Jon Bradshaw: Where Is AI Taking Us in 2026?

Welcome to Go-To-Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go-To-Market is sponsored by Fulcast and Silicon Slopes. My name is Amy Cook, and I'm so excited to introduce my very good friend, John Bradshaw. He is the CEO of Codebase. He is the president of AWS Utah, and he is the co-host of the VC Podcast. John, how are you doing?

I'm doing really good. Thanks for having me on.

I'm so happy that you could come on. Thank you so much. I know that you are at AWS's re:Invent right now, and I really appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to tell us about it and to tell us a little about you. And just talk about all things AI.

Sounds good.

Well, just to get our listeners a little more familiar with you, can you tell me a little bit about your background? How did you become the president of Codebase and, and why are you so interested in VCs and AI?

So I became the president of Codebase when I started it. You just pay $100 and you can become a president like that. So I think it's $100. We started it like 8 or 9 years ago. I used to go to India a lot for my another company I used to own. And a lot of people were asking for help with development and outsourcing because of that. And I went from saying no to yes. And now we have a team of about 44 software developers focusing a lot on Python and React. The reason I'm here at the AWS re:Invent Summit is just to, you know, sharpen the saw, Stephen Covey would say. Just like be where the people are at, be where the interesting discussions are at. I'm assuming they're going to talk a lot about agents. That's probably, it's been a big theme at a lot of the conferences this year. It's how do we do a lot of agentic work, things like that.

In our Go-To-Market Live first annual conference, you were on a panel, on an AI panel, and I loved the discussion and it even got a little bit, uh, con— like controversial.

Merci.

Yes, it got a little spicy, which is how we know it was a really good topic.

I'm the one who made it spicy, so I apologize.

Don't apologize. It was awesome. I want to dive into the spiciness right now. So I want to know, what is your perspective on AI? How is it going to be in terms of jobs and in terms of the workforce moving forward?

I think the, I think the future that your kids will grow up in, they'll probably go to like a 30-hour work week. I think the fear that you and I have, it's all because of change. And I think we need to just recognize everyone else has that same fear. And as long as you stay sharp and you're spending, spending time actively to try to, you know, stay up on, on new tools as much as you can, you're, you're at the top of the pack.

I've heard it said that this is kind of like the revolution with computers, right? Where people's jobs are not necessarily eliminated.

Mm-hmm.

But you have to be enabled. You have to learn how to use a computer. You have to learn how to use AI. How do you think that that comparison holds? Do you think that that's true?

Yeah, I think this time everyone gets a PhD virtual assistant. And as, as good as you can become at leveraging that, the better. We have to remember, like, AI is in a computer. It misses most of the context of the real world. So even if it's perfectly smart, it needs eyes, it needs It needs feedback. It needs, you know, good communication.

I love that. And so from your perspective, you're a human that's enabled by your virtual PhD that can give you the information from the public database, but you contextualize it as a person and you make it your—

you need to make it your buddy.

So that makes sense.

One of the things I do with all my engineers is you have to remember that everyone's use case is different. So I like to do a lot of demos with my team. Like when I'm on a project with them, I'll pull up ChatGPT. I show them how I'm using it, which is very different from like how a developer might do it. And I think all of us are just starting to realize, hey, I didn't realize I could ask it this question. Hmm.

So you think that learning, like being able to, to use it well has to do with learning how to write prompts, learning what, having It's just changing your perspective, right?

I think it's learning how, just, it's all like with AI Utah, we run demo days and it's just seeing, seeing how other people are using it for their use cases. And that just opens windows. Hey, I didn't know, I didn't know I could do this. I didn't know I could automate that. Things like that.

What do you think about writers like myself who are worried that their job is going to be replaced by AI?

I think if you look at most of the research, human in the loop with AI is better than one without. But you're much more than a writer.

Well, thank you. That's nice. But yes, I agree.

But even if you're a writer, it's all about, it's about context. Someone, someone on your team has the context that AI doesn't have. They're not meeting the clients. They're not seeing the needs. So I think, I think things will shift, but all of us are writing, right? All of us are moving more to an, in some aspects, an executive role because of AI.

What about the people who don't want to learn AI?

Do you think they're in trouble?

They're in trouble. So you think this is just a, it must happen. You have to just, you know, be gritty and just learn it no matter how old you are.

