This week on The AI Report, Liam Lawson is joined by Jake George, founder of Agentic Brain, to cut through the noise on AI agents.

Jake shares why most AI agent projects fail, what everyone gets wrong about automation, and why a generalist chatbot will never run your sales team. With experience training agents to act like departments complete with project management, team roles, and reasoning models,  Jake walks us through building systems that scale.

They talk about how models like o3 and o4-mini are changing the game, why prompting alone won’t get you far, and what innovative businesses are doing to stay competitive in the era of reasoning AI.

Also in this episode:

• The myth of the $20 agent
  

• Why sales automation is still mostly garbage
  

• Building “department-level” agents from scratch
  

• The new consulting model for AI integration
  

• How to spot companies faking their AI credibility
  

Jake doesn’t sugarcoat it. He brings the hard truths and deep insights you need to integrate AI into your workflow.

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Chapters:

(00:00) The Myth of $20 AI Employees

(02:22) Why Even Smart People Struggle With Agents

(04:02) o3, o4-mini, and the New Era of Reasoning

(06:05) What Makes an Agent Think

(07:01) Building Agents That Act Like Teams

(08:25) How Models Reshape the Agentic Brain Playbook

(10:07) Why Access to Context Beats Raw Intelligence

(12:07) Building for Specific Use Cases

(14:03) Training AI the Way You Train People

(17:11) Department-Level Agent Workflows

(18:24) AI Tools That Will and Won’t Survive

(20:12) Where AI Still Fails in High-Ticket Sales

(21:02) What Agentic Brain Offers Clients

(23:12) The Role of Context in Cold Outreach

(25:17) A New Model for AI Consulting

(27:00) Why Real Companies Don’t DIY This

(29:04) Telling Real and Fake AI Startups Apart

(32:27) Pricing Mindsets: $500 vs $5,000 Clients

(34:45) Enterprise Expectations and PM Discipline

(36:12) Claude’s Secret Advantage

(38:05) Model Flexibility and Why OpenAI Still Wins

(41:13) Balancing Cost and Accuracy

(42:11) Where to Connect With Jake