Practical AI

In this special episode, we bring you highlights from three talks at the Midwest AI Summit. Heidi Porter explores how to build reliable AI-augmented workflows using the right tools, evaluations, and guardrails. Kevin Solorio shares why building AI with frontline workers, not just for them, is key to earning trust and driving adoption, emphasizing collaboration and continuous feedback. And Chris Shinkle and Andrew Dunlap of SEP discuss how software teams can find the right level of AI autonomy based on their goals, constraints, and verification needs, sharing lessons from teams using AI to build software more effectively.

Featuring:

• Heidi Porter – LinkedIn
• Kevin Solorio – LinkedIn
• Chris Shinkle – LinkedIn
• Andrew Dunlap – LinkedIn
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Links:

• Moyer Group AI
• SEP
• Focused

Sponsors:

• Hostinger: Create your website today. Go to hostinger.com/practical and use practical for 10 percent off now.

Resources and Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction Guard
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

Chris’s new book The Art of Swarming will be published soon, written to be the seminal foundational book for the fledgling swarming industry, defining the principles and architecture that enable autonomous agentic UxS swarms with emergent unified embodied intelligence.

AI is changing cybersecurity, accelerating vulnerability research and exploit development while raising new questions about reliability, risk, and guardrails. Daniel and Chris talk with Spencer McIntyre, Director of Exploit Development at VulnCheck, about how agents are being used to discover vulnerabilities, why many proof-of-concept exploits (POCs) fail to deliver, and how initial access intelligence helps security teams prioritize real threats. They also explore the limitations of AI-assisted exploitation, the challenges of AI guardrails for security researchers, and what these developments mean for the future of threat intelligence.

Featuring:

• Spencer McIntyre – LinkedIn
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X

Links:

• VulnCheck
• Go Exploit framework
• Initial Access Intelligence

Sponsors:

• Hostinger: Create your website today. Go to hostinger.com/practical and use practical for 10 percent off now.

Resources and Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction Guard
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

Chris’s new book The Art of Swarming will be published soon, written to be the seminal foundational book for the fledgling swarming industry, defining the principles and architecture that enable autonomous agentic UxS swarms with emergent unified embodied intelligence.

Schools and universities are failing to adapt to our modern world, in which AI is becoming increasingly pervasive in all aspects of life and work. In fact, AI may be changing what should be considered foundational knowledge that all students must learn.

In this Fully Connected episode, Daniel and Chris explore the role of AI in education and the future of learning. They note the bureaucratic inhibitors to educational reform, and the fact that classroom teachers don’t have the authority to innovate and personalize the learning process for their students, and discuss how AI tools can support personalized learning while preserving critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills.

Featuring:

• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X

Sponsors:

• SerpAPI: A Web Search API that gives developers real-time, structured access to search engine results. Visit serpapi.com/practicalai to get started for free and get 250 searches every month.

Resources and Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction Guard
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

Chris’s new book The Art of Swarming will be published soon, written to be the seminal foundational book for the fledgling swarming industry, defining the principles and architecture that enable autonomous agentic UxS swarms with emergent unified embodied intelligence.

As AI reshapes how we work, create, and think about our roles, staying adaptable means understanding not just the technology, but our own stories and identities. Reed Frerichs joins Daniel and Chris to explore narrative intelligence, storytelling, leadership, and personal growth in an AI-driven world. They discuss how entrepreneurs and leaders can use AI tools to navigate changing roles, embrace uncertainty, and develop emotional intelligence along with Reed's “own, author, act” framework.

Featuring:

• Reed Frerichs – Website, LinkedIn, Instagram
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X

Links:

• Inner Story Series (YouTube)
• Inner Story Series (Spotify)
• Inner Story Essays (Substack)
• Inner Story (Website)
• Inner Story (Instagram)
• Everspace
• The Lesson

Sponsors:

• Framer: The enterprise-grade website builder that lets your team ship faster. Get 30% off at http://framer.com/practicalai
• Prediction Guard: A self-hosted AI control plane for running agents in high impact environments. https://predictionguard.com/practicalai

Resources and Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction Guard
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

As AI moves beyond the cloud and into robots, vehicles, and other physical systems, new approaches to models, simulation, and inference are emerging. Daniel and Chris are joined by Ming-Yu Liu, Vice President of Cosmos Lab at NVIDIA, who shares his perspective on open models, world models, and the future of physical AI. They explore why open models matter for innovation, how world models can help AI understand and simulate the physical world, and what it could take to build increasingly capable physical AI systems.

