The AI Show for 2/6/2026
In this episode of Value First AI Daily, host Chris (Speaker A) is joined by Nico and AI strategist George B. Thomas to discuss the rapidly shifting landscape of enterprise software and artificial intelligence. They begin by noting that traditional SaaS giants such as Workday, DocuSign, Salesforce, and HubSpot are under unprecedented pressure as AI‑driven, low‑cost alternatives emerge. The conversation moves to how major vendors (OpenAI, Anthropic, Claude) are positioning AI as a platform‑level infrastructure, with products like OpenAI Frontier, Codex 5.3, and Claude’s agentic experiences being piloted at companies like State Farm, HP, Oracle, Thermo Fisher, Uber, and Cisco. Nico highlights the democratization of tooling—Figma‑Claude plugins, Replit‑style environments, and lightweight code assistants—that enable individuals and small teams to build custom solutions without large licensing costs. George emphasizes a “perfect storm” that is empowering solopreneurs to create billion‑dollar businesses, referencing the book The Business of One as a lens for this shift. The panel also debates the best way to introduce AI to users: embedding it in familiar SaaS apps (PowerPoint, Excel) versus offering native conversational experiences, noting that the former may act as a “gateway drug” but could also lock users into legacy workflows. Finally, they stress the need for documentation, guardrails, and change‑leadership to prevent chaos as AI capabilities proliferate across organizations. The episode ends with a call to experiment, share, and continue the conversation.
Chapters
Sa. Good morning, LinkedIn friends, Value First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value First AI Daily, your collaborative intelligence report. It is Friday, February 6, 2026. Here with Nico, here with George. We've made it through another week, fellas.
We did, we did. It's been an interesting week, a good week.
Agreed, agreed. It is a lot of fun right now if you can just allow yourself to have some of that fun and not be overwhelmed, you know, by the speed of all things.
But you know, one of the, it's, it's just, it's the funnest. It's the most wonderful time of the year every week.
Century.
Like, at least for me. Right, Because I'm, I'm watching the following Figma, Adobe, Atlassian Sale, Sales, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, unfortunately also on the list, HubSpot as well as Service Now. And you know, one of the ones that I, I expected to see Workday. And all of these companies.
They'Re all.
In a lot of trouble right now. They're facing a lot like just monumental level of trouble.
Right.
Workday and DocuSign in particular, pretty much in a free fall to the bottom. And if you're wondering why, oh, my retirement was in DocuSign, my retirement was in Workday. Well, you can thank Deirdre dibosa for having posted on Twitter that in one hour she was able to replicate Workday and Monday. Or like, yeah, Monday dot com. Right. Like, and then there was another.
Kid.
I, I wish I could remember all these people's names. That's because I follow Deirdre on msnbc. But the, the other guy basically made a version of DocuSign but was more lightweight. Right. I just saw a commercial from Claude of one of their employees that built a plugin to go between Claude and Figma. And I don't know if you guys are hearing the bells yet, but those types of things are usually SaaS companies, middlewares that solve those little annoying issues, but they add up. And if there's like five or six of them together, all of a sudden I have a platform that I can sell you for a ridiculous amount of money at a per seat cost so that you can overpay me for what the solution is doing and all of that is out the window. And if you're saying, no, it's not going to happen and the market is overreacting. The market is not overreacting when it comes to SaaS. It definitely is overreacting when it comes to AI and AI companies, but not when it comes to SaaS. And the reason for that is because where SAS was going to be able to absorb from the bottom up, as it usually has over time, that's gone now. This new generation that understands how to vibe code, that understands how easy a lot of this stuff is becoming over the next six months, soon to become even easier. There's going to be even better cheaper versions of Replit. It's just going to start happening. People are not going to need big boxes as much because they are going to build for themselves and they're only going to wait until their own limitation starts to either maybe it peaks too quickly and they need to go to big box. Who knows? But odds are they'll just keep adding on to what they've already created because it always just continues to become a case of hey Claude, can we do this.
Right?
