Computer-Use Agents and the Future of the Agentic Internet

0:02Welcome to the Practical AI Podcast, where we break down the real-world applications of artificial intelligence and how it's shaping the way we live, work, and create. Our goal is to help make AI technology practical, productive, and accessible to everyone. Whether you're a developer, business leader, or just curious about the tech behind the buzz, you're in the right place. Be sure to connect with us on LinkedIn, X, or Blue Sky to stay up to date with episode drops, behind-the-scenes content, and AI insights. You can learn more at practicalai.fm. Now, on to the show.

0:41Hey, welcome to another episode of the Practical AI Podcast. I am Chris Benson, your co-host. Daniel is out today, and he's really going to miss this one because we have an old friend to the podcast, who has been on multiple times, Demetrius Sprinkman, who is, okay, let's get the title right here, Demetrius, head of development experience and a member of the non-technical staff at the Agentic AI Foundation. And he's also, by the way, as most folks who have seen shows with us before, he's the founder of the MLOps community. Oh my God, that's the longest title, Demetrius, I think I've ever had to do on the show.

1:23I made it hard on you. You made it real. I'll tell you what, I just read a paragraph. So great to have you back. I've lost count of how many times we've done this together. You are, like for those who are joining us that are not familiar with you, in addition to all these hats that you wear, amazing thought leader in the world of AI. And I know we're going to have some really good stuff to talk about today. and I know that the viewers and the listeners will enjoy this as much as I do. And before we start, I have to say, so after the last time we talked, you had sent me a t-shirt that's a super cool t-shirt.

2:04It's one of my favorite bum around the house t-shirts. I'm wearing it right now. For those who are watching us on YouTube, it says, I hallucinate more than chat GPT. And so my wife is completely sick of seeing me wear it. It's faded red now. It doesn't, I'm sorry, man. And it looked good when you gave it to me, but it doesn't look good anymore because it's all faded out. But that's because it's a fun t-shirt to wear. I'm going to send you the next one. Well, anytime I wear it out, I have to tell people. Everyone asks me about the hallucination thing. Then I have to also say, and just because there are people at my real job, I'm not hallucinating.

2:40Just so you know, there's no drug test required or anything. No hallucinating here whatsoever. uh so with all the fun start um this is probably not the show most viewers were expecting that we'd start with but we always have fun uh how you doing uh things have really changed since the last time we talked for you um tell us where you're at what you're doing what's going on with it at this point well first of all let me just say that the last time we chatted we came up with some bangers that people are still hitting me up for like broccoli ai i don't know if you remember going i do I do. A whole Gartner hype cycle.

3:17And we created our own Gartner hype cycle. And one of the things that was on there was Broccoli AI. It was almost peak hype. So, and for those who didn't hear that episode, it is that AI that you probably don't like because it tastes bad, but you need it because it's good for your organization. That's right. And that was something, and Daniel's not here today, but he was also all about that, that it's, you know, like there are things in our world, we, you know, the hype tends to take over, but there are things in our AI world that you just got to do to do this stuff well. And some of it's not the coolest and most fun thing.

3:54And we were talking about that and that is, Broccoli AI was born. So there you go. The next thing I want to say is I'm going to get you the new shirt that says member of the non-technical staff. Excellent. So you can join me in my ranks. Excellent. I got to get my ego stroked right there. You know, that's good. I appreciate that. I just find it hilarious that everyone at Anthropic or OpenAI, they're members of the technical staff. And so I had to go against the grain and be a member of the non-technical staff. That's where that came from. And that's a pretty good idea. Yeah. I mean, tell me about ML Ops Community and the Agentec AI Foundation and what happened here.

4:35Well, so I'm super excited because in the beginning of the year or just at the end of last year, MCP got donated to the Linux Foundation. They created the Agentic AI Foundation around it. And out of that, there's just been like huge interest from all the top players because now MCP went from being something that was owned by Anthropic to being this neutral governing body that is steering it. And so I was sitting there and I was like, man, that is an awesome opportunity. We've been doing so much already in the MLOps community around agents. You know, the MLOps community started as putting machine learning into production.

