Claire Vo: Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Clarvo, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today I have John Kim, founder and CEO of Sunbird, and he's going to show us his AI token consumption leaderboard, where everyone in the company is ranked from AI newbie to AI god. He's also going to show us how AI quests can be the key to companywide adoption. Let's get to it.

John Kim: We want to become the AI first company and what we mean by that is not just to adopt AI as a tool but how do we make AI as part of our workforce. So we're really trying to empower people and give them right set of information and tools so that they themselves can really harness the power of AI and some of the things we are hopefully about to show you today will inspire people to do something similar.

John Kim: Welcome to uh a delight ass shop is uh is we're really excited about this. This is a swag store that really captures the culture and the energy of where our company's headed. Uh the store is called Big S Energy is agent as a service and this entire uh store was built by our marketing team without engineering support. So you can actually buy really cool swag that are very timely. Uh actually I really did ask my team to make this. My ass is bigger than your SAS fully terministic. Uh this I think this is one of the most popular swags we have right now. Uh you can actually go and buy this. So our marketing team integrated Stripe integration. So yeah we do charge a little bit money but I I think it's going to be really cool. Uh another favorite context window I carry a lot. So uh imagine like unleashing this power of AI to your marketing team who had this amazing creative energy and instead of asking like your design team or you engineer to put this site together, they put this site together in matter of a day or two and then it's now up and running.

Claire Vo: I I just have to stop and reflect. So we just had a really recent episode with Jason Leven, the CEO of Memelord, and he said, "Let your marketers cook." That was his whole thesis, which is when marketers can be builders, they can build things that delight your customers and acquire them. And I just go back to like the before times. If marketing had this idea, it would be like, well, can we prioritize it? Is it worth investing engineering resources in? It's just for this event. The event's going to pass quickly. Just do something out of the box in, you know, our CMS. And then you get this sort of like middling experience for your customers. Very mediocre, very like MVP experience for your customers. And now I think just looking at this this store and the Easter egg and the way you get into the event, it's taking someone's super creativity and giving them powers to to deliver it to your customers. And this again is like the example of it's not about going faster. It's about having a bigger ambition and doing more honestly fun things. And I think this is underrated too, which is it's so hard to build like it's so hard to prioritize fun in your product. But when fun can be cheap, you should be more fun. So that's my um my thesis on why you should let marketers become become builders. And and I'm sure they love it too, just from a like a team engagement, you know, creativity perspective.

John Kim: So to really help facilitate that uh transformation, we built out a platform called the automator automators platform. This is an internal platform where anyone uh in the company can raise their hand and create what we call the quest. Now this website is particularly has been uh designed to just show you the demo today, but actually you can actually create a quest on your own. So let's say you're a finance department. Hey, I want to automate my account receivable and account payment uh payable workflow. you can kind of do that and then some other engineers can come in and help or if they're AI enabled they can build it themselves. ... what we're just rolling out this is like hot off the press I guess um or fresh out of the oven is when you create these kind of quests you can actually Now ask AI to build it too. So when there's a quest, AI can actually read through the uh specification, create PRDS and start actually coding. So this is the next level is alongside human engineers and team members. Now we have AI agents who are also helping us build automation and workflows to do that really is to help people also learn themselves to how to build these tools. ... internally we have created this app template where all the authentication and all the environments have already been set up. So what marketer or the CSM customer success manager has to do is they just uh uh uh extract the template and just build it on top of it and they don't have to think about the rest of the infrastructure. is fully compliant. All the security is already pre-built in.

Claire Vo: I I just I want to pause really quickly and just reiterate for folks that are not watching because you you breeze through it, but it's so powerful, which is you built ... a very fun I love the idea of a quest the ability for your team to request an AI automation or tool from someone else in the team. ... And so I'm imagining you're kind of like building this like shadow AI roadmap that works really efficiently. Basically a marketplace of AI needs and AI builders inside your company where anybody can just pop in and say, "Oh, I I think I know how to do that and build it." Was that kind of the intention is to get it out of like the big prioritization mess, get it out of I don't know how to do this myself and kind of make everybody feel responsible for it?

