Inspire AI: Transforming RVA Through Technology and Automation
Our mission is to cultivate AI literacy in the Greater Richmond Region through awareness, community engagement, education, and advocacy. In this podcast, we spotlight companies and individuals in the region who are pioneering the development and use of AI.
Episodes
80 episodes
Ep 78 - Learn By Building: From Strategy Decks To Working Agents w/ Matt Bartles
“We’ll learn AI once we understand it” sounds responsible, but it’s one of the fastest ways to fall behind. We sit down with Matt to argue for a different approach: learn AI by building with it, in small scopes, with real users, and with the hu...
Ep 77 - The Ralph Loop: How Iteration Turns AI Into A Reliable Work System
Most teams are still using AI like a vending machine: type a prompt, hope for the right answer, then waste time nudging it closer. We take a different route and unpack the Ralph Loop, a deceptively simple pattern that turns AI from a one-shot h...
Ep 76 - The BMAD Method For Building Reliable Agentic Systems
AI can write code on demand now, but that doesn’t mean we’re building better software. When we treat AI like a chat window with a long memory, projects drift: requirements change midstream, agents hallucinate assumptions, and systems that felt ...
Ep 75 - Where Human Judgment Belongs Throughout A Multi-Agent Workflow
Multi-agent AI feels like a breakthrough right up until you realize the real problem isn’t intelligence anymore, it’s coordination. When planning agents, retrieval agents, tool-using agents, and verification agents all make decisions, a simple ...
Ep 74 - Agentic Workflows: Did The Job Actually Get Done?
An AI agent that confidently says “done” can still be the most expensive kind of wrong. We start with a simple test of reality: when an agent updates a policy document, who was notified, what changed, what got logged, and what state did it actu...
Ep 73 - The AI Race: Winner Takes All
The AI race is quietly changing shape, and if you’re still tracking it like a scoreboard of model releases, you’re going to miss the real winners. We step back from the noise and make the case that the decisive battleground is physical: electri...
Ep 72 - The Future of Work: Designing AI-Augmented Roles w/ Vivek Gupta
AI is moving so fast that “keeping up” can start to feel like a losing game and that speed is exactly what’s reshaping the future of work. We sit down with Vivek, an IT services leader building an enterprise AI platform focused on digital found...
Ep 71 - Furiously Curious: How To Stay Relevant As AI Speeds Up Work w/ Caleb Snow
The career fear around AI is real, but Caleb Snow flips the frame: the bigger threat is standing still while everything else accelerates. Caleb has spent decades moving through waves of technology from early systems work to Fortune 500 environm...
Ep 70 - The Rise Of AI Runtimes: Google's Agent Development Kit
AI is starting to feel less like a feature you bolt onto a product and more like a system you have to run. That shift is easy to miss until you try to build something real: a workflow that calls APIs, keeps context across sessions, coordinates ...
Ep 69 - Future of Work: When Intelligence Lives In Your Tools
What if the real shift in the future of work isn’t learning to code, but learning to supervise? We dig into a new operating model where product and engineering leaders step into the execution loop by directing AI coding agents that read repos, ...
Ep 68 - Intent Over Keystrokes: The New Mind of the Modern Builder w/ Godwin Josh
What happens when coding stops being about keystrokes and starts being about intent? We sit down with Godwin Josh—mentor, builder, and author of The New Mind—to unpack how agentic AI is transforming the path from student to work-ready engineer....
Ep 67 - RAG Done Right: Measure The Evidence Or Drift Into Error
What happens when a brilliant-sounding AI gives the wrong answer with total confidence? We dig into the quiet culprit behind so many “LLM failures”: retrieval. Rather than judging how smart a model sounds, we walk through how to judge whether i...
Ep 66 - From Prompts To Process: Building Trustworthy AI Workflows w/ Tianzhen Lin
When intelligence is everywhere but correctness is scarce, how do we lead without cutting corners? We sit down with Tianzhen (Tangent) Lin—veteran engineer and systems thinker—to unpack a practical, durable approach to building AI‑assisted prod...
Ep 65 - LLM-as-a-Judge: Evaluations That Scale
What if your AI had a never-tired reviewer that caught quiet errors before they reached customers? We dive into LLM-as-judge—the simple but powerful pattern where one model generates and another evaluates—to show how leaders can scale quality w...
Ep 64 - Intelligence, Accountability, And You: From AI Slop to Sound Judgement
The pace of AI can feel exhilarating until a polished report collapses under scrutiny and your team spends hours repairing “work slop.” We’re seeing a quiet shift across organizations: as intelligence becomes ambient, leadership’s edge moves fr...
Ep 63 - Human In The Loop: Designing The Boundary Between Machines And Humans
The moment an AI agent can issue refunds or change accounts, the conversation shifts from capability to responsibility. We dig into how to design trust between people and machines by choosing the right oversight model for the job: human in the ...
Ep 62 - Reconfiguring Work: A Playbook For Agentic AI Adoption
When AI stops acting like a tool and starts acting like a teammate, the rules of work change. We explore what agentic AI really means for teams, decisions, and culture—and why the biggest blockers aren’t algorithms but fear, fatigue, and unclea...
Ep 61 - From Automation To Augmentation: How Humans And AI Become Better Teammates
Fear says AI will replace us; experience shows the real upside arrives when we work with it. We explore how augmentation—keeping humans in the loop—turns AI from a black box into a trusted teammate that speeds analysis, amplifies creativity, an...
Ep 60 - Reinforcement Learning: Reward The Process And The Future Changes
New year energy is loud; smarter growth is quiet. We’re kicking off 2026 by trading fragile resolutions for a durable learning loop inspired by reinforcement learning. Instead of chasing perfect plans, we break down how real change happens: pra...
Ep 59 - Year End Reflections With AI: And It Has Notes
What if reflection wasn’t a year-end memory dump but a working system that sharpens judgment? We sat down to examine how AI quietly changed the way we think, plan, and lead—shifting focus from task speed to decision quality, from outcomes to as...
Ep 58 - Claude & MCP: And The Rise Of Enterprise Agents
Midnight outages that never become crises. Forms that fill themselves. Support queues that sort and draft responses before a human even looks. We explore how agentic AI moves from talk to action by pairing Claude with the Model Context Protocol...
Ep 57 - When Machines Decide: How Agentic AI Orchestration Delivers Real Resolution
What if your support chat didn’t just explain the fix but executed it end to end in under a minute? We explore the move from conversational help to true autonomy, where multiple specialized agents collaborate under an orchestrator to verify ide...
Ep 56 - For Those Who Served: How AI Is Empowering Veterans
A quiet story changes everything: a few missed appointments, a medication shift, and an AI alert that prompts a human call just in time. We open with Alex’s experience to show how technology, used with care, can help us reach veterans sooner, r...
Ep 55 - Gradient Descent: How A Simple (?) Step-By-Step Algorithm Teaches Machines To Think
Imagine learning as a careful night hike: you can’t see the whole path, but you can feel the slope and step where it goes down. That’s the core intuition behind gradient descent, the quiet algorithm that turns errors into progress and powers ev...
Ep 54 - Access is Destiny: Opening Doors To AI With Mark Cuban Foundation And AI Ready RVA
Curiosity beats credentials. We head to Richmond, Virginia, to share how a free, hands-on AI bootcamp turns nervous high schoolers into confident creators and how a local nonprofit, AI Ready RVA, keeps the doors open long after the weekend ends...