Arty McLabin On Leading People & AI Agents as a CEO
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In this episode, Olivia sits down with Arty McLabin — CEO and founder of Game Ready, founder of Borzai.dog, and host of The Raw CEO Show — to talk about business engineering, context engineering for AI agents, and why clear thinking is the one skill that compounds everything else.
Arty breaks down why some employees resist AI even when they shouldn't, why a CEO has a duty to push adoption anyway, and what soft skills — articulation, edge cases, and knowing the real problem — actually matter for leading AI agents in 2026.
Arty also makes the case that every business is a system you can architect and optimize, and that context engineering — giving AI the right SOPs and instructions — is what separates leaders who get consistent results from those who don't. He walks through how he uses Claude Code to triage his email inbox multiple times a day, sorting by urgency and mental load, and how he runs the content pipeline for two podcasts.
Whether you're a CEO, a solo founder, an employee, or a builder, this is what the top operators are actually doing with AI agents in 2026.
What we cover:
Why Arty treats every business as a system, and what changes when CEOs start engineering theirs
Why context engineering, not leadership, is what gets you consistent results from AI agents
The three soft skills every CEO needs for leading AI agents: articulation, edge cases, and knowing the real problem
How Arty uses Claude Code to triage his email inbox multiple times a day, sorted by urgency and mental load
Why some employees resist AI even when they shouldn't, and the CEO's duty to push adoption anyway
Why AI abundance is sending us back to tribal trust, and what that means for how leaders network in 2026
How Arty runs the content pipeline for two podcasts
Connect with Arty McLabin
Arty runs Game Ready, an eight-year-old game development studio with over 20 employees and partnerships with Epic Games, and Borzai, an agentic AI infrastructure company building AI teammates for team chats. He also hosts The Raw CEO Show, a podcast on business engineering and AI.
Website: https://artymclabin.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arty-mclabin X: https://x.com/Arty_McLabin The Raw CEO Show: https://artymclabin.com/podcast Borzai: https://borzai.dog YouTube (Raw CEO): https://www.youtube.com/@ArtyMcLabin-RawCEO Arty's interview with Matt Blumberg, Leading in the AI Era: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3Ug9p0FAQI
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