The Path to AGI with John Thompson

Artificial General Intelligence is a term that most of us have heard, a good number of us know how its defined, and some claim to know what it will mean for the average marketer. Here’s what OpenAI’s Sam Altman said “It will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI.”

 

What nobody knows for sure is when it will be here. Some said that GPT5 would herald the dawn of artificial general intelligence. 

 

This episode is airing In mid-2025, and GPT5 has come out…and it is not widely believed to have AGI.

 

Our guest says AGI is a long way off, and more importantly, that it might not be the sought-for milestone we need for AI to be a revolutionary force in our lifetimes. Today’s guest takes us through what it will take for AGI to truly arrive. We also talk about  public vs private models, Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, the Branches of AI like Foundational vs generative, Agents and Agentic Workflows.

 

Today’s guest  graduated from DePaul with an MBA, has headed the AI/Analytics groups at (EY) Ernst & Young, Gartner, CSL Behring and now at the Hackett Group.  

He has written several books and is here to talk about his 5th which came out in 2025. 

 So let’s go to Chicago now to speak about “The Path to AGI” with its author. Let’s welcome back for the 4th time on this show, more times than anyone else, John Thompson. 

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.