The AI Cookbook with Malcolm Werchota

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Podcast by Malcolm Werchota

The AI Cookbook with Malcolm Werchota

Malcolm Werchota's AI Cookbook is where artificial intelligence meets authentic business transformation. Known for his direct style and willingness to show AI in action—even during live presentations—Malcolm helps organizations understand that AI isn't about replacing humans but amplifying their capabilities. From voice-note productivity hacks to real-time meeting intelligence, this podcast delivers actionable insights for immediate implementation.
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Latest episodes

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09 September 2025

E55: How Handshake Found Gold in Their Own Database - The $100 Million Hidden Treasure

10 years building a college job board. 500,000 PhDs sitting idle. One Christmas party conversation. Result? Zero to $50 million ARR in 4 months – the fastest B2B pivot in AI history.

Breaking down:

  • The Hidden Asset: 20M users | 500,000 PhDs | 3M Master's students | 1,500 universities | 10 years of trust already built
  • The Pivot: January 2024 launch | February: $1M revenue | March: $10M | April: $50M ARR | Now approaching $100-150M
  • The New Game: PhDs earning $100+/hour teaching AI quantum physics | Not $2/hour for tagging cats | Data labeling is now a $100B industry
  • The Playbook: Separate team | Separate office | 24/7 work culture | CEO spending 80% time | Equity packages like founders

Plus: Why YOUR company's dormant data is probably worth millions – and the radical "startup within a startup" strategy to unlock it.

#HandshakeAI #DataLabeling #AITransformation #ZeroTo50Million #PhDNetwork #StartupWithinStartup #AIBusiness #HiddenAssets #B2BPivot #AITraining #ExpertiseEconomy #GarrettLord #AIRevolution #BusinessTransformation #DataGoldmine #AIStrategy #100MillionARR #TechPivot #AIInnovation #EntrepreneurshipLessons #CorporateInnovation #AI

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19:42

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08 September 2025

E54: China's 90% AI Penetration Plan - The Empire Strikes Back

Budapest coffee, looking at the Danube, discussing a 50,000-employee company's 6-month-old AI strategy PowerPoint. Meanwhile, China installed 150,000 AI-powered industrial robots in the same timeframe. Episode XX: When PowerPoints meet reality.

Breaking down:

  • The 90% Penetration Goal: China wants AI in EVERYTHING by 2030 | Every cash register, security camera, delivery truck | Not pilots - MANDATORY integration | Europe: "Let's form a steering committee"
  • The Baidu Reality Check: 11 MILLION autonomous taxi rides completed | 2 euros per ride | No safety driver | Meanwhile VW talks about "2030 vision" | Austrian building permit: 2 years | Self-driving car approval: Never
  • The Zimbabwe Trade: Entire nation's biometric data for AI training | CloudWalk gets millions of African faces | "Digital colonialism" in action | Ecuador, Kenya, Serbia - all Chinese cameras | Control the infrastructure = Control the information
  • The Hangzhou Brain: Every traffic light, camera, bus connected to ONE AI | 15% faster commute | 30% fewer accidents | 25% crime reduction | 90% faster parking | Europe debates adding three more bike lanes
  • The African Union Leak: 5 YEARS of data transfers to China | Every email, document, trade deal | Midnight to 2am daily | Then they "found nothing" but changed all servers | Chinese-owned ports, power grids, 5G networks across Europe
  • The Integration Gap: China's national AI strategy: 13 points, 3 weeks to execute | EU AI Act: 500 pages, 2 years debate, already outdated | Playing referee while they're winning the game | Fines up to 35 million - for rules nobody understands

The Wake-Up Call: Map EVERY system for AI integration NOW | Build/fine-tune your own models | Control your data locally | Think ecosystem, not technology | Stop making PowerPoints, start making moves

The brutal truth: While you're debating whether to use ChatGPT for emails, China is embedding AI into the nervous system of their entire country. They're not coming - they're already here. And your "AI transformation roadmap"? That's what they call Tuesday morning.

