The magentIQ Show

Ian Barkin and David Brain get into what happens when you trust a single AI model too much, and what to do instead. A client's agent confidently got a healthcare policy answer wrong, which sets up David's most practical idea yet: a council of agents, several different models cross checking each other so no one blind spot slips through. From there, the quiet trend of organizations rehirin...

Ian Barkin and David Brain are back, and getting comfortable. This one ranges from World Cup soccer to the real bottleneck in AI, which turns out not to be tokens or building, but knowing what to build. They dig into why great ideas beat raw consumption, why last year's models are quietly the smart buy, and what a sudden model shutdown teaches every operator about not putting all their eggs i...

Ian Barkin and David Brain go behind the scenes on the agentic platform they have been building, and dig into why the biggest model is rarely the right one, why this year's AI savings are quietly funding next year's budget, and why going faster will not fix a process that was never designed for AI in the first place. A practical, pattern matching conversation from two people who have liv...

People can plan a week of meals, diagnose an ailment, and draft a proposal with AI on a Sunday, then walk into work on Monday and find everything still stuck in silos, legacy systems, and tribal knowledge. In Episode 9 of The magentIQ Show, Ian Barkin sits down with industry analyst and icon Phil Fersht to name that dissonance, the velocity gap, and to talk honestly about why so few enterprises ar...

The company burning billions on AI is somehow getting less done. In Episode 8 of The magentIQ Show, Ian Barkin and David Brain dig into why, working through the mistakes the AI era keeps repeating even though most of them were supposed to be learned a decade ago. Here is what Ian and David unpack: Why the era of unlimited tokens is turning, and why disciplined AI is proving cheaper and more produc...

AI can draft a report in seconds, but it cannot put its name on it. In Episode 7 of The magentIQ Show, Ian Barkin sits down with Andreas Welsch, ten year AI veteran, LinkedIn Learning instructor, and author of two books written entirely by hand. Their conversation cuts past the hype to a question every leader is now living with: when output is effortless, how do you keep the quality, the judgment,...

The whether of AI is settled, or at least that's what our webinar audiences told us. What people are hungry for now is the how. In Episode 6 of The magentIQ Show, Ian Barkin and David Brain answer the questions that came straight from the people in their recent webinars, share fresh survey data on where AI adoption really stands, and walk through a client who saved six figures a year by build...

Ian Barkin and David Brain are joined by Tom Davenport, President's Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College and author of twenty-five books on AI, analytics, and the future of work. Tom, David, and Ian have co-authored numerous journal articles and a book on citizen development. Tom is a friend, collaborator, and expert with an unrivaled perspective...

Ian Barkin and David Brain return for Episode 4 of The magentIQ Show, picking up where the headlines leave off. AI is everywhere at work right now, but the loudest signal is not better results. It is token maxing and layoffs justified by an AI story that often runs ahead of reality. Ian and David dig into what happens when leaders measure AI adoption by volume of usage instead of business value, a...

Ian Barkin and Joe Boggio have been comparing notes on innovation since their Capgemini days. They were at one of the first OpenAI hackathons in San Francisco three years ago. The room they sat in turned out to be ground zero for everything that followed. Welcome to Episode 3 of The magentIQ Show. For four decades, the McKinsey Three Horizons model gave leaders a comfortable distance from the futu...

Co-founders Ian Barkin and David Brain have been having these conversations for fifteen years. This time, the recording light is on. Welcome to Episode 2 of The magentIQ Show, and the first installment of our founder discussions. Wall Street just placed a very loud bet on a quiet truth: enterprise AI is hard. Anthropic has teamed with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Hellman and Friedman, and General At...

Episode 1 of The magentIQ Show is here! Ian Barkin sits down with Pat Geary, the man who gave Robotic Process Automation its name. Over lunch, no less. The term that built an industry started as a metaphor on a napkin, and Pat has had a front row seat for every wave since.  In this episode, Pat and Ian trade stories from the early days of enterprise AI, revisit the now legendary "Welcome to R...

Every CEO has a mandate. Every consultant has a framework. Every LinkedIn post has a hot take. But who's actually telling the truth about AI? The magentIQ Show is the podcast for people who want to cut through the BS and hype. Hosted by Ian Barkin and David Brain , two operators who have spent more than two decades building, scaling, and exiting in the AI, automation, and outsourcing world. J...