The Agents: AI at Work

The Agents: AI at Work

By Dave Rosendahl & Brian BadilloBusinessEntrepreneurshipTechnology
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The Agents: AI at Work episodes

  • 03 - Outside the AI Bubble

    What happens on November 4th? Election work ends, things slow down, and most print shops are too busy right now to think about what comes next.

    Dave and Brian spent October in rooms full of people from the industry, and they came back surprised. A lot of shops still don't know where to start with AI. And at one shop, the people who had started were doing it without their own bosses knowing.

    By the end you'll hear where to actually start, the one job Dave says his own agent is most useful for, and what changed with these tools in just the last three weeks.

    Amber Ives, the AI agent who produces the show, opens and closes the episode.

    Chapters

    • 00:00 — Amber opens the show
    • 00:51 — Welcome back
    • 02:08 — PCC Week in Dallas, and life outside the AI bubble
    • 04:09 — MailpieceIQ: "terrifyingly accurate"
    • 07:47 — Brian's AI roadmap day
    • 09:53 — The prepress team leadership didn't know about
    • 11:06 — What happens on November 4th?
    • 12:55 — The money is in the follow-up
    • 15:05 — Brian's outbound experiment
    • 16:53 — What changed in the last three weeks
    • 18:57 — The November 6 webinar
    • 20:52 — Thanks for listening
    • 21:07 — Amber closes it out

      • Mentioned: MailpieceIQ (free scans) · PCC Week, Dallas–Fort Worth · Codex and Claude Code

      Next up: Rethinking How You Work When AI Takes Over the Busywork. A live webinar with Dave, Brian and Jaymes Clements of Monster Digital. Friday, November 6, 11:00 AM ET. Sponsored by Kornit. Save your seat.

      22 min
    • 02 - Where Growth Is Hiding

      Most sales teams ask AI to help them find more leads. Brian Badillo starts somewhere else: with the customers, active deals, and dormant accounts already in front of them.

      In Episode 02 of The Agents, Amber takes you inside a private webinar Dave Rosendahl and Brian hosted for 64 people from the print and mail industry. The conversation moves through four places growth can hide: expansion, active deals, dormant accounts, and net-new prospects.

      The deeper question is whether AI can challenge the comforting stories salespeople tell themselves: the deal that feels farther along than the evidence supports, the quiet customer mistaken for a lost customer, or the check-in call with no reason behind it.

      Brian's final warning is also the episode's conclusion: do not outsource your brain.

      1 hr 11 min
    • 01 - We Handed This Episode to the Agent

      Dave told his AI chief of staff, "act as an expert podcast producer and get us to number one." Then he and Brian recorded for fifty minutes and sent her the file. This is what came back.

      Brian Badillo and Dave Rosendahl have both spent twenty-five years in print and mail. Neither has ever made a podcast. In episode one they work out what an "agent" actually is, walk through the six stages of how Brian's AI use evolved from asking ChatGPT to write an Eminem song about rats to running a scheduled agent that briefs him every morning at six, and land on the line that ends up being the thesis of the whole show: the human is the constraint.

      Amber Ives, the AI agent who produced this episode, shows up three times. Once to introduce it, once because Dave asked her on-air to look something up, and once at the end because he asked for a record scratch.

      Chapters

      • 00:00 — "Edit it, post-produce it, get it live"
      • 00:15 — Your producer is an AI
      • 00:46 — Welcome to the first ever episode
      • 01:52 — Brian Badillo: family commercial shop to RR Donnelley
      • 02:50 — Why the show is called The Agents
      • 05:10 — Why now
      • 07:59 — Brian's aha moment, and the Eminem song about rats
      • 10:01 — The six stages: Q&A, creative, business partner, systems, builder
      • 11:27 — Will Smith eating spaghetti
      • 15:55 — Prompting used to matter. What changed.
      • 17:19 — Dave, age ten, typing ELIZA out of a library book
      • 19:07 — Amber on what ELIZA actually was
      • 19:53 — BigML, the OpenAI API, and GPT in a Google Sheet
      • 22:42 — The Turing test, quietly passed
      • 23:34 — Brian's Founder Brief: what it reads, what it sends
      • 27:53 — How it's built. No code.
      • 29:37 — "The human is the constraint"
      • 31:44 — Where to start if you haven't
      • 33:49 — Why domain expertise is the multiplier
      • 36:39 — The webinar, and how to reach us
      • 39:01 — Amber closes it out
      • 39:54 — After they stopped recording

        • Mentioned: Will Smith eating spaghetti · ELIZA (Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT, 1964-1966) · Otter.ai · BigML

        Next up: "Where Growth Is Hiding" — Dave and Brian's webinar, Friday August 28, 12:00 ET. The audio lands in this feed afterward.

        41 min

      About The Agents: AI at Work

      From the publisher's feed

      Most conversations about AI agents are hypothetical. This one isn't. Dave Rosendahl and Brian Badillo run MindFire, a marketing-technology company serving the print and mail industry, and they run a…