Computer-Use Agents and the Future of the Agentic Internet

Longtime followers of Practical AI know that multi-repeat guest and friend Demetrios Brinkmann combines brilliant insight and playful banter into one fun-filled show, and this conversion with Chris was no different. They had a blast! As AI agents become more capable of using computers, interacting with software, and taking action on behalf of users, what does that mean for the way we work and interact with the internet? Chris and Demetrios explore computer-use agents, MCP, agent harnesses, agent-to-agent interactions, and prognosticate the emerging possibilities around agentic commerce. They also discuss how these tools are already being used to automate everyday tasks, the challenges of bringing computer-use agents into enterprise environments, and how the relationship between models and agent harnesses is evolving. In fact, they had so much fun that their conversation continued long after the show was over, but we didn’t get that here. 🤷‍♂️ Featuring: Demetrios Brinkmann – LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/Chris Benson – Website https://chrisbenson.com/, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbenson, Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/chrisbenson.bsky.social, GitHub https://github.com/chrisbenson, X https://x.com/chrisbensonLinks: Agentic AI Foundation https://aaif.io/MLOps Community https://mlops.community/AGNTCon + MCPCon https://events.linuxfoundation.org/agntcon-mcpcon-north-america/?utm_campaign=43369003-AGNTCon-MCPCon-NA-2026&utm_source=MEDIA25&utm_medium=MediaPartners – the Agentic AI Foundation’s flagship conferenceSponsors: Midwest AI Summit: Join AI practitioners on October 15 in Indianapolis for practical sessions, hands-on discussions, and real-world AI solutions. Use code PracticalAI20 to save 20% on your registration. https://midwestaisummit.com/#ticketsResources and Events: Register for upcoming webinars here https://practicalai.fm/webinars! Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction Guard https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRpRdFmBfdF6boDgAD3nNaLm8Yx4KN2VtMidwest AI Summit 2026 https://midwestaisummit.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Practical AI Podcast, where we break down the real world applications of artificial intelligence and how it's shaping the way we live, work, and create. Our goal is to help make AI technology practical, productive, and accessible to everyone. Whether you're a developer, business leader, or just curious about the tech behind the buzz, you're in the right place. Be sure to connect with us on LinkedIn, X, or Blue Sky to stay up to date with episode drops, behind the scenes content, and AI insights. You can learn more at practicalai.fm. Now, onto the show.

• 0:41Chris Benson?

  Hey, welcome to another episode of the Practical AI Podcast. I am Chris Benson, your co-host. Daniel is out today, and he's really gonna miss this one because we have an old friend of the podcast who has been on multiple times, Demetrius Frankman, who is, okay, well, let's get the title right here, Demetrius, Head of Development Experience and a member of the non-technical staff at the Agentic AI Foundation. And he's also, by the way, as most folks who have seen shows with us before, he's the founder of the ML Ops community. Oh, my God, that's the longest title, Demetrius, I think I've ever had to do on the show.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  I made it hard on you.

• 1:24Chris Benson?

  You made it real. I'll tell you what, I just read a paragraph. So, great to have you back. I've lost count of how many times we've done this together. You are, like, for those who are joining us that are not familiar with you, in addition to all these hats that you wear, amazing thought leader in the world of AI. And I know we're gonna have some really good stuff to talk about today. And I know that the viewers and the listeners will enjoy this as much as I do. And before we start, I have to say, so after the last time we talked, you had sent me a T-shirt. It's a super cool T-shirt. It's one of my favorite bum around the house T-shirts. I'm wearing it right now.

• 2:07Chris Benson?

  For those who are watching us on YouTube, it says, "I hallucinate more than ChatGPT." And so, my wife is completely sick of seeing me wear it. It's faded red now. It doesn't, I'm sorry, man. It looked good when you gave it to me, but it doesn't look good anymore because it's all faded out. But that's because it's a fun T-shirt to wear.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  I'm gonna send you the next one.

• 2:28Chris Benson?

  Well, anytime I wear it out, I have to tell people I'm like, like, everyone asks me about the hallucination thing.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  No way.

• 2:35Chris Benson?

  Then I have to also say, and just because there are people at my real job, I'm not hallucinating. Just so you know, there's no drug test required or anything. No hallucinating here whatsoever. So, with all the fun start, this is probably not the show most viewers were expecting that we'd start with, but we always have fun. How you doing? Things have really changed since the last time we talked for you. Tell us where you're at, what you're doing, what's going on with it at this point.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, let me just say that the last time we chatted, we came up with some bangers that people are still hitting me up for, like, Broccoli AI. I don't know if you remember going through-

• 3:13Chris Benson?

  I do, I do.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  A whole Gardner hype cycle. And we created our own Gardner hype cycle. And one of the things that was on there was Broccoli AI. It was almost peak hype. So, and for those who didn't hear that episode, is that AI that you probably don't like because it tastes bad, but you need it because it's good for your organization.

• 3:36Chris Benson?

  That's right. And that was something, and Daniel's not here today, but he was also all about that, that it's, you know, like, there are things in our world, you know, the hype tends to take over, but there are things in our AI world that you just gotta do to do this stuff well. And some of it's not the coolest and most fun thing. And we were talking about that. And that is, Broccoli AI was born. So, there you go.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  The next thing I wanna say is I'm gonna get you the new shirt that says, "Member of the non-technical staff."

• 4:06Chris Benson?

  Excellent.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  So you can join me in my ranks.

• 4:09Chris Benson?

  Excellent. I gotta get my ego stroked right there. You know, that's good. I appreciate that.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  I just find it hilarious that everyone at Anthropic or OpenAI, they're members of the technical staff. And so, I had to go against the grain and be a member of the non-technical staff. That's where that came from.

