## SHOW NOTES

**Episode 2: When Agents Meet Reality**

The agentic AI landscape just crossed a threshold. The question is no longer "can we build agents?" — it's "can we control them?" This episode unpacks three stories that mark that crossing point, and what they mean for builders at every scale.

**In this episode:**

- OpenClaw — the first mainstream personal AI agent, and the first real agent security crisis. What the "lethal trifecta" means for anyone deploying autonomous agents.

- OpenAI Frontier — an enterprise platform for managing fleets of AI agents. What it signals about where the hard problems now live.

- Agent observability — Cisco's new monitoring tools and why logging what agents do (not just what they produce) matters at every scale.

- The trust architecture split — ChatGPT ads vs Anthropic's ad-free stance, and why your platform's business model is a dependency decision.

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

SHOW NOTES

Three stories from the first week of February 2026 — and a single thread connecting all of them.

Two hundred and eighty-five billion dollars wiped from global software stocks. Two competing enterprise AI platforms launched on the same day. And a survey of sixteen hundred business leaders quietly confirmed that most organisations have no idea how to deploy what they're building. The coverage was dramatic. The framing was almost entirely about large organisations. Here's what it means for founders.

**What we cover:**

- Two adoption paths: OpenAI's top-down Frontier platform vs. Anthropic's bottom-up Cowork — and why the distinction matters if you're not an enterprise

- The SaaS panic: what triggered the $285B selloff, the "SaaSpocalypse" narrative, and why the pricing pressure is good news for lean operators

- The readiness gap: 76% of organisations can't make their processes legible to agents — and why that's a structural advantage for founders who can describe how their business actually works

**Named sources:**

- Fidji Simo, OpenAI CEO of Applications — on Frontier as end-to-end enterprise agent platform

- Barret Zoph, OpenAI GM for Business — "transitioning agents into true AI coworkers"

- Jason Lemkin, SaaStr — counter-take on the SaaS selloff: "Nobody is building a homegrown CRM in Replit to replace Salesforce"

- Gartner — assessment of Cowork plugins as "potential disrupters for task-level knowledge work"

- Celonis — survey of 1,649 business leaders on agentic readiness

**Key numbers:**

- $285B wiped from global software stocks in the first week of February

- Thomson Reuters down 18%, RELX down 14%, Salesforce down 14% over five sessions

- Software price-to-sales ratios compressed from 9x to 6x

- 85% of leaders want to become "agentic enterprises" within 3 years

- 76% admit their processes aren't structured for agents

- 47% lack internal expertise; 45% struggle with AI understanding business context

**Links:**

- The Agentic Entrepreneur — the book and toolkit: theagenticentrepreneur.pro

- All Things Agentic newsletter: allthingsagentic.xyz

- Voice synthesis by ElevenLabs: [affiliate link]

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