5:18Then when LLMs came out and they were all the rage, we kind of started incorporating more of the putting LLMs into production. And then agents became a real thing and they became something that we were using every day. And then it was like, okay, well, what about putting agents into production? And so it just kind of made sense when we were looking at, hey, is there a home for the MLOps community to do more and have more resources around it and take the same types of stuff that we're doing and the same reasons that people enjoy being in like this very deep technical community and then just like do more and better and so that was the pitch and luckily the folks at the agentic ai foundation were on board and so we we kind of merged we're now going to be doing a bit of a rebrand the ml ops community is becoming the agentic ai community or the agentic ai foundation community and uh We're just doing more of the same.

6:25Like we're doing a whole lot of conferences. Next week, I'm going to Japan for a MCP Dev Summit. And then I'm right back in Amsterdam for Agent Con. Agent Con is like our big flagship event in Europe. And that is September 17th. And then we have another Agent Con in North America in San Jose on October 22nd. And you'll like this. One thing I'm doing for Agent Con that is very much in the spirit of what we did in the MLO Ops days is I got a 36-hour live stream put together. So we have the live event. And what I, you know, I love watching Coachella or like these very highly produced events that are both, they're taking the virtual aspect into consideration.

7:16It's not just like a in-person and you fully optimize for in-person, but then the virtual aspect isn't really there. So what I decided to do is how can we make the AgentCon in Amsterdam absolutely like optimized for in-person, but not forgetting about the virtual aspect. And that's why we decided to do, you know, 36 hours live streaming the whole thing. I'm going to be hosting it. So we'll be popping in and out. It's going to be like ESPN style play by play of the talks. Oh, what does that mean? What do we think? I'm going to be grabbing people from the crowd, walking around the expo hall. All that is to say it's the first time I'm going fully all in on it.

7:59So there's going to be a few problems. Things will break. But that's where I'm at right now. It sounds like a lot of fun. So you're not going to stay up for 36 hours there, right? I mean, I would not make a lot of sense. Please tell me you're not going to do that to yourself. So I was going to say, you'd just be babbling. We have some tricks in there. Okay. Okay. Okay. I got you. Yeah. Because there's going to be breakout sessions, right? There's really three or four tracks going on at once. And so we'll be live streaming the main track during the day when it's actually happening live. But then we're recording all of the breakout tracks.

8:35And then we're going to put those back to back on top of it. But there's some other cool things that I don't want to fully give away yet, but I'm going to be recording some stuff that we can splice in in between different talks. And we've also got some of the sponsors to like give us some cool material that we can also splice in. So it's going to be an event, that's for sure. It may totally fall flat on its face, but I'm going to go down with the ship if it does. Okay, fair enough. I'm just glad you have something there to mix in with it. I'm imagining interviewing you right after a 36-hour marathon, and you're just laying your head on the desk, unable to function.

9:18It's good. I'm glad we got the stuff in there. Get a little sleep in the process. Looking forward to watching the live feed myself as we get there. Listen, I've been to an incredible amount of AI events, many of which are good, but many of which are not practical. You know I love practicality. We're on practical AI. And some are just hype-focused. Some are sales-focused. That's why I'm always eager to share about an event that I truly think is practical and useful for people. That's what I discovered last year at the Midwest AI Summit. And they're going to have another Midwest AI Summit October 15th in Indianapolis this year, 2026.

10:01One of the reasons why I love this event was there was an actual AI engineering lounge where you could sit down and talk through your use cases with actual experienced AI engineers and practitioners to really brainstorm and come back from the event with actual solutions and practicality rather than just a bunch of content and slides. But there were also amazing keynote speakers, speakers from even that had been on the podcast before, like Rajiv Shah was at last year's event. I would really recommend that you go to midwestaisummit.com. And for our listeners, you can actually get 20 % off with the code practicalAI20.

10:46So go to midwestaisummit.com. don't miss your chance to attend this event and get 20 % off with the code practical AI 20.

11:01Okay, so a lot of cool events that you're working on. And it sounds like a lot of fun. Looking forward to seeing how all that goes. But you're not just doing events. I know that. So what else you got going on there? Well, yeah, I think that's been some of the biggest surprises for me is how the community has rallied and there's so much interest not only from the member companies of the agentic ai foundation now there's over 250 which is wild to think about how many companies yeah they want to be members and they want to be a part of this movement right and then we've got ambassadors around the globe so we opened up the ambassador program and there was over a thousand applications of people that wanted to be an ambassador.

