Ed Ortega has spent 20 years in Silicon Valley at the intersection of technology, strategy, and how people actually work. He's a partner at Machine & Folk, and he's one of the clearest, most grounded thinkers on AI we've ever had on Slideshow. He's also, as we say in New Zealand, a bloody good bloke.

This episode went somewhere neither of us expected.

It starts in 1950, on a factory floor in postwar Tokyo, where an obscure American statistician named W. Edwards Deming was about to change the way the world makes things. It runs through the Toyota Production System, the Andon cord, a notorious GM plant in Fremont California where one in five workers didn't show up on any given day and thermoses of vodka were a workplace accessory, and a joint venture that transformed the same chaotic workforce into one of the best-performing plants in the country.

Then it lands squarely in 2025 — and why most AI transformations are failing for exactly the same reason GM couldn't take what they learned at Fremont back to their other plants.

The constraint is gone. The process stayed. That's the problem.

We also watched a tool called Pencil build a fully designed CRM interface from a single prompt. About ten minutes, start to finish. Ed's seen the future of the designer/developer relationship and it looks nothing like the briefs, markups, and JIRA tickets most teams are still running today.

And we talked about what happens to people when AI dissolves the bottleneck their entire workflow was built around — and why that's not a threat. It's the most interesting opportunity in business right now.