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Season 1 · Episode 07September 4, 20269 min

Podcast episode

Almost Nobody Changed the Company

The PromptsBuddy Podcast

Nearly nine in ten companies use AI. Thirty-seven percent see it in earnings. Rony and Meghna unpack why the tools had a huge year and the scoreboard didn't — and what the six percent who moved EBIT actually did differently.

  • MeghnaStaff engineer

The PromptsBuddy Podcast

Almost Nobody Changed the Company

Theme

0:000:00

Chapters

  1. 00:00Theme
  2. 00:05Almost everyone uses AI
  3. 01:29The scoreboard did not move
  4. 03:12Bought software, not shorter work
  5. 04:52Agents, cancel rates, and the six percent
  6. 06:21What you would turn off
  7. 07:40A manners story

Show notes

Almost everyone uses AI now. Almost nobody has actually changed the company.

Rony sits down with Meghna — staff engineer, fifteen years in backend systems — to dig into that gap. Finance teams with a tab open on every desk. Closes that still take the same number of days. CEOs staring at flat cost-to-serve and wondering who lied.

Nobody lied. The speed leaked into nicer drafts — not fewer steps.

What we cover

  • McKinsey's August 2026 picture — nearly nine in ten companies using AI; thirty-seven percent seeing it in earnings (flat year over year)
  • The six percent — the ones who moved EBIT in a material way, and the operational split that actually matters
  • Copilot as seat count — why a license dashboard is not a work dashboard
  • Coding as the annoying exception — Google's numbers, purchase orders that die, and why claims and onboarding don't fail in public the same way
  • Agents in a rush — Gartner's ship-and-cancel forecasts that can both be true
  • The grim test — what breaks if you take the tools away tomorrow, and three steps that must not exist in ninety days

The one line to steal

It's not a technology story. It's a manners story — who is allowed to delete work.

Sources mentioned

McKinsey, State of AI in 2026 (late August) · Deloitte enterprise AI report · Gartner 2026 agent forecast · Stanford AI Index 2026 · Google engineering coding-assist numbers

Mentioned in this episode

Prompts from this episode

StrategybeginnerStaff pick

The pre-mortem: find how your plan fails before it does

Hands the model a plan and asks it to write the post-mortem for a failure that hasn't happened yet. Surfaces the risks your team is too invested to name out loud.

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The scope cut that still ships something real

For when the date won't move. Sorts the plan into what ships, what waits, and what quietly gets cancelled — and names what breaks for users in each case.

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Turn a messy meeting transcript into a decision doc

Separates what was decided from what was merely discussed, attributes owners, and flags the open questions everyone left the room assuming someone else would answer.

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