You need to lean into the hard things. If there's a quote that talks about, you know, the, the, what you want in life is on the opposite of that hard thing. And in this case, it's just embracing change and making it happen.

Yeah, I agree. I think that, that makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, I can write a press release now in about 30 minutes, whereas it used to take me 4 hours. And it's, it's an amazing opportunity for writers to be more productive if we know how to use it.

How are you keeping your critical thinking skills sharp though?

That's really, actually, it's a very interesting question. So some of the things that I've explored so far are writing emails, writing social media posts, writing, getting the base. Um, you know, because I'm older now and I was using an assistant editor or an assistant writer for most of my stuff anyway. I have just using AI for the first draft and then keeping the second draft to myself. And so that is something that my process hasn't changed very much because of that. But for first-time writers, for people who are on the ground writing from scratch, I think that that is something that's gonna really take some deliberate, some deliberate thought in how to keep your critical thinking skills. For me, it's a little bit more because you're right, like, I'm, I'm in more of an executive role now where I'm like piecing things together that already exist. My job hasn't changed very much, but for those people who are the creators who are doing the initial creation, that's where like the rubber meets the road in my opinion. What if like you and your developers, have you found AI has been helping your developers code or have you felt like it's a distraction? How advanced are we in terms of AI and development?

AI development's interesting because some of the smartest developers I know won't touch it. And then the other smartest I know don't even touch a keyboard anymore.

Hmm.

Um, so one of the engineers from that, that I know, his name's Carlos Kemeny. He has built a custom LLM on NVIDIA Spark at, at his home. And so when he is driving home, he's talking to in his, in his, in his app and is coding during dinner. And then before he goes to bed, he talks to the app more and then it, and then it builds the next version. And there are some people I know that aren't even touching a keyboard and they're building great apps. And then there are other developers I know that are just very concerned about quality control and hallucinations. And I think, I think there's a place for both. It just depends on the context, but as a general rule, I think the way development has to change is most of engineers' time right now, I think, is creating a doc with AI saying, here's the product, here's the output. And once your doc is good enough where it can get you 80% of the way, that's when you start like coding. Whereas right now everyone's still kind of like coding from scratch. It's, it's create that document. Don't, you know, keep iterating on that document until it can moonshot and get most of the work done in a single, in a single pass.

Hmm. Interesting.

That's, and then you should, and then you should store that document in your GitHub repository. And I think you're seeing more like micro and nano services where it's like, here's a specific feature, here's the prompt we created for this output.

So it's more like the code itself is being assembled in like a, in a GitHub repository. And then, and then it's more like like building with Legos rather than build with—

but we're now building the prompts where before we were like building the prompt in our mind and the code.

That makes sense. Interesting. So when you have, you know, you encounter new developers that you may want to hire, what are you looking for in terms of their ability to use AI versus coding?

So we're pushing more for in-person interviews and seeing how well someone can perform in front of a whiteboard.

Interesting. Why is that?

Because I think the value of a senior engineer is much more valuable developing that critical thinking skills, and I want to see that someone knows it and they don't just blindly rely on ChatGPT.

Hmm.

Like a really simple example for general listeners is, you know, I, I have a hurt knee right now and I was asking it like how I should fix my knee and it told me the RICE method, rest, ice, compression, elevation. But then I came back and I said, isn't this outdated? And ChatGPT then said, oh yeah, you're right, John. So like it's still gonna take time for where you need, I think, a smart person to be able to pick up on if it's a, a good or bad process.

Yeah, that makes sense.

But I also think we're getting to the point where, you You won't be hi— I would not hire a PM today if they don't know how to write an MVP through like Lovable or something like that.

Really interesting. So for you, you gotta have the ability to communicate in person. Yeah. You have to have the ability to understand workflows natively, intuitively. You have to have the ability to use AI. Mm-hmm. And code. Mm-hmm.

And communicate clearly.

And communicate clearly. So really, like, you, you hire the best of the best. So everyone should just use Codebase.

There we go.

I think that's great. And it's also very important for anyone listening who is a developer who's looking to understand how to get hired onto a team like Codebase. Very interesting.

So if someone doesn't embrace AI, we just don't hire them. If someone's not leaning into the hard things, we're, we're, we're walking away. Even when it comes to like video editors.

