A Beginner's Guide to AI

Humayun Sheikh on the Agentic Web, Trust, and the Agentic Economy Humayun Sheikh joins Dietmar Fischer to explain what happens when AI stops recommending and starts doing. We explore the Agentic Web, a new layer where personal AI agents and verified brand agents collaborate to complete tasks like booking travel, coordinating meetings, and shopping with trust built in. You will learn what makes a r...

🧠🤖 Stop Using AI Just for Content. Start Using It for Discovery Most businesses still treat AI like a faster writing assistant: useful for summaries, captions, reports, and endless slightly polished LinkedIn posts. But Google DeepMind points to something much bigger. From AlphaGo’s historic victory over Lee Sedol to AlphaFold’s breakthrough in protein structure prediction, DeepMind shows us that...

AI agents are rapidly becoming one of the most influential technologies inside modern organizations — often without leaders even realizing the shift. In this episode, Dietmar Fischer sits down with MIT Sloan podcast host Sam Ransbotham to uncover why AI agents and agentic AI systems are spreading through enterprises at remarkable speed. Based on a global study of 2,100 executives across 116 countr...

What happens to leadership when AI can analyze faster, structure better, and answer almost anything in seconds? In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI , Dietmar Fischer speaks with Sally Bendersky , engineer, executive coach, leadership expert, and founder of New Leadership, about why AI makes human leadership more important, not less. Sally argues that AI is a phenomenal assistant. It can reco...

AI search is changing how customers discover, evaluate and choose brands. In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI , Dietmar Fischer speaks with Joseph Levi , CEO of Noise Media , about Generative Engine Optimization , AI brand visibility and why appearing in ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity answers may soon matter as much as ranking on Google. Joseph explains why GEO is not just another marketing a...

Stop Thinking of AI as a Content Machine, Start Seeing It as a Bargain Machine AI is not just changing how businesses write content, automate tasks, or analyse data. It is changing how markets work. In this episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI , we connect artificial intelligence with the Coase Theorem, the classic economic idea that explains how people bargain over resources when transaction costs...

In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI, we sit down with Alex Kihm, founder of POMA AI, to explore how enterprises can finally make sense of their data. AI search is broken, RAG often fails, and corporate documents are notoriously hard for LLMs to interpret. Alex explains how POMA AI’s patented method reconstructs structure inside unstructured data, enabling powerful, accurate enterprise search...

AGI Is Not Just a Better Chatbot Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, may be one of the most important ideas in artificial intelligence, but it is also one of the easiest to misunderstand. In this episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI, we look at what AGI really means, why it is different from today’s narrow AI tools, and why business leaders, founders, marketers, and executives should care befo...

AI can write, generate images, suggest chess moves, edit photos, draft campaigns, and produce more content than most teams can handle. So what is left for humans? In this episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI , we look at why human creativity still matters in the age of AI and why faster output is not the same as better work. AI-generated content can help businesses move quickly, but it can also mak...

AI feels human. That’s the problem. In this episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI , Dietmar Fischer breaks down one of the most misunderstood aspects of artificial intelligence: why we treat AI like a person and why that creates real business risks. You’ll discover how anthropomorphism shapes the way we interact with AI, why human-like responses increase trust, and how companies unintentionally push...

Why AI safety is the floor, not the ceiling, and how to pivot with power In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI, Dietmar Fischer talks with AI policy and trust & safety leader Erica Shoemate about designing and protecting systems that center around people. This is not the usual Terminator question. It is the practical, urgent one: how do we ensure AI serves the most vulnerable, what does tr...

Ever wished you could clone yourself to get more done? Julian Goldie actually did it — and built a content empire out of it. In this episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI , host Dietmar Fischer talks with Julian about how he uses AI to create five videos a day , automate workflows, and still keep a personal, human touch that builds real trust with his audience. Julian reveals how he turned his initi...

🎙️ He Taught AI How to Have Manners — Meet David Petrou of Continua AI What if your next group chat had an extra participant — one that listens, understands the social context, remembers what you said last week, and even knows when to stay quiet? In today’s episode, host Dietmar Fischer sits down with David Petrou , founder and CEO of Continua AI , to explore the emerging world of Social AI — inte...

