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Practical AI LLC

Making artificial intelligence practical, productive & accessible to everyone. Practical AI is a show in which technology professionals, business people, students, enthusiasts, and expert guests engage in lively discussions about Artificial Intelligence and related topics (Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, GANs, MLOps, AIOps, LLMs & more).

The focus is on productive implementations and real-world scenarios that are accessible to everyone. If you want to keep up with the latest advances in AI, while keeping one foot in the real world, then this is the show for you!

Practical AI: Machine Learning, Data Science

Dan and Chris break down Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan, issued by the White House in July 2025. Structured as three "pillars" — Accelerate AI Innovation, Build American AI Infrastructure, and Lead in International AI Diplomacy and Security — our dynamic duo unpack the plan's policy goals and its associated suggestions — while also exploring the mixed reactions it’s sparked across political lines. They connect the plan to international AI diplomacy and national security interests, discuss its implications for practitioners, and consider how political realities could shape its success in the years ahead. 

Featuring:

 • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
LinkedIn • , 
Bluesky • , 
GitHub • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links:

 • Press Release: 
White House Unveils America's AI Action Plan • Paper: 
America's AI Action Plan
Sponsors:

Shopify • – The commerce platform trusted by millions. From idea to checkout, Shopify gives you everything you need to launch and scale your business—no matter your level of experience. Build beautiful storefronts, market with built-in AI tools, and tap into the platform powering 10% of all U.S. eCommerce. Start your one-dollar trial at 
shopify.com/practicalai
Register for upcoming webinars here!

Inside America’s AI Action Plan

Allegra Guinan of Lumiera helps leaders turn uncertainty about AI into confident, strategic leadership. In this conversation, she brings some actionable insights for navigating the hype and complexity of AI. The discussion covers challenges with implementing responsible AI practices, the growing importance of user experience and product thinking, and how leaders can focus on real-world business problems over abstract experimentation.

Featuring:

 • Allegra Guinan – 
LinkedIn • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
LinkedIn • , 
Bluesky • , 
GitHub • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links:

Lumiera
Sponsors:

Shopify • – The commerce platform trusted by millions. From idea to checkout, Shopify gives you everything you need to launch and scale your business—no matter your level of experience. Build beautiful storefronts, market with built-in AI tools, and tap into the platform powering 10% of all U.S. eCommerce. Start your one-dollar trial at 
shopify.com/practicalai
Register for upcoming webinars here!

Confident, strategic AI leadership

Dan sits down with guests Mark Daniel Ward and Katie Sanders from The Data Mine at Purdue University to explore how higher education is evolving to meet the demands of the AI-driven workforce. They share how their program blends interdisciplinary learning, corporate partnerships, and real-world data science projects to better prepare students across 160+ majors. From AI chatbots to agricultural forecasting, they discuss the power of living-learning communities, how the data mine model is spreading to other institutions and what it reveals about the future of education, workforce development, and applied AI training.

Featuring:

 • Mark Daniel Ward – 
LinkedIn • Katie Sanders – 
LinkedIn • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links:

The Data Mine
Sponsors:

Shopify • – The commerce platform trusted by millions. From idea to checkout, Shopify gives you everything you need to launch and scale your business—no matter your level of experience. Build beautiful storefronts, market with built-in AI tools, and tap into the platform powering 10% of all U.S. eCommerce. Start your one-dollar trial at 
shopify.com/practicalai
Register for upcoming webinars here!

Educating a data-literate generation

We unpack how AI is reshaping hiring decisions, shifting job roles, and creating new expectations for professionals — from engineers to marketers. They explore the rise of AI-assisted teams, the growing compensation bubble, why continuous learning is now table stakes, and how some service providers are quietly riding the AI wave.

Featuring:

 • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
LinkedIn • , 
Bluesky • , 
GitHub • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Sponsors:

Outshift by Cisco • : AGNTCY is an open source collective building the Internet of Agents. It's a collaboration layer where AI agents can communicate, discover each other, and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for inter-agent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows."

Register for upcoming webinars here!

Workforce dynamics in an AI-assisted world

In this episode, Chris sits down with Igor Nikitin, CEO and co-founder of Nice Technologies, to explore how AI and modern engineering practices are transforming the actuarial field and setting the stage for the future of actuarial modeling. We discuss the introduction of programming into insurance pricing workflows, and how their Python-based calc engine, AI copilots, and DevOps-inspired workflows are enabling actuaries to collaborate more effectively across teams while accelerating innovation. 

Featuring:

 • Igor Nikitin – 
LinkedIn • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
LinkedIn • , 
Bluesky • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links:

Nice Technologies
Sponsors:

Shopify • – The commerce platform trusted by millions. From idea to checkout, Shopify gives you everything you need to launch and scale your business—no matter your level of experience. Build beautiful storefronts, market with built-in AI tools, and tap into the platform powering 10% of all U.S. eCommerce. Start your one-dollar trial at 
shopify.com/practicalai

Reimagining actuarial science with AI

In this episode of Practical AI, Chris and Daniel explore the fascinating world of agentic AI for drone and robotic swarms, which is Chris's passion and professional focus. They unpack how autonomous vehicles (UxV), drones (UaV), and other autonomous multi-agent systems can collaborate without centralized control while exhibiting complex emergent behavior with agency and self-governance to accomplish a mission or shared goals. Chris and Dan delve into the role of AI real-time inference and edge computing to enable complex agentic multi-model autonomy, especially in challenging environments like disaster zones and remote industrial operations.