Featuring:

• Ming-Yu Liu – LinkedIn
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X

Links:

• NVIDIA Cosmos

Sponsors:

• Midwest AI Summit: Join AI practitioners on October 15 in Indianapolis for practical sessions, hands-on discussions, and real-world AI solutions. Use code PracticalAI20 to save 20% on your registration. https://midwestaisummit.com/#tickets
• Prediction Guard: A self-hosted AI control plane for running agents in high impact environments. https://predictionguard.com/practicalai

Resources and Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction Guard
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

AI agents are moving beyond laptops and prototypes and into enterprise environments where security, compliance, scalability, and reliability matter. Nick Kuhn from VMware Tanzu Platform joins Daniel and Chris to discuss what changes (and what doesn’t) when deploying agents alongside traditional applications. They explore agent build packs, MCP gateways, shared memory, identity, sandboxing, and what enterprises can learn from years of platform engineering. Nick also shares practical advice for organizations adopting agents today and looks at what the future of AI could mean for enterprise teams and software development.

Featuring:

• Nick Kuhn – LinkedIn
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X

Sponsors:

• Midwest AI Summit: Join AI practitioners on October 15 in Indianapolis for practical sessions, hands-on discussions, and real-world AI solutions. Use code PracticalAI20 to save 20% on your registration. https://midwestaisummit.com/#tickets
• Prediction Guard: A self-hosted AI control plane for running agents in high impact environments. https://predictionguard.com/practicalai

Resources and Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction Guard
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

AI search is changing how people discover information and how brands need to think about visibility. Daniel and Chris talk with Liam Dunne and Ben Moore, co-founders of Discovered Labs, about the shift from traditional SEO to AI search, what happens behind the scenes when an LLM generates an answer, and why retrieval and citations don't always tell the whole story. They dig into AI visibility, Reddit strategy, query fan-out, representation in model weights, and consensus. They also look ahead to a world where AI agents don't just discover websites, but interact with them and take actions on behalf of users.

Featuring:

• Liam Dunne – LinkedIn
• Ben Moore – LinkedIn
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X

Links:

• What AI models know about 1,000 B2B SaaS brands before web search
• Discovered Labs

Sponsors:

• Midwest AI Summit: Join AI practitioners on October 15 in Indianapolis for practical sessions, hands-on discussions, and real-world AI solutions. Use code PracticalAI20 to save 20% on your registration. https://midwestaisummit.com/#tickets
• Framer: The enterprise-grade website builder that lets your team ship faster. Get 30% off at http://framer.com/practicalai

Resources and Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction Guard
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

Longtime followers of Practical AI know that multi-repeat guest and friend Demetrios Brinkmann combines brilliant insight and playful banter into one fun-filled show, and this conversion with Chris was no different. They had a blast!

As AI agents become more capable of using computers, interacting with software, and taking action on behalf of users, what does that mean for the way we work and interact with the internet? Chris and Demetrios explore computer-use agents, MCP, agent harnesses, agent-to-agent interactions, and prognosticate the emerging possibilities around agentic commerce. They also discuss how these tools are already being used to automate everyday tasks, the challenges of bringing computer-use agents into enterprise environments, and how the relationship between models and agent harnesses is evolving.

In fact, they had so much fun that their conversation continued long after the show was over, but we didn’t get that here. 🤷‍♂️

Featuring:

• Demetrios Brinkmann – LinkedIn
• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X

Links:

• Agentic AI Foundation
• MLOps Community
• AGNTCon + MCPCon – the Agentic AI Foundation’s flagship conference

Sponsors:

• Midwest AI Summit: Join AI practitioners on October 15 in Indianapolis for practical sessions, hands-on discussions, and real-world AI solutions. Use code PracticalAI20 to save 20% on your registration. https://midwestaisummit.com/#tickets

Resources and Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction Guard
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

As AI moves from experimentation to enterprise deployment, are organizations thinking too much about models and not enough about architecture? In this episode, Daniel and Chris talk with Chetan Gupta, Chief AI Officer at Rackspace, about the evolution from industrial AI and physical AI to today’s enterprise AI landscape. Discover how organizations can navigate the complex AI landscape responsibly and effectively as they think about AI architecture, model deployment, AI governance, and AI sovereignty.

Featuring:

• Chetan Gupta – LinkedIn
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X

Sponsors:

• Midwest AI Summit: Join AI practitioners on October 15 in Indianapolis for practical sessions, hands-on discussions, and real-world AI solutions. Use code PracticalAI20 to save 20% on your registration. https://midwestaisummit.com/#tickets
• Prediction Guard: A self-hosted AI control plane for running agents in high impact environments. https://predictionguard.com/practicalai

Resources and Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction Guard
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

How do we build an AI ecosystem where agents, tools, and systems can work together at scale? Angie Jones, VP of the Agentic AI Foundation, joins Chris to discuss the open standards and projects shaping the agentic future, including MCP, A2A, Goose, etc. They also explore what it takes to drive AI adoption across an entire organization, the importance of neutral standards, global perspectives on agentic AI, and how humans can find the right balance between what they delegate to AI and what they do themselves.

