synthetic content

* Whether people want algorithmically generated entertainment

* How OpenAI is closing the web by moving from tool to ecosystem

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com

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ChatGPT recently launched Pulse, a feature that reads everything you do, repackages your work back to you, as if you are the subject of a daily newsroom. It's like taking notes that talk back, or having someone present your own thoughts better than you could. Is this useful or just another feed we'll forget about in three weeks.

Details in the Show:

* Behavior-driven media vs algorithmic targeting

* The difference between relatability and utility in AI-generated content

* How context plus specificity changes your relationship with information

* Whether this is the start of something bigger or just yesterday's weather report

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com

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The AI revolution promised to transform everything. Instead, we got chatbots that sound smart but deliver work that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, but turns out to be a goose. This episode digs into why the agentic AI hype hasn't delivered transformative experiences, and what's really holding back the next phase of human-computer interaction.

Details in the Show:

• Why "not everything needs to be a conversation" is the key insight missing from AI design
• How the volume knob reveals the flaw in invisible interface thinking
• Why better thinking doesn't equal better doing in the agentic world
• The difference between multi-step reasoning and true agency
• How the internet became static again, and where the UX designers went
• Why AI tools still require you to do your actual work

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com

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Andrew Rosen’s ESPN vs. NYT breakdown is generating headlines, not because it’s about sports or news, but because it’s about institutions facing disruption. This episode doesn’t just recap his argument, it asks a harder question: What does it look like when legacy brands adjust too slowly to seismic shifts in distribution, personalization, and participation?

Details in the Show:

* Why Rosen says NYT is adapting, and ESPN isn’t

* How personalization is breaking legacy distribution models

* What AI-native fandom reveals about the future of content

* How legacy instutions in legacy platforms should adapt to the AI revolution

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Toby, Dan, and Chmiel set out to decode vibe coding but end up in a more urgent conversation about thinking. What happens when our tools get smarter, but our minds get lazier? Who wins in the battle between machine automation and human inspiration?

Details in the Show:

* How vibe coding is amazing (and frustrating)

* The rise of synthetic synthesis and what it’s doing to original thought

* How AI enables performance over understanding

* What happens when the internet becomes a memory prosthetic, and we stop remembering anything ourselves'

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com

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Toby, Dan, and Chmiel dig into the implosion of Gartner’s market cap, and what it reveals about the future of knowledge work. The conversation starts with a provocative question: if the business of certifying value no longer creates value, what’s next?

Details in the Show:

• Why Gartner lost half its value
• The crumbling authority of research firms in a world of AI-generated synthesis
• Why “knowledge work” was always a proxy for service
• If AI can truly replace what Gartner does
• Plus: the annual lobster roll competition, and what it teaches us about surf, turf, and interface friction

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com

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Toby, Dan, and Chmiel examine LinkedIn’s strange grip on our professional lives. What starts as a confession, Toby admitting to opening the app 30 times a day, turns into a bigger question: is LinkedIn a tool, a feed, or just another dopamine trap? Together, they unpack why the platform feels indispensable yet indistinguishable from TikTok or Instagram, and what that says about the state of “professional” culture online.

Details in the Show:

• Why LinkedIn use feels more like compulsion than utility
• The collapsing distinction between LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram feeds
• Dan’s take on why “professional content” isn’t as unique as it once was
• How the platform serves as both a temperature check and a time sink
• Whether compulsive usage equals value or just digital junk food
• What LinkedIn’s stickiness reveals about the broader internet economy of attention

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com

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Chmiel sits down with ON_Discourse members Natalie Monbiot and Craig Elimeliah for a sharp dive into AI’s hidden cost: the erosion of human cognition. Natalie, founder of Virtual Human Economy, shares research showing how over-reliance on LLMs can short-circuit learning, while Craig, Chief Creative Officer at Code and Theory, explores how design choices can either feed (or fight) that decline. Together, they unpack why today’s AI interfaces make it too easy to bypass thinking, and how reimagined UX could keep humans in the loop without slowing progress.

Details in the Show

• Why cognitive “bypassing” is more a UX problem than an AI inevitability
• The MIT Media Lab study showing how starting with AI leads to zero recall and weaker encoding of ideas
• What “caring” means in creative work, and why instant AI answers kill it
• How better interface design could encourage iteration, reflection, and deeper engagement
• Craig’s view on designing AI experiences that empower rather than overwhelm users
• Why friction is the spark for meaning-making and growth
• A challenge to AI product teams: stop optimizing for speed at the expense of human depth

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com.

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Toby and Chmiel continue last week’s conversation on human ingenuity with a founder who’s putting it to the test. Katherine von Jan (KVJ to those who know her) joins the pod to talk about her new venture, Tough Day, and its mission to unlock the best of human potential in an AI-saturated workplace. As a longtime ON_Discourse member and former Salesforce exec turned startup founder, KVJ has a sharp perspective on where AI helps, where it hurts, and why the future of work depends on not automating away what makes us human.

Details in the Show

• Why KVJ believes the next wave of AI should elevate human problem-solving, not replace it
• The overlooked cost of frictionless workflows, and why some struggle is essential to great ideas
• How “human ingenuity gaps” show up inside organizations, and what tools can close them
• Lessons KVJ carried from big tech leadership into startup building in the AI era
• Why today’s obsession with scale blinds us to the micro-moments that define good work
• A challenge to AI founders: build tech that makes people better, not just faster

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com.