Featuring:

 • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
LinkedIn • , 
Bluesky • , 
GitHub • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links:

ROS - Robotic Operating SystemGazeboHugging Face Agents CourseSwarm Robotics | Wikipedia

Chris's definition of Swarming:
Swarming occurs when numerous independent fully-autonomous multi-agentic platforms exhibit highly-coordinated locomotive and emergent behaviors with agency and self-governance in any domain (air, ground, sea, undersea, space), functioning as a single independent logical distributed decentralized decisioning entity for purposes of C3 (command, control, communications) with human operators on-the-loop, to implement actions that achieve strategic, tactical, or operational effects in the furtherance of a mission.
© 2025 Chris Benson

Sponsors:

Outshift by Cisco • : AGNTCY is an open source collective building the Internet of Agents. It's a collaboration layer where AI agents can communicate, discover each other, and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for inter-agent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows.

Agentic AI for Drone & Robotic Swarming

In the first episode of an "AI in the shadows" theme, Chris and Daniel explore the increasing concerning world of agentic misalignment. Starting out with a reminder about hallucinations and reasoning models, they break down how today’s models only mimic reasoning, which can lead to serious ethical considerations. They unpack a fascinating (and slightly terrifying) new study from Anthropic, where agentic AI models were caught simulating blackmail, deception, and even sabotage — all in the name of goal completion and self-preservation. 

Featuring:

 • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
LinkedIn • , 
Bluesky • , 
GitHub • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links:

Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threatsHugging Face Agents Course
Register for upcoming webinars here!

AI in the shadows: From hallucinations to blackmail

In this episode, we sit down with Joey Conway to explore NVIDIA's open source AI, from the reasoning-focused Nemotron models built on top of Llama, to the blazing-fast Parakeet speech model. We chat about what makes open foundation models so valuable, how enterprises can think about deploying multi-model strategies, and why reasoning is becoming the key differentiator in real-world AI applications.

Featuring:

 • Joey Conway – 
LinkedIn • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
LinkedIn • , 
Bluesky • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links:

Llama Nemotron UltraNVIDIA Llama Nemotron Ultra Open Model Delivers Groundbreaking Reasoning AccuracyIndependent analysis of AIParakeet ModelParakeet Leaderboard • Try the Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Ultra-253B-v1 model 
here • and 
here

Finding Nemotron

Can AI-driven autonomy reduce harm, or does it risk dehumanizing decision-making? In this “AI Hot Takes & Debates” series episode, Daniel and Chris dive deep into the ethical crossroads of AI, autonomy, and military applications. They trade perspectives on ethics, precision, responsibility, and whether machines should ever be trusted with life-or-death decisions. It’s a spirited back-and-forth that tackles the big questions behind real-world AI.

Featuring:

 • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
LinkedIn • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links:

The Concept of "The Human" in the Critique of Autonomous WeaponsOn the Pitfalls of Technophilic Reason: A Commentary on Kevin Jon Heller’s “The Concept of ‘the Human’ in the Critique of Autonomous Weapons”
Sponsors:

Outshift by Cisco • : AGNTCY is an open source collective building the Internet of Agents. It's a collaboration layer where AI agents can communicate, discover each other, and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for inter-agent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows.

AI hot takes and debates: Autonomy

It seems like we are bombarded by news about millions of dollars pouring into AI startups, which have crazy valuations. In this episode, Chris and Dan dive deep into the highs, lows, and hard choices behind funding an AI startup. They explore early bootstrapping, the transition to venture capital, and what it’s like to trade in code commits for investor decks. 

Featuring:

 • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
LinkedIn • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links:

Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5bn 'AI' Startup Exposed as 'Actually Indians' Pretending to Be Bots
Sponsors:

 • Miro: Feeling overwhelmed by AI? Miro brings clarity by combining human creativity with intelligent tools to help teams get great work done. Learn more at 
miro.com • .

Behind-the-Scenes: VC Funding for AI Startups

Chris and Daniel talk with Greg Allen, Chief of Strategy and Communications at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). The mission of the JAIC is “to seize upon the transformative potential of artificial intelligence technology for the benefit of America’s national security… The JAIC is the official focal point of the DoD AI Strategy.” So if you want to understand how the U.S. military thinks about artificial intelligence, then this is the episode for you!

Join the discussion

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do.co/changelog • . 

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Featuring:

 • Greg Allen – 
LinkedIn • , 
X • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
LinkedIn • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Show Notes:

U.S. Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center
Summary of the 2018 Department of Defense Artificial Intelligence Strategy
Fact Sheet: 2018 DoD Artificial Intelligence Strategy
White House AI Website
Practical AI – Episode #47 - GANs, RL, and transfer learning oh my!
AlphaGo
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - DARPA
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity - IARPA
Law of War

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

How the U.S. military thinks about AI

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