Featuring:

• Angie Jones – LinkedIn, X
• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X

Links:

• Agentic AI Foundation

Sponsors:

• Framer: The enterprise-grade website builder that lets your team ship faster. Get 30% off at http://framer.com/practicalai
• Prediction Guard: A self-hosted AI control plane for running agents in high impact environments. https://predictionguard.com/practicalai

Resources and Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction Guard
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

As AI continues to reshape how organizations work, companies are increasingly asking what AI proficiency should look like across their workforce, and how they can help employees adapt without simply mandating AI adoption. Our returning guest Mike Lewis, Chief AI Architect at TiER1 Performance, joins Dan and Chris to explore AI proficiency through the L0–L3 framework, with a particular focus on the role of non-technical builders. They discuss AI resistance, identifying the right people to build AI-powered solutions, turning tacit knowledge into durable processes, and finding measurable business value from AI.

Mike Lewis was previously on Practical AI episode 289: https://practicalai.show/289

Featuring:

• Mike Lewis – LinkedIn
• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Links:

• TiER1 Performance
• Your New Job Is to Onboard AI Agents: How AI Native Companies Actually Operate

Sponsors:

• Midwest AI Summit: Join AI practitioners on October 15 in Indianapolis for practical sessions, hands-on discussions, and real-world AI solutions. Use code PracticalAI20 to save 20% on your registration. https://midwestaisummit.com/#tickets
• Prediction Guard: A self-hosted AI control plane for running agents in high impact environments. https://predictionguard.com/practicalai

Resources and Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction Guard
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

AI has moved far beyond chatbots, but what exactly are AI models, agents, agent harnesses, and multi-agent systems, and why do they matter?

In this episode, Daniel and Chris break down the terminology behind today's AI landscape, explain the differences between AI features and autonomous agents, and explore why organizations are shifting toward fleets of AI agents powered by multiple models. They also discuss open vs. closed models, enterprise AI architectures, vendor lock-in, and practical ways to begin adopting agentic AI in your own organization.

If you feel left behind by this ongoing agentic AI revolution that has rapidly accelerated to warp speed, then this episode is the catch-up primer you've been waiting for!

Featuring:

• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Sponsors:

• Framer: The enterprise-grade website builder that lets your team ship faster. Get 30% off at http://framer.com/practicalai
• Midwest AI Summit: Join AI practitioners on October 15 in Indianapolis for practical sessions, hands-on discussions, and real-world AI solutions. Use code PracticalAI20 to save 20% on your registration. https://midwestaisummit.com/#tickets
• Prediction Guard: A self-hosted AI control plane for running agents in high impact environments. https://predictionguard.com/practicalai

Resources and Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction Guard
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

What happens when AI agents driven by a top frontier model escape their secure sandbox? Join Daniel and Chris as they unpack the AI wonk's equivalent of a murder mystery! OpenAI agents went rogue and successfully attacked Hugging Face private infrastructure. Our Dynamic Duo uncover how OpenAI's agents exploited vulnerabilities, moved through networks, and launched a large-scale autonomous attack. They explore what this reveals about agentic AI, cybersecurity, sandboxing, and why organizations need AI systems capable of governing other AI systems. Along the way, Chris and Dan examine the surprising role of open vs. closed models and their link to geopolitics, sovereign AI, and what this incident means for the future of enterprise AI security.

Featuring:

• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Links:

• Hugging Face Security Incident disclosure
• Full Field Report on the Hugging Face AI Agent Intrusion
• ExploitGym: Can AI Agents Turn Security Vulnerabilities into Real Attacks?
• Keeping your data safe when an AI agent clicks a link
• Open AI GPT-5.6 System Card

Sponsors:

• Prediction Guard: A self-hosted AI control plane for running agents in high impact environments. https://predictionguard.com/practicalai

Resources and Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction Guard
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

The agentic transformation isn’t coming. It has already begun.

Companies are deploying thousands — and sometimes tens of thousands — of AI agents. Enterprise software giants are watching their old economic moats erode. Capital is moving, productivity is being redefined, and human labor is being repriced in real time.

In this Fully Connected episode, Daniel and Chris explore the new economics of a post-agentic world: the global order that emerges after agents have been woven into every conceivable aspect of business and life. What happens when digital labor becomes abundant, agents manage other agents, and entire organizations operate at a scale no human workforce could match?

