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Just Now Possible

Just Now Possible

Written by: Teresa Torres
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 How AI products come to life—straight from the builders themselves. In each episode, we dive deep into how teams spotted a customer problem, experimented with AI, prototyped solutions, and shipped real features. We dig into everything from workflows and agents to RAG and evaluation strategies, and explore how their products keep evolving. If you’re building with AI, these are the stories for you.All Rights Reserved | Product Talk Economics Leadership Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • Building a Career Co-pilot for Disadvantaged Students: How Zero Gravity Bridges Knowing and Doing

    Building a Career Co-pilot for Disadvantaged Students: How Zero Gravity Bridges Knowing and Doing
    Jan 8 2026
    How do you help disadvantaged students take action on opportunities they don't even know exist? In this episode of _Just Now Possible_, Teresa Torres talks with Elliot Little (Product Manager) and Dan St. Paul (Software Engineer) from Zero Gravity, a UK-based platform that helps state school students access elite career opportunities through mentoring, community, and learning pathways. They've built an AI career co-pilot that acts as an orchestrator—not an automation tool—bridging the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. You'll hear how they: - Started with grand visions of AI mentors and synthetic avatars, then scaled back to something simpler and more effective - Discovered that hiding the "LLM magic" backfired—students needed to feel the personalization - Built context management strategies to handle multi-month student journeys without blowing up token counts - Approached safeguarding as a first-class concern when building AI for 16-year-olds - Used application logic rather than complex RAG architectures to manage tool availability and context freshness It's a practical look at building AI products that augment human relationships rather than replace them—from a team navigating the unique challenges of educational technology.
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • Automating the Full Customer Support Iceberg: How Gradient Labs Built a Multi-Agent Platform

    Automating the Full Customer Support Iceberg: How Gradient Labs Built a Multi-Agent Platform
    Dec 18 2025
    What happens when a customer reports a stolen credit card? The frontline answer is simple—freeze it. But underneath lies a cascade of follow-ups: dispute filings, fraud investigations, merchant communications, and proactive outreach to gather more details. Most AI support tools handle only the tip of the iceberg. In this episode, Teresa Torres talks with Jack Taylor (Product Engineer) and Ibrahim Faruqi (AI Engineer) from Gradient Labs, an AI-native startup building agents that automate the full scope of customer support in fintech. They share how they've architected a platform with three coordinating agents—inbound, back office, and outbound—all built on a shared foundation of natural language procedures, modular skills, and configurable guardrails. You'll hear how they: - Let non-technical subject matter experts define agent behavior through natural language procedures—no coding required - Architected a state machine orchestrator that manages turns, triggers, and skill selection across long-running conversations - Built guardrails as binary classifiers with eval pipelines, tuning for high recall on critical regulatory checks - Designed an auto-eval system that samples conversations for human review to catch edge cases and build labeled datasets It's a detailed look at how one startup is moving beyond simple Q&A bots to agents that can actually take action, coordinate across workflows, and handle the messy reality of customer support.
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Building Mowie: How a Concierge Service Became an AI Marketing Platform

    Building Mowie: How a Concierge Service Became an AI Marketing Platform
    Dec 11 2025
    What if your small business could have a full marketing team—automated content calendars, customer segmentation, and channel-specific posts—without the headcount? In this episode of Just Now Possible, Teresa Torres talks with Chris O'Connor (CEO) and Jessica Valenzuela (Co-Founder) of Mowie, an AI marketing platform built for small and medium-sized businesses in restaurants, retail, and e-commerce. Chris and Jessica share how their hands-on experience managing marketing for overwhelmed business owners at a previous company led them to build Mowie—first as a concierge service, then as a fully automated AI product. They walk through their document hierarchy approach: how Mowie crawls the web to build a "dossier" about each business, infers customer segments and marketing pillars, and generates quarterly content calendars with channel-specific posts. You'll hear about the technical challenges of structuring unstructured data, the evolution from rigid schemas to loosely structured markdown, and how they use customer feedback—from calendar approvals to regeneration requests—as their primary evaluation signal. Whether you're building AI products that synthesize messy real-world data or figuring out how to keep humans in the loop without overwhelming them, this conversation offers practical lessons from two founders who built their product by doing the work first.
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    1 hr and 8 mins
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