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Toby, Matt, and Dan wrestle with what it means to have a “voice” in an AI-mediated world, and what happens when that voice gets flattened, filtered, or faked. This episode digs into the paradox of human ingenuity in the age of synthetic output, the strange intimacy of talking to machines, and why friction, not fluency, might be the future of AI design.

Details in the Show

• Why AI-generated content feels increasingly soulless and how “sludge” became the internet’s new texture
• The performance of trust: how we signal presence in an era of invisible agents
• A defense of friction: what gets lost when AI makes things too easy
• How real-time collaboration with AI can sharpen and not replace human ideas
• Why product interfaces may need less wizardry and more humanity

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com

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Toby, Dan, and guest Craig Hepburn step inside the AI browser wars, and ask if the future of the internet is being quietly rewritten not by models, but by interfaces. This episode zooms in on Perplexity’s new agentic browser Comet, the real promise (and limits) of context-aware assistants, and what gets lost when AI "helps" too much.

Details in the Show

• Why “the browser” might be AI’s most important battlefield, and what Perplexity’s big bet reveals
• The rise of agentic interfaces and the myth of productivity-as-progress
• The paradox of better UX: does frictionless mean future-proof, or forgettable?
• Why Google is still sleeping at the wheel, and how fast that could change
• What Craig learned from testing five AI browsers, and which one might actually stick
• The power (and danger) of right-click reversal: what happens when the browser starts prompting you
• A little “closed system vs. open protocol” debate
• How context layers could finally fix the broken web… or break it entirely

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com

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Toby, Dan, and Chmiel interrogate the quiet crisis hiding inside the AI boom: we’re offloading too much thinking and calling it strategy. This episode explores what gets lost when cognitive offloading becomes the norm, and why the future of leadership may depend on friction, not flow.

Details in the Show

• Why “upstream of strategy” isn’t just a catchphrase—it’s a call to rethink how we think
• Cognitive offloading, groupthink, and the invisible atrophy of over-automated ideas
• What AI can't replicate: disagreement, unpredictability, and taste
• Why trust, vulnerability, and gut-checks still outperform generative polish
• The difference between provocation and prompting—and why AI doesn’t know the difference
• How “the weak ties” in your network might be your sharpest strategic inputs
• The real value of feeling dumb: learning, not performance, is the point

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com

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Dan, Toby, and Chmiel go behind the scenes of Cannes Lions to unpack the real programming, posturing, and potential shaping the creative industry’s biggest week. Is the future of advertising being written on the main stage or whispered behind closed doors?

Details in the Show

• Why the most important conversations at Cannes don’t happen on stage
• How closed-door programming became the sharpest tool for industry change
• The AI content hype loop: tools, platitudes, and the myth of mastery
• Automation vs. creativity: why the exciting stuff is still the unknown
• “Implementation isn’t innovation”—and other Cannes heresies
• The honest (and uneasy) truth about AI’s impact on labor, ads, and originality

Learn more about ON_Discourse.

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In this episode, we’re joined by Taylor Halsted of Shamrock Capital to interrogate the illusion of AI efficiency. What if the mess we’re trying to automate out of work is actually where creativity, connection, and culture live?

Details in the Show

• Why “Head of AI” might be the new “Webmaster”—and just as misguided
• The difference between performing productivity and producing outcomes
• Whether AI is making us more emotionally honest—or just better at faking it
• “AI guilt,” last-mile problems, and the hidden costs of over-orchestration
• Messy work, vibecoding, and the underrated value of creative friction
• What it takes to build AI culture without losing the human core

Learn more about ON_Discourse.

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Toby sits down with Henrik Werdelin and Nicholas Thorne, co-authors of Me, My Customer, and AI, to interrogate the optimistic thesis at the heart of their book, and the paradoxes it reveals. From donkeycorns to Dunbar numbers, this session explores what happens when everyone is an entrepreneur, and no one stands out.

Details in the episode:

• Why founder–customer fit matters more than product–market fit
• The illusion of scale and the power of intimacy
• Donkeycorns, not unicorns: redefining success in the AI era
• The creative danger of agreeable AI (and why we need disagreeable bots)
• What it means to “solve small” and why feedback loops must get weird

Learn more about ON_Discourse.

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Toby and Dan track the decline of Google Search, the end of SEO, and what’s replacing it: group chats, agentic systems, and personalized internets built around behavior, not clicks.

Details in the episode:

• Why search is collapsing (and what’s replacing it)
• How generative AI is reshaping discovery and intent
• What the “human internet” might look like
• Why the future isn’t conversational—it’s contextual
• Blockchain, Web3, and the portability of “your internet”

Learn more about ON_Discourse.

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We have been hosting closed-door, private Group Chats at ON_Discourse for 2 years. In this episode, Toby and Chmiel talk about the ON_Discourse version of group chats and how they are different than the contentious, political experience that was recently profiled by Ben Smith at Semafor.

Details in the episode:

• How the pandemic inspired group chats
• How group chats are the future of media
• Why trust matters more than security in private chats

Learn more about ON_Discourse.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.