What happens when AI does not just advise you, but lives inside your brain In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI, Dietmar Fischer talks with science fiction author Richard Anderson about Ophelia, a sentient AI implant that connects to a vast data sphere and changes the balance of power through information. This is not the usual Terminator question. It is the quieter, more realistic one: who co...

Artificial Intelligence isn’t just reshaping technology — it is reshaping leadership. In this episode, former Google strategist Louisa Loran joins Dietmar Fischer to explore how leaders can adapt, evolve, and thrive in an age defined by rapid AI acceleration. Louisa shares her journey across Moët Hennessy, Maersk, and Google, revealing why the biggest barrier to meaningful AI adoption isn’t techno...

In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI, Dietmar Fischer talks with Peter McAllister about AI risk, AI safety, AI sentience, regulation, and the strange overlap between science fiction and current reality. Peter is the author of The Code: If Your AI Loses its Mind, Can it Take Meds? , a near-future novel about an AI on the moon that begins dismantling it with catastrophic consequences. Peter des...

In this episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI , host Dietmar Fischer talks with Roman Chernin from Nebius , about how AI democratization is reshaping the enterprise world. Roman reveals what it really takes to move from prototype LLMs to reliable, scalable AI platforms - and why most companies don’t need to train their own models to harness AI’s potential. 📧💌📧 Tune in to get my thoughts and all e...

🚀 The Hidden Cost of AI: Losing Meaning, Not Jobs AI is not just automating work. It is challenging the very foundation of human identity. In this episode, Derek Rydall breaks down why the biggest risk of AI is not unemployment, but a global meaning crisis. As intelligence becomes cheap and abundant, the real question becomes: what are humans for? You’ll learn why purpose is becoming the ultimate...

🎙️ Machine Ethics Podcast x Beginner's Guide to AI AI is everywhere. But almost nobody agrees on what it actually is. In this episode, Ben Byford from the Machine Ethics Podcast and Dietmar Fischer explore why AI feels intelligent while fundamentally being something very different. From AI misconceptions to generative AI risks, this conversation breaks down the gap between perception and reality a...

What does the Catholic Church actually think about artificial intelligence? A lot more than you might expect. In this episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI , Prof. GepHardT explores the Vatican’s surprisingly sharp position on AI ethics, human dignity, deepfakes, truth, and the growing risk of letting machines replace judgment rather than support it. This is not a sermon against technology, and it i...

Artificial intelligence can generate answers fast, but can it generate knowledge you can trust? In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI , Dietmar Fischer talks with Jonathan Fraine and Raja Amelung about why human knowledge still matters in the age of LLMs. Together they explore Wikipedia, Wikimedia, AI hallucinations, trust in AI, free knowledge, and the future of reliable information online. T...

AI is no longer just a chatbot that helps you write emails faster. In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI, Dietmar Fischer sits down with Ethan Ouyang to explore how agentic AI is changing the way businesses are built, managed, and scaled. Ethan is publicly identified with ATOMS, and the platform’s official site is atoms.dev , where it is described as a multi-agent AI workflow for building prod...

Human-Centered AI at Work with Monica Marquez: A Practical Adoption Playbook If you’re still treating AI like a shiny gadget, this episode will be a polite intervention. Monica Marquez (Flipwork) shows how to build a human-centered AI adoption playbook that actually sticks. We dig into AI as a partner , not a tool; psychological safety for teams; and the one-workflow-per-month rule that turns expe...

In this episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI , Dietmar Fischer talks with Alex Levin , the Co-Founder and CEO of Regal.io , about how Voice AI is bringing real human conversation back to customer service. For years, businesses have been hiding behind IVRs and chatbots - cutting off the personal touch that customers crave. Alex explains how AI voice agents are transforming the experience, allowing b...

In this episode, Dietmar Fischer talks with Tallulah Le Merle, a humanist technologist and investor, about how to think clearly in the age of AI without falling into doomsday panic or blind optimism. You’ll get a practical mental model of the AI stack, a grounded take on AI alignment risk, and a refreshing argument for hope as a strategic posture that shapes what gets built. 🤖🌍🧠 What you’ll lea...