Robin O'Connell spends his days inside LinkedIn's marketing and advertising team in Australia, working with founders and brands on content strategy - which makes him a rare voice on where AI genuinely helps marketers, and where it still falls flat. In this episode, Robin makes the case that the smartest move for any marketer right now is trying to replace parts of your own job with AI, just to find out fast what it can't do. His answer: strategy. AI can automate tactics at scale, but it still can't replace the judgement that comes from genuinely understanding a customer.

Georgie and Robin get into how brands actually stand out on LinkedIn (hint: it's not by looking like Apple), why comments and DMs are a better growth signal than impressions, and how to tell when AI-written content is quietly killing your credibility.

The standout story, though, is personal: Robin's dad Dennis, a serial entrepreneur in Dublin who lost his retail business during COVID, now runs a landscaping venture - and uses AI image generation on an iPad to show clients exactly what their garden will look like before a single spade hits the ground. It's one of the clearest, most human examples of AI actually changing how someone runs a small business.

Find Robin on LinkedIn for more on marketing, AI, and content strategy.

Freddie McKenzie is the co-founder and CEO of Manifest, an AI platform that helps creative and marketing agencies capture the real value of their work without timesheets. Before Manifest, he built and exited VIVID Creative, an Auckland-based production agency behind campaigns for Jetstar and other major brands, and in this conversation with Georgie Healy he traces that journey and where he thinks AI agents, and the AI hype cycle, are actually heading.

Freddie shares his AI hack of stacking meeting transcripts to actually see progress over time, and explains why he refuses to automate the one interface he thinks matters most: his inbox. He unpacks why Manifest's CTO built a proprietary AI model instead of wrapping an off-the-shelf one, the real story behind Manifest's $2 million pre-seed raise in a tough funding market, and his take on why most companies experimenting with AI agents still can't get past their first prompt. He also makes the case that the so-called SaaS apocalypse is a myth, and shares his simple rule for founders chasing product-market fit: find the ugly problem, not the sexy one.

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Peter Gostev is head of AI capabilities at Arena (LMArena), the community-based platform where millions of real people vote in blind tests to rank AI models, born out of research at UC Berkeley. Before Arena, Peter was Head of AI at Moonpig and built a large following sharing hands-on explorations of what the latest models can actually do. He joins Georgie Healy from London for a genuinely nerdy, insider look at how models are judged and where the frontier is heading.

In this episode, Peter explains the difference between static benchmarks and human judgment, and why a model can pass every test you write and still produce something that looks completely awful. He breaks down the current state of the leaderboards, why Anthropic's models are dominating and how that tracks with real world adoption, and gives a sharp comparison of the top Western models, including why Anthropic's non-reasoning models are exceptional while OpenAI's strength lies in deep reasoning. Georgie and Peter get into why people aren't using Chinese models more despite their quality, the economics behind AI pricing and how enterprise usage is priced very differently from consumer subscriptions, why release cadence matters as much as capability, and what the wave of data centre investment means for the models arriving next. Along the way there's a fond detour on Opus 3 as the model you could talk to for hours, and why better models can sometimes feel worse.

Tune in for a clear-eyed, hype-free guide to how AI models are really evaluated, straight from someone who watches the charts move in real time.

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