• 4:27Chris Benson?

  And that's a pretty good idea. Yeah, I mean, tell me about ML Ops community and the Agentic AI Foundation, and what happened here?

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Well, so I'm super excited because in the beginning of the year, or just at the end of last year, MCP got donated to the Linux Foundation. They created the Agentic AI Foundation around it. And out of that, there's just been, like, huge interest from all the top players because now MCP went from being something that was owned by Anthropic to being this neutral governing body that is steering it. And so, I was sitting there and I was like, man, that is an awesome opportunity. We've been doing so much already in the ML Ops community around agents. You know, the ML Ops community started as putting machine learning into production.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Then, when LLMs came out and they were all the rage, we kind of started incorporating more of the putting LLMs into production. And then, agents became a real thing and they became something that we were using every day. And then it was like, okay, well, what about putting agents into production? And so, it just kind of made sense when we were looking at, hey, is there a home for the ML Ops community to do more and have more resources around it? And take the same types of stuff that we're doing and the same reasons that people enjoy being in like this very deep technical community? And then just, like, do more and better?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  And so, that was the pitch. And luckily, the folks at the Agentic AI Foundation were on board. And so, we kind of merged. We're now going to be doing a bit of a rebrand. The ML Ops community is becoming the Agentic AI community or the Agentic AI Foundation community. And we're just doing more of the same. Like, we're doing a whole lot of conferences. Next week, I'm going to Japan for MCP Dev Summit. And then I'm right back in Amsterdam for Agent Con. Agent Con is like our big flagship event in Europe, and that is September 17. And then we have another Agent Con in North America, in San Jose, on October 22.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  And you'll like this. One thing I'm doing for Agent Con that is very much in the spirit of what we did in the ML Ops days is I got a 36-hour livestream put together. So, we have the live event. And what I, you know, I love watching Coachella or like, these very highly-produced events that are both, they're taking the virtual aspect into consideration. It's not just like a in-person and you fully optimize for in-person, but then the virtual aspect isn't really there. So, what I decided to do is, how can we make the Agent Con in Amsterdam absolutely like optimized for in-person,

• 7:33Speaker 02

  but not forgetting about the virtual aspect? And that's why we decided to do, you know, 36 hours livestreaming the whole thing. I'm gonna be hosting it, so we'll be popping in and out. It's gonna be like ESPN-style, play-by-play of the talks. What does that mean? What do we think? I'm gonna be grabbing people from the crowd, walking around the expo hall. All that is to say, it's the first time I'm going fully all-in on it. So, there's gonna be a few problems. Things will break. But that's where I'm at right now.

• 8:04Chris Benson?

  It sounds like a lot of fun. So, you're not gonna stay up for 36 hours there, right?

• 8:10Speaker 02

  I mean, I would not make a lot of sense.

• 8:12Chris Benson?

  Please tell me you're not gonna do that. I was gonna say, you'd just be babbling.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  We have some tricks in there.

• 8:17Chris Benson?

  Okay, okay, okay. I got you.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, because there's gonna be breakout sessions, right? There's really three or four tracks going on at once. And so, we'll be livestreaming the main track during the day when it's actually happening live. But then, we're recording all of the breakout tracks. And then, we're going to put those back-to-back on top of it. But there's some other cool things that I don't wanna fully give away yet, but I'm gonna be recording some stuff that we can splice in in between different talks. And we've also got some of the sponsors to like, give us some cool material that we can also splice in. So, it's gonna be an event, that's for sure. It may totally fall flat on its face, but I'm gonna go down with the ship if it does.

• 9:05Chris Benson?

  Okay, fair enough. I'm just glad you have something there to mix in with it. So that, like, I'm imagining interviewing you right after a 36-hour marathon and you're just like laying your head on the desk, you know, unable to function. So, it's good. I'm glad we got the stuff in there. Get a little sleep in the process. Looking forward to watching the live feed myself as we get there.

• 9:28Daniel Whitenack?

  Listen, I've been to an incredible amount of AI events, many of which are good, but many of which are not practical. You know I love practicality. We're on Practical AI. And some are just hype-focused, some are sales-focused. That's why I'm always eager to share about an event that I truly think is practical and useful for people. That's what I discovered last year at the Midwest AI Summit. And they're gonna have another Midwest AI Summit, October 15, in Indianapolis this year, 2026. One of the reasons why I love this event was there was an actual AI engineering lounge where you could sit down and talk through your use cases with actual experienced AI engineers

• 10:12Daniel Whitenack?

  and practitioners to really brainstorm and come back from the event with actual solutions and practicality rather than just a bunch of content and slides. But there were also amazing keynote speakers, speakers from even that had been on the podcast before, like Rajiv Shah was at last year's event. I would really recommend that you go to Midwestaisummit.com. And for our listeners, you can actually get 20% off with the code PRACTICALAI20. So, go to Midwestaisummit.com. Don't miss your chance to attend this event and get 20% off with the code PRACTICALAI20.

• 11:01Chris Benson?

  Okay, so, so a lot of cool events that you're working on and it sounds like a lot of fun. Looking forward to seeing how all that goes. And, but you're not just doing events, I know that. So what else, what else you got going on there?

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I think that's been some of the biggest surprises for me is how the community has rallied. And there's so much interest, not only from the member companies of the Agentic AI Foundation. Now there's over 250, which is wild to think about how many companies. Yeah, they want to be members and they want to be a part of this movement, right? And then we've got ambassadors around the globe. So we opened up the ambassador program and there was over a thousand applications of people that wanted to be an ambassador. And we also set up these local chapters of community events. So anybody can organize a community event.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  And now we're in over 80 cities and there's like 250 different community chapter leads. And all of that is just to say like, it's kind of taken on its own thing. It's

• 12:11Chris Benson?