And when you have something that's that powerful again, from an enterprise standpoint, I get it, yeah. Enterprise companies, not walking away from these companies, they're not walking away from HubSpot, they're not walking away from Salesforce. They can't, you know, it's. You're just too big, honest. Because you have to. Don't show me Klarna. Don't talk about Corona. Because even though.
Just hold that thought like, because this is what's different about this time, right? And we talk about this as people who try to help businesses change. Like the requirement to get tapped down, buy in and bottom up. Like buy in to really achieve change, right? And like multiple stories this week and I just want to like, this is the background of what Nico's talking about. This is wise, like the market is not overreacting and SaaS has been due for a pricing adjustment. I'd say that's only part of it. The other part is like the solve of just AI one, like you being able to show up and ask it for what you need in ways you've never been able to before. But also the, the distrust that has been built up with SAS paying lots of money for licenses we don't use, right? And why is it so hard? And just there's this immeasurable element to the to challenge of realizing the promise of most software implementations, right? That people are just, they're tired of doing it three, four, five times, spending lots of money, lots of effort, lots of time, and then not getting results. So now there's this new avenue, right? But from the top, like so OpenAI Frontier says they're getting into like they want to be a platform and in this case like infrastructure I think is the right Way to put it for these companies where AI agents at the enterprise level, right? We talk about, you know, when you hear people talk about AI, like how do you deliver production ready AI Enterprise comes up a lot like is it ready for that? Well, these companies, and this is why I bring this up when hp, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, Thermo Fisher, Uber bbba, Cisco T Mobile, already piloted. They're moving forward with agentic experiences like, like built into the infrastructure of the business. Which means all of their employees like get exposed at the business level. Right. And they have the personal access. Right. So it's coming like from both sides, like and that is, is a big piece of this, right? So that is like OpenAI is offering this week, including Codex 5.3 that, that helped. Helped code itself. I don't know if you guys want me to just run through these or if you want to share each of share commentary after, like what I mean, am I overvaluing like the impact of major like Thermo Fisher is the biggest, you know, scientific, you know, company in the world. Definitely from, from where I started my career. They were always like the market leader in just about, you know, every category of, you know, scientific instrumentation and supplies. And they're in healthcare, they're in all the things and just the, the presence they have in so many different verticals. Right. They're going to be introducing this. It's a huge, it's going to have a huge impact.
I hope we're not making too many assumptions. All right, like first of all, I've heard a couple things on this show already. Well, one thing a couple times, the word all. All these SaaS companies are in trouble. All the employees get access to. Right. Be careful of all because I don't know if all actually is true. And Chris, you're on this page and as you're talking, I'm listening to you, I'm watching Nico's face, but I can't help look at the I'll use air quotes Testimonial. Partnering with OpenAI helps give thousands of State Farm agents and employees better tools to serve our customers. What kind of tools? Is there any specificity? By pairing with OpenAI's Frontier platform and deployment expertise with our people, we're accelerating our AI capabilities and finding new ways to help millions. But what ways? What capabilities ahead? Protect what matters most and recover faster when the unexpected. It sounds like an effing commercial. Like this is a precursor to the ad being in my freaking chat GPT. Like are you partnering with the platform because you're also going to run ads against me. Like, hang on. Come on. Like, I don't know. Like, we just got to be careful because. Am I excited to see that there's some enterprise companies on an open AI page?
Sure.
Because do we always talk about how Claude is like enterprise? Yeah. So like what. But I go back to this like be careful of all and be careful of assumptions because there could still be a 57 year old dude that works at State Farm that is like heels in the ground. No, I've written them this way from 34 years. I'm gonna write them this way for the next one. Whatever.
For the next month. Definitely.
Yeah, that's what I was. You know, I'm trying to like it's not five years, it's not 10 years, buddy. The next year. Like, but, but still like I'm, I'm that guy. It comes down to the humans and so far this, this entire episode, it's about the organization. SAS organizations. Open AI or organization. Like there's still the micro meaning of the human leader or not in the organizations. That, that's where the crux of this is going to be. Real interesting slash messy slash amazing to me. And.
