In The Blink of AI with Georgie Healy

Dan Westgarth has spent 7 years helping build Deel from a contractor invoicing tool into one of the most valuable HR and payroll platforms in the world, and he did it after cutting his teeth as an early operator at Revolut. As COO, he sits across nearly every function the AI conversation touches: finance, sales, engineering, and the sheer operational load of running a company at global scale.
In this conversation, Dan gets specific on AI and Ops. He walks through the internal tool that takes a bug ticket, writes the fix, and opens its own pull request for an engineer to review. He talks through what he actually looks for when hiring, and the future of SaaS isn't dead, but there is about to be a lot more competition.
We traverse through a funny detour into Dan's own weekend coding habit (his laptop did not enjoy….), a rundown of which AI tool he reaches for and when, and an answer to "what would you build this weekend”
Listen for a leading operator's view of AI adoption at scale

CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open, the AI agent that writes its own code
00:46 Show intro, Deel's sponsorship, and what's ahead
02:03 Sponsor break, Deel
02:30 What Deel actually does
03:14 Rapid AI hot takes, finance roles, human oversight, hardware, sports, and the World Cup
09:29 Why Deel keeps winning after seven years
10:00 How the product evolved from contractor invoicing to a full HR platform
11:28 What Dan looks for when hiring
13:06 Leaving Revolut for Deel
14:17 Sponsor break, Deel
14:57 The YC Winter 2019 connection
15:49 Setting targets and building momentum
16:43 Where AI helps the sales team, and where it can't
19:20 Should AI handle your email
21:03 AI meeting assistants, pros and cons
22:53 What makes an A+ engineer in 2026
23:37 Inside DCA, Deel's self-writing code agent
25:55 Breaking into new international markets
28:34 B2C versus B2B expansion
30:16 The cost of not using a platform like Deel
33:01 What keeps Dan up at night about AI agents
33:29 Akai, and scaling operations without growing headcount
36:15 Dan's own weekend coding experiment
37:26 Rapid fire, is the SaaS apocalypse real
39:48 The physical Deel Card and crypto payroll
42:23 What is a stablecoin
43:02 Which AI tools Dan actually reaches for
44:51 If Dan built one AI project this weekend
46:45 Closing thoughts and where to find Dan
47:08 Deel's new Arsenal FC sponsorship
48:41 Georgie's weekly AI newsletter

Lucas Cantor has an unusual claim on the AI conversation. In 2019, Huawei asked him to finish Schubert's Unfinished Symphony using artificial intelligence, and he did it. He's an Emmy-winning composer who has worked on every Olympics since 2002, produced a cover of Everybody Wants to Rule the World with Lorde, and now invests in music technology. His new book is Unfinished: The Role of the Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
In this episode Georgie Healy gets Lucas to take apart the story we're all being told about AI. Why he thinks nobody actually knows what the term even means. Why every single person he asks assumes AI can do the job they're not an expert in, and can't do the job they are. Why the claim that AI democratizes creativity is a fallacy sold by AI companies, and what it actually democratizes instead. Why B2B SaaS isn't dead, and who benefits from you believing it is. And why the music industry, supposedly murdered by Napster, is bigger now than it was before.
If you build, market, or operate anything, this is a useful hour of pressure testing. Lucas isn't a doomer and he isn't an evangelist. He's someone who has been inside the technology long enough to tell the difference between what it does and what it's sold as.
Recorded ahead of his first trip to Australia for BIGSOUND - which is September 1st - 4th in Brisbane!

Chapters:
00:00 Cold open
00:54 Welcome, and who Lucas Cantor is
02:49 The AI hack: stem separation
04:14 Taylor Swift's wedding
04:55 BIGSOUND, and the fear around AI in music
06:23 Why the purist argument falls apart
07:25 Tuning has drifted since the Renaissance
10:02 Composer, producer, author, investor
11:16 What Suno is, and the ethics problem
12:20 Why all music sounds better now
15:33 What it actually means to have your music stolen
16:56 Covering Everybody Wants to Rule the World with Lorde
19:19 Source Connect, Audio Movers, and remote studios
20:22 The fallacy that AI democratizes creativity
22:38 Black Swan, conductors, and the war on expertise
24:26 The doctor who said AI could write a pop song
27:38 Why he called himself a Luddite
30:18 Hans Zimmer's studio, and saying yes to Huawei
32:34 Finishing Schubert's Unfinished Symphony
37:00 "I don't think anybody knows what AI is"
38:49 Every AI agent ad shows something nobody needs
42:14 Hot take: is B2B SaaS dead?
45:13 AI is a story, and that's the problem
46:25 What actually wins in music tech
49:28 Amusing, but not amazing
50:20 Ben Affleck, Scorsese, and AI in the creative process
53:30 Two Emmys and a coach of the year award
55:36 The one takeaway from Unfinished
57:33 Georgie's Substack, Attention Is All I Need