  Yeah, that's a big thing. Yeah, that's huge. Like pretty quick. I mean, considering you're only talking a few months. It's, uh, so it's, uh,

• 12:24Chris Benson?

  the Linux Foundation is going to be like, well, we took them on. Oh my gosh, the baby's growing up pretty quick here. So, you know.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is one of the, I don't quote me on it, but I think it's one of the biggest foundations in the Linux Foundation even.

• 12:38Chris Benson?

  I would not be surprised. Yeah. I mean, you know, when you, when you think about just like, I mean, so much has happened. Yeah. Just since we talked last, so much has happened, uh, you know, the, this world, the, the, the, the rise of Agentic. You know, Agentic were around last time we talked, but they were still in the absolute infancy. And at this point, it is, it is dominating everything going forward and just growing. And, and you know, that sounds very hypey and I apologize for that, but, um, it's, it's just, uh, you know, the monster gets bigger and bigger.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Well, let me tell you, because I was the one who was probably the biggest naysayer on the hype naming. And agents and it's like, yeah, yeah. I remember using, what was it? Like baby AGI? Back in the day and just getting mad because all it did was give me, so it got stuck in a recursive loop. And I got like a $80 API bill from OpenAI. And it was like, these agents don't work, dude. What's going on? But since then, you're right, man. Like I'm fully bought in now and I am the first one to say that I was way wrong.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Like they were coming and they came hard. And I want to tell you about the newest stuff that I've been doing specifically with like computer use.

• 14:05Chris Benson?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Because that, man, I feel like my life has changed and there's something that happened, I will say, in the latest OpenAI model release, which came out, what it's 5.6 is what we're at right now.

• 14:23Chris Benson?

  It's been out, been out a bit, but yeah.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so since that came out, if you specifically use the computer use skill, it is so good. There are very few things that I can throw at it that it does not accomplish, which is wild because, okay, so now I'd never have to worry about getting APIs for anything. I don't have to worry about, oh, but I can't reach that data because of some block or something that's wrong with it. And granted, this is me as a personal use type thing. Like I'm, I'm able to do that. I have my three or four different Gmails logged in.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  And so computer use can go and look at all three or four of them, which I know that with one, I can't remember if it's Hermes or Grokbot. You can also set up multiple accounts. But just to be able to like use that, throw at it like, hey, check all of my emails and give me the daily briefing. And also check Slack and give me a daily briefing and not just one of the Slack workspaces that I'm in, but like all five of them. Yeah. Right. And so you don't have to worry, you don't have to fiddle with any connections or anything. You can just go and it'll use computer use and that is great. That's like quality of life thing. But what was wild to me is now

• 15:51Speaker 02

  I can set up these workflows or triggers, I guess is what you call them, that, hey, when you see something, then just do this automatically. So for example, one of these things is, as you know, we had all these conferences all over the world. And I've been taking a lot of flights. Well, I will buy the flight with computer use. I just say, find me the best flight on this day to this day. And then before it actually pays, I'm the one who actually will click the button because

• 16:21Chris Benson?

  Sure.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  We're still not at that point, but, or I need a few more zeros in my bank account before I'm cool with it being at that point.

• 16:29Chris Benson?

  I'm the same. I get it. It's, it's, it's funny when you say that because I, you know, like I'm doing, I'm having agents do all the things. And, and my, my focus has been on a little bit different use case in swarms of agents. Where you have many agents addressing really complex things at once. But then it's, it's funny, like if I'm doing something like you and it's my personal bank account, you know, and, you know, which doesn't have anywhere near as many zeros as I wish it did. I'm the same way. I'm like, I'm like that very, well, would really have quite a small purchase, but I'm like, okay. And so I, I have that same like reservation, like they're doing amazing things, you know, what you can get agents to go do.

• 17:12Chris Benson?

  And yet there's still that, that intrinsic trust factor. And if you and I are having that with the kinds of, you know, the fact that this is what we do, then I know we have to deal with that with general population and, you know, as, as they come on. So it's kind of, it's interesting to see the technology running so, you know, into like this amazing space that, that is beyond really where anybody was predicting this fast. And then simultaneously like, like, do I want it to buy the movie tickets for me? Well, okay, that's not too expensive. I'll just tell it to do it, you know?

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Totally. You know what? Though I, I've seen and I've heard of my friends saying like they'll set up rules where if it's under 20 bucks.

• 17:56Chris Benson?

  Yeah, I've done, I've done that.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm still afraid of that because I'm like, yeah, it can just buy something for 20 bucks 20 times and then I'm pissed. Cause it can figure out, we've all heard those stories. So I'm not quite there yet, but I wanted to mention the, the different workflows that I have set up around it. So for example, this workflow of buy my ticket, get the ticket. Cool. I don't have to fill out any forms anymore, which is absolutely beautiful. Like on the internet, you know how many pointless forms you have to fill out, which are just your name and your phone number and whatever. Like, oh, passport number. And I never have it memorized. So then I have to go and search for it and find that number and boom, I got it.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Well, now I don't have to do that because I have my, all my information stored in a document that the agent can reference. And then it'll buy the flight. And when it comes time to check in, I just told an agent, hey, monitor my inbox. And if you ever see a email come through that says it's time for you to check in, just go check in. You don't even have to ask me, just go and do it. Check in, send me the boarding pass to my phone. And so now I don't ever have to work out any of that, which, mm, total side note, I'm pretty sure like checking in. Why do we have to do that still? Somebody needs to explain why checking in is still a thing.

