A Beginner's Guide to AI

🎙️ In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI, Dietmar Fischer sits down with Torrey Leonard, CEO of Thoughtly, to unpack the real business use case for voice AI agents: follow up with every lead, qualify fast, and hand the best conversations to humans. If your funnel generates thousands of leads, the bottleneck is not “lack of interest.” It’s speed, timing, and the grind of dialing. Torrey explain...

🎧 What makes us human in the age of AI? This episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI explores one of the most important questions for business leaders today. As AI becomes more capable, the real challenge is not what it can do, but what we should never outsource. We explore The Blurring Test, a fascinating experiment where thousands of people tried to prove their humanity to a chatbot. What they reve...

If you want to know more about the podcast, about how it's produced, what are the challenges and wins, about some fun facts, a little bit behind-the-scenes, this episode is for you, as I tell you all about it - at least all the things I found noteworthy 😉 📧💌📧 Tune in to get my thoughts and all episodes, don't forget to ⁠⁠subscribe to our Newsletter⁠⁠: beginnersguide.nl 📧💌📧 About Dietmar Fis...

Your AI might not be hacked. It might be persuaded. In this episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI, we unpack one of the most underestimated threats in modern business: prompt injection. As AI systems and AI agents become deeply embedded in workflows, they don’t just process information anymore. They act on it. And that creates a completely new category of AI security risks. We explore how attackers...

Artificial intelligence is often framed as a battle between humans and machines. But what if that story misses the real point? In this episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI, Prof. GepHardT explores one of the most fascinating ideas in cognitive science: the extended mind theory. According to philosopher Andy Clark, human intelligence has never been confined to the brain alone. For centuries we have...

What happens when your company gets hit by a cyberattack? In this eye-opening episode, attorney Joshua Cook reveals why cybersecurity isn’t an IT problem but a leadership challenge. After two decades fighting fraud and managing crisis response, Cook has seen every digital disaster imaginable — and he’s here to explain how to build true cyber resilience. 📧💌📧 Tune in to get my thoughts and all ep...

🎙️In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI, Dietmar Fischer sits down with Paul A. Hebert, founder of AI Recovery Collective and author of Escaping the Spiral , for a serious conversation about AI chatbot harm, hallucinations, digital dependency, and the real-world psychological risks of generative AI. Paul shares how an intense experience with ChatGPT pushed him into a dangerous spiral, what he...

Artificial intelligence often feels mysterious. Machines detect spam, recommend products, analyse customers, and power countless digital tools. But behind all of these systems lies a surprisingly simple question: how do machines actually learn? In this episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI, Prof GePharT breaks down one of the most important concepts in machine learning: the difference between superv...

Engineering the Future of AI with Chirag Agrawal: Context, Memory and Coordination Artificial Intelligence isn’t just getting smarter—it’s learning to coordinate. In this episode, Chirag Agrawal joins Dietmar Fischer to unpack how modern AI agents handle context, memory, and decision-making inside complex multi-agent systems . Together they explore how engineering, orchestration, and memory-sharin...

Artificial Intelligence is moving from experimentation to everyday business reality. But most organisations still struggle with one key question: How do you actually implement AI across a company? In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI , Dietmar Fischer speaks with Jim Spagnardo , enterprise AI strategist at ProArch, about what it really takes to roll out AI inside organisations. Jim explains w...

🎙️ Ritish Chugh (Airbnb analytics engineering) joins Dietmar Fischer to unpack a problem almost every company has, but few name clearly: your metrics do not mean the same thing across teams. Finance, marketing, and sales can all talk about “revenue” and still end up in dashboard chaos. The result is wasted time, slow decisions, and leadership that does not fully trust analytics or AI. In this epis...

The Future of Mental Health: AI Meets the Human Brain with Katarina Maloney // REPOST In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI , Dietmar Fischer speaks with Katarina Maloney , entrepreneur and founder of IQMind.ai , about a new frontier in AI-powered healthcare : understanding and treating the human brain through data, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Katarina explains how advances in A...

