Agents on Main Street

Every small business owner is drowning in answers. Your accounting software has them, your project management tools have them, and now AI can produce ten more before you finish typing. But answers were never the problem. The real challenge is knowing which questions to ask. Agents on Main Street is a practical show about putting AI to work in real small businesses: the shops, contractors