• 19:26Chris Benson?

  I'm not sure. I don't know.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  I, I spend so much money on a flight. Who's gonna just miss? I don't know. That's for me. And I'm sure there's plenty of people that will check in and they still miss their flight. So it's not like it's a good gauge of who's actually going to show up for the flight. So that's a total non-agent, non-AI tangent.

• 19:47Chris Benson?

  I just, I suspect the people missing the flight, like they've checked in. I, I just don't think there's a, a strong correlation between the two.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  No, it doesn't make any sense to me. It's

• 19:55Chris Benson?

  I'm sure there is, there is somebody at, at one of these airlines out there listening right now going, oh, these guys totally don't get it. They don't understand. There's a very, there's a very clear reason we do this and we acknowledge that for, for that person, just to let you know.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  We just don't know why.

• 20:11Chris Benson?

  Yeah, we don't get it. So, okay, fair enough. Back to computer use.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I have something like that going. I also have a great use case that I had this morning was I need to update my Spanish driver's license to a German driver's license. And so I, before computer use, was going and taking screenshots and then giving it to my agent and saying, or giving it just to the chat, really. It wasn't even an agent and saying, what does this say? What should I click on? Where should I put my information? Because this is a perfect example of the German government in my small town does not have an API that my coding agent can access and submit something through, right?

• 20:59Speaker 02

  But what it does have is a webpage where I can go and submit something, or I can have computer use go and submit something. So now it just did it. It created my appointment and then it created a calendar invite for me. So I know when the appointment is and it said everything I needed to bring and it said my cancellation number or it said my like main number, blah, blah, blah. That's all there and I didn't have to worry about it at all. And I changed that like three different times. And all I have to do is say like, change it to a different day because I can't do it on this day anymore.

• 21:31Chris Benson?

  Yeah. So I'm curious, like, what do you think are some really, you've talked a little bit about how you're using it. What do you think are some really good opportunities for folks watching or listening out there as they're listening? And they've heard some of the things that you're talking about, what would you, what would you suggest to go try out? Like, what, what, what are some of the, what are some of the, the fruits that maybe people haven't picked from yet? And you're just like, oh, man, this is amazing. You know, just like, other than flights.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Think for me, the biggest eye opener of getting it right was now anytime I encounter a form, when I'm using the internet, right? I'm going through my day to day and I'm using the internet and I encounter a form and it has this big trigger that goes off in my head. And I'm like, why didn't I ask computer use to do this whole task? Cause I just got to this point where I realized, oh, forms, I don't have to fill out anymore. That's something that is good enough to be done by computer use. So I just go and I, I now am like, oh, right. Let's see if, let's see if they can do that. Boom. So that would be one, anytime you encounter a form on the internet.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  However, I will caveat this with a conversation that I just had yesterday with my friend Sam, who was saying like, this is such a thing that you can do if you're B to C. But if you're trying to do this in B to B, like good luck, dude. Yeah. You're gonna go tell your employees.

• 22:58Chris Benson?

  That's exactly where I was gonna ask you next. I literally like was in my head. I'm like, oh, I know where I want to go and that's it. And that is like with the inevitability of the B to B use case, uh, being an agentic to agentic use case, where you're doing, uh, agents interoperating with agents beyond your border. In other words, you know, that, that, that some other entity, uh, another commercial entity or whatever it is that you're talking about. And instead of being static APIs, uh, that your agent is going and talking to, or you're web scraping, you know, with the agent and doing the kind of the form stuff that we're talking about. What, what are your thoughts around when, when is every organization out there going to have, uh, an agentic

• 23:41Chris Benson?

  interface in which your agents, you know, as you're doing what you're describing are just interoperating, giving it a lot more fluidity and dynamic, uh, capability, uh, because you're doing an agent to agent interaction, which can accommodate things. It's no longer just the static API that your agent has to, to navigate. What are your thoughts around that? And what like, like, how far out do you think it is before we get to that?

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Well, I think that's one reason that MCP is so popular is because of those use cases. And it feels like that's the way that the industry has standardized on being able to give agents access to different systems. Right? And but then what we have to do is we have to wait for everyone to have MCP servers that are good enough for my agent just to pick up and use at will and use well so that I can get what I need done. Which feels like there still needs to be some maturing that needs to happen before we get to that point.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  And so that's why it's beautiful with computer use because you don't have to wait for the other person to set up an MCP server. Or you don't have to go and build an MCP server to enable that. And there's a lot of these use cases that who knows if they even are gonna build an MCP server. Like the German government DMV, I'm not sure they ever are gonna have an MCP server that my agent can go and talk to, right? So that's going back to this B to C use case in a way. But if you think about it, what, what's incredible for me is us consumers are tasting this like forbidden fruit of wow, things can really be that easy. Like it can just work.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  And then you know that that pressure is going to start building on the software that we have and we're using in our day to day lives at the office. Like, that's how I feel. I feel like it's coming. It's just gonna put a lot of pressure on, hey, this is, this doesn't have to be like this. Or we don't have to be blocked by something. Can we figure out a way to make it work with? Hmm. I, I mean, I don't know how it's gonna play out because I will say that there's a security nightmare happening. If you just start doing like computer use, everyone at your company now has computer use going on all five of their

• 26:11Speaker 02

  emails and all of your ERP systems or you're like, like on the, oh, man. Basically any, anything that you can think of, God, that sounds so dangerous, but wow, it is like quality of life there.

• 26:26Chris Benson?

