Practical AI

This episode is a special crossover between the Practical AI podcast and The Changelog podcast. Chris was recently invited by longtime friends Jerod Santo and Adam Stacoviak, cohosts of The Changelog, to join them on the show. They discuss AI, drones, robotics, swarming technology, and the rise of high-performance edge computing with Rust.  Chris points out that open source software, small AI mode...

Fireflies CEO, Krish Ramineni shares how the company is transforming AI-powered note-taking into a deeper layer of knowledge automation. He breaks down the technology behind real-time functionality like Live Assist, the user behavior patterns driving product evolution, and how Fireflies is innovating far beyond meetings. Krish also shares insights on future trends in AI and the potential for hardw...

Waymo’s VP of Research, Drago Anguelov, joins Practical AI to explore how advances in autonomy, vision models, and large-scale testing are shaping the future of driverless technology. The conversation dives into the dual challenges of building an onboard driver and testing that driver (via large scale simulation). Drago also gives us an update on what Waymo is doing to achieve intelligent, real-ti...

Dan and Chris unpack whether today’s surge in AI deployment across enterprise workflows, manufacturing, healthcare, and scientific research signals a lasting transformation or an overhyped bubble. Drawing parallels to the dot-com era, they explore how technology integration is reshaping industries, affecting jobs, and even influencing human cognition, ultimately asking: is this a bubble, or just a...

Dan and Chris sit down (again) with Jared Zoneraich, co-founder and CEO of PromptLayer, to discuss how prompt engineering has evolved into context engineering (and while loops with tool calls). Jared shares insights on building flexible AI applications, managing tool calls, testing and versioning prompts, and empowering both technical and non-technical users in AI development. Along the way, they...

In this fully connected episode, Daniel and Chris explore the emerging concept of tiny recursive networks introduced by Samsung AI, contrasting them with large transformer based models. They explore how these small models tackle reasoning tasks with fewer parameters, less data, and iterative refinement, matching the giants on specific problems. They also discuss the ethical challenges of emotional...

As AI systems move from simple chatbots to complex agentic workflows, new security risks emerge. In this episode, Donato Capitella unpacks how increasingly complicated architectures are making agents fragile and vulnerable. These agents can be exploited through prompt injection, data exfiltration, and tool misuse. Donato shares stories from real-world penetration tests, the design patterns for bui...

Daniel sits down with Chelsea Linder, VP of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at TechPoint, to explore the what AI innovation and impact look like on the ground.  They discuss Chelsea's journey from the VC world into economic development/ innovation, the growth of an AI innovation network in Indiana (funded by the SBA), lessons learned from fostering AI communities, and how businesses are actually a...

Longtime friend of the show Rajiv Shah returns to unpack lessons from a year of building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and reasoning models integrations. We dive into why so many AI pilots stumble, why evaluation and error analysis remain essential data science skills, and why not every enterprise challenge calls for a large language model. Featuring: Rajiv Shah – LinkedIn   Danie...

In this episode, Daniel and Chris are joined by Chris Aquino, software engineer at Thunderbird to hear the story of how they developed a privacy-preserving AI executive assistant. They discuss various design decisions including remote (but confidential) inference, local encryption, and model selection. Chris A. does an amazing job describing the journey from "let the big LLM do everything" to spli...

In this Fully Connected episode, we dig into the recent MIT report revealing that 95% of AI pilots fail before reaching production and explore what it actually takes to succeed with AI solutions. We dive into the importance of AI model integration, asking the right questions when adopting new technologies, and why simply accessing a powerful model isn’t enough. We explore the latest AI trends, fro...

Daniel and Chris sit with Citadel AI’s Rick Kobayashi and Kenny Song and unpack AI safety and security challenges in the generative AI era. They compare Japan’s approach to AI adoption with the US’s, and explore the implications of real-world failures in AI systems, along with strategies for AI monitoring and evaluation. Featuring: Rick Kobayashi – LinkedIn Kenny Song – LinkedIn Chris Benson – Web...

Dan and Chris break down Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan , issued by the White House in July 2025.  Structured as three "pillars" — Accelerate AI Innovation , Build American AI Infrastructure , and Lead in International AI Diplomacy and Security — our dynamic duo unpack the plan's policy goals and its associated suggestions — while also exploring the mixed reactions it’s sparked across...