11:47And we also set up these local chapters of community events. So anybody can organize a community event. And now we're in over 80 cities and there's like 250 different community chapter leads. And all of that is just to say like it's kind of taken on its own thing it's yeah that's a big thing yeah that's huge like pretty quick i mean considering you're only talking a few months um yeah it's uh so it's the linux foundation is going to be like well we took him on but oh my gosh the baby's growing up pretty quick here so you know yeah it is one of the i don't quote me on it but i think it's one of the biggest foundations in the lytics foundation even and i would not be surprised yeah i mean you know when you when you think about just like i mean so much has happened yeah just since we talked last so much has happened uh you know the this world the the the rise of agentics you know agentics were around last time we talked but they were still in the absolute infancy um and at this point it is dominating everything going forward and just growing.

13:07And that sounds very hype-y, and I apologize for that. But it's just, the monster gets bigger and bigger. Well, let me tell you, because I was the one who was probably the biggest naysayer on the hype naming and agents. And it's like, yeah, yeah. I remember using, what was it, like Baby AGI back in the day and just getting mad because all it did was give me. So it got stuck in a recursive loop and I got like a$80 API bill from open AI. And it was like, these agents don't work, dude. What's going on? But since then, you're right, man. Like I'm fully bought in now. And I am the first one to say that I was way wrong.

13:57Like they were coming and they came hard. And I want to tell you about the newest stuff that I've been doing specifically with like computer use. Yeah, go for it. Because that, man, I feel like my life has changed. And there's something that happened, I will say, in the latest OpenAI model release, which came out, what, it's 5.6 is what we're at right now. Spin out a bit. Yeah. Yeah. And so since that came out, if you specifically use the computer use skill, it is so good. There are very few things that I can throw at it that it does not accomplish, which is wild because, okay, so now I'd never have to worry about getting APIs for anything.

14:47I don't have to worry about, oh, but I can't reach that data because of some block or something that's wrong with it. And granted, this is me as a personal use type thing. Like I'm, I'm able to do that. I have my three or four different Gmails logged in. And so computer use can go and look at all three or four of them, which I know that with one, I can't remember if it's Hermes or Grokbot. You can also set up multiple accounts. But just to be able to like use that, throw at it like, hey, check all of my emails and give me the daily briefing and also check Slack and give me a daily briefing and not just one of the Slack workspaces that I'm in, like all five of them.

15:35Yeah. Right. And so you don't have to worry. You don't have to fiddle with any connections or anything. You can just go and it'll use computer use. And that is great. That's like quality of life thing. But what was wild to me is now I can set up these workflows or triggers, I guess is what you call them, that, hey, when you see something, then just do this automatically. So for example, one of these things is, as you know, we've had all these conferences all over the world and I've been taking a lot of flights. Well, I will buy the flight with computer use. I just say, find me the best flight on this day to this day.

16:16And then before it actually pays, I'm the one who actually will click the button because we're still not at that point, or I need a few more zeros in my bank account before I'm cool with it being at that point. I'm the same. I get it. It's funny when you say that because I'm having agents do all the things. and my focus has been a little bit different use case in swarms of agents where you have many agents addressing really complex things at once but then it's funny like if I'm doing something like you and it's my personal bank account which doesn't have anywhere near as many zeros as I wish it did I'm the same way I'm like that varies really quite a small purchase but I'm like okay so I have that same like reservation, like they're doing amazing things, you know, what you can get agents to go do.

17:12And yet there's still that, that intrinsic trust factor. And if you and I are having that with the kinds of, you know, the fact that this is what we do, then I know we have to deal with that with general population and, you know, as, as they come on. So it's kind of, it's interesting to see the technology running. So, you know, into like this amazing space that, that is beyond really where anybody was predicting this fast. And then simultaneously, like, do I want it to buy the movie tickets for me? Well, okay, that's not too expensive. I'll just tell it to do it, you know? Totally. You know what?