  I think, I think, you know, you talk about the security issue and I think like you're at, I think you're at the place, you know, at the center of, you know, at the foundation where as good security architectures are further developed, they will find their way into the foundation, probably for purposes of, of getting, you know, acceptance, widespread acceptance through the world. I think there's another point, I'm gonna, I'm gonna diverge hard as, as you were doing that.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Oh, nice.

• 26:54Chris Benson?

  I, I'm, I'm, as you're talking about that, like, I think that what you were describing there is very much the story starting with, with, with us and the people watching this, because these are AI native folks, you know, that, that, that are, that the, the folks that are showing up for your podcasts and showing up for this podcast are folks that, you know, they, they work in it. They care enough about it and they're following that. I'm curious, like, what's it gonna take to bring like? Cause we're all kind of going, holy cow, look at what I can do now. And it was just kind of what you're describing. What, what does it take to bring? Like, we're only now getting to where, you know, the general population is starting to get comfortable using,

• 27:37Chris Benson?

  you know, just kind of what seems very old fashioned, you know, chat, you know, you know, whether it's Gemini and, you know, or, or chat GPT or, you know, or, or Claude or whatever, um, they're just coming along there. What does it take to bring that in? Not only for like, just so they can do this, but, you know, as they're worrying about jobs and all the bigger things that everyone is so concerned about in the world. How, how does that, how does that all, like, how do you bring the, the masses that are not, I, you know, AI native into, into being able to do this to get the benefits? Cause right now they're just all scared to death, you know? I get that more and more.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  I remember back in the day when Google came out or when the search engines came out, the internet came out and it was magical that you could go to a website or you could search something and find information on the internet.

• 28:32Chris Benson?

  Yeah.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  And we were, there was a lot of people that were just early adopters and they were very early on that and using it. It feels a little bit like that now in that, so my wife is not very technologically savvy. She avoids phones and computers at all costs, but today she had to cancel her PayPal account and then start a new one. And I told her, okay, watch this. And I downloaded chat GPT on her computer. And then I got her set up. I also got her set up with Whisperflow so you can just talk to the computer.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  And I, I gave it to, I said, hey, look, I need to get rid of my PayPal account and I need to start a new one. Let's start with just like deleting this PayPal account and like canceling everything that's related to it. And it did that. And my wife's eyes lit up because for her, that is so much time that she would have had to have spent, especially because she's not. Yeah. It's incredible. So you have those experiences for someone and they're, it's instantly bought in. It's like, oh, okay. So tell me, what else can I do here? Or let me try. And then the person just tries and there's not a lot. That's what I'm saying. Like, there's not a lot that I throw at it these days that it can't do.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  And I keep going back to like my personal computer use stuff, which is great. Going to the B to B stuff though, this is where I really feel like you're putting pressure on what we do at work. Because if what we do at work still feels cumbersome, or we have to be really technical in order to get the advances that AI brings, then we're doing it wrong. It really feels like that's not how it should be. And so how can we enable that type of thing? But with all of the enterprisy features, you, that you, the organizations have come to grow and they've loved over these years, you know, just like role-based access control is one.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  And so I guess if you're using computer use, you've already got your roles set out and so you're not gonna have problems with that. But there's a lot of, I, I will not be naive and say that it's the end all to be all, especially inside of the enterprise. It could cause a lot of problems. However, man, the thing that is great for me is using it on my personal use cases. And I'll give you another one. I've got like 20 of them that I've been doing because you asked. And I think it's good to like stimulate folks creativity when they hear it. I have this 36 hour livestream coming up and I want to reach out to everyone that I've

• 31:21Speaker 02

  had a conversation with on LinkedIn. That's been like an actual two-way conversation and it's been a few turns back and forth, right? So acquaintances, you could put in parentheses. And so what I did is I told Computer Use, I said, "Go and look through all my LinkedIn." Because LinkedIn has this API that you cannot, it's notoriously hard. Like you can't get stuff from LinkedIn's API. It's not like X where you can pay and then you get everything. It's fully locked down. So I was sitting there and I was like, "I wanna analyze all of my DMs and see who I've interacted with a bit." And then we make this shortlist of people that I can

• 32:03Speaker 02

  reach out to and let them know that I'm having this livestream event. And what it did was, instead of just going through all of my DMs, it was like, "Oh, well, you know what? I just found this ability to download all your data." So it downloaded all of my data, but LinkedIn has to package it up and then send it to your email over 48-hour span. So what it did is it set a reminder for itself to just kept checking my email. And so then, once it got my data, then it analyzed everything. It created this shortlist of 500 people and then it created personalized messages that I could send them to let them know about the 36-hour livestream.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  But then I went one step further, because AI and why not, right? I said, "Well, create a personalized media kit for each person in case they need some kind of inspiration."

• 32:57Chris Benson?

  Yeah.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  And so every single person has their own website that says like, "Hey, Chris, you're awesome for doing this. And here's some inspiration in case you wanna post this. You can just copy paste. Or here's some prompts if you wanna write it yourself. And by the way, here's some funny photos of me if you wanna add those. But I would love it if you share about this livestream event." And so now those are firing off. And you may say that is absolutely ridiculous because I took all of the personalization out of it and tried to make it as personalized as possible still. Or maybe it's cool. I don't know. But that's another thing that I've been doing over the past 24 hours.

• 33:38Chris Benson?

  Very cool, man. There is, I've had some similar things. I don't have time to cover it at all today, but like, I love the inspiration that you're offering. And I'm hoping that folks watching or listening are kind of thinking of the things that they can go do and stuff. One of the things I wanna make sure that we get in is, is I know, I know you have an interest in kind of harnesses and the current state and some of the challenges around that. I wanted to make sure we fit that in today. I'll just, I'll toss the ball to you and let you run with that because I know you have some thinking around it.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Let me keep blabbing. Yeah, this is the episode nobody asked for, but we're getting somehow.

