AI Clarity for Businesses with Chakra's Adam Staples

EPISODE DESCRIPTIONAdam Staples spent 25 years in revenue operations before he watched a $100 million SaaS company hand every employee an AI license and call it a strategy. It failed the way CRM rollouts have failed for decades: nobody at the top owned the result. Now he runs Chakra AI Solutions, and his pitch is the opposite of the enterprise consultants charging five figures a day. Map where your business actually spends its energy first, then let a foundation model plug in one chunk at a time.Jason and Adam get into BECA, Chakra's diagnostic for charting how work really flows through a company, and the Chakra Workbench, a Claude project that acts like an AI administrator for a 10 to 150 person business. They argue domain expertise beats another AI certification every time, why the best plumber makes a lousy company owner, and what happens to the workforce when 30 percent of people plus AI can do almost all of the work. Jason tells the story of the night Codex installed a tool on his Mac while he sat in a car 20 minutes away. Chakra's whole bet: scale the humans first, and the systems scale with them.ABOUT THE GUESTAdam Staples is the founder of Chakra AI Solutions in Indianapolis. He spent 25 years in revenue operations, most recently leading customer success operations at martech company Aprimo, before building Chakra around a blunt idea: businesses fail at AI for the same reason they failed at CRM rollouts, a lack of clarity about how work actually flows. Chakra maps that flow first, then coaches teams into foundation-model tools one piece at a time, aimed at the 10 to 150 person companies most AI consultants ignore.GUEST LINKSAdam Staples on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-staples-96a942a/Chakra AI Solutions on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/chakraaisolutions/Chakra AI Solutions: https://chakrasolutions.ai/TIME STAMPS00:00 - A new show for the humans in the loop01:38 - What Chakra is and a 25-year operations career03:39 - The secret sauce most businesses are missing05:20 - Why Monday.com and most tech rollouts fail08:26 - BECA: mapping where a business spends its energy13:19 - Clarity first, not a rip-and-replace of your stack18:01 - Coaching over deliverables: medicine, not diet24:48 - The late-night agent that installed a tool remotely44:40 - Domain expertise beats another AI certification55:22 - What Chakra actually costsCONNECT WITH JASON PADGETTJason Padgett | AI Solutions Architect | Co-Founder, Wooden Boy Industries | Host, AGI Podcast | AI Adoption, LLM Systems & Human-AI WorkflowsAGI - Advance Grow and Innovate with AI Podcast Network🌐 https://schoolsout.agipodcast.ai/CoFounder, Wooden Boy Industries🌐 https://woodenboyindustriesai.com/Chief Solutions Architect, Chakra AI Solutions🌐 https://chakrasolutions.ai/📧 jason@agipodcast.aiAGI PODCAST NETWORKSchool's Out Saturdays: https://schoolsout.agipodcast.ai/Field Notes newsletter: https://schoolsout.agipodcast.ai/field-notesIndiana AI education events: https://schoolsout.agipodcast.ai/eventsAll AGI Podcast shows: https://schoolsout.agipodcast.ai/networkRESOURCES MENTIONEDChakra AI Solutions: https://chakrasolutions.ai/Aprimo: https://www.aprimo.com/Monday.com: https://monday.com/Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/Odoo: https://www.odoo.com/Acumatica: https://www.acumatica.com/Anthropic Claude: https://www.anthropic.com/claudeOpenAI (ChatGPT and Codex): https://openai.com/Google Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/Microsoft Copilot: https://copilot.microsoft.com/Cloudflare Workers and Agents: https://www.cloudflare.com/GitHub: https://github.com/NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google.com/Simon Sinek: https://simonsinek.com/