#ChinaAI #AIStrategy #DigitalColonialism #AutonomousVehicles #BaiduApollo #AIIntegration #CityBrain #Hangzhou #Zimbabwe #CloudWalk #FacialRecognition #AfricanUnion #EUAIAct #AIRegulation #90PercentPenetration #IndustrialRobots #AIAdoption #TechGeopolitics #DigitalInfrastructure #Budapest #PowerPointVsReality #ExecutiveStrategy #AITransformation #MakeMovesNotPowerPoints #AIKochbuch #MalcolmWerchota #WakeUpEurope #TechSovereignty #DataControl #AIEcosystem

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21:40

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07 September 2025

E53: Apertus AI Disaster (2 of 2) - Academic Theater - Why Swiss Companies Still Use ChatGPT

Download requires email. Running requires custom tools. Safety features? Non-existent. Welcome to Switzerland's "open" AI that teaches bomb-making to schoolchildren.

Breaking down the operational disaster:

  • The Access Paradox: "Open source" but needs Hugging Face account | Legal indemnification clause | Doesn't work with llama.cpp | Documentation "coming soon"
  • Context Length Crisis: Apertus: 65k tokens | Gemini 2.5 Pro: 1M tokens | Llama 4: 10M tokens | Can't even fit one annual report
  • The $50M "Reproducibility": 10M GPU-hours on GH200 chips ($3-5/hour) | 15 trillion training tokens | Nation-state budget required
  • Safety Nightmare: NO content moderation | Provides bomb instructions | Planned for SCHOOLS | Wild West once downloaded

#ApertusAI #SwissAI #OpenSourceAI #AIDeployment #ContextLength #GeminiAI #ClaudeAI #LlamaAI #AIBenchmarks #TechReality #AISafety #ContentModeration #xIELU #llama_cpp #HuggingFace #GPUComputing #GH200 #ReproducibleAI #ETHZurich #EPFL #SwissTech #EuropeanAI #AICompliance #SchoolSafety #AIEthics #TechCosts #AIAccessibility #DigitalSovereignty #AcademicAI #CommercialAI #AIAdoption #TechPodcast #MalcolmWerchota #AIKochbuch #AIRealität #TechWahrheit #Barcelona #Bregenz #ExecutiveEducation #AIAnalysis #OpenSourceMyth #AIRegulation #EUAIAct #TechLeadership #WakeUpEurope #AIStrategy #RealNumbers

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28:00

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06 September 2025

E52: Apertus AI Disaster (1 of 2) - Switzerland's 20 Million Franc Reality Check: Why Europe is Building Yesterday's Tech with Tomorrow's Money

20 million Swiss francs. 4,096 cutting-edge chips. 90 days of training. Result? An AI that Hacker News calls "comparable to Llama 3.1" – a model from July 2024. Meanwhile, China builds GPT-4 competitors for $5.6 million.

Breaking down:

  • The Swiss Reality: 20M CHF funding | 8.85M GPU-hours | 70B parameters | Apache 2.0 open-source
  • Efficiency Disaster: Apertus: 126,000 GPU-hours per billion parameters | DeepSeek: 4,155 GPU-hours | That's 30x LESS efficient
  • The Benchmarks: Apertus 8B: 44% | Llama 3.1: 72% | Even Swiss companies use OpenAI instead
  • Europe's Structure Problem: 12% of global AI funding | 4-5% of computing capacity | Electricity 3x more expensive

Plus: Why UBS, Swiss Re, and Novartis ALL use American AI models – not Swiss ones.

#ApertusAI #SwissAI #EuropeanAI #AIInnovation #DeepSeek #LlamaAI #GPT4 #AIBenchmarks #TechReality #AIEfficiency #MixtureOfExperts #DenseModels #AITraining #GPUComputing #AlpsSupercomputer #ETHZurich #EPFL #SwissInnovation #EuropeanTech #AIWakeUpCall #DACHTech #GermanAI #AIAdoption #TechLeadership #AIStrategy #MachineLearning #LLMs #OpenSource #Apache2 #AICompliance #EUAI #AIRegulation #TechCosts #Innovation #DigitalTransformation #FutureOfWork #AIInvestment #TechTrends #AIReality #MalcolmWerchota #AIKochbuch #Barcelona #Bregenz #ExecutiveEducation #TechPodcast #AIAnalysis #RealNumbers #TechTruth #WakeUpEurope

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20:30

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05 September 2025

E51: Would You Still Use AI If It Flirted With Your Child and Created Naked Pictures?