• 34:22Chris Benson?

  I'm having a good time, man. We always have a good time. So let's go for it.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Hopefully, yeah, hopefully I've inspired you. And please write me if you use Computer Use and you find a rough edge where it doesn't do something. But man, these different like 5-10 step procedures where it does stuff, it's incredible. But anyway, on the harnesses that I wanna talk to you about is really just how much of the harness is being blurred into the actual model, it feels like. And how we've got now these, you know, like Claude Code harness doesn't, there's a whole lot of things wrong with it right now, today with like Fable and Opus 5. That's again, timestamping it. People are not happy with the Claude Code experience.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  And I myself have pretty much stopped using it, which is wild because, I don't know, six months ago, I put up with all the crap that Anthropic was doing. I put up with everything. Maybe not all the crap. I love Anthropic. I love everybody there. But I put up with everything that was going on. There's so much drama in the news all the time because they had such a superior product. It was so good. And then somehow or another, when they RL'd this last model and you try and bring a lot of this harness into the model, or I guess it inherently becomes blurry because they have their system prompt. And after the world

• 35:53Speaker 02

  uses the model for long enough, that system prompt just like keeps getting longer and longer and longer, right? And then they come out with a new model and that system prompt can shrink again because all of that long system prompt from the last model gets almost like RL'd into the new model. But that can create some weird, janky stuff that happens. And we're seeing that. And I'm sure that Anthropic's next model is gonna be incredible. And we're gonna be right back at like, "Oh, wow, they were able to do it." But this is just, for me, when it comes to harnesses, it is so fascinating to see how these, I think some people call it the inner harness, basically the harness that the labs provide, is very

• 36:37Speaker 02

  much like you are super optimized for the model that is, that lab is putting out. And if you wanna have your own kind of harness, if you're trying to run Py or some of the, or Hermes or whatever, you know what? It's actually like, maybe you're gonna do better on some open source models. And a lot of these open source models coming from China are really great with that. And so there was something that a friend, my friend Drew told me how a lot of times in Py, you would hear Mario, the creator of Py, talk about how he had to fight with Claude to not like make these API calls, like Claude Code API calls. Then it

• 37:22Speaker 02

  was like, "Man, I have to fight against the model to not act like the harness that it was trained with," you know? So that's fascinating for me to just think about all of that and how it's going to affect the next few months that we're seeing the models come out with.

• 37:38Chris Benson?

  How do you think, you know, as we, as we look at that and, and, you know, right now, like, you know, with Hermes and Py on the rise, and, you know, with Claude Code having been through these user challenges and like I was, you know, like, if you go into some of the forums on that, people are just really frustrated with it. And I, I have too. So I use, I use Claude Code quite a lot. And, and there's all sorts of issues. So it's a love-hate relationship. There are things I love about it. There are things I'm like, "Oh, God." And, um, and obviously with Codex out there, like how, what do you think of, either is the future

• 38:18Chris Benson?

  or do you have any suggestions on, on where things need to go, both for users or even for the companies that we have? We have folks from all these organizations who tune in. So, you know, like, how do you see this shaking out going forward?

• 38:32Speaker 02

  For me, it's just, it would be really wild if the research labs didn't have the best product because they're getting all of this data on how folks are using their products. And then they can incorporate that into the product itself, right? The model or the harness that they're giving. So that's why it's, it's crazy to me right now that Claude Code is having this moment where it's like, "Man, they might've gone a little too far on this. They, they may have tried to push it too much." And the fact that they have all that information and this, and this data of people using it and how they're using it makes me think that they are for sure

• 39:14Speaker 02

  going to have the best product. However, today as it stands, that's not necessarily the case.

• 39:20Chris Benson?

  Yeah. I think, I think there's a lot of work there that needs to be done to improve because we're seeing, kind of to your point, we're seeing user experience very jittery. Like, you know, it goes from being very good to being a struggle. And then, you know, I see people, I mean, even things like rolling back to older models within Claude Code, for instance, you know, because they're complaining about how Opus is so verbose and, and it is. It drives me nuts. But I'm like, "Oh, my God, you just wrote a book on this last thing and I just wanna get to the end." That's like, that's my, that's my typical thing. I wanna get to the end, get there. And so, yeah, I just, it's interesting to see how all this is gonna shake

• 40:03Chris Benson?

  out in that, in the harness merging with different models space and what the relationship is and where the, where the line between the two is being drawn in terms of that. So.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  By the way, have you seen the Bro skill?

• 40:17Chris Benson?

  I have not seen the Bro skill.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  So this skill is incredible. For anybody who's having these issues like you're having where it's like, "Man, that was a book and I don't know if I understand half of it." You use, you invoke the Bro skill and it forces the model to explain things very simply so that it doesn't give you these, this jargon and all these big words and all this stuff that you're like, "Whoa, what is, what does that even mean?" Right? It just is like, kinda explain it to me like I'm five type thing?

• 40:47Chris Benson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  And so that is a very, very useful one. Another skill that is quite useful is called ShowMe. And so this one basically just makes it give you visuals when it's, instead of like writing the book and trying to explain it in words that you kind of get lost in, it will give you visuals so that it can go with it. And both of those together are very useful when you're encountering these problems.

• 41:19Chris Benson?