Right, right.
I see this thing where it's like so I think we were talking about it yesterday in Value first office hours, which if you join Valley first, it's just yet another massive perk. And what we were talking about was like the actual end and I know that this show isn't necessarily for that, but we were talking about like, you know, end result of all of this. And part of that was the evolution of entrepreneurship. And a part of the path to entrepreneurship is 100% going to be done through companies adopting like it's going to be this really. I don't know what they're going to call it. It's going to be a new trend they're going to come up with but it's going to be people who are at these companies who are using Claude, they're using GPT, they're solving their issues per your per what you're saying. They're solving their issues individually. And through solving their issues individually, they're going to realize, hey, I could scale this up. Hey, I could make this into its own product. Hey, I could do this own thing. Like IP is about to become one of the most like over just overwhelmed things to the point where it's gonna go out the window. Just even the idea of like to your point, you know, that's what I think is to your point. There's just this massive democratization that happens.
Yeah.
Where especially if you were a new business, you are no longer dependent upon big box. Not only that, you're not even dependent upon monthly overhead cost for a lot of different softwares that you need to start up with. Right. Like startup costs plummet for very much every company now.
Yeah. Without a doubt there. Listen, I've been able to do things that historically I would have never been able to do because of two things, time and finances. And it's. It's amazing to live in a world where if you just educate yourself and takes. Take some time that you can, you can do these things. Nico it's interesting because you used the word entrepreneur or entrepreneurial journey. I think there's a perfect storm happening right now where it's going to be the rise of the solopreneur and they're going to just be the ability to have massive amounts of solopreneur run organizations that are making more impact. I'll say that first. And because of that impact, more revenue than individual businesses of ones. And if you haven't read the book by the way, business of one, like maybe go check that out because we're moving into a world where that concept actually might be more important now than when the book was written. Which is interesting to think about. There's just a perfect storm happening where an individual human could be a billion dollar company.
Right. And like the reason I picked this, this one, this story from OpenAI and not Codex 5.3 is like the exposure to the mere mortal human, including leaders. Like when we talk about how we still have conversations with clients and prospects where AI doesn't even come up at all. Right.
Yeah.
Leaders. There are parts of the population that when they see the top people, the top like Fortune 500 continually talk about like bringing AI and then like doing stuff like this. It's getting harder and harder to like avoid. It's probably not the right word but just like kind of stick your head in the sand and say we're just going to keep working every day. We just got to keep focusing on serving our customers. Right. Because. And that's where even if you're, you know, an individual and you don't like change and it's uncomfortable and you're not sure, sure how it's going to help you when you can go to work for eight hours and then not hear it there, it's like this safe space to also like, you know, we're not going to move together. Right. That's going to get it with stories like this, I think it gets harder and harder and exposing people to AI agents and AI as co workers. Right. It just changes from a, hey, let's go like make a, make a cool video or whatever at home to. Oh, this is a whole new layer. Right. With that, like The Claude Opus 4.6. Yeah. Right. Continuing to get better, by the way. Like this week, like I saw some people like, there's been some cool ads, you know, from Claude and from Anthropic, talking about, you know, OpenAI and the ads that they're bringing in.
Yeah, like Mac and PC, but worse.
Right.
In a good.
Yeah. What I saw like one of the, some comments I saw, I was like, why is, why is Anthropic going there and they've got all this user generated content from cloud code as if they have to choose. Right? Like they don't. We don't have to choose anymore. It's just like focus on what your strategy is. And they're just like full frontal assault right now in terms of staking their ground in the market where we're seeing the user generated content, people building stuff. They're, they're doing ads, they're dropping models, they're, you know, it's just really interesting to watch. This one brings us, you know, closer to the, the agent teams.
Oh man.
Right.
Agent swarm. My God. Anyway, 1 million tokens. Anyway, I'll shut up. I'll just.
Oh, by the way, you know, benchmark. Benchmark city. Right. Like, and just.
