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  ...