AI Operators & Builders - Real-World Deployed AI Case Studies

I launched something. After months of planning and recording, the first episode of 120 Octane is live. This is a podcast I've wanted to make for years. Most AI conversations live in the clouds. Predictions. Promises. Press releases. I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to sit down with the people actually building real systems and ask them to show us under the hood. That's the show. For Episode 1, I sit down with Fernando Degwitz alongside my co-host Alexandra Jacobo. Fernando spent 15 years building large-scale real estate developments in Latin America. MIT educated. Big projects, big teams, big capital. Then he moved to Miami and bought a TruBlue handyman franchise. And instead of running it like everyone else in the space, he applied enterprise systems thinking to it. He found his biggest bottleneck (estimating) and used AI to cut the time in half. A few things I took from the conversation: → You don't have to be technical to be an AI operator. You have to know what to fix. → The best AI buyers ask the right questions before they ever look at a tool. → Big company discipline applied to small business problems is a quiet superpower. → 50 percent time savings isn't just an efficiency gain. It's a capacity unlock. To everyone who helped get this off the ground, Alexandra for being the perfect partner in this, Jon for the editing, Fernando for trusting us with his story, our family and friends who listened to me workshop ideas for months, thank you. If you've built or deployed something with AI that actually works, I want to hear about it. Apply to be a guest at 120octane.com. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. (links in comments) This is just the beginning. Enjoy!