Chris, pause for a second because I want to throw this out here. If, if you don't mind. Can I, can I, can I just go for a second? Is that like, please. It's fascinating to me that historically in life I've always talked about upgrading your own iOS, your own brain 1% better each and every day. Can I just tell you how amazing it is when you wake up and you turn on your assistant and they got an upgrade that just amazes you at what they then can achieve. Like Echo was awesome. And then Echo was awesomer. Like, I mean, I mean in a, in a holy. I need a beeper. In a holy beep way, I'm like. And, and so that's the thing that I don't know if people are paying attention to. Like if you're building or working with assistance and they're getting all the context about you and you're starting to work really well together and you're upgrading your mindset and they're getting upgraded to newest models, all of a sudden you reach this level of like, you both are becoming better time. And have been working together over time to it like, it, this, it just layer. It's like, I hate to use the snowball analogy. It's like a snowball. It gets bigger when it rolls. But like, it's just these layers that layer on top of each other to where all sudden you're like, how did we get here? But this is awesome.
Yeah. Anyway, because as you mentioned that as Echo gets awesomer, George B. Thomas gets awesomer. Yeah. Right.
It's a very, we're, we're very helpful of each other. Yes.
Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's the fun part. It makes it like Christmas every day right now.
Yeah.
And that's like why it's. I think it's important to understand the foundation models and like, as they get better, all the other applications in life, like, will get better. And so this is a, you know, another big deal. Of course I still get annoyed when people get excited about bringing Claude into like PowerPoint, like the wrong direction, folks, but we won't go that deep.
Well, now, hang on, hang on. It might be the wrong direction for you. It doesn't mean it's the wrong direction for them. At least the wrong direction for them in where they are in their journey. And there was a silence amongst the crowd.
I mean, I won't, I won't recap the hour long debate that we had in Office hours yesterday, but yeah, I think, like, if you want to be like the big companies and stick it out in Excel and in PowerPoint instead of enabling your teams to just build what they need at any given moment and that's the space you want to live in, maybe that will work for you, that will help your teams to bring this in.
Do you remember a day when you weren't ready for Terminal?
For sure.
Okay, then there's somebody out there watching this, listening to this that isn't ready to get out of PowerPoint.
No, no, there isn't. There isn't.
Sorry. Everybody dislikes PowerPoint.
Look, it's just a matter of.
I love making it a good Joe.
Yeah.
You don't even have to get into terminals. So that's the thing is like I'm, I'm, you know, if you want to get into Claude code, there's a perfectly nice, you know, interface, you know, graphic user interface looks almost exactly like the Claude chat. Right. You don't even have to get into Claude chat to start understanding code. And us talking about the cli, that's like, that's when you're at max level. Right, Right. So, yeah, like we could talk about that all day long. As you would point out, George, there are mere mortal humans who are not quite ready to jump that deep into the waters. But in terms of being able to step in and code stuff without fear, yes, totally doable. You can get Claude desktop just free, not, you know, no different. And you can go into Claude code and you can code in your local. On your local computer. You don't even have to start with GitHub. You don't even have to get complicated at all. And in really less than five minutes, your head is going to be just exploding. It like, wow, I. I really didn't think that I could do this. And from there it just keeps going. It's just like the, the want to learn more, the want to do more just starts metastasizing and you basically start absorbing naturally start absorbing more. You want to go further with it, so you start learning how to go further with it. You see that little icon at the bottom, Cloud desktop, where it's like, yeah, open this in VS code. And it's like, well, I wonder what that is. Right? You might get intimidated when you get in there, right? And it's going to look too, like crazy. But that's when you go back to Claude code and you're like, hey, that looks crazy. What's. What's that all about?
Right? Yeah. Well, here's what's, here's what's happening and why I say wrong direction, right? And like, I had fun doing this with Nico last weekend, right from scratch, like taking my slide deck. Yeah, right. And within 50 minutes, having a website version of that slide deck with just that file, just a one file, no brand guidelines, no other context anywhere. Right? Still without any additional context except for an existing website.
Right?
