It's 6:45 in the morning, it's dark out, and Megan and Nicole are pretty sure they have nothing to say about AI. Then they say a lot about it. This AI in the AM edition recaps two very different September events: the kickoff of In Dialogue with AI, a six-part lecture series with Roberto Santiago and the University of Portland, and a hands-on night about agents with the one and only Chen Chen Chen.

Nicole walked into the first lecture tired of AI headlines and walked out feeling better, which says a lot. Roberto's take is simple: don't be afraid, let's figure this out together. From there, the conversation moves to the practical side. What an agent actually is, why you don't need one for everything, and who's on the hook when an autonomous agent messes up. Spoiler: it's you.

Along the way:
🎭 How the word "robot" got its start in an early-1900s play (and why that plot still sounds familiar)
📈 Have we hit peak AI? Not the tech, just the "every Lyft driver wants to talk about it" kind
📚 A novel set during the late-90s internet boom that sounds a lot like today's AI promises
🤖 What "agent" really means, and why calling a Copilot project an agent doesn't count
🍾 The problem with agents: they burn tokens, the humans become the bottleneck, and nobody knows what anyone else has built
💸 The ROI question: how do you measure the value of just being better prepared for a meeting?
🧑‍⚖️ Who's accountable when an agent acts on its own? The domain expert. The human. You.

Plus: A pitch for an AI Portland robot musical, Chen Chen Chen's excellent domain, and a friendly heads-up that the OSU field trip is on an actual school bus. Green seats and all.

Related Links:

• AI Portland, where you'll find upcoming events and In Dialogue with AI registration
• In Dialogue with AI lecture series with Roberto Santiago

• Chen Chen

A recruiter with 20 years in the business has never heard of a forward deployed engineer. A job title called "rehash manager" exists and nobody can explain it. And a French bulldog named Gary is still standing at a cracked door, trying to open it with his mind. It's another classic episode: part community update, part job market reality check, part group therapy for anyone who's submitted 200 applications and heard absolutely nothing back.

Megan and Nicole sit down with Kelsey New of Mainz Brady Group, a boutique Portland recruiting firm, to find out what's actually happening on the other side of the application portal. Fake resumes, deepfake interviews, auto-apply bots dumping a thousand candidates into a posting in the first twelve hours, and companies who thought AI meant they'd never need a recruiter again. Spoiler: they're finding out the hard way that human expertise matters.

Along the way:
🏷️ Why job titles turned into the Wild West, and how recruiters play detective to decode them👻 Where ghost jobs actually come from (the boring explanation is sadder than the conspiracy)🦄 Why "most of the requirements" no longer cuts it, and some companies will wait a year for a perfect candidate💔 The part where candidate experience quietly disappears while it's an employer's market🌱 Kelsey's advice: water the garden before you need the harvest🚌 Why we're putting the entire community on a school bus to OSU's robotics and AI lab

Plus: Nicole tells you directly to stop blindly mass applying. Kelsey confirms there are, in fact, real jobs. Nicole built us a whole new website with AI and owes us a case study. And the final, definitive job search strategy turns out to be: drink water.

Fresh off Friday's AI Portland event for job seekers, Megan and Nicole bring AI Portland's favorite resume expert, Andrea Gerson, onto the podcast for round two. This one goes deep on what actually moves an ATS score, why LinkedIn should work more like a dartboard than a diary, and why the fundamentals of a good resume haven't really changed much—even as everything else has.

Andrea, founder of Resume Scripter, has read tens of thousands of resumes over her career and is watching AI reshape both sides of hiring in real time. She breaks down what took one resume from a 40 to a 100 on an ATS screen without any keyword stuffing, why "context, scope, outcome" beats a list of tasks every time, and why showing a little more humanity on a resume is starting to work in people's favor again.

Along the way:


🎯 Why "context, scope, outcome" beats a bullet list of tasks, every time


📊 How Andrea took one resume from a 40 to a 100 ATS score without keyword stuffing


🪞 Why LinkedIn should work like a dartboard, not a diary


🚪 Why the shift toward self-employment and entrepreneurship might be the next real change in how we work

Plus: the great car-vs-walking-and-talking LinkedIn influencer video debate, Nicole's dream job checking people out at New Seasons, and a full-circle return to manifesting as a legitimate job search strategy.

Breaking news: Andrea's new pathfinder tool is NOW LIVE! Try it out here: PathFinder

Related links:

• Andrea Gerson / Resume Scripter
• Oregon AI Accelerator