Allegra Guinan of Lumiera helps leaders turn uncertainty about AI into confident, strategic leadership. In this conversation, she brings some actionable insights for navigating the hype and complexity of AI. The discussion covers challenges with implementing responsible AI practices, the growing importance of user experience and product thinking, and how leaders can focus on real-world business pr...

Dan sits down with guests Mark Daniel Ward and Katie Sanders from The Data Mine at Purdue University to explore how higher education is evolving to meet the demands of the AI-driven workforce. They share how their program blends interdisciplinary learning, corporate partnerships, and real-world data science projects to better prepare students across 160+ majors. From AI chatbots to agricultural fo...

We unpack how AI is reshaping hiring decisions, shifting job roles, and creating new expectations for professionals — from engineers to marketers. They explore the rise of AI-assisted teams, the growing compensation bubble, why continuous learning is now table stakes, and how some service providers are quietly riding the AI wave. Featuring: Chris Benson – Website , LinkedIn , Bluesky , GitHub , X...

In this episode, Chris sits down with Igor Nikitin, CEO and co-founder of Nice Technologies, to explore how AI and modern engineering practices are transforming the actuarial field and setting the stage for the future of actuarial modeling. We discuss the introduction of programming into insurance pricing workflows, and how their Python-based calc engine, AI copilots, and DevOps-inspired workflows...

In this episode of Practical AI, Chris and Daniel explore the fascinating world of agentic AI for drone and robotic swarms, which is Chris's passion and professional focus. They unpack how autonomous vehicles (UxV), drones (UaV), and other autonomous multi-agent systems can collaborate without centralized control while exhibiting complex emergent behavior with agency and self-governance to accompl...

In the first episode of an "AI in the shadows" theme, Chris and Daniel explore the increasing concerning world of agentic misalignment. Starting out with a reminder about hallucinations and reasoning models, they break down how today’s models only mimic reasoning, which can lead to serious ethical considerations. They unpack a fascinating (and slightly terrifying) new study from Anthropic, where a...

In this episode, we sit down with Joey Conway to explore NVIDIA's open source AI, from the reasoning-focused Nemotron models built on top of Llama, to the blazing-fast Parakeet speech model. We chat about what makes open foundation models so valuable, how enterprises can think about deploying multi-model strategies, and why reasoning is becoming the key differentiator in real-world AI applications...

Can AI-driven autonomy reduce harm, or does it risk dehumanizing decision-making? In this “AI Hot Takes & Debates” series episode, Daniel and Chris dive deep into the ethical crossroads of AI, autonomy, and military applications. They trade perspectives on ethics, precision, responsibility, and whether machines should ever be trusted with life-or-death decisions. It’s a spirited back-and-forth...

It seems like we are bombarded by news about millions of dollars pouring into AI startups, which have crazy valuations. In this episode, Chris and Dan dive deep into the highs, lows, and hard choices behind funding an AI startup. They explore early bootstrapping, the transition to venture capital, and what it’s like to trade in code commits for investor decks.  Featuring: Chris Benson – Website ,...

An recent article in Variety was titled: "Sylvester Stallone-Backed Largo.ai Teams With Brilliant Pictures for ‘World’s First Fully AI-Automated Film Company’". Obviously this caught our attention! We sit down with Sami Arpa, CEO of Largo.ai, to unpack how films are developed, funded, and brought to life using AI. We discover how tools like script analysis, financial forecasting, and digital twins...

Chong Shen from Flower Labs joins us to discuss what it really takes to build production-ready federated learning systems that work across data silos. We talk about the Flower framework and it's architecture (supernodes, superlinks, etc.), and what makes it both "friendly" and ready for real enterprise environments. We also  explore how the generative Generative AI boom is reshaping Flower’s roadm...

In this first of a two part series of episodes on federated learning, we dive into the evolving world of federated learning and distributed AI frameworks with Patrick Foley from Intel. We explore how frameworks like OpenFL and Flower are enabling secure, collaborative model training across silos, especially in sensitive fields like healthcare. The conversation touches on real-world use cases, the...