In this section I review one AI-powered application and demonstrate how it can be used to create new value.
The story has to leave your laptop somehow. For a lot of leaders that somehow is video. Keynote clips, customer messages, internal town halls, the speaker reel that lives on your homepage. Until 2024, producing any of those at quality meant booking a small production team and waiting three weeks. Today it can mean Descript and an evening.
The reason Descript is worth a post of its own, beyond the feature list, is the philosophy. CEO Laura Burkhouser frames it plainly: "We like AI, but we also really like humans. We think humans are better storytellers than AI, but man, AI is so fast at doing discrete actions and we really want to build a platform that leverages the magic of that so that we can tell more stories."
That sentence is the product strategy. Humans set story shape. AI does discrete actions fast. Two layers, one workflow.
How Descript thinks about the work
Burkhouser describes the product in three layers.
The generation layer does the polish. Studio Sound for audio. Eye-contact correction. Filler-word removal. Lip dubbing and jump-cut concealment. Plus the smaller niceties like automatic speaker identification and captions.
The application layer is the human-in-the-loop step where you actually edit the story you wanted to tell. As Burkhouser puts it, "the last 10 to 20 to sometimes even 30%, depending on how much artistic flare you have, you're going to need to do yourself." This is the layer Descript is least precious about. They want you here. They do not want AI here.
The orchestration layer is Underlord, Descript's background AI agent. Underlord imports footage and drafts rough cuts on its own, then proposes B-roll and social clips through the API and MCP. It is the closest the platform comes to "give it the raw and get the cut."
My week with it
Two weeks ago I sat down with Gary Fabbri, a professional video storyteller and creative director, in a studio we rented for a series of takes. Gary combined those takes with footage I already had from previous podcasts and workshop recordings, and shaped a powerful two-minute speaker reel. We iterated, I asked for several adjustments, and he sent back two final versions. I shared them with a few friends and got back another round of small notes.
Then I opened the file in Descript.
- I removed some filler words I had not noticed before.
- I changed a couple of cuts that felt slightly off after the friends' feedback.
- I let Underlord suggest a couple of additional tweaks and took the ones that landed.
- I reached for Overdub on two sentences where I wanted to sound a little more fluent without re-recording an entire take, and used it only on words I had actually said.
- Descript auto-labelled the speakers along the way.
The whole pass took about an hour. Gary's work was the foundation: the story shape, the pacing, the artistic decisions only a human storyteller does well. Descript was the polish I could not have justified asking him for a fourth round on, or renting the studio again for.
That seems to be the right division of labor for now. A human creative director sets the story. AI-assisted post-production tightens execution. You keep the final cut in your own hands. You can watch the finished speaker reel on my homepage.
The CEO as product manager of the company
Burkhouser's interview surfaces a bonus angle that connects directly to this issue's framework piece on strategic narrative. Amazon teaches its PMs to think like CEOs of the product. Burkhouser flips it. The CEO is the product manager and the company is the product.
She names her hardest discipline plainly: not to "be a product manager. The hardest thing for me not to do is to say, I've got this one, I'm just going to write this back." Opening Cursor and building it herself is fun and fulfilling. For a CEO it is also low leverage.
The CEO-as-PM job looks like what Burkhouser calls being a simplifier, pulling people out of the weeds and helping them see why the work matters. Plus what her mentor told her: "The more senior you get, the more your job is walking into different rooms and saying the same three things all over again."
That is Section 2's strategic narrative work in product-management clothes. The PRD for the company-as-product is your bold direction, said out loud, in the same words, in every room. AI is the lever that finally lets a CEO-PM ship the same three things into forty rooms with the conviction intact. Descript is one button on that lever, for the rooms that need video. The voice discipline is the same one I cover in this issue's leadership section.
Your action step
If you have raw video sitting on your hard drive and you have been telling yourself you will get around to it, Descript will collapse the gap between intent and shipped output. The free tier is enough to test the workflow.
Pick one piece of footage you keep meaning to ship: a recorded talk, a customer testimonial, a workshop snippet. Spend an hour in Descript. Use the polish layer freely. Let Underlord propose a cut. Use Overdub only on words you have actually said. If you find yourself reaching for Underlord to write the story for you, stop. The story is the thing you own. Descript is the lever that ships it.
Watch Laura Burkhouser's interview if you want the founder's view on where the platform is heading next.
If you are building a speaker reel, a leadership comms cadence, or a video-led internal narrative and want a second pair of eyes on the story shape before the polish, that is the kind of work I do in keynote and workshop engagements and AI strategy advisory sessions with leadership teams.