Paco Nathan has been building AI since 1983 - before it was cool, before it was profitable, and through every hype winter since.

In this no-BS conversation with Nick Schutt on Robots and Red Tape, Paco explains why this wave is legitimately different (hardware finally caught up), why the AGI/superintelligence talk is marketing fiction backed by trillions, and where the real wins are hiding: anti-money-laundering, fraud detection, and preserving institutional knowledge as veteran workers retire.

A masterclass in spotting hype vs. reality:

Why hardware, software, then process is the real AI hierarchy

The dirty secrets of latency & cost killing most “agentic” demos

How graphs and entity resolution are the hidden backbone of mission-critical AI

Lessons from Spark/Databricks that every GenAI builder needs  ...