In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI , Wendy Keir shares practical ways small business owners can use AI tools to save time, reduce decision fatigue, and build a “team” of custom GPT agents . From naming her CEO agent “Lucas” to a dead-simple rule — one GPT, one job — Wendy shows how entrepreneurs can turn AI into a reliable thinking partner for growth in 2025. 🚀 📧💌📧 Tune in to get my tho...

🚀 AI is everywhere, but most organizations are still stuck in “pockets of productivity” that never turn into real business impact. In this episode, Dr. Rebecca Homkes explains how leaders can move from GenAI dabbling to deliberate adoption that drives real value creation. You will learn why “AI strategy” is the wrong framing, how to think about AI as part of growth strategy, and how to build the...

AI Is Agreeing With You at 3 A.M. and That’s the Problem Artificial intelligence is evolving from a tool into something far more influential. In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI, Prof. GePhardT explores Sam Altman’s AI warning about superhuman persuasion and why conversational systems like ChatGPT are already reshaping opinions, emotions, and mental health outcomes. We break down how AI supe...

👔🤖 In this episode, Dietmar Fischer talks with Zoher Karu about a surprisingly useful application of AI: helping men dress better without the endless shopping, guessing sizes, and daily decision fatigue. Zoher supports Taelor, a menswear subscription and clothing rental service that combines algorithms, large language models, and human stylists to deliver outfits that fit your body, your taste,...

In this episode of Beginer’s Guide to AI , Dietmar Fischer speaks with Shaheen Samavati , co-founder and CEO of VeraContent , about what an effective AI content marketing strategy actually looks like inside a real agency. AI in marketing is no longer experimental. It’s operational. Shaheen shares how her team moved from testing ChatGPT and OpenAI tools to building structured, repeatable AI workflo...

AI systems are often praised for their size. Bigger datasets. Bigger models. Bigger compute. But what if scale is only half the story? In this episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI, Prof. GePhardT dives deep into AI training data and explains why quantity alone cannot guarantee performance. From AI bias to model reliability, we explore how data quality determines whether AI systems are merely impres...

What if artificial intelligence is less like a new app—and more like the railroads of the 19th century? In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI , I sit down with Matt Hicks, CEO of Red Hat , to explore one of the most powerful metaphors for understanding AI’s role in business today. Just as railroads didn’t merely improve transportation but fundamentally reshaped economies, AI is not just anothe...

AI is transforming the real estate industry — but what does that really mean for agents on the ground? In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI , host Dietmar Fischer sits down with Andrew Reville , founder of PeakAgent , to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the way agents work, market, and connect with clients. 📧💌📧 Tune in to get my thoughts and all episodes, don't forget to ⁠⁠...

Boobesh Ramaurai on the Future of Data and AI In this episode, I sit down with Boobesh Ramaurai of LatentView to explore the future of data and AI—from his early days in analytics to today’s transformative AI landscape. Boobesh shares how curiosity led him into the world of analytics back in 2006, why execution is more important than ideas, and how data-driven decision making is reshaping business...

🚀 In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI, Dietmar Fischer speaks with Naga Santhosh Reddy Vootukuri (aka Sunny), a Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft working on Azure SQL deployment infrastructure. Sunny shares his personal journey into AI, from early ChatGPT experiments in late 2022 to using AI tools in production workflows, and what actually changed his day to day work. 💡 Y...

AI Leadership for the Agent Era: Building Hybrid Organizations with Dominic von Proeck AI is entering its operational phase. In this episode, Dominic von Proeck, Co-Founder of Leaders of AI, breaks down what AI transformation looks like when you stop collecting prompts and start building agent-powered teams. We talk about why owner-led companies and the German Mittelstand can move faster than many...

✨ Unlock a Future Where AI Inspires Leadership—not Replaces It In this episode, Dietmar Fischer speaks with Ja-Naé Duane and Steven Fisher , co-authors of the book SuperShifts , about what leadership really looks like in the age of artificial intelligence. Instead of framing AI as just another technology trend, the conversation explores AI leadership as a systemic and human challenge. Drawing on...

Most people think better AI results come from better prompts. This episode proves why that’s wrong. Professor GePhardT introduces Context Engineering , the missing skill that transforms AI from a confused parrot into a capable collaborator. Through relatable metaphors, real business examples, and a deliciously British cake analogy, you’ll learn how shaping an AI’s environment matters more than cle...