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Factory Fireside
Factory Fireside

Exploring the history and future of AI & Agents with Dr. Don Perugini (CEO - Socontra)

21 December 2025 51:11 Peter Inge

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About this episode

In this episode of Factory Fireside, Peter Inge sits down with Dr. Don Perugini, a pioneer in AI and agentic systems with over 20 years of real-world experience spanning defence, enterprise, healthcare, and startups. Together, they cut through the hype to explore what agents actually are, why most enterprise pilots stall, and what it really takes to move from experimentation to production impact.

This is not a surface-level LLM conversation. Don draws on decades of work building cognitive agents, federated AI systems, and large-scale simulations from predicting bushfire behaviour and modelling entire populations, to improving IVF success rates and enabling privacy-preserving AI in healthcare.

You’ll hear:

  • Why agents didn’t start with LLMs, and why that history matters
  • The real reasons 95% of AI pilots never reach P&L impact
  • Why “narrow problems” outperform grand AI ambitions
  • How agentic commerce and the agentic web will change SaaS and B2B
  • Why AGI is mostly a distraction and what progress actually looks like
  • What founders and technologists should focus on now to build durable AI businesses

This episode is essential viewing for technology leaders, founders, product teams, and anyone trying to understand where AI agents are genuinely delivering value and where the hype still vastly outweighs reality.

🎧 If you care about building AI that works in the real world, this one’s for you.

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