Fin Sunday Edition #9
How fast is fast enough?
“What’s the next thing?”
Des went on Trailblazers Episode 10 to talk about why he favours momentum over moonshots, why a unique identity has power for incumbent AI companies, and why it’s so hard (and rewarding) to cook Beef Wellington.
He also thinks the old social networks are dying and there’s a need for a network that focuses on tech without being drowned out in the noise.
The demo-to-deployment gap
We got talking about Business Insider’s deep look this week at Salesforce’s Agentforce struggles. The headline numbers tell one story: fewer than half of 12,500 customers are paying, less than 2% were having more than 50 agent conversations per week as of summer. But the more revealing detail is about what happens between the demo and going live:
“It’s very, very difficult — even for people working on the products — to know the difference between what we say in a demo, what’s on a road map, and what’s actually in production.”
The gap between vision and execution is real for everyone building in this space. Demos showcase the future but they need to be grounded in real tools that humans can implement.
Writing, fast and slow
Over on the Intercom blog, our Senior Content Designer Russell shared his insights in How to build a Content Design Agent.
He built an agent called VERBI — powered by Glean — to help the product design team refine UI copy, from whole flows down to single components. He walked through how he built it, how it connects to internal systems, and what it takes to move from idea to functioning tool.
Content designers, product designers, PMs, and the AI-curious all wanted to know how to build their own.
“Feels like the future of copywriting and design/copy systems”
The conversation swirled around speed, complexity, and adoption. But Russell noted that the agent itself was really the tip of the iceberg — the real value came from the editorial style and design guidance it was built on, which took months of human thinking to establish and refine. All that brainpower is a big part of automation, the fuel source that makes quality at speed possible.
Globetrotting, blueprints in hand
Last week our first-ever AI Agent Blueprint event in New Zealand brought together 40 people in Auckland for a panel discussion with Sharesies and Resly, all about designing and developing their own blueprints with Fin.
In Europe, we met up with Dust in Paris for a conversation about multi-agent systems and orchestration patterns. The recap’s here.
Next up: we’ll be in Amsterdam on Nov 25 — then back to Paris, plus Berlin and London, in the first two weeks of December. You can sign up for all our upcoming events on Luma.
Our parting thought
The tech might change but the principle stays the same: build tools that help people everywhere do more — more powerfully and more reliably.
See you next Sunday.
Spot on. That demo-to-deployment gap is critcal. It's often the hardest engineering problem.
The demo-to-deployment gap is probaly the biggest chalenge in AI products right now. The Agentforce numbers are sobering but honest. Too many companies are still showcasing futures that their infrastructure can't actually deliver. The tension between moving fast and building somthing humans can actually use is real. Russell's framework on fast vs slow writing applies perfectly here.