Practical AI

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: 
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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 framer.com/practicalai
Upcoming Events: 
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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 framer.com/practicalai
Upcoming Events: 
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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. 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 framer.com/practicalai
Prediction Guard: A self-hosted AI control plane for running agents in high impact environments. predictionguard.com/practicalai
Upcoming Events: 
Register for upcoming webinars here!
Midwest AI Summit 2026