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AI | AI/Technology | Business

Ed Ortega: AI isn’t stealing your job. It’s changing it. (+ live build demo)

Dave Hayward

Dave Hayward

Founder Europa Creative Partners

March 8, 2026

No “AI is coming for your job” panic here.

Ed Ortega, partner at Machine and Folk, joins Dave to talk about what AI transformation actually looks like from the inside — and then builds a working CRM prototype live on screen. Ed has spent the last few years watching companies navigate this shift in real time.

In this conversation, he explains why the fear of job displacement misses the point, why the smartest leaders are using AI to multiply their teams, and why the biggest risk right now is standing still while your competitors speed up. Halfway through, we switch gears into a live demo of Pencil — a design tool where drawing and code are the same thing — and watch Ed build a fully designed CRM app from a single prompt. In about ten minutes.

If you work with designers, developers, or anyone trying to figure out where AI fits in your business, this one is worth your time.

In this episode:

  • The gap between AI fear and AI reality
  • The sandwich bet: a framework for specific predictions over vague anxiety
  • Why AI multiplies great teams rather than replacing them
  • The Cezanne vs Picasso theory of transformation
  • Case study: automating document data extraction (and what the team discovered halfway through)
  • The designer-developer handoff problem — and how Pencil solves it
  • Live demo: building a CRM in Pencil using Claude as the engine
  • Reverse migration: taking existing code back into a design environment
  • What the Toyota production line has to do with your AI workflow

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Chapters

00:00 Introduction
01:00 Ed Ortega and Machine and Folk
02:00 Is AI going to steal my job?
04:00 The sandwich bet framework
05:30 Early adopter advantage
06:30 The rising tide: multiplying engineers
08:00 The learning curve before the rocket ship
09:00 Switching from ChatGPT to Claude
11:00 Cezanne vs Picasso: two types of transformation
13:30 Agile and lean as the AI framework
15:00 Data extraction case study
18:00 Liberating people from work they shouldn’t be doing
20:00 How design sprints have evolved
23:00 Vibe coding and its limits
25:00 The designer-developer handoff problem
27:00 Introducing Pencil
30:00 Toyota, Kaizen, and continuous improvement
33:30 Setting up the live demo
34:00 Demo: building a CRM in Pencil
40:00 Iterating without breaking the code
43:00 Reverse migration
45:00 Generating the Next.js prototype
49:00 Out-of-body experience for designers
50:30 Wrap up

Slideshow with Dave Hayward is produced by Europa Creative Partners.

#AI #FutureOfWork #AITransformation #VibeCoding #ProductDesign #ArtificialIntelligence #TechPodcast #ClaudeAI #MachineLearning #StartupGrowth

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      Dave Hayward

      Dave Hayward

      Founder  Europa Creative Partners

      Dave, the founder of Europa Creative Partners, has over twenty years of experience in sales and marketing. He reserves the right to shoehorn in his interests such as astronomy and sport into our company blog.
      Contact Dave for a no-obligation consultation.
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