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.

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

Join the conversation shaping the future of energy.
Collide is the community where oil & gas professionals connect, share insights, and solve real-world problems together. No noise. No fluff. Just the discussions that move our industry forward.
Apply today at collide.io

https://twitter.com/collide_io

https://www.tiktok.com/@collide.io

https://www.facebook.com/collide.io

https://www.instagram.com/collide.io

https://www.youtube.com/@collide_io

https://bsky.app/profile/digitalwildcatters.bsky.social

https://www.linkedin.com/company/collide-digital-wildcatters

Matt Robillard from SmartAC joins Alex on AI After Dark to explain why he walked into a company with product-market fit but antiquated tech stack and immediately started rewriting everything with AI at its core. He breaks down the difference between horizontal process automation that Service Titan can eventually replicate versus vertical intelligence modeling the actual thermodynamics of HVAC systems that nobody else can touch, why clean energy is magical thinking constrained by the Shockley-Queisser limit and Betz limit, and how hiring the best AI talent in HVAC meant recruiting from SpaceX, Databricks and Perplexity by selling real-world impact over another CRM with AI slapped on. The conversation reveals why OEMs surprisingly embrace their solution instead of fearing disruption, his controversial take that LLMs are stochastic parrots not true intelligence, and how the marginal cost of code going to zero is pure hype when production systems at scale still require senior engineers who deeply understand customer pain points.

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

Join the conversation shaping the future of energy.
Collide is the community where oil & gas professionals connect, share insights, and solve real-world problems together. No noise. No fluff. Just the discussions that move our industry forward.
Apply today at collide.io

https://twitter.com/collide_io

https://www.tiktok.com/@collide.io

https://www.facebook.com/collide.io

https://www.instagram.com/collide.io

https://www.youtube.com/@collide_io

https://bsky.app/profile/digitalwildcatters.bsky.social

https://www.linkedin.com/company/collide-digital-wildcatters

Akhil Mantripragada from Pie joins Alex on AI After Dark to trace his journey from coding without a computer in eighth grade India to building a $100M+ revenue AI-native marketing platform for SMBs. He shares how changing seven schools growing up forced him to become adaptable, why he spent hours writing multiple code versions on paper with only one hour per week at a computer lab, and how selling his first ed-tech company to UTSA funded grad school at Columbia. The conversation reveals why Pi's first three hires were designers instead of engineers, his controversial belief that chat is the "lousiest way to interact with AI," and how meeting users where they're at - not where you want them to be - became the core design philosophy that lets three engineers do what used to take thirty. Plus, the framework for building modular systems where perfection lies in the architecture's inputs and outputs, not the code inside the black box.

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

Join the conversation shaping the future of energy.
Collide is the community where oil & gas professionals connect, share insights, and solve real-world problems together. No noise. No fluff. Just the discussions that move our industry forward.
Apply today at collide.io

https://twitter.com/collide_io

https://www.tiktok.com/@collide.io

https://www.facebook.com/collide.io

https://www.instagram.com/collide.io

https://www.youtube.com/@collide_io

https://bsky.app/profile/digitalwildcatters.bsky.social

https://www.linkedin.com/company/collide-digital-wildcatters