I Have Some AI Questions (With Justin Coats) Episodes

Erik and Justin unpack Paul Rotzer’s AI maturity “eight pillars” and use it to frame what leaders should do after the hype: step back, explore what AI can do, choose a priority problem, then build vision, strategy, governance, literacy, and measurement in that order. 🧭 Conversation Highlights AI adoption is a forcing function: excitement about what AI can do often triggers the harder question of what the business should actually solve first. Justin argues for a mindset shift from “pick the per...

Erik and Justin talk through why AI agents get stuck when teams cannot articulate how work is done, and why the answer is iterative agent deployment with guardrails, sandbox testing, and ongoing process refinement. 🧭 Conversation Highlights Most professionals struggle to explain the steps of their work, which blocks automation and agent adoption. Agents feel hard to hand off to because people fear losing control, making mistakes, or looking foolish. A practical path forward is iterative proce...

Erik shares how he’s running a week-one “vibe coding” summer curriculum for his 10- and 7-year-old daughters using voice-first ChatGPT. He and Justin unpack what’s working, what friction to watch for, and how to think about learning, iteration, and human responsibility as AI becomes the new interface. 🧭 Conversation Highlights Erik’s kids start with voice prompts to generate images, then turn them into stories and comic panels. When they hit “out of ideas,” they switch to a question-driven loop...

Erik and Justin take a practical tour through AI “tools that actually ship.” They start with Lovable to build a real landing page fast, then move to NotebookLM for source-grounded research and repackaging, and finish with Spinach AI for meeting intelligence that turns conversations into executable next steps. 🧭 Conversation Highlights Erik’s Lovable experience: a subsite built in minutes by feeding a prompt and letting the tool pull branding, structure the story, and generate interactive compon...

Erik and Justin unpack what an “AI orchestration layer” actually means when agents move from experiments into day-to-day operations. They focus on the practical shift from building tools to managing systems: mirroring the org chart with digital agents, defining who maintains them, and creating an auditing layer so leaders can trust performance at scale. 🧭 Conversation Highlights Teams are quickly moving from a handful of agents to managing 5 to 10 agents per person, and that forces org design q...

Erik and Justin dig into what it actually means for AI to “become real,” arguing that consumer usage does not equal workplace adoption. The conversation lands on a “pause moment” where organizations are finally forced to address governance, security, policy, and measurement because the tools are now powerful enough to create real operational risk and real operational leverage. 🧭 Conversation Highlights Justin distinguishes massive user counts from meaningful adoption, emphasizing that most peop...

Erik and Justin unpack a recent story about an AI agent deleting a rental car company’s entire database, using it as a real-world forcing function for how leaders should think about agent risk, permissions, and organizational readiness. 🧭 Conversation Highlights Justin frames the incident as evidence of technical limitations, rapid capability growth, and a lack of widespread agent literacy. Erik pushes on the core fear: even if you tell an agent “don’t do that,” an agent with write/delete powe...

This conversation shifts from theory to reality. Erik and Justin move beyond what AI could do and into how it actually works today—and more importantly, how most people are using it wrong without realizing it. From hidden settings that quietly degrade performance to the emergence of AI agents that can act on your behalf, this episode exposes a new layer of the AI conversation: your results are only as good as your setup. The big unlock? AI isn’t just a tool anymore—it’s becoming a customizabl...

In this follow-up to last week's conversation, Erik and Justin tackle one of the most emotionally charged topics in AI: job displacement. But instead of fear-based predictions, they reframe the conversation entirely. The real story isn’t that AI is replacing jobs—it’s that most people don’t understand what parts of their job actually create value. They introduce a powerful lens: “white-collar factory work” vs. truly human work. And once you see that distinction, everything changes—from how you...

This episode marks the beginning of a new weekly series featuring Justin Coats—AI expert, co-founder of LearnAir™, and now recurring co-host. Erik brings his biggest questions about AI in business, and Justin brings grounded, practical answers. The core tension? AI isn’t the limiting factor—humans are. Specifically, our lack of awareness around how we actually work. Together, Erik and Justin unpack why most businesses struggle to adopt AI, how vague thinking kills automation, and why leadershi...