In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Joe McLean, Group Product Manager for the AI Stream at Miro, who led the overhaul of Miro's Sidekicks and Flows AI surfaces launched at Canvas 25. Joe traces how his hobbyist love of Eurorack modular synthesizers shaped Flows, arguing that visible, patchable connections reveal what a chat box hides, and that a good tool's structure can enable rather than constrain creativity. He and Douglas dig into what he calls the "visual trace" - treating an AI agent like a new hire who needs onboarding, check-ins, and a replayable record so a whole team, not just one operator, can trust and build on its work. The conversation covers how cheap execution is reshaping product development, from teams showing up to meetings with working prototypes instead of slide decks, to Miro's internal VibeLab tool solving the "Git problem" of AI-generated design branches, to the rise of throwaway personal software built for an audience of one. They close on a candid discussion of the switching costs of chat-interface lock-in and Joe's conviction that the healthiest relationship with AI comes from building things with it, not just asking it questions.

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Taran Lent, Chief Technology Officer at Illumia, about how his organization moved from individual AI experimentation to enterprise-wide capability. Lent describes building an "enablement task force" that deliberately avoided becoming a governing bottleneck, instead creating conditions for employees to play, learn, and share what worked, before this year's push to elevate personal AI habits into shared team and company-wide skills, standards, and vetted tools. He talks about using AI as a contrarian thought partner and even having it grade his own interviewing and meeting behavior, while cautioning that transcripts alone miss tone and body language. The conversation also covers the governance side of scaling AI, including a stakeholder review process for new tools and skills, the four-to-six-week approval timeline for new vendors, and guardrails to prevent incidents like an unauthenticated internal dashboard. Lent connects this to Illumia's recent merger of Transact and CBORD, crediting a shared "humble, hungry, smart" culture for making the integration smoother, and closes by arguing that judgment, creativity, and human discernment remain the differentiators as AI adoption accelerates.