Just Record Your Screen: Guy Fenton, Head of Go-to-Market at Akai by Deel

Georgie Healy talks to Guy Fenton, who heads up go-to-market for Akai, the AI workflow automation platform from Deel. Akai started as an internal tool at Deel and is now offered to other companies as a way to automate repetitive back-office work across finance, HR and operations.

Georgie opens with the headless debate: if software no longer needs a login screen, does design still matter? Guy's answer is that UX matters more than UI right now, because his customers would rather use agents inside Slack, Teams or a webhook than log in anywhere. He explains how Akai builds an agent from a screen recording, and describes the virtual country finance manager Deel built for month-end bank reconciliation, which he says does the work of 10 people while the team reviews and approves it in Slack.

They get into what makes agent projects stick, why the non-technical user is the real bottleneck, and why forward deployed engineers sit with customers to get them to value fast. Guy says the people getting ahead are citizen developers, curious people in HR, ops and finance who adopt AI every day, and he predicts they become the leaders of the future. He also shares a hack for anyone building a team: ask AI to play your toughest buyer, then let it score your answers.

The conversation closes on jobs, trust and privacy: why Guy frames AI as optimizing jobs rather than replacing them, how regions from APAC to Germany react to security questions, why he would only trust an agent with his tax return after a few human-approved runs, and his bet that open source models will give the frontier labs a run for their money.