17:49Though I've seen and I've heard of my friends saying like they'll set up rules where if it's under 20 bucks, the agent can just do it. I've done that. I'm still afraid of that because I'm like, yeah, it can just buy something for 20 bucks. 20 times and then I'm pissed because it can figure out we've all heard those stories. So I'm not quite there yet, but I wanted to mention the different workflows that I have set up around it. So for example, this workflow of buy my ticket, get the ticket. Cool. I don't have to fill out any forms anymore, which is absolutely beautiful. Like on the internet, you know how many pointless forms you have to fill out, which are just your name and your phone number and whatever, like, oh, passport number.

18:39And I never have it memorized. So then I have to go and search for it and find that number and boom, I got it. Well, now I don't have to do that because I have all my information stored in a document that the agent can reference. And then it'll buy the flight. And when it comes time to check in, I just told an agent, hey, monitor my inbox. And if you ever see a email come through that says it's time for you to check in, just go check in. You don't even have to ask me, just go and do it. Check in, send me the boarding pass to my phone. And so now I don't ever have to work at any of that, which total side note, I'm pretty sure like checking in, why do we have to do that still?

19:22Somebody needs to explain why checking in is still a thing. i'm not sure i don't know i i spend so much money on a flight who's gonna just miss i don't know that's for me and i'm sure there's plenty of people that will check in and they still miss their flight so it's not like it's a good gauge of who's actually going to show up for the flight so that's a total non-agent non-ai tangent i just i suspect the people missing the flight like they've checked in i i just don't think there's a strong correlation between the two It doesn't make any sense to me. I'm sure there is somebody at one of these airlines out there listening right now going, oh, these guys totally don't get it.

20:02They don't understand. There's a very clear reason we do this. And we acknowledge that for that person just to let you know. We just don't understand. Yeah, we don't get it. So, okay. Fair enough. Back to computer use. So I have something like that going. I also have a great use case that I had this morning was I need to update my Spanish driver's license to a German driver's license. And so I, before computer use was going and taking screenshots and then giving it to my agent and saying, or giving it just to the chat, really, it wasn't even an agent and saying, what does this say? What should I click on?

20:43Where should I put my information because this is a perfect example of the German government in my small town does not have an API that my coding agent can access and submit something through, right? But what it does have is a web page where I can go and submit something or I can have computer use go and submit something. So now it just did it. It created my appointment and then it created a calendar invite for me. So I know when the appointment is and it said everything I needed to bring. And it said my cancellation number or it said my like main number, blah, blah, blah. That's all there. And I didn't have to worry about it at all.

21:25And I changed that like three different times. And all I have to do is say like, change it to a different day because I can't do it on this day anymore. Yeah. So I'm curious, like, what do you think are some really, you've talked a little bit about how you're using it, what do you think are some really good opportunities for folks watching or listening out there as they're listening and they've heard some of the things that you're talking about? What would you suggest to go try out? What are some of the fruits that maybe people haven't picked from yet? And you're just like, oh man, this is amazing.

21:57Other than flights. I think for me, the biggest eye opener of getting it right was now anytime I encounter a form when I'm using the internet, right? I'm going through my day to day and I'm using the internet and I encounter a form and it has this big trigger that goes off in my head. And I'm like, why didn't I ask computer use to do this whole task? Cause I just got to this point where I realized, Oh, forms, I don't have to fill out anymore. That's something that is good enough to be done by computer use. So I just go and I, I now am like, Oh, right. Let's see if, let's see if they can do that.

22:35Boom. So that would be one anytime you encounter a form on the internet. However, I will caveat this with a conversation that I just had yesterday with my friend, Sam, who was saying like, this is such a thing that you can do if you're B2C, but if you're trying to do this in B2B, like good luck, dude. Yeah. You're going to go tell your employees. That's exactly where I was going to ask you next. I literally like was in my head. I'm like, oh, I know where I want to go. And that's it. And that is like with the inevitability of the B2B use case, being an agentic to agentic use case where you're doing agents interoperating with agents beyond your border.

