AI Judgment, Work Trends, and the Angel Investor Gap with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about Anthropic's bet on philosophy, trends shaping work in 2026, and why we need more angel investors. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger and Miles Zero’s Robyn Bolton. As we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact, let's get started.

Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

Thinkers50 Recognition and the Role of Modern Management Thinkers in Innovation

[00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And with me, I have Robyn Bolton. Robyn, welcome to the show. 

[00:00:43] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Great to be here again. 

[00:00:45] Brian Ardinger: We are excited as always, to talk about innovation and all the things that we've learned. Anything going on in your life that you want to share?

[00:00:52] Robyn Bolton: Got some exciting news actually a couple weeks ago. Don't know if folks are familiar with Thinkers 50. That is kind of like the list of the top management thinkers and they have a radar list of up-and-coming thinkers and found out that I got named to that list. 

[00:01:08] Brian Ardinger: Yes, that's awesome. 

[00:01:10] Robyn Bolton: 30 up and coming thinkers and very excited. I'm a thinker now. 

[00:01:15] Brian Ardinger: It's always good to be recognized and even more to be recognized as a thinker. I think, especially in today's world. 

[00:01:21] Robyn Bolton: Yes, yes. Thinking is good. Doing is good too. And you know, it's an organization, they always say thinking plus doing equals impact. And I'm like, yep. 

[00:01:30] Brian Ardinger: There we go. 

[00:01:30] Robyn Bolton: Gotta be doing too.

[00:01:32] Brian Ardinger: Well congratulations on that. 

[00:01:34] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. What about you? What's new in your world? 

[00:01:36] Brian Ardinger: Right now, we are buried in seven inches of snow, so that was fun. The week before we were in Phoenix, so I think I picked the wrong week to go on vacation. Other than that, unburying from email and unburying from snow this week. So, it's all good. 

[00:01:51] Robyn Bolton: Well, at least you had a week of warm to remember what that's like. 

[00:01:53] Brian Ardinger: Exactly. Remember what it was like. Excellent. Well, let's get started. We've got a couple of different articles over the last few weeks. The first one we want to talk about is a YouTube video from AI News and Strategy Daily by Nate b Jones.

He had a video a couple weeks ago talking about Anthropic CEO's bet on the company and his philosophy, and the data says that he's right, that he's thinking about things in a little bit different way. It really talks about the constitution that Anthropic has put together. They put together an 80-page Claude constitution outlining the principles of how they've developed Claude and thinking about it, quite frankly, in a different way than a lot of the other AI companies have been thinking about it.

What they've said that they've done is really look at how do you build these AI models using core principles, rather than having to build out every single rule and what the AI has to do based on rules and more about what's the philosophy of how the AI model should think through the system so that gives it more flexibility.

And basically, this idea of having a more. Flexible constitution or way of thinking versus a strict rules-based approach may actually be a, a way that is going to give Claude an edge in the future.

Anthropic’s Claude Constitution, AI Judgment, and the Future of Large Language Models

[00:03:05] Robyn Bolton: Yeah. This was really fascinating because it brought up a theme that we've talked about several podcasts since the start of the year, which is judgment.

And we've always talked about, and we've seen it written about it, it's like, hey, judgment is what is going to continue to give humans relevance. Because we have judgment and AI is just rules based. And so, what was fascinating and terrifying was in this constitution, it's based on Aristotle's philosophy and it emphasizes that they're trying to build Claude to exercise judgment versus following rules.

And I was like Uh oh, if that was the, a human moat to kind of give us relevance and we're building Claude that I use daily to exercise judgment this is going to result in some very interesting things. And so, kind of early on, obviously Claude has not progressed to being, having full wisdom and judgment. But now with this constitution, one of the things that Nate mentioned is that when you're prompting Claude, the why matters more than the what.

So, the importance because of this constitution and how they're programming Claude, that when you ask for something, you're going to get a better response if you explain why you're asking for it versus all of the other, you know, chat, Grok, Gemini, et cetera, you can just put a request in and it will answer. So, I thought that was interesting. 

[00:04:35] Brian Ardinger: The idea of having additional context and giving the LLM, the ability to take that context into decision making, I think is where it's different versus saying, you know, you have to go on a particular path, but based on the context of that path, you may have different outcomes.

And that's just like in real human life, when you're presented with problems or forks in the road, you oftentimes take into consideration all the context around it rather than a specific rule. Like in this particular case, I have to follow this particular rule. And sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes you break rules as a human, because you know the context is different. And so, I thought it was interesting that they're trying to build that into the LLM and we'll actually see if, you know, if it actually helps or how that differs with the outputs as things change. 

[00:05:18] Robyn Bolton: The brave new world.

HBR Trends 2026, AI in the Workplace, and the Future of Work Strategy

[00:05:19] Brian Ardinger: All right, speaking of Brave New World, we've got a couple of different articles that we brought up last week talking about trends. And the first one we want to talk about is an HBR article talking about Nine trends shaping work in 2026 and beyond. And this goes into a lot of different topics and I think the primary topics are really around how are people thinking about AI? How are people unlocking value from ai? How are employees engaging with this? It's not necessarily trends, but this is the reality of the world. So what are your thoughts on this article? 
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