Robin O'Connell spends his days inside LinkedIn's marketing and advertising team in Australia, working with founders and brands on content strategy - which makes him a rare voice on where AI genuinely helps marketers, and where it still falls flat. In this episode, Robin makes the case that the smartest move for any marketer right now is trying to replace parts of your own job with AI, just to find out fast what it can't do. His answer: strategy. AI can automate tactics at scale, but it still can't replace the judgement that comes from genuinely understanding a customer.
Georgie and Robin get into how brands actually stand out on LinkedIn (hint: it's not by looking like Apple), why comments and DMs are a better growth signal than impressions, and how to tell when AI-written content is quietly killing your credibility.
The standout story, though, is personal: Robin's dad Dennis, a serial entrepreneur in Dublin who lost his retail business during COVID, now runs a landscaping venture - and uses AI image generation on an iPad to show clients exactly what their garden will look like before a single spade hits the ground. It's one of the clearest, most human examples of AI actually changing how someone runs a small business.
Find Robin on LinkedIn for more on marketing, AI, and content strategy.

Freddie McKenzie is the co-founder and CEO of Manifest, an AI platform that helps creative and marketing agencies capture the real value of their work without timesheets. Before Manifest, he built and exited VIVID Creative, an Auckland-based production agency behind campaigns for Jetstar and other major brands, and in this conversation with Georgie Healy he traces that journey and where he thinks AI agents, and the AI hype cycle, are actually heading.
Freddie shares his AI hack of stacking meeting transcripts to actually see progress over time, and explains why he refuses to automate the one interface he thinks matters most: his inbox. He unpacks why Manifest's CTO built a proprietary AI model instead of wrapping an off-the-shelf one, the real story behind Manifest's $2 million pre-seed raise in a tough funding market, and his take on why most companies experimenting with AI agents still can't get past their first prompt. He also makes the case that the so-called SaaS apocalypse is a myth, and shares his simple rule for founders chasing product-market fit: find the ugly problem, not the sexy one.
Mentioned in this episode:
Deel x PX_Post Intro

Welcome to the first ever episode of AI Icons, a new thing I'm launching on the show. Here's the idea: the people reshaping tech have stories more entertaining than anything Hollywood is putting out, so in under 30 minutes I'm going to tell you the whole story, the good, the bad, and the ugly, but only the facts. No spin. And at the end, I'll give you my two cents on what actually made them an icon, and whether it's something you and I could ever replicate.
First up is Mira Murati, and I'll admit it, I'm a fan. I take you all the way back to her childhood in isolated post-communist Albania, where maths was the one subject the party couldn't rewrite, through a scholarship in Canada, degrees in maths and mechanical engineering, and a Goldman Sachs floor in Tokyo at 21. Then it's Tesla and those ridiculous Falcon Wing doors, a risky bet on a startup called Leap Motion, and the move that made her famous: OpenAI, where she rose to CTO and helped bring DALL-E and ChatGPT into your life.
And then there's the part that genuinely reads like a thriller. The 72 hours in November 2023 when Sam Altman was fired, Mira was named CEO, and a 52-page memo and a string of 2:30am texts sat right at the center of it. I walk you through what we know, what we still don't, and what came out under oath. I finish on her next act, Thinking Machines Lab, the record-breaking raise, the talent exodus, and why, out of my four Gs, I think one of them explains her better than the rest. Come find out which one.
In the Blink of AI is made possible by our wonderful partners
Deel
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It’s why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast.
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✨ Connect with Georgie Healy
Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/
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