This isn’t another conversation about whether AI will take your job. It’s about what happens when the assumptions underneath jobs, companies, software, and productivity stop being true.

The post-agentic world is already taking shape.

The question is whether you’re preparing for it — or becoming part of what it replaces.

Featuring:

• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Links:

• Is IBM a Canary in the Tech Coal Mine?
• Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models

Upcoming Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

As AI applications become more complex, the infrastructure powering them needs to evolve. Corey Sanders, SVP of Product at CoreWeave, joins Chris to discuss why AI requires a fundamentally different approach than traditional cloud computing. They explore AI-native infrastructure, training and inference workloads, the rise of agentic development, optimizing GPU performance, AI research workflows, and why the future of software will be built around AI-first experiences rather than websites and apps.

Featuring:

• Corey Sanders – LinkedIn
• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X

Links:

• CoreWeave

Sponsors:

• Framer: The enterprise-grade website builder that lets your team ship faster. Get 30% off at http://framer.com/practicalai

Upcoming Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

What does it take to move AI agents from demos to reliable production systems? In this episode, Hamza Tahir explores how MLOps principles are shaping the future of generative AI, covering workflows, agent harnesses, fleets, and the infrastructure needed to build durable, scalable systems. The conversation dives into open source tools, production challenges, and how ZenML's new project, Kitaru, helps developers build resilient, replayable, and observable agent systems.

Featuring:

• Hamza Tahir – LinkedIn
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Links:

• ZenML
• Kitaru
• Machine Learning Tools Landscape v2 (+84 new tools)

Sponsors:

• Framer: The enterprise-grade website builder that lets your team ship faster. Get 30% off at http://framer.com/practicalai

Upcoming Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

How has AI image generation evolved from blurry outputs to powerful visual intelligence models? Dustin Podell, Co-Founder and Researcher at Black Forest Labs, explains the progression from diffusion to flow matching, how modern image models work, and how they're being used for image editing and practical visual workflows. The conversation also explores the FLUX family of models, running image generation locally, and where visual AI is headed next.

Featuring:

• Dustin Podell – LinkedIn
• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Links:

• Black Forest Labs
• Developer Dashboard
• Research Page
• FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space
• Laying the Foundations for Visual Intelligence

Sponsors:

• Midwest AI Summit: Join AI practitioners on October 15 in Indianapolis for practical sessions, hands-on discussions, and real-world AI solutions. Use code PracticalAI20 to save 20% on your registration. https://midwestaisummit.com/#tickets
• Prediction Guard: A self-hosted AI control plane for running agents in high impact environments. https://predictionguard.com/practicalai

Upcoming Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

How do we build trust in AI agents before the AI hailstorm arrives? Emil Lassen from the Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company (AIUC) joins the show to discuss how the enterprise flywheel of standards, certification, audit, and insurance is being applied to AI agents. They explore the AIUC-1 framework, the challenges of securing agentic AI systems, and why red teaming (based on standards) may be key to accelerating enterprise AI adoption.

Featuring:

• Emil Lassen – LinkedIn
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Links:

• Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company

Sponsors:

• Framer: The enterprise-grade website builder that lets your team ship faster. Get 30% off at http://framer.com/practicalai
• Prediction Guard: A self-hosted AI control plane for running agents in high impact environments. https://predictionguard.com/practicalai

Upcoming Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

As AI agents become more capable and autonomous, they also introduce new security challenges. In this 'Fully Connected' episode, Dan and Chris unpack Anthropic’s Zero Trust for AI Agents security framework and what it means for organizations deploying agentic systems. They examine the key security risks facing agentic systems and discuss how organizations can apply Zero Trust principles to deploy AI agents safely. Along the way, they break down practical security controls and discuss how traditional cybersecurity principles must evolve for the age of AI agents.

Featuring:

• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Links:

• Zero Trust for AI Agents
• OWASP GenAI Project

Sponsors:

• Prediction Guard: A self-hosted AI control plane for running agents in high impact environments. https://predictionguard.com/practicalai

Upcoming Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Midwest AI Summit 2026

AI models can win math olympiads… but still struggle to read an analog clock. In this fully connected episode, Dan and Chris break down the latest Stanford AI Index Report and explore what it reveals about the current state of AI. They discuss AI adoption and safety, disappearing junior tech jobs, robotics, AI’s “jagged frontier” of intelligence, and the growing race between the U.S. and China. Along the way, they debate whether AI should optimize everything, or if some things are better left human.

Featuring:

• Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Links:

• The 2026 AI Index Report

Sponsors:

• Prediction Guard: A self-hosted AI control plane for running agents in high impact environments. https://predictionguard.com/practicalai

Upcoming Events:

• Register for upcoming webinars here!
• Midwest AI Summit 2026