AI Builders
Digest

The Takeaway: Enterprise platforms like ServiceNow offer a far more cost-effective and reliable foundation for AI-powered applications than trying to replicate everything with language models alone.

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott, who started his entrepreneurial journey by buying a deli at 16 and went on to lead giants like SAP and now ServiceNow, shares hard-won lessons on leadership and the future of enterprise tech in the AI age. From understanding customers intimately in his deli days to battling for his first sales job at Xerox, McDermott emphasizes that customer focus, resilience, and human connection are timeless—especially now, when AI risks eroding them. He argues that while LLMs are powerful for thinking, platforms excel at acting through workflows, data context, and determinism.

Counterintuitively, McDermott calculates that replicating a simple ServiceNow application with a language model would cost 10 times more, factoring in GPU factories, tokens, human capital, and rebuilding costs. "People that run businesses understand that people make mistakes. They never will forgive software for making a mistake." Businesses need platforms that integrate AI as a control tower for agentic reinvention, connecting hyperscalers, models, and systems of record. ServiceNow's moves into security with Armis and agentic tools like Moveworks show how to make AI practical for global enterprises.

McDermott's philosophy is that human connection and agency matter more than ever; AI serves to amplify human ambition, not replace it. Companies are moving from AI experiments to mainstream agentic reinvention, with ServiceNow enabling implementations in under 30 days and agents handling 90% of customer service cases. The result is leaner operations, higher productivity, and expanding margins without massive headcount growth.

OpenAI VP Science Kevin Weil announces his last day at OpenAI as the OpenAI for Science initiative is being decentralized into other research teams. It’s been a mind-expanding two years, from Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for Science. Weil believes accelerating science will be one of the most stunningly positive outcomes of our push to AGI, and he’s rooting for the whole team including sama, markchen90, fidjissimo, gdb, merettm and others to continue the work.

Box CEO Aaron Levie predicts that agents are going to use software 100X more than people will in the future. This shift will force enterprise platforms to become headless and be able to work with any agent on or off platform. Levie sees this as a huge boon rather than a threat, creating vastly more use-cases for platforms than even existed pre-AI. Agents work 24/7 in parallel and string together work across systems, unlocking use-cases like reviewing all contracts or running 10X more campaigns that were previously rate-limited by humans.

Software business models will shift to seats for people and consumption for agents, offering significant upside. Systems of record like Salesforce data or Box documents can be leveraged 100X more for automation and insights. Embracing headless architecture is essential to avoid being DOA.

FPV Ventures partner Nikunj Kothari is thrilled to have backed nicbstme and the Fintool team as an angel. Fintool was a magical product that was able to do a lot of the heavy reasoning tasks before the models even existed. Microsoft is getting an absolutely phenomenal product team.

During his time at Opendoor, chintanparikh94 was one of Nikunj’s favorite engineers—smart, opinionated, and deeply customer-focused. When he left Secureframe to start a newCo with chrissesi, Nikunj immediately wired funds even before they joined YC. Opendoor is getting another truly phenomenal team.

Google Labs announces the Flow family is growing with Google Flow Music (formerly ProducerAI), a standalone site that helps you create, share, and remix original music using natural language prompts. Flow handles images and videos while Flow Music focuses on songs and playlists. The new remix feature gives people more control over their tracks.

VP Josh Woodward is excited about pushing creative boundaries further.

Claude (Anthropic) announces the Claude Code hackathon is back with a $100K API credits prize pool. Claude for Word is now available on Pro and Max plans alongside Opus 4.7. Claude reads your codebase and design files to build your team's design system and applies it automatically.

Researcher Alex Albert notes that everyone with a vision can now produce very high-quality designs with a little help from Claude, and bugs from the Opus 4.7 launch have been fixed.

Replit CEO Amjad Masad has been really enjoying a feature that anticipates minor but important improvements you can make to your app. He also highlights “animate your way to virality” and is excited about a Colossus profile from Camille.

Design @Cursor_ai Ryo Lu states the best agent equals best harness plus best models plus runs anywhere, highlighting Cursor_ai.

Every CEO Dan Shipper shares the full Opus 4.7 vibe check breaking down performance on coding, writing, spreadsheets and more, and explains why every Claude model has a different idea of how much to help.

Product at Roblox Peter Yang is having a lot of fun with Claude Design and shares a video demoing five use cases including videos, slides, websites, mobile apps, and even a design system. He also recommends a great watch from steipete that changed how he thinks about products.

VC Matt Turck notes that Anthropic Labs is on a generational run with Claude Code, Skills, Claude Cowork, and Claude Design.

Builder Zara Zhang observes that in a lot of use cases, designing with code is superior to designing using image gen models, and she’s been making most of her graphics using HTML instead of Nano Banana. She also notes that writing ≠ generating text and that LLMs are often mistaken as good writers just because they generate text well.

AI builder Swyx highlights a Colossus profile from Camille, notes it’s neck and neck in a poll, and is grateful to steipete for prompting an AMA with the question “what’s the future of ClosedClaw?”

Y Combinator President & CEO Garry Tan compares OpenClaw to the Ferrari and Hermes Agent to the Honda Accord. He also recounts hours lost when OpenClaw decides to do brain surgery on itself and ends up dying from an edit to its own config.