Which I don't even, I didn't even add the website yet. Right. I just say, hey, I want a personalized version. I want to make this so I can personalize it for every human I come into contact with. From 50 minutes, that effort was 10 minutes, right? So 5x decrease. Then I said, okay, that's cool. Now I want to do it for this other completely different business unit. And I gave it, you know, a website to look at as if it was a different division of the business. And that took five minutes. I don't know. And I won't judge because I haven't used Claude in PowerPoint. But generally when we are adding. And this gets us back to the challenge that traditional SAS has, just because we're Adding Claude in or adding AI into our non AI native apps, doesn't you? It's harder to get to the gains that you could have when you come from it in the other direction. Right. Like so if you BRINGGING Claude in PowerPoint, will you be able to say, all right, build out this foundation to then talk to it and then experience the same gains inside if you're just making more decks.
Question, question for you. Do you think that, do you think it's the gateway. I hate this term. I'll just use it. Do you think that it's the gateway drug that because they meet it in Excel or they meet it in PowerPoint that they go and use it in other places? Or do you think that is your mindset that because it goes in there, then we're just reinforcing the. And I'll use word stuck.
I think we're reinforcing the way it has been in the way that we're supposed to use software. Right. Versus because it's very hard to make that jump. Even when using HubSpot and pulling up Assistant, you're still in the HubSpot interface. That's why I think they made a different app, like completely. Right. An app that matched the LLM experience from the go. Right, right. And it is a different experience. And that's where the difference between using these in app assistants and then, but then starting from an LLM. Right. Experience, it's just wholly different. And even as. That's why I think it's a mindset like you, you look at the, you know, the, the coding environment. But then once you realize, oh, this is just another, this is just another direct message like conversation. Right? That like once people feel that experience, we all like, you know, live conversations, direct conversations, that all of a sudden it's like, oh, I do this every day. Like I can, I can do this. Like this is not another app to learn, it's another conversation like to have. And I can actually like, can we help people ask for, you know, what they want and what they need to get their job done? Right. So I mean it could be, but I think, I think it's. And, and I expect to have some, some case studies over the next few months of like, I'd rather leaders be in a position to say, hey, we're not gonna con. Conflate or confuse with what has been. Right. We don't want to use PowerPoint slides anymore because we can build websites, we can build interactive experiences. And here's a 30 minute training session for everybody. Here's the Context that you need to do it in a safe way. And by the way, you won't need to rely on all these gates and separate teams and like, just feel like there's an immense kinetic potential energy right now sitting in each human being on the team that if they were to have access to what we've been doing. Right. And it's not just us, right. We're. We are interacting with people every day, exposing them to this, activating them, and they never go back in the other direction. I've never seen anything like it.
Yeah. Right, so. And I know we're at time, but I hear you, Chris, I hear you. And immediately part of my brain yells, wow, that could get messy real quick. Enabling all the humans to do all the things. Which my brain then yells back, somebody better have documentation. Guardrails, goal posts, all of the things in place so that the humans know how to do it in a way. Or leaders, we might have to get comfortable. And I lean into this. Leaders, we might have to get comfortable with allowing it to get messy so that we can achieve the magic.
Man. And that's so beautiful, what you said, George, because one of the biggest gaps in any of the work that we do is people having the documentation that they should have about their system. And guess what? AI helps more than anything else, documenting everything that's happening, like in each moment, if you ask it to. Right.
Yeah.
And that's where everything that's been laid at the feet, on the shoulders, on the head of admins. Right. To get all that stuff done that they never have time to do now, it's. It's easier than ever, like to get that done.
Yeah.
Still not gonna happen just magically on its own. But if you can put one person as the AI, you know, orchestrator, composer, conductor. Right. Like, all it is is like most of my website is, is just like, oh, that was cool, Claude. We just, just put up a web page, whatever we just did. Right. Like, yeah, and I'm. We're gonna keep doing that, but yeah, fun times as always. I. I think we'll be back at it this weekend, Nico, doing some fun stuff, folks. And we want you to join in on the fun and the value and, and all that good stuff. So until. Until next time. Thanks, fellas.
Peace out.