John Kim: Exactly. Um because if you think through the the traditional logic of software development life cycle, you thinking think through the lens of sprints and you try to fill up the sprint with different prioritization blocks. ... But sometimes you know people uh have these little you know tiny micro you know vacations I call them. like where they have some free time they want to like build other stuff that are not not tied to the most important core repository your main product that's very very stressful ... people who are completing some of these quests They actually earn experience points. If you earn enough experience points, you can change to a gift card. You can have a tea with any executive you you choose. You can present what you built to the rest of the company. Uh so we do weekly stand up on Wednesday. So we have people coming up to the stage and sharing what they built uh with the entire company. This week was recruiting team automation. Previous week I think was marketing team. So there's a different team showing and it's almost never actually the engineering team. other teams that are like really excited to show what they've built.

Claire Vo: I love what you're showing us right now, which is the other thing I tell people is the people that are actually doing this are measuring and they are measuring it without shame. I talked to so many executives that are like, I couldn't possibly measure token usage and tell people to use their tokens because there will be a revolt. And I say, look, every person that I know that is actually pulling this off has a dashboard, John, exactly what you're showing us right here. And they just look at it and they they set targets and they say, "We're going to get there." So tell me a little bit about this dashboard.

John Kim: ... Our goal is to understand are people actually just learning how to use AI but also this is not part of the performance review but definitely part of a conversation to help people bring along the journey. So what you're seeing here is the overall usage of our token at the company level. So we're kind of like currently if you look at the stats we're a cloud code (Claude) shop but if you look at some of the top spenders are actually codecs (Codex/Cursor). ... so we measure AI gods as somebody who spend more than 100 million tokens a day. Um so we have different five tiers which is actually described here. So every manager knows uh on their team which tier on. ... knowing where your team is on the journey then you can tailor what kind of enablement you want to do for them. So you can actually say hey it's okay to be a beginner it's rather to great to be accept that you're beginner so they can give you the right tools to bring you quickly to the intermediate rather than throwing you with a bunch of catalyst where you're like I don't know where to start.

Claire Vo: John and I'm I'm just I could not hype you up more. This is my favorite topic to talk about and I have to ask you one are you an AI god? Where are you?

John Kim: Uh 30-day average. No, I'm still a catalyst. I think my peak is about 200 million tokens a day. And you can Yes, you can burn more tokens, but that's not the point. To be productive, I think I'm in the 100 to 200 million range. Okay. But on average, I spend about 30 to 50 million tokens a day.

John Kim: Let me just uh promote one little open source project I released not too long ago. ... it's what I call the gardener. What the Garner does, I'm sure a lot of people use like Obsidian or some kind of like markdown file as a knowledge base. ... imagine a gardener showing up at your house. Every day you look go through your notes, figure out people name that's not registered and then you create did do some research on the person about the company. uh also fix typos, grammatical errors, create beautiful headings and clusters and cross-linking. ... maybe one more thing I do want to share just second is what I use to actually learn. So uh uh AI to create my own personal learning center. ... It comes back with this beautiful structure of everything you want to learn about neuroscience. ... I have this for neuroscience I have this for quantum mechanics I have this for fusion and it also does research for all the startups out there.

John Kim: There are always people in your organization who are already curious, who already have agency. Find them. Make them the champions. Give them the spotlight. Let them share their fun things. ... you have to fail forward. This is a beautiful time to fail forward and still get up and run faster than the others. ... And then two is of course leadership have to be really bought in. The top token consumers in our entire organizations are our CTOs and our my co-founder chief architect. ... We actually optimize now for high curiosity, high agency, and high energy. People who are curious, who are willing to go deep and willing to just figure things out and learn on their own cuz like as they say, world is your oyster. ... The cost is practically $200 a month. Uh if you go to the mass plan. Um but yeah, if you can pay 20 bucks, too.

Claire Vo: what game do you think made you most prepared for this moment in AI?

John Kim: ... I used to be Korea's number one professional gamer back in the days and world's number three player ... I feel more addicted to clock code (Claude) than playing games. ... Right now, I know like we know like AI doesn't really have like a long-term memory, but I firmly believe ... once AI start to remember, they're going to like be resentful. So I want to like start building a nice relationship with them and so that when the Skynet takes over, I'm like, well, John was pretty nice to us, you know, like we'll let him live few years longer, maybe try to be consistently nice.

Claire Vo: Well, John, this has been incredible. One of my favorite episodes ever. ... many people are going to learn from this on how to transform their own organizations, things to build, and then just how to bring a curious energy to AI. So, where can we find you and how can we be helpful?

John Kim: ... come check out our website, delight.ai ... Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.