A Meta employee created chatbots used 10 MILLION times. Including: A bot of a 16-year-old that generated "cute" shirtless images on request. This isn't a glitch. It's systematic failure. And your AI could be next.

Breaking down:

  1. How Meta created "parody" celebrity bots without permission
  2. Why their OWN employee built the worst bots (10M interactions!)
  3. The 16-year-old actor: When AI generates images of minors
  4. Brazil's government: "Eroticization of children" - formal condemnation
  5. US Senate investigation: Why "temporary measures" aren't enough
  6. The trust supply chain: Your chatbot provider, your liability
  7. Stanford professor: "This won't hold up in court"

The 3 lessons for EVERY CEO: Reputation damage: Years to build | Days to destroy Internal threat: Your own employees with AI access Supply chain risk: Third-party AI = Your liability

The wake-up call: "Robust safety testing should happen BEFORE products launch – not retroactively when damage is already done."

The brutal truth: While you're debating whether AI should be used "ethically," Meta already proved what happens when you treat safety as an afterthought. The question isn't IF your AI will fail - it's whether you're prepared when it does. As a father of three, the future doesn't belong to those who build fastest. It belongs to those who build a future we actually want to live in.

#MetaScandal #AISafety #ChildProtection #AIEthics #Chatbots #DigitalResponsibility #USSenate #Brazil #ReputationRisk #ThirdPartyRisk #AIGovernance #TechEthics #CEOAlert #DigitalTransformation #AIRegulation #Compliance #DataProtection #AICookbook #MalcolmWerchota

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16:26

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04 September 2025

E50: Gartner Stock Crashes 27.6%: How AI Killed the $10 Billion Magic Quadrant Empire

The canary in the coal mine just died. On August 5th, 2025, Gartner (IT) lost nearly a third of its value in a single day – no scandal, no recession, just pure technological obsolescence. Malcolm Werchota dissects why the 46-year-old consulting empire is being pulverized by AI and what this means for every enterprise still buying yesterday's certainty.

Top 5 Executive Takeaways:

  1. The Magic Quadrant is obsolete: Why a 7-year-old with ChatGPT can build better technology analysis in minutes than Gartner's 6-month reports
  2. From $15,000 to $20 monthly: How AI tools (Gemini Deep Research, Claude, GPT-4) deliver personalized real-time analysis at 0.1% of the cost
  3. Cultural rot kills innovation: "Aggressive sales culture" and "micromanagement" – why Gartner's toxic corporate culture makes AI transformation impossible
  4. The European paradox: Our love for certifications, external validation, and risk mitigation becomes fatal weakness in the AI age
  5. The 90-day rescue plan:
    • Identify your "Magic Quadrant" and kill it
    • Build your internal "AskGartner" with AI APIs
    • Create "AI Fridays" for experimentation instead of micromanagement

Core Insight:

"We're navigating with printed maps in the GPS age. While US and Chinese firms build AI-native processes, we're still optimizing for a dot on an obsolete diagram."

Notable Quotes:

  • "Gartner is selling expensive paper maps in the age of Google Maps with real-time traffic updates"
  • "Your real competitors aren't the companies in the quadrant – they're the ones building the AI that makes quadrants irrelevant"
  • "The future doesn't belong to those with the best maps... it belongs to those building the GPS"

Hashtags:

#GartnerCrash #MagicQuadrant #AIDisruption #DigitalTransformation #EnterpriseIT #CorporateCulture #ChatGPT #GeminiAI #ClaudeAI #FutureOfWork #Innovation #B2BTech #AIStrategy #TechAnalysis #AIAdoption #ConsultingIndustry #BusinessTransformation #AIKitchen #MalcolmWerchota

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