AI Rebels

Jacob and Spencer

The AI Rebels Podcast is dedicated to exploring and documenting the grassroots of the current AI revolution. Every week a new episode is posted wherein the hosts interview entrepreneurs and developers working on the cutting edge. Tune in to benefit from their insight.

  1. 1D AGO

    Why Your AI Projects Keep Failing (It's Not the Tech) ft. Barbara Wittman

    Barbara Wittman has spent 25 years cleaning up broken transformation projects, and the root cause is never the technology. In this episode, she breaks down how AI is exposing dysfunction that companies have been hiding for years: misalignment between business and IT, unchecked assumptions, and a total lack of shared understanding. She explains why boards pressure CEOs into AI adoption out of fear, why the people actually executing get sidelined, and why most “AI use cases” fall apart the moment you pick them apart. Barbara makes the case for “human infrastructure” as a real budget line item, not a buzzword, and shares frameworks so simple they fit on the back of a napkin. If you’re a founder, a transformation leader, or anyone trying to figure out why your AI investments aren’t paying off, this conversation will reframe how you think about the problem.

    52 min

  2. APR 1

    Bhaskar Sunkara: The AI Agent That Never Sleeps. How Bicycle AI Catches Revenue Leaks in Real Time

    Bhaskar Sunkara built AppDynamics into a $3.7B company. Now he's back with Bicycle AI, an always-on agent that catches revenue leaks before your team even knows they exist. In this episode he breaks down why most AI products will never make it to production, how to actually build enterprise trust, and what "doing the boring stuff" really means. We get into real use cases across travel and payments where Bicycle is already saving companies millions. If you're building in AI or buying AI tools for your business, this one is required listening.

    58 min

  3. MAR 25

    RAG, Agents, and the Future of AI Memory with Roie from Pinecone

    Most RAG implementations are fundamentally broken; and the company that coined "vector search" just told us why. In this episode, Roie from Pinecone breaks down the "Franken answer" problem plaguing AI systems, why naive retrieval falls apart at scale, and what most teams are getting wrong about evaluation. He reveals how the AutoGPT explosion nearly took down Pinecone's infrastructure overnight — and the radical architecture shift it forced them to build. We dig into why LLMs can't be trusted without grounding, what AI memory will actually look like in the age of agents and robots, and where the line between useful hallucination and dangerous fiction really sits. If you're building anything with RAG, vectors, or agents, this conversation will change how you think about it. https://www.pinecone.io/

    1h 3m

  4. MAR 11

    You Can't Have an AI Story Without a DataStory ft. Dalan Winbush, Nasuni

    95% of enterprises are failing at AI. Not because the technology doesn't work, but because they're measuring the wrong things. In this episode, Nasuni CIO Dalan Winbush breaks down why adoption metrics are meaningless without real business impact, why his decentralized AI team failed and what he replaced it with, and how he's building an army of digital employees that will match his 800-person workforce. From his sales agent NORA to a hiring agent that cut time-to-hire by 80%, Dalan isn't theorizing. He's sharing the playbook he's running right now.

    1h 1m

  5. MAR 5

    Making Insurance Fair: How Tuio Puts Customers First With AI ft. Juan Garcia, Tuio

    Insurance was built to profit off confusion, and Tuio is proving it doesn't have to be that way. Juan Garcia and his co-founders rebuilt insurance from the ground up as a fully digital, AI-native company in Spain, and they're running 3x the industry's average profit margins while charging customers less. The secret isn't just slapping AI onto old processes. It's rethinking every layer of the business, from data infrastructure to claims handling to marketing, so that AI actually compounds in value. If you want to understand what it really looks like when a company is built around AI instead of bolting it on, this is the episode.

    56 min

  6. FEB 24

    Same Effort, 10x Results: How a Neurodivergent Artist Uses AI as a Force Multiplier ft. Victor Varnado

    A billion-dollar liquor company paid a rapper with ADHD low six figures to build them a custom video game, and he delivered it in two weeks. That rapper is Victor, and in this episode he shows two games side by side, built on the same timeline: one before AI, one after. He's also a New Yorker cartoonist, NSF grant recipient, patent holder, and TV producer who will tell you straight when AI is not the right tool for the job. He breaks down a business model where every customer becomes a permanent marketing engine, and walks through the writing coach he built specifically for neurodivergent creators like himself. If you've written off AI as a crutch for people who don't want to do real work, this is the conversation that complicates that.

    49 min

  7. FEB 17

    AI Prototyping at Zero Cost: How Ian Cook Ships What Others Can't

    95% of enterprise AI projects fail, but not for the reasons you think. Ian Cook has spent 16 years shipping AI products across healthcare, physical security, consumer goods, and now cultural data, and the pattern behind the failures is always the same: companies start from the top down with vague mandates instead of solving a specific person's specific problem. In this episode, Ian breaks down his framework for AI implementations that actually stick. Start bottom-up, ask a tangible question, and know what "done" looks like before you write a line of code. We get into why the cost of throwing away code is now zero and what that means for how fast you can experiment, how tools like Claude Code have changed what a solo engineer can ship in an afternoon, and which industries are about to get hit hardest by this wave. Ian doesn't sell magic. He builds prototypes that put working software in people's hands, and his track record speaks for itself.

    49 min

  8. FEB 3

    Humanoid Robots Are a Distraction (Here's What Actually Works) ft. Grigorij Dudnik

    What happens when AI leaves the screen and enters the physical world? It breaks. Spencer and Jacob sit down with robotics researcher Grigorij Dudnik, who's been running real experiments with real robots—and finding that most of our assumptions about AI fall apart the moment hardware gets involved. The big one: the idea that a single massive model can do everything. Grigorij makes the case that the future isn't a "super-intelligent" humanoid. It's a modular system where an LLM plans, specialized models act, and physical constraints keep everything honest. They get into why humanoids are overrated, why generalization keeps failing in robotics, and why a system built on narrow, composable skills might be the actual breakthrough everyone's overlooking.

    1h 2m
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Ratings & Reviews

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About

The AI Rebels Podcast is dedicated to exploring and documenting the grassroots of the current AI revolution. Every week a new episode is posted wherein the hosts interview entrepreneurs and developers working on the cutting edge. Tune in to benefit from their insight.

Information

  • Creator
    Jacob and Spencer
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    84
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 AI Rebels
  • Show Website
    AI Rebels