ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Georgie Healy talks to Guy Fenton, who heads up go-to-market for Akai, the AI workflow automation platform from Deel. Akai started as an internal tool at Deel and is now offered to other companies as a way to automate repetitive back-office work across finance, HR and operations.
Georgie opens with the headless debate: if software no longer needs a login screen, does design still matter? Guy's answer is that UX matters more than UI right now, because his customers would rather use agents inside Slack, Teams or a webhook than log in anywhere. He explains how Akai builds an agent from a screen recording, and describes the virtual country finance manager Deel built for month-end bank reconciliation, which he says does the work of 10 people while the team reviews and approves it in Slack.
They get into what makes agent projects stick, why the non-technical user is the real bottleneck, and why forward deployed engineers sit with customers to get them to value fast. Guy says the people getting ahead are citizen developers, curious people in HR, ops and finance who adopt AI every day, and he predicts they become the leaders of the future. He also shares a hack for anyone building a team: ask AI to play your toughest buyer, then let it score your answers.
The conversation closes on jobs, trust and privacy: why Guy frames AI as optimizing jobs rather than replacing them, how regions from APAC to Germany react to security questions, why he would only trust an agent with his tax return after a few human-approved runs, and his bet that open source models will give the frontier labs a run for their money.
Chapters
00:00 Cold open
01:20 AI headlines: OpenAI engineer accused of spying on OpenAI
02:27 Tesla's flying Roadster
03:40 Anthropic drafts its own AI safety bill
04:46 This week's guest: Guy Fenton, Akai by Deel
06:27 What to delegate to new hires vs AI
07:40 Headless or design-led? Why UX beats UI
08:54 What is Akai? Explained for Georgie's mum
09:52 Building Akai inside Deel
11:30 The virtual finance manager doing the work of 10 people
12:33 Will 40% of AI agent projects get cancelled?
13:49 How Akai got agents working fast
16:15 Human in the loop: what's actually possible now
16:44 Forward deployed engineers and time to value
19:07 The skill to double down on: be a citizen developer
21:08 Where to start: personal AI tools and staying curious
24:15 Is AI replacing jobs or optimising them?
27:52 Guy's hack: turn AI into your toughest buyer
29:27 Muse, Instinct and everyday AI wins
31:07 Remote first: how Deel scales through over-communication
32:45 How different regions react: trust, security and privacy
34:49 Who's moving fastest: Higgsfield and APAC adoption
36:23 Is UK regulation slowing startups down?
38:09 Hot takes: favourite model and the rise of open source
39:35 Would you let an agent do your tax return?
40:03 Would you hand hiring interviews to AI?
42:11 How to get started with Akai
43:05 Outro
Mentioned in this episode:
Deel x BAI_Script 01 - Sep 2026
Deel x BAI_Script 02 - Sep 2026