23:16In other words, you know, that some other entity, another commercial entity or whatever it is that you're talking about. And instead of being static APIs that your agent is going and talking to or your web scraping, you know, with the agent and doing the kind of the form stuff that we're talking about. Now, what are your thoughts around when is every organization out there going to have an agentic interface in which your agents, you know, as you're doing what you're describing, are just interoperating, giving it a lot more fluidity and dynamic capability because you're doing an agent to agent interaction, which can accommodate things.

23:56It's no longer just the static API that your agent has to navigate. What are your thoughts around that? And how far out do you think it is before we get to that? Well, I think that's one reason that MCP is so popular is because of those use cases. And it feels like that's the way that the industry has standardized on being able to give agents access to different systems. Right. But then what we have to do is we have to wait for everyone to have MCP servers that are good enough for my agent just to pick up and use at will and use well so that I can get what I need done, which feels like there still needs to be some maturing that needs to happen before we get to that point.

24:44And so that's why it's beautiful with computer use because you don't have to wait for the other person to set up an MCP server or you don't have to go and build an MCP server to enable that. And there's a lot of these use cases that who knows if they even are going to build an MCP server like the German government DMV. I'm not sure they ever are going to have an MCP server that my agent can go and talk to. So that's going back to this B2C use case in a way. But if you think about it, what's incredible for me is us consumers are tasting this like forbidden fruit of, wow, things can really be that easy.

25:28Like it can just work. and then you know that that pressure is going to start building on the software that we have and we're using in our day-to-day lives at the office like that's how i feel i feel like it's coming it's just gonna put a lot of pressure on hey this is this doesn't have to be like this or we don't have to be blocked by something can we figure out a way to make it work with i mean i don't know how it's going to play out because I will say that there's a security nightmare happening. If you just start doing like computer use, everyone at your company now has computer use going on all five of their emails and all of your ERP systems or you're like, like on the, oh man, basically any, anything that you can think of, God, that sounds so dangerous, but wow, it is like quality of life there.

26:26I think, you know, you talk about the security issue and I think you're at the place, you know, at the center of, you know, at the foundation where as good security architectures are further developed, they will find their way into the foundation probably for purposes of getting, you know, widespread acceptance through the world. I think there's another point, I'm going to diverge hard, as you were doing that. Oh, nice. As you're talking about that, like, I think that what you were describing there is very much the story starting with us and the people watching this because these are AI native folks, you know, that are, the folks that are showing up for your podcast and showing up for this podcast are folks that, you know, they work in it, they care enough about it, and they're following that.

27:19I'm curious, like, what's it going to take to bring, like, because we're all kind of going, holy cow, look at what I can do now, which is kind of what you're describing. What does it take to bring, like, we're only now getting to where, you know, the general population is starting to get comfortable using, you know, just kind of what seems very old-fashioned, you know, chat, you know, whether it's Gemini and, you know, or ChatGPT or, you know, or Claude or whatever. they're just coming along there what does it take to bring that in not only for like just so they can do this but you know as they're worrying about jobs and all the bigger things that everyone is so concerned about in the world how how does that how does that all like how do you bring the the masses that are not i you know ai native uh into into being able to do this to get the benefits because right now they're just all scared to death you know i get that more and more i remember back in the day when Google came out or when the search engines came out, the internet came out and it was magical that you could go to a website or you could search something and find information on the internet.

28:32And we were, there was a lot of people that were just early adopters and they were very early on that and using it. It feels a little bit like that now in that. So my wife is not very technologically savvy. She avoids phones and computers at all costs. But today she had to cancel her PayPal account and then start a new one. And I told her, okay, watch this. And I downloaded ChatGPT on her computer. And then I got her set up. I also got her set up with WhisperFlow so you can just talk to the computer. And I gave it to, I said, hey, look, I need to get rid of my PayPal account and I need to start a new one.

29:19Let's start with just like deleting this PayPal account and like canceling everything that's related to it. And it did that. And my wife's eyes lit up because for her, that is so much time that she would have had to have spent, especially because she's not. Yeah. It's incredible. So you have those experiences for someone and there it's instantly bought in. It's like, oh, okay. So tell me what else can I do here? Or let me try. And then the person just tries and there's not a lot. That's what I'm saying. Like there's not a lot that I throw at it these days that it can't do. And I keep going back to like my personal computer use stuff, which is great.