Interesting. So do you think that the way that you are responding to the market is similar to how most people are?

I think the market's in chaos right now. I don't think they, they, I think there's a lot of opinions. It amazes me. There's a lot of CTOs that aren't even leaning in. Like that's where my main concern is. Like, like Lovable and some of these other apps are some of the fastest growing apps in all, in all of history. And when your CTO hasn't even taken the time to play with it, like, that's where I think it needs to be. It's like, you need to spend time playing with the new tools just so you can start to see how the world's changing. And there's too many people who are just stuck in the old world. Like, and that's a, that's a top-down problem in the dev world.

Yeah, that makes sense because there is like a gen— like even with me and social media, right? Like I use social media every day. I would consider myself a strong user, but my children are natively so much better at social media than I am. They call me a boomer all the time because I forget— not a boomer— because I forget where the buttons go and what to do and start, like especially on the new stuff, like, um, You're just here in your, you're, you're in your executive mode.

The world changes. The apps change.

That's right. It all changes. And so—

The further you go up the computer, the, the, the, the stack, the smaller your computer gets. You go from having 4 screens to like, you're probably on your phone more than anything else anymore.

You know, isn't that kind of sad though? And I think that it's so important what you just said is that if you're, you, if you are an executive, you have to take time to learn the tech. You have to go deeper. Because if you don't, then you're going to start making bad decisions for, from a company-wide level by not getting into the details and knowing what's going on. And I see that happening a lot all over the place. And because you just don't have the tools or the understanding to see how the world is changing.

One of the reasons I started AI Utah, because the goal of AI Utah was to identify the top 100 AI leaders. And then we do a demo day once a month and only engineers are allowed to show up. And the 99.99% of the benefit why I do it is I want to be in the room where, I can't mention names, you know, this engineer who's making $2 million a year from a well-known company. I want to learn what he's learning. I want to, I want to be able to soak that in. And I think too many of us, we're not. Leaning in.

You're absolutely right. We've gotta lean in and we've got to adopt the technology. We don't want to get left behind. Mm-hmm. Uh, because if we are looking at a 30-hour work week in the future, and we are going to allow technology to serve us, you know, we don't wanna be the ones that does get replaced.

And I don't think peo— but people are gonna— I think everyone will eventually change. It'll just be, You can choose to be at the front of the wave or get pummeled and still make it to the beach, right?

Oh, that's a great point. So for those of us who don't wanna change with AI, what kind of jobs are we looking at? Just a, a total shuffling of like blue collar and white collar jobs?

I think a lot of white collar jobs are gonna become blue collars. They're gonna become a, a lot more piecemeal.

Mm-hmm.

I don't know.

What do you mean by that? What do you mean by, uh, white collar to become blue collar and peacemaker?

Because everyone has, everyone has a PhD in their pocket.

Mm-hmm.

And so it's democratizing fairly elitist roles.

I agree a million percent. I love the way that you said that. The democratization of knowledge through AI is unprecedented. And I think that's one of the really, really exciting things about it.

Mm-hmm.

And it gives everyone more of an equal opportunity based on, you know, that PhD in your pocket. That's amazing. Well, John, I love your thoughts and clearly, clearly at the top of your game. And I love that you're doing the work yourself with AI Utah and going to AWS re:Invent and staying there. Besides, you know, staying in the room where it happens and learning everything, what else do you do to stay on top of your game?

Uh, I mean, I think you just, you need, you're the, you're the average of the 10 people you hang out with. So when it comes to AI or anything you wanna get better at in life, you need to figure out how to hang with those people.

That's awesome. That is really great advice. So I'm glad that you're one of my 10 people, John, that all of a sudden my IQ just went up.

But I mean, it's the same thing, like, look at, I mean, just to be very clear, like what I'm doing at, at Codebase. And what you did at Simplest, I see as that's where I want to go. So it's like, who are the smart people in the room? Hey, Amy sold a company for $250 million to Infosys. What, what future do I want Codebase to have? And then you find ways to serve those people and lean in.

I love that. Great words of wisdom. And thank you so much for joining the podcast. And thank you so much for taking the time out to be able to do this, even though that you're in the middle of a conference.

Anything for you.

You are the best. Thank you, John.

Alright, thanks.

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