The Five-Year Century: What leaders need to understand about AI, work, and human potential

The Five-Year Century: What leaders need to understand about AI, work, and human potential

A century of change is arriving in five years. Most organizations are responding by making their industrial age models slightly more efficient, and that is the problem. In this episode, Micah Smith sits down with Mihir Shukla, Chairman and CEO, Automation Anywhere, and Nancy Hauge, Chief People Experience Officer at Automation Anywhere. Together, they have written The Five-Year Century, a book on what it actually means to lead through this moment. The conversation covers why revolutionary tools applied to broken frameworks change very little. What resistance to AI really signals, and how trust changes the equation. Why the industrial age kept more human capability out of work than it ever asked for. And why every person in an organization is about to get a promotion with AI. If you lead people, make decisions, or are figuring out where to go from here, this one is for you.

Building the workforce for agentic AI: Skills, teams and what leaders need now

You've got the platform and executive buy-in, but do you have the people to deliver on agentic AI? In this episode, Micah Smith and Kate Ressler talk with Mike Reynolds, Business and Technology Executive at KeyBank, about what it actually takes to build, retool, and upskill automation teams for the shift from task-based RPA to goal-driven agentic AI. Mike shares how he invests in his team to build automations, how those citizen developer skills are evolving for the agentic era, why ideas that were rejected years ago are now greenlit, and the leadership mindset required to invest in people when the pressure is on short-term results.  Whether you lead an automation team, build solutions, or are figuring out what skills to invest in next, this one's for you.

What actually matters in enterprise automation in 2026?

Every week brings a new AI technique, a new protocol, a new framework claiming to change everything. So how do you actually decide what to build, what to wait on, and what to ignore entirely? In this episode, Adi Kuruganti, Chief AI and Development Officer at Automation Anywhere joins Micah Smith & Kate Ressler, to share how he thinks about separating signal from noise, what it really takes to move agentic AI from POC to production, and the two contrarian bets his team is making right now on data architecture and conversational UX. Grounded, direct, and worth your time.

Meet the winners of Automation Anywhere's Agentic Bounty Challenge

In this episode, hosts Micah Smith and Kate Ressler spotlight winners from Automation Anywhere’s Agentic Bounty Challenge, created to help the Pathfinder community move beyond simple task automation and build goal-based AI agents for real business problems.   They interview three winners: Jenna Saunders, who built an agent that performs sentiment analysis on product reviews, outputs a CSV with sentiment scores, and generates actionable insights, using Python for precise data sorting and formatting; Omkar Mahajan, whose transit-focused agent uses maintenance and disaster management manuals to recommend next actions, create Salesforce tasks, work orders, and purchase orders with guardrails like order-history checks and approved product lists; and Ganesh Bhat, who built a “Sprint to Jira” agent that turns unstructured sprint planning inputs (screenshots, emails, transcripts) into Jira epics, stories, and tasks with human-in-the-loop and data protection guardrails.

From Automation to Autonomy. What Aisera Brings to Automation Anywhere.

What if most IT, HR, and finance requests were solved instantly, without creating a ticket or waiting for a human? The union of Automation Anywhere and Aisera creates an agentic automation powerhouse for enterprises. In episode 5 of the Agentic Edge podcast, host Micah Smith, along with co-host Kate Ressler, invites Rahul Guha, VP of IT Service Management and Employee Experience at Automation Anywhere to explore how Aisera is pushing enterprises closer to “zero service desk” and what agentic AI really means in the real world. Rahul breaks down how AI agents work, why context matters more than hype, and how organizations are moving from automation to autonomy. Tune in today!