Practical AI

Practical AI is a podcast hosted by Daniel Whitenack and Chris Benson about AI applications, tools, and implementation. Its inaugural episode was published on July 2, 2018, with a stated mission to make artificial intelligence “practical, productive and accessible to everyone.” By September 17, 2026, the hosts were covering AI search with Discovered Labs cofounders Liam Dunne and Ben Moore in the episode labeled E372, “How to get discovered in AI search”.[2][4]

The inaugural episode, recorded April 20 and published July 2, 2018, brought Whitenack and Benson together with Changelog’s Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo. Stacoviak recalled discussing a data-science podcast with Whitenack after his appearance on Go Time; the concept subsequently expanded to AI, machine learning, and neural networks. Benson described wanting a Changelog-style community where people could learn together and thanked Stacoviak and Santo for giving the hosts the opportunity to build it.[2]

The launch plan combined application interviews, learning interviews, and topical discussions. Whitenack proposed conversations about applications such as planet detection and cancer identification, alongside explanations of complicated topics and discussions of ethics, infrastructure, and AI on phones. Stacoviak announced a weekly schedule. The hosts also invited listeners into Changelog’s Slack community and encouraged them to experiment with AI and bring questions and projects to the show.[2]

Practical AI collaborated with Latent Space on “AI trends: a Latent Space crossover”, dated June 14, 2023. Whitenack joined Alessio Fanelli and Shawn Wang at StudioPod in San Francisco to discuss AI trends and lessons from past episodes. Latent Space published its version on July 2, describing the collaboration as part of a podcast feed swap.[3][1]

The crossover covered open-access LLMs, small models, model controls, prompt engineering, and LLMOps. Its featured Practical AI episodes included “From notebooks to Netflix scale with Metaflow,” “Capabilities of LLMs 🤯,” and “ML at small organizations”—examples of the show’s coverage of both model capabilities and the practical conditions of deploying machine learning.[3]

In the September 17, 2026 AI-search episode, Whitenack and Benson spoke with Dunne and Moore about the shift from traditional SEO to discovery through AI systems. Topics included retrieval and citations, query fan-out, representation in model weights, and consensus. The episode also considered agents that interact with websites and take actions on users’ behalf.[4]

That episode carried sponsor listings for Framer and the Midwest AI Summit and directed listeners to prior webinars from Prediction Guard, identified as a partner. These sponsorships and educational resources accompanied the podcast’s continuing interview output.[4]