Surviving the New Economics of a Post-Agentic World

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Welcome to the Practical AI Podcast, where we break down the real world applications of artificial intelligence and how it's shaping the way we live, work and create. Our goal is to help make AI technology practical, productive and accessible to everyone. Whether you're a developer, business leader, or just curious about the tech behind the buzz, you're in the right place.
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**Daniel Whitenack** (0:41)
Welcome to another episode of the Practical AI podcast. This is Daniel Whitenack. I am CEO at Prediction Guard, and I'm joined as always by my cohost, Chris Benson, who is a principal AI and autonomy research engineer. Welcome, Chris.
It's one of these episodes where it's just the two of us, and we get to talk about whatever is interesting for us. So I'm excited about this. I missed the interview with you last week. It was a great one, but yeah, excited to be back on.

**Chris Benson** (1:10)
Absolutely. Welcome back. And I know we both had outages lately with summer vacations and family and things like that that we've been doing. Good to be back together.
And yeah, these fully connected episodes, as we call them, where you and I get to kind of go wherever we want to go, is, they're always fun for me. Yeah, for sure. For guests, it gives Dan and I kind of a chance to freelance and to kind of, instead of just focusing on a particular topic to kind of go wherever we want to go. And so we have a good time with them. So yeah, and a lot's happening right now.

**Daniel Whitenack** (1:46)
A lot's happening. And yeah, just as a reminder also for our guests, a few things that we don't normally share on our shows and we have a guest because we like to get into that, but please do engage with us online. If you didn't know, we are posting videos now on YouTube. So if you haven't got a chance yet, at least go over there, give us a subscribe on YouTube, the Practical AI Show. And of course you can still listen to us on all the other places as well. And then reminder, just coming up in October, October 15th in Indianapolis, we're going to have another Midwest AI Summit, which was a great experience. Chris and I got to jam at a little bit last year and excited for some really cool speakers that we have on deck this year and lots of practicality with an AI engineering lounge where you can sit down and talk through architecture and design and agents and plans and security and whatever you want to talk about with practitioners. So check it out, just search for Midwest AI Summit and make sure you get registered for that. But yeah, lots of things happening.

**Chris Benson** (2:57)
Before you get away from that, I want to point out that that's a fun conference. You and I go to a lot of conferences and that one is a fun conference and everybody is accessible. If you want to talk to somebody, they're there, it's great. So I just wanted to point that out.
I love that one. So yeah, you want to start us off?

**Daniel Whitenack** (3:16)
Sure, sure. It's interesting today, this morning.
I mean, I guess like most people now, we don't have regular TV, but sometimes my wife and I listen to some sort of feed of, like on Prime Video, they have CNN news highlights or whatever. So sometimes we'll listen to that in the morning while we're eating our cereal. And this morning on those news highlights, it highlighted that IBM had a major hit in their series. So 25% stock plunge, which is kind of crazy. And it talked about, oh, IBM has this 25% plunge in their stock. It has something to do with AI. And I was obviously paying attention. I don't know that based on how they were describing it, it immediately made sense to me, but I did a little bit of research. And I am looking at this and also thinking about if it's a wider trend that is going to be happening across tech companies. So is this something you ran across or have been thinking about, Chris?

**Chris Benson** (4:21)
So I wasn't at all surprised about this in that way. Like I didn't know that IBM would do this. But so it's something I've been thinking about quite a lot lately. And it's something that I know I've mentioned this to you. I'll mention it without any names. I'm in discussions about writing a book that kind of hits this topic with the CEO of a publishing company. And I'll leave it at that. It may never happen. But they asked me to write some books that they were interested in. I said, no, I'd rather write this book.