Inspire AI: Transforming RVA Through Technology and Automation
Our mission is to cultivate AI literacy in the Greater Richmond Region through awareness, community engagement, education, and advocacy. In this podcast, we spotlight companies and individuals in the region who are pioneering the development and use of AI.
Episodes
New year energy is loud; smarter growth is quiet. We’re kicking off 2026 by trading fragile resolutions for a durable learning loop inspired by reinforcement learning. Instead of chasing perfect plans, we break down how real change happens: practice that compounds, rewards that align with values, feedback that arrives fast, and reflection that turns data into decisions.
We unpack the core ideas behind learnin...
What if reflection wasn’t a year-end memory dump but a working system that sharpens judgment? We sat down to examine how AI quietly changed the way we think, plan, and lead—shifting focus from task speed to decision quality, from outcomes to assumptions, and from rigid plans to resilient learning loops. Instead of asking what happened, we asked who we grew, where we created real leverage, and how our narrative as lead...
Midnight outages that never become crises. Forms that fill themselves. Support queues that sort and draft responses before a human even looks. We explore how agentic AI moves from talk to action by pairing Claude with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) so models can safely reach into the tools your teams use every day and execute real work with guardrails.
We start by framing the leap: a chatbot is great at con...
What if your support chat didn’t just explain the fix but executed it end to end in under a minute? We explore the move from conversational help to true autonomy, where multiple specialized agents collaborate under an orchestrator to verify identity, update records, resolve conflicts, and confirm outcomes without human handoffs. It’s a practical, real-time shift that turns AI into a digital workforce built to deliver ...
A quiet story changes everything: a few missed appointments, a medication shift, and an AI alert that prompts a human call just in time. We open with Alex’s experience to show how technology, used with care, can help us reach veterans sooner, reduce red tape, and restore dignity in moments that matter most.
We dig into practical ways AI supports veterans across the system. From summarizing dense benefits docu...
Imagine learning as a careful night hike: you can’t see the whole path, but you can feel the slope and step where it goes down. That’s the core intuition behind gradient descent, the quiet algorithm that turns errors into progress and powers everything from recommendations to self-driving perception.
We walk through a vivid mental model for loss, gradients, weights, and biases, then break down backpropagation...
Curiosity beats credentials. We head to Richmond, Virginia, to share how a free, hands-on AI bootcamp turns nervous high schoolers into confident creators and how a local nonprofit, AI Ready RVA, keeps the doors open long after the weekend ends. Guided by industry mentors and anchored in real-world problems, students explore core AI concepts, question ethics and bias, and build capstone projects they can cite on colle...
The internet doesn’t live in the sky—it lives in a quiet corner of Northern Virginia, inside miles of windowless buildings that hum day and night. We pull back the curtain on how Loudoun County became the world’s data center capital, tracing the line from AOL’s dial‑up era to the hyperscale cloud and the power-hungry rise of artificial intelligence. What starts as a story about fiber optics becomes a deeper look at mo...
What if the habits that built last century’s companies are the very things holding yours back today? Dr. John Dentico joins us to challenge the factory-floor model of leadership and swap control for something bolder: a system built on doubt, collaboration, and meaning. We dig into why AI doesn’t just speed things up—it exposes brittle hierarchies and demands a new operating system where influence is shared, trust is t...
What if your culture metrics could feel as real as a story told around a campfire? We sit down with technologist and humanist Andy Sitison, CTO of Share More Stories, to unpack how long-form narratives—analyzed with AI—can reveal what surveys miss: the emotions, values, and motivations that drive people to show up, speak up, and stay. Andy traces his path from early internet waves to machine learning, then to a sabbat...
What if your loudest growth came from fewer, truer signals? That’s the through-line of our conversation with LinkedIn strategist Judy Fox, who rebuilt after a 2023 house fire and turned AI into a clarity engine rather than a content factory. She shares the first move that changed everything: using AI to write code, scrape 500+ client forms, and triage demand in hours. From there, collaboration unlocked more: co-prompt...
A state is letting an algorithm read the rulebook—and then asking people to decide what to change. We head to Virginia to unpack the “agentic AI” pilot that scans statutes, regulations, and guidance to flag contradictions, redundancies, and unclear language, promising cleaner code for public life. The vision is compelling: fewer dead ends for citizens and small businesses, faster updates as laws evolve, and a maintain...
A simple question changed everything: what if balance were measured like blood pressure? We sit down with founder Vincent Vu—who went from a refugee camp to launching minimalist shoes to building a clinical platform—to unpack how AI and movement data can predict fall risk, empower clinicians, and make prevention practical for everyone.
We dig into the origin story: an injury that led to Kennis Barefoot, a sci...
What if intelligence could see every path at once? We dive into the live wire where quantum computing meets AI—mapping the real breakthroughs, the hard limits, and the choices that will define how this technology reshapes science, industry, and daily life. From the rise of deep learning and the GPU-fueled leap in model scale to the weird physics of qubits, superposition, and entanglement, we lay out why this union mat...
What happens when machines can think at the speed of light? Today we dive into the fascinating world of supercomputers – not just as technological marvels, but as the silent engines driving humanity's greatest breakthroughs.
Have you ever checked a weather app that accurately predicted a storm's path? Used an AI tool to write or create art? Benefited from a life-saving medicine developed in record t...
Have you fallen into the AI execution trap? While everyone races to master prompt engineering and ChatGPT tricks, this episode reveals the uncomfortable truth: execution has never been the real bottleneck in innovation. The true differentiator—in every technological revolution—has always been clarity.
We dive deep into how the democratization of AI creates a dangerous "execution obsession" where tea...
The business landscape is undergoing a seismic shift, and AI stands at the epicenter. But as Accenture CEO Julie Sweet pointedly states, "AI won't save you if all you do is adopt it." This fundamental truth launches us into an exploration of what truly matters in the AI revolution: complete business reinvention.
I walk you through what I call the "AI Reinvention Cycle" – six powerful ...
Ever wished your website could answer questions while you sleep? That's exactly what we're exploring today as we dive into the world of no-code AI chatbots that are revolutionizing customer service for businesses of all sizes.
What caught my attention about Chatling AI was the stark contrast to my previous experience. After spending weeks coding a chatbot with Python, Langchain, and various other to...
The invisible line between AI innovation and disaster often comes down to one critical factor: guardrails. Just as safety barriers on mountain roads don't slow you down but prevent catastrophic falls, AI guardrails establish crucial boundaries for powerful technology without limiting its potential.
Through compelling real-world examples, we examine what happens when these protective measures fail. We exp...
What if teachers could reclaim their evenings and weekends while actually improving student outcomes? That’s the promise of AI in education—not replacing teachers, but amplifying their impact by taking on the administrative burden that pulls them away from what matters most: connecting with students.
Cary Wright, co-founder of TEACH (Transforming Education Through AI, Connections, and Humanity), brings 30 years of clas...
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