In the second instalment of our Agentic AI series, Georgia and Matt are joined by returning friend of the pod and AI product expert, Pete Sbarski, to put our AI-generated startup ideas under some very real scrutiny.

But first… the news:

⚖️ Legal & Regulatory Shakeups A US court ruled that training AI on legally purchased books = OK, pirated books? Not so much.

Germany's taking on DeepSeek, pressuring Apple and Google to block the app over privacy concerns.

⚡️ Infrastructure Watch

Amazon's going big in Australia, announcing a massive $13B investment in data centers and solar by 2029.

Cloudflare and Google Cloud had a rough week, with outages reminding us that even hyperscalers aren’t immune to single points of failure.

💡 Back to Business: Can AI Actually Build a Startup?

Last episode, Claude and Gemini pitched six startup ideas.

This week, we brought in Pete to roast them (constructively). Here’s what made the shortlist:

1. 📝 AI RFP Assistant
2. ✅ Compliance Monitor for SMEs
3. 🔍 B2B Data Quality Tool
4. ⚖️ AI Paralegal for Small Firms
5. 💰 Grant Guru for Nonprofits
6. ✍️ Content Copilot for Solo Creators

🧠 Key Takeaways from Pete

• “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” — some use cases (like legal AI) come with huge liability baggage.
• Data hygiene does not necessarily mean fancy tools — a lot of orgs want AI, but what they really need is cleaner, more structured data.
• AI isn’t the bottleneck — people are — from resistance to change to unclear ownership, it’s often human systems holding us back.

✅ What We’re Testing Next

We’re moving ahead with two experiments:

The Content Copilot – using AI to repurpose and summarise our own podcast archive.

RFP / Grant Assistant – trialing real-world applications with a friend’s health tech startup.

We’ll be back soon with some early results — and hopefully a winner. 👀 📩

Want early access and exclusive insights from our experiments?

Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly executive takeaways from the edge of AI, cloud and innovation here: cloud-dialogues.com

In this episode, Georgia and Matt serve up your weekly dose of AI and cloud news — plus the launch of something brand new (and a little wild):

*The Agentic Series* — our hands-on experiment to see if AI agents can design, build, and run a business… with minimal human meddling. 📰

Headlines This Week:

Amazon’s AI Workforce Shift: Andy Jassy’s latest shareholder letter teases a leaner, more AI-powered workforce. The hosts dig into what this could *really* mean (and how Amazon Fresh’s “AI stores” were actually powered by humans in a control center in India).

BBC vs. Perplexity: The BBC’s getting legal over AI scraping — accusing Perplexity of publishing full articles without permission. Is AI crossing the fair use line?

Big Tech Chessboard: Rumors swirl of Apple sniffing around Perplexity, while Elon’s XAI Grok cozies up to Microsoft *and* Oracle Cloud.

Game on. 🤖

Launching The Agentic Series What happens when you put Claude Opus, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and ChatGPT 4.5 in a virtual war room and ask them to create a business? We're finding out. 🧪

The Challenge: Create a digital-only, serverless product business — researched, designed, and architected by AI agents. Each LLM acts as a specialist:

Claude & Gemini: product strategist & market analysts

ChatGPT: evaluator and judge

They were tasked with:

• Finding underserved problems
• Sizing the market
• Proposing architecture + GTM strategy
• Recommending pricing and monetization models

📊 The Outcome: Claude’s Top Picks:

1. AI-powered RFP response assistant

2. Continuous compliance monitoring for SMEs

3. Real-time B2B data enrichment

Gemini’s (eventual) Suggestions:

1. AI-powered paralegal for law firms

2. “Grant Guru” for nonprofits

3. Content co-pilot for solo creators

🎯 Winner (according to GPT-4.5): The AI content co-pilot for creators, thanks to high relatability, market size, and strong demo potential.

🔜 What’s Next? We’re moving into solution design and technical architecture in the next episode — with expert guests joining the build.

Expect practical use cases, ethical debates, cost guardrails, and a few surprises as we let the agents do their thing.

💡 Don’t want to miss what AI builds next?

👉 Subscribe to our newsletter for exclusive insights on executive strategy, AI architecture, and emerging tech trends - subscribe here cloud-dialogues.com

🎙️ Cloud Dialogues #34: Plugging AI Into the Real World — Why MCP Matters

In this episode of Cloud Dialogues, Georgia and Matt go beyond the buzzwords and into the wiring of enterprise AI. From AI agents that write code to cloud strategies that make a lick of sense, we unpack the tools and protocols reshaping modern AI — starting with the week’s wild headlines.

• Databricks acquires Neon, strengthening the serverless Postgres story

• OpenAI drops Codex, a multitasking software agent that’s raising a few eyebrows

• Google launches Gemini 2.5 and VO3, stepping further into multimodal territory

• Microsoft open-sources GitHub Copilot, plus introduces a new SRE agent

• Oracle bets big on AI, snapping up $40B in Nvidia chips for U.S. data centers

We also call out the rise of “vibe coding” and the risks of AI-powered startups without adult supervision. Georgia thinks that credentials still matter....

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an answer to a growing problem that we are all hearing about: LLMs are powerful, but kind of clueless. Without fresh data, structured tools, and the ability to reason in real-time, they hallucinate. A lot.

MCP fixes that — by letting AI agents safely plug into real systems (think APIs, dashboards, HR tools) with structure, permissions, and traceability.

• ✅ Inject real-time data into AI workflows without retraining models

• ✅ Reduce hallucinations and increase trust, auditability & reliablity

• ✅ Enable secure, role-based access to internal systems (HR, finance, ops)

• ✅ Build agents that do more than chat — they act

• Pulling support ticket history during a live customer call

• Executing a compliance check via a secure API

• Asking your AI assistant to summarize live KPIs across platforms

🎧 We wrap up with a challenge: what would it really take to let an AI agent run an entire startup? (Spoiler: we’re not there yet — but we’re closer than you think - eyes on this space 👀)

📩 Want weekly insights like this straight to your inbox? Subscribe to our newsletter for exec-focused takes on AI, cloud, and digital transformation — link in the comments.

#CloudDialogues #MCP #GenAI #AgenticAI #Copilot #CloudStrategy #AIIntegration #Anthropic #Claude #APIs #ModelContextProtocol #TechLeadership #DigitalTransformation