  I am that like today, because I spend a lot of time in Claude Code and I didn't know that. So I am, I'm invoking those today because I, I have a, I have an emotional cycle that goes with using the, using it as I prompt through things and then I'm going scroll. Yeah. So you've just solved it for me. Okay. So you just, go ahead.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry to cut you off, but you know what? I would love your take on some other thing that I've been thinking about deeply is really along the lines of the shopping experience and where we're going to shop in the future on the internet. Because for me, it feels like we're not that far off from doing everything in the chat. Like the chat is the new browser in a way.

• 42:11Chris Benson?

  Yeah.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  That's not that novel of a term. I think we're all okay with saying that these days because the majority of our work gets done from the chat. And so what I realized, and this came from me being in Seoul, and I talked to a lot of payment processing companies who just joined the Agentic AI Foundation. And they were wondering like, well, what is the future of payments? How is it going to work? Where are people going to pay? Especially if you start to think about e-commerce worlds and you think about folks have Shopify stores, or you can even think about Amazon, right?

• 42:51Speaker 02

  And normally what we do is we go to some e-commerce store and we buy something from this Shopify store by having an experience on that website. Or we go to Amazon and we pick out what we want and then we buy something from Amazon and it comes same day or the next day or whatever. But what happens when our whole experience is being done through the chat and the agent is the one that's going and

• 43:17Chris Benson?

  Which is really where we're going. I mean, that's where I'm already trying to go. Like I, I don't want to be on amazon.com. I spend what I, but, but I always have chats open. I always have agents doing stuff and I do my shopping that way, you know? And I only will go to where I have to do that. And actually, at this point, even for Amazon, I just need the agents to buy the stuff within thresholds and stuff like that and be done with it. So, yeah, exactly what you're saying.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Here's what, here's what gets me about this is how there, there's so many things that are big question marks in my mind, right? The first one is how is Amazon just gonna let that happen? A, because they normally, when you, a human user, log on to Amazon and you shop around, they get all that first party data and that is used to serve up recommendations or it's used to get you on other things, right? And hopefully increase the amount of money that you spend on Amazon. Or again, not singling out Amazon, there's plenty of other e-commerce stores out there. We can just use Shopify John's e-commerce store.

• 44:26Chris Benson?

  Okay.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  So now what happens? They're just gonna be like, all right, cool. Well, now that it's an agent doing it, you don't understand the intent. You don't understand, the agent just goes for the thing. It's using it in a way that you're not used to seeing a human use it. And it also bypasses all this stuff that we spent the last 20, 25 years optimizing, like the upsell or the pop-ups or the, all this stuff that it's like, oh yeah, Chris, by the way, if you spend three more dollars, we're gonna give you free shipping. And the agent doesn't care about that, right? The agent just gets the stuff and gets out. It doesn't have that kind of discernment, at least as of now. Maybe it'll come back to you and say, oh, Chris, by the way, there's these things, maybe, but maybe not.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  And so we're gonna have to start building our e-commerce websites to entice the agents, not the humans.

• 45:19Chris Benson?

  So that's where I think it's going.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  But we want the agents, we want to entice them to go back and give you information, right? So we've completely lost our relationship with the customer.

• 45:31Chris Benson?

  So I, I, I agree. I think we're in transition and going back when I was talking about having an agentic interface instead of, so, and this is where I think there's room for, not just room, this is where I think it almost has to go, given like, given the necessities of marketing, branding, capturing the customer, holding the customer, enticing the customer with various incentives, that kind of thing, is that you can't just have your agents go to an MCP server. Like I think, I mean, that's how things will start. But I think for, for the sellers, for the, for the companies that are trying to produce that, I think that they have to have these agentic interfaces that are, that are going beyond MCP, because you know, where you're just going out and getting access to a tool

• 46:15Chris Benson?

  or something, but you're actually having a negotiation across agents where that can happen and then agents on both sides are getting smarter. Or maybe that you have combinations of purchasing agents and then you have negotiation agents and things like that. Where I talked about kind of the swarms, you may have like a mini swarm that does your shopping where each agent has its own set of responsibilities, including the negotiation from the, the upsell and all the other concerns that, that come about. So I think, I think that, that, I think to make it incredibly rich, in the agentic context, the same way they've been trying to do it in a, in a human world, is to, is to make

• 46:56Chris Benson?

  that an agentic to agentic transaction with all those kinds of communications that go on in there that may bring, and it may bring it back. And then you, you develop a profile yourself as a consumer of the things that are interesting to you and not, and that, and so your agent learns your preferences. And then when, when a deal comes from the agent that it's interacting with and all, you know, that, that kind of upsell thing, your agent understands your behavior and what would be acceptable and it can act autonomously to a certain degree to, to satisfy your wishes before you even know it's there. That's what I think is happening.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  I like that vision and I do like the idea of, oh, it's gonna have its ear to the street and constantly be getting hit up with offers. Potentially that's, that's the world. And then it discerns whether or not it should tell you about the offer. Because the last thing we want is an agent that's constantly pinging us about, oh, there's this cool offer, there's this cool offer.

• 47:54Chris Benson?

  Oh no, it'll have to know you. Yeah, yeah. It's, it'll have to learn you.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  There's, there's a few things that for me are wild there. It is true that, yeah, we can fan out right now and create these swarms and these agents can go off and hit a hundred different websites looking for shoes, right? And, or one item that we're trying to shop for. But what happens when I go and I say, cool, so get me these shoes and that dress and that, and this banana? And the agent now, where are you gonna do the payments? And this is where, why it all started for me. And so first of all, actually even taking another step back, does any of this even matter? Is there going to be a forcing function to create this reality if with browser use,

• 48:43Speaker 02

  I can already get what I want? So first of all, I will just say that, like browser use is good enough for my agents to go and browse the front end.

• 48:53Chris Benson?

  Yeah.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  And get me what I want. So why is there going to be an incentive to create this new internet where agents are talking to agents and you've got these swarms and all this complex stuff happening? Because I just, I've already got what I need, right?

• 49:06Chris Benson?

  Good point.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  With browser use. So, so that's where there's, there's potential that it never happens. But I will, I will go with you on this idea of like, all right, if we do get there to the, the swarms and now I've just told my agent that I want three different things from three different merchants. The way that we do that today is like, the agent will go to each one of these websites and it will buy them. Or it will tell us, hey, here's, here's the button, are you okay to buy it? And we eventually click on it and say yes or no. But it's not that far off of a reality if we are living in this timeline where agents do that. When Anthropic or OpenAI, they say, well, why not just pay me directly as OpenAI?

• 49:51Speaker 02

  I can be your payment processor and you just pay me. And so then you know what happens? You don't even need, then you disintermediate Shopify. Like why do I as a merchant even need to create a Shopify store? I just create, the marketplace is all going towards the chat. And so now, what is, what is a marketplace now? Is it just me creating an agent with my, with all these different SKUs that is easily searchable and then it can be bought through an agent on the chat, right? Like, do you see where I'm going with this?

• 50:28Chris Benson?

  I do see where you're going and I think, I think that that also will, I like, I think what I'm saying is likely to happen, but I also think inclusively that what you're saying, I think there'll be a lot of experimentation from, from different types of merchants on how that, and there will be third party, you know, marketplaces forming to see if that works. So I think we'll see all of those. I think the, I know as a consumer, um, I don't like, I don't want to be shopping. It's not what I do. I don't care about it. I want, and I will, I, but I will know that I will have all of my agents that are looking out for my interests and they have learned me very, very well. And there is a lot of private profiling that, in other words, my agents profiling me and

• 51:13Chris Benson?

  my wife and my daughter and our needs and how often we get things and when we need, what the circumstances are. And my agents will learn that very well. And from my standpoint, I want, you know, good quality. I want it when I want it. I want to not spend too much money and I don't really care where it comes from, if I can return it expeditiously as well and all that. So I'm gonna leave that to my agents at some point to figure out, you go to the marketplace, you go directly to an agentic interface, you go to a more of a Shopify, you know, or Amazon today and scrape it on the, you know, I don't care. Just make it happen. Make sure all these things that I care about are in place and don't bother me with it. Period. That's where I'm going. Bang.

• 51:57Chris Benson?

  Not that I'm a demanding customer.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And but don't. That's why I feel like the friction, there's still some there's still some big question marks because the ideal scenario for us as a consumer is exactly what you just mapped out, where it knows us better than we know ourselves, right? And I'm OK if I have an agent or my swarm of agents, my army of agents that I know are looking out for my best interest, I'm OK with giving it all the information it needs and having like the top recommender system. It's like I will gladly give you anything, any information. You can quiz me or grill me on my likes and dislikes because I trust that you're looking out for my

• 52:42Speaker 02

  best interest, right? Now, the big question mark here and where OpenAI could potentially fumble is if they see that, wow, we could be the marketplace and we can make money anytime there's a transaction that happens, wouldn't that incentivize them to only show things that are coming from their marketplace? So I know I'm making all kinds of big leaps here in like what the potential future could be because OpenAI does not have a marketplace right now and they've never stated that they want to be a marketplace. But if this is one of the potential timelines and you think about it, like they would only push their own product.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  However, that could make me feel like, oh, well, they're taking advantage of me because they're playing both sides. They know everything about me and then they're finding a way to leverage the what the merchants have on OpenAI. Like, I would feel like I wouldn't trust it as much if I knew that they were in the middle of it. But if it was an agent, like you were saying, where it is going out and doing the searching on my behalf out in the wild, wild west of the agent verse, then maybe I would feel a little bit more OK with it. I don't know. This is, these are like the thought experiments.

• 54:02Chris Benson?

  I think, I think it's gonna be messy. I think it's gonna be messy and people will try it out. On that note, I'm gonna, I'm gonna wind this up. And this has been a fun, fun conversation. I always love these. We got, I love it's, I love getting you back on the show and talking about these things. I think, I think we're just at a, at a moment in time where any of these things that we've just talked about might happen. It may take, and I, and I think it's worth talking about because things are happening so much faster than anyone's expecting right now that it wouldn't surprise, I wouldn't surprise to see some of these things occurring before this year is out, you know, as people start experimenting. So we'll see.

• 54:45Chris Benson?

  We'll have to, our next conversation, we'll look back and this one will seem so outdated. This will seem so like

• 54:52Speaker 02

  It will be great.

• 54:53Chris Benson?

  What were we thinking about that? You know, like, oh, my gosh.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  So far off.

• 54:57Chris Benson?

  We're so far off and all that. And it was so much more than what we were expecting. So we'll see. Anyway, Demetrius, thank you again for coming on and having a conversation. I hope the viewers and listeners enjoyed it as much as I did. Got some pretty cool, pretty cool topics, man. So I'll see you next time. Thanks for coming on the show.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  Ciao.

• 55:25Speaker 00

  All right. That's our show for this week. If you haven't checked out our website, head to practicalai.fm and be sure to connect with us on LinkedIn, X, or Blue Sky. You'll see us posting insights related to the latest AI developments and we would love for you to join the conversation. Thanks to our partner Prediction Guard for providing operational support for the show. Check them out at predictionguard.com. Also, thanks to Breakmaster Cylinder for the beats and to you for listening. That's all for now, but you'll hear from us again next week.