A Beginner's Guide to AI

🎙️ In this episode of Beginner’s Guide to AI, Dietmar Fischer sits down with Torrey Leonard, CEO of Thoughtly, to unpack the real business use case for voice AI agents: follow up with every lead, qualify fast, and hand the best conversations to humans.

If your funnel generates thousands of leads, the bottleneck is not “lack of interest.” It’s speed, timing, and the grind of dialing. Torrey explains how Thoughtly’s AI phone agents call inbound leads, answer initial questions, build rapport, and then transfer the call to a licensed human closer. Humans stay in the loop for the big life decisions. The AI handles the repetitive first steps that burn out teams.

You will also learn:
✅ Why voice beats typing as the fastest interface for human communication
✅ Why customer service voice AI is harder than sales and lead qualification
✅ How onboarding works with CRM integrations like Salesforce and HubSpot
✅ Why A/B testing matters before ramping to 100% lead volume
✅ Why the “moat” is orchestration, workflows, and guardrails, not just a great voice model
✅ What agentic AI and omni-channel “next best action” looks like next

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About Dietmar Fischer: Dietmar is a podcaster and AI marketer from Berlin. If you want to know how to get your AI or your digital marketing going, just contact him at argoberlin.com

Chapters
00:00 From Minecraft to voice first AI and the origin of Thoughtly
02:44 What Thoughtly does AI calls that qualify and transfer to humans
07:45 Trust, disclosure, and why customer service voice AI is so hard
12:50 Scaling across verticals dialects and the model orchestration stack
18:12 Onboarding CRM integrations and A/B testing to 100% volume
28:21 The next wave autonomous agents OpenClaw and a sane take on AI risk

Quotes from the Episode
“After 90 seconds we’ve got a great rapport built. Boom, transferred over to a licensed agent.”
“The voice isn’t the unique selling proposition. It’s the orchestration of the whole stuff.”
“Nobody needs to worry about the Terminator scenario, unless we humans build Terminator.”

Where to find the Guest
🌐 Thoughtly: thoughtly.com
🔗 Torrey Leonard on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/torrey-leonard/

Music credit: “Modern Situations” by Unicorn Heads
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

🎧 What makes us human in the age of AI?

This episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI explores one of the most important questions for business leaders today. As AI becomes more capable, the real challenge is not what it can do, but what we should never outsource.

We explore The Blurring Test, a fascinating experiment where thousands of people tried to prove their humanity to a chatbot. What they revealed changes how we should think about AI, business, and identity.

You will learn why AI can mimic humans but cannot experience reality, why human judgment becomes more valuable in an automated world, and how to use AI without losing authenticity and meaning.

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Tune in to get my thoughts and all episodes, don't forget to ⁠subscribe to our Newsletter⁠: ⁠beginnersguide.nl⁠
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👤 About Dietmar Fischer:
Dietmar is a podcaster and AI marketer from Berlin. If you want to know how to get your AI or your digital marketing going, just contact him at https://argoberlin.com/

💡 Quotes from the Episode
"AI can follow the recipe, but it cannot taste the cake."
"Your humanity is not what you do, but why you do it."
"The real risk is not AI replacing us, but us becoming more like AI."

⏱ Chapters
00:00 The Question That Changes Everything
04:30 The MrMind Experiment
11:20 AI vs Human Identity
19:10 The Cake Test Explained
26:40 AI in Business and Decision Making
34:00 What Makes Us Human

🚀 This episode challenges how you think about AI, business, and yourself. The future will not be about replacing humans. It will be about understanding what makes us irreplaceable.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you want to know more about the podcast, about how it's produced, what are the challenges and wins, about some fun facts, a little bit behind-the-scenes, this episode is for you, as I tell you all about it - at least all the things I found noteworthy 😉

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Tune in to get my thoughts and all episodes, don't forget to ⁠⁠subscribe to our Newsletter⁠⁠: beginnersguide.nl
📧💌📧

About Dietmar Fischer: Dietmar is a podcaster and AI marketer from Berlin. If you want to know how to get your AI or your digital marketing going, just contact him at argoberlin.com

Music credit: "Modern Situations" by Unicorn Heads
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Your AI might not be hacked. It might be persuaded.

In this episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI, we unpack one of the most underestimated threats in modern business: prompt injection. As AI systems and AI agents become deeply embedded in workflows, they don’t just process information anymore. They act on it. And that creates a completely new category of AI security risks.

We explore how attackers can manipulate AI systems using nothing but language, why AI struggles to separate instructions from data, and how this leads to real-world issues like AI data leakage. This is not a theoretical problem. It is already happening inside enterprise environments.

If you are working with AI in marketing, operations, or leadership, this episode will fundamentally change how you think about AI risk management and enterprise AI security.

Key highlights:
What prompt injection is and why it matters
Why AI agents introduce new security risks
Real-world case of AI data leakage
How AI systems get manipulated through input
What businesses must change to stay secure

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Tune in to get my thoughts and all episodes, don't forget to ⁠⁠subscribe to our Newsletter⁠⁠: beginnersguide.nl
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Quotes from the Episode:
“Prompt injection is social engineering for machines.”
“Your AI can become an insider threat without meaning to.”
“Language is no longer just information. It’s control.”

Chapters:
00:00 Why AI Security Is Different
05:40 What Prompt Injection Really Is
14:20 How AI Gets Manipulated by Language
23:10 Why AI Agents Increase the Risk
32:45 Real Case Study: AI Data Leakage
44:30 How to Protect Your AI Systems

About Dietmar Fischer: Dietmar is a podcaster and AI marketer from Berlin. If you want to know how to get your AI or your digital marketing going, just contact him at argoberlin.com

Music credit: "Modern Situations" by Unicorn Heads
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Artificial intelligence is often framed as a battle between humans and machines. But what if that story misses the real point?

In this episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI, Prof. GepHardT explores one of the most fascinating ideas in cognitive science: the extended mind theory. According to philosopher Andy Clark, human intelligence has never been confined to the brain alone. For centuries we have extended our thinking through tools like writing, maps, calculators, and computers.

Generative AI may simply be the newest and most powerful addition to this cognitive ecosystem.
Instead of replacing human creativity, AI may expand it. By generating ideas, exploring possibilities, and challenging assumptions, AI can act as a powerful thinking partner.

A striking example comes from the famous AlphaGo match against Go champion Lee Sedol. When the AI played the now legendary Move 37, professional players initially believed the move was a mistake. Later they discovered it opened entirely new strategic possibilities. The machine did not just beat humans at Go. It helped humans rethink the game itself.

This episode explores how human AI collaboration works and why hybrid intelligence may define the future of creativity, work, and learning.

📧💌📧
Tune in to get my thoughts and all episodes, don't forget to subscribe to our Newsletter: beginnersguide.nl
📧💌📧

About Dietmar Fischer
Dietmar is a podcaster and AI marketer from Berlin. If you want to know how to get your AI or your digital marketing going, just contact him at argoberlin.com

Quotes from the Episode
“Your brain has never worked alone. It has always been part of a thinking system that includes tools and environments.”
“The future of intelligence may not be human versus machine but human plus machine.”
“The most important skill in the AI age may not be prompt writing but judgement.”

Podcast Chapters
00:00 The Big Question About AI and Human Thinking
06:40 The Extended Mind Theory Explained
16:20 Why Humans Are Natural Born Cyborgs
26:50 The AlphaGo Story and Move 37
38:15 AI as a Creative Thinking Partner
49:30 The Future of Hybrid Intelligence

Music credit: Modern Situations by Unicorn Heads
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.