AI Agents Shift, Not SAVE, Your Time (Don't Be Fooled by Marketing Hype)

What happens when you automate away a six-hour task? You don't get more free time ... you just do more work. 

In this impromptu conversation, Kimberly and Jessica break down what agentic AI actually does, why the "time savings" narrative misses the point entirely, and how to figure out which workflows are worth automating.

WHAT WE COVER:

• What agentic AI actually is (and how it's different from ChatGPT)
• Jessica's real invoice automation workflow: how she turned 6 hours of manual work into an AI agent task
• The framework for identifying automatable workflows (repetitive, skill-free, multi-step tasks)
• Why this beats creative AI work: no judgment calls, just execution
• The Blackboard experiment: what happens when an agent does something you didn't ask it to do
• Security & trust: passwords, login credentials, and where your data actually goes
• Enterprise-level agent solutions (and why they're not quite ready yet)
• The uncomfortable truth: freed-up time doesn't mean fewer hours—it means more output
• How detailed instruction manuals prepared Jessica for prompt engineering
• The human bottleneck: why your whole organization has to move at the same speed
• Why marketing and research are next on the chopping block

TOOLS MENTIONED:

• ChatGPT Pro with Agents — https://openai.com/chatgpt/
• Perplexity Comet (agentic browser) — https://www.perplexity.ai/comet
• Zoho Billing — https://www.zoho.com/billing/
• Constant Contact — https://www.constantcontact.com
• Zapier — https://zapier.com
• Elicit (systematic reviews & literature analysis) — https://elicit.com
• Corpus of Contemporary American English — https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/
• Descript — https://www.descript.com
• Canva — https://www.canva.com
• Riverside.fm — https://riverside.fm

TIMESTAMPS:

• 0:00 — Opening & guest cancellation
• 1:18 — Podcast website & jingle development (and why music taste is complicated)
• 6:34 — What is agentic AI? Jessica's invoice automation example
• 10:33 — Why this use case actually works
• 14:15 — The Blackboard incident (when the agent went off-script)
• 16:21 — Security concerns: passwords, login credentials, and trust
• 18:35 — Why speed doesn't matter (as long as it's faster than human bottleneck)
• 19:27 — Enterprise solutions on the horizon
• 20:57 — United Airlines cease-and-desist letters for replica training sites
• 22:27 — Why Kimberly can't use agents in her CCRC work
• 25:21 — How to identify your automatable workflows (the practical framework)
• 27:57 — Research automation with Elicit & corpus linguistics
• 30:45 — The core insight: AI shifts time, it doesn't save it
• 34:10 — Organizational bottlenecks & human capacity limits
• 35:08 — Pit & Peach (staying in your own canoe)