Living Lindy: a No-BS Conversation on AI Agents with Flo Crivello

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Nathan Labenz** (0:31)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Flo Crivello, CEO of AI agent platform, Lindy. This is Flo's sixth appearance on the podcast, but only his second that goes deep on Lindy specifically. I reached out to Flo to request this conversation while I was preparing for my recent presentation on AI agents at Imagine AI Live. Because I know that Flo lives and breathes AI agents as much as anyone, and yet he always cuts through the hype and shoots me straight on what's working and what's not working yet. For comparison, that presentation, which we ran as a recent episode, is a higher level overview that I hope people will find valuable for structuring their thinking and perhaps even bringing leaders in their organizations up to speed. Whereas this conversation is a much deeper dive, fit for AI engineers, tinkerers, and builders of all types, and full of practical nuggets. Now, if you've been following the AI agent space, you know that it's been a bit of a rollercoaster. We've gone from mind-blowing, autonomous agent demos like BabyAGI and AutoGPT back around the time of GPT-4 launch in 2023, to a world today in which most AI agents, and certainly the vast majority of AI agents in production, are better described as intelligent workflows, in which AIs perform specific tasks that do require fluid intelligence, but nevertheless exist within a structure and control flow that was designed and built by humans. That said, while it's taken longer to get here than I expected, two things are now becoming very clear. First, even in this more constrained paradigm, the practical value of AI agents is becoming huge, for use cases across customer service, sales, recruiting, inbox management, scheduling, and information synthesis. And second, the more open-ended, choose-your-own-adventure form of AI agents are also now starting to work. Flo describes a few that he's built for himself on the Lindy platform, but you can see this happening everywhere, from OpenAI's operator, to Claude Code, to Google's spreadsheet integration of Gemini 2.5, which I recently tried again for the first time in months and found to be dramatically improved. At the same time, these are only starting to work, and just how quickly these capabilities will continue to advance is, of course, hard to say. Flo, as you'll hear, isn't convinced that we should just extrapolate Meters' historical trend analysis of AI task-length doubling times all that far into the future. And perhaps, as a result, he's not ready to go all in on multi-agent systems either. Beyond that, you'll definitely want to hear Flo's takes on model choice and managing model upgrades, fine-tuning, rag, whether the tools that AI agents are given to use should themselves be intelligent and dynamic or dumb and deterministic, how Lindy helps users maximize performance by curating successful examples, and how and why, even assuming we do get AGI soon, Flo believes that scaffolding will continue to play a critical role in helping humans understand and control AI activity. On a personal note, I'm also glad to share that I do now have a Lindy doing meaningful work for me. I've previously mentioned that we're experimenting with sponsored episodes, but to date these have been very few and far between. Now with podcast guest pitches from AI companies' PR firms ramping up to a truly unmanageable volume, I finally decided to enlist the help of an AI agent to process them all. And so I built a relatively simple agent on Lindy that takes a PR firm email as input, researches the company they represent using the Proplexity API, evaluates whether they're a legitimate AI industry leader that our audience would actually want to hear from, which by the way does filter out a large majority, and then for those few that pass review, finds contact information for key executives via the Rocket Reach API, and finally drafts personalized outreach emails explaining our sponsored episode offering, which are placed directly into the Turpentine Business Team's Gmail Drafts folder for review and sending. One could of course build such a workflow on many different platforms, but I do find it valuable to see how an AI obsessed team like Lindy is thinking about these things, and Lindy does a particularly nice job of having AI set all the configuration values for you, of making sure that AI has full context at each step, and of allowing you to chat with individual instances of a task. In any case, this is exactly the kind of task that's perfect for current generation agents, and that every business should be experimenting with now. Well defined, multi-step, requiring both research and judgment, and ultimately allowing us to scale a valuable activity that we previously couldn't. Of course, I'll be transparent with you, the audience, by always identifying any sponsored episodes that we do bring you. Today's is not one. And I'll maintain my own agency by remaining personally responsible for the companies that we do and do not choose to feature on the feed. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you take a moment to share it with friends, write a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or leave a comment on YouTube. We welcome your feedback via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, and also by DMing me on your favorite social network. Now, I hope you enjoy this no BS conversation about the state of AI agents with Flo Crivello, CEO of Lindy.