Patterson Consulting Podcast
AI Coffee Hour
Unvarnished conversations about the real state of AI — what's working, what's noise, and what it actually means for how work changes. No slides, no vendor pitches. Just a long, honest discussion over coffee.
About the show
Signal, not noise.
The AI media cycle is loud and mostly wrong. Every week there's a new claim about what's going to be automated, eliminated, or revolutionized — and most of it evaporates on contact with reality.
AI Coffee Hour is the conversation that happens after the conference ends — when practitioners talk about what's actually running in production, what keeps failing, and what the economic history of automation tells us that the breathless headlines don't. Technology, economics, philosophy — no agenda except honesty.
Wide-ranging guests
Industry veterans, researchers, and practitioners from AI, data infrastructure, and enterprise operations — each bringing a different vantage point on the same set of questions.
No pitch. No panel.
Conversations run long and go off-script. The interesting part is usually the tangent — and there's no moderator pulling anyone back to the bullet points.
AI, economics, and work
The through-line: what does automation actually do to how people work, and what does 250 years of precedent say about where it goes? The history is more useful than the forecast.
Episodes
Latest conversations
Melanie Warrick & Josh Patterson
June 25, 2026
An honest look at where AI applications are actually landing in the enterprise — and where the gap between the pitch and the production system is widest.
Amandeep Khurana & Josh Patterson
May 27, 2026
A conversation about data infrastructure, the real prerequisites for production AI, and what the market is getting wrong about what "AI-ready" actually means.
Roger Magoulas & Josh Patterson
May 1, 2026
Drawing on years of technology research and market analysis, the conversation ranges from AI adoption patterns to how noise in tech marketing shapes — and distorts — real investment decisions.
Cover coming soon
Josh Patterson
2026
The first episode — setting the stage for the series and the questions it's going to keep returning to.
Your host
Josh Patterson
Founder and CEO of Patterson Consulting. Twenty-five years of machine learning in the enterprise, across five technology cycles. Co-author of two O'Reilly books on deep learning and MLOps. Employee #36 at Cloudera. Provisional patent in Cognitive Labor Compilers.
Josh has been building production AI systems since long before the current cycle had a marketing budget — and has spent most of that time explaining the gap between the headline and the reality to executive teams, investors, and engineers alike. AI Coffee Hour is that conversation, recorded.
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