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AI Rebels

AI Rebels

Jacob and Spencer 86 episodes Latest May 7, 2026

The AI Rebels Podcast explores the grassroots of the current AI revolution. Each week, hosts Jacob and Spencer interview entrepreneurs and developers working on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. Listeners can benefit from their insights and learn about the latest innovations in the field.

Episodes

AI Is Moving at 100 MPH. Your Company Probably Isn’t. ft. Sreedhar Peddineni May 7, 2026 3261 Sreedhar Peddineni has built companies through the internet, SaaS, cloud, and now AI, which makes his perspective especially valuable because he is not reacting to hype — he is comparing this shift to every major technology wave he has lived through. He argues that AI is moving far faster than most leaders and companies can absorb, and that the widening gap between what is possible and what teams
Cavemen With Fire: Governing the AI Agent Fleet ft. Logan Kelly Apr 15, 2026 3429 Everyone's shipping agents. Almost nobody is asking what happens when a hundred of them go off the rails at 100% utilization while a customer is on the other end. Logan Kelly — CEO of Waxell and a guy who's been punched in the face by real-world sales operations — joins us to argue that a dashboard isn't governance, it's an autopsy, and that most teams are "cavemen playing
Why Your AI Projects Keep Failing (It's Not the Tech) ft. Barbara Wittman Apr 7, 2026 3138 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,
Bhaskar Sunkara: The AI Agent That Never Sleeps. How Bicycle AI Catches Revenue Leaks in Real Time Apr 1, 2026 3479 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 trav
RAG, Agents, and the Future of AI Memory with Roie from Pinecone Mar 25, 2026 3790 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 i
You Can't Have an AI Story Without a DataStory ft. Dalan Winbush, Nasuni Mar 11, 2026 3672 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
Making Insurance Fair: How Tuio Puts Customers First With AI ft. Juan Garcia, Tuio Mar 5, 2026 3339 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
Same Effort, 10x Results: How a Neurodivergent Artist Uses AI as a Force Multiplier ft. Victor Varnado Feb 24, 2026 2938 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
AI Prototyping at Zero Cost: How Ian Cook Ships What Others Can't Feb 17, 2026 2915 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 dow
Humanoid Robots Are a Distraction (Here's What Actually Works) ft. Grigorij Dudnik Feb 3, 2026 3733 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 Hidden Tradeoffs of AI Automation (and Why Friction Still Matters) ft. Jakob Ambuehl, Brex Jan 27, 2026 3483 How does generative AI actually work inside a large, regulated fintech company when real customers, real money, and real regulations are on the line?The AI Rebels Crew sits down with Jake from Brex’s Customer Experience Strategy team to reveal what actually happens when AI moves from hype to production. You’ll hear how a major fintech deploys AI in customer support without sacrificing trust, compl
From Hype to Controls: Securing AI Before Regulation Catches Up Jan 22, 2026 3286 Most companies are racing to adopt AI, but almost none can explain who’s responsible when it goes wrong. Cordell Robinson of Brownstone Consulting joins the AI Rebels crew to unpack the uncomfortable truth about AI governance, security, and compliance in a world moving faster than regulation. Why is the U.S. is lagging behind on enforceable AI rules, how can existing frameworks like NIST and ISO b

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