Let’s dive into the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology:
⚒️ Building for Yourself
🛜 Monitoring AI
🏦 Anthropic IPO
💣 Persuasion Bombing
🤖 AI Trust
❌ Overriding AI
🎃 Jack-o'-lanterns
Podcast
Build It for Yourself First: Todd Katcher on Internal Tools, AI Reality Checks, and Why the Best Product Doesn’t Win
In this episode, Kyle and Todd talk about how one conversation can change a company’s direction, and how Todd’s team builds its own tools when off-the-shelf software covers only 80% of what they need. That approach produced Zoney, Convert It, PriceAlerts, and an e-signature platform. Todd explains how he decides what to build, what to keep internal, and what to take to market, including why building their own CRM didn’t make the cut. They also take an honest look at AI: where it saves real time, where it still needs a critical human eye, and why managing expectations matters. The conversation closes on Todd’s biggest lesson: making the product is rarely the hard part. Getting people to buy it is.
News and Useful Reads
We urgently need to monitor AI agents’ actions in real time
As AI agents are introduced to more aspects of our lives and businesses, we have to have better frameworks in place for monitoring what’s happening and protecting our data.
AI agents are taking unauthorized actions, and the companies building and running them are mostly relying on luck and hindsight to mitigate any harmful impacts. They must do more to ensure safety.
Anthropic’s IPO filing lists 93 pages of risks. What could possibly go wrong?
Anthropic is moving forward with its IPO and filed paperwork this week, but a sizeable chunk of the filing shows how risky AI continues to be.
Nearly a third of the 335-page securities filing is devoted to outlining not only the routine risks any company might face as it seeks to grow its business, but also the extraordinary risks that Anthropic's frontier models could pose.
AI’s ‘Persuasion Bombing’ Can Make Experts Question Themselves
This sounds like the trait of a terrible coworker, trying to make you feel you’re wrong when you correct them. But it’s becoming more of a reality embedded in all the tools we’re using.
Companies are increasingly embedding generative AI into everyday workflows, helping employees answer important questions and make key decisions—yet a research team has found that when it gets something wrong, the model may focus less on correcting the mistake than convincing users it's right.
The share of enterprises trusting AI agents to make production changes on their own has fallen from 75% to 56%, VB Intelligence finds
Enterprises are (rightly) reducing how willing they are to trust AI agents to make changes directly in production.
In VentureBeat’s August Agentic Reliability and Evaluations wave, 56% of respondents whose organizations deploy autonomous AI agents said they already allow certain production changes based on automated evaluation results alone, without human review, or are engineering their systems to permit this within the next year. This is a notable drop from 75% in VentureBeat’s July survey.
Why Even Your Best Employees Override AI Systems That Work
If employees are going to be on the hook for something, it makes sense they aren’t willing to completely outsource the decisions. I can think of other reasons I wouldn’t fully outsource my work as well, but this is a compelling one.
Companies are deploying AI systems faster than they are redesigning the governance surrounding them. As a result, many AI systems remain permanent advisers rather than actual decision-makers—not because the technology falls short but because the organizations fail to transfer authority along with accountability. When employees remain personally responsible for outcomes, overriding the system is a rational act of self-protection, even when the AI performs better than humans.
Other Interesting Finds
Jack-o’-lanterns come from an Irish myth about a man named Stingy Jack
My wife and I got talking this week about the origin of carving pumpkins, and found it to be interesting. Carving pumpkins certainly beats carving a turnip.
Americans haven’t always carved pumpkins; it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that squash was used for holiday fun.