Bowden Kelly from Nutiliti joins Alex on AI After Dark to explain why being a fast follower beats bleeding-edge adoption, particularly when your customers just want accurate utility bills paid on time and don't care about your tech stack. He breaks down why AI native companies often confuse magic demos with production reality, why replacing his entire engineering team with agents would be insane, and how the paradigm shift isn't about chat interfaces but building artifacts that make high school interns into experienced employees. The conversation reveals why Nutiliti spent years building PDF parsers only to discover LLMs weren't good enough yet, his controversial take that the agentic AI wave is overhyped, and how the hiring equation is flipping from one PM managing ten engineers to five PMs with two engineers because code execution is getting commoditized while business reasoning stays expensive.

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00:00 Fast follower versus bleeding edge adoption philosophy
07:38 Paradigm shifts from blockchain to mobile to AI
13:29 Tech debt concerns and why Google engineer stories mislead
21:10 Cloud Code improvements and managing context windows
28:04 MCP servers and the actual problem of data access
34:47 Why non-technical users aren't ready for AI interfaces
39:07 Building artifacts versus executing tasks as organizational design
46:17 High school intern analogy for training agentic AI
51:18 Controversial take on AI being overhyped despite being valuable
55:02 Hiring shift from programmers to business-minded builders
01;06;05 Fundraising strategy for non-unicorn companies
01;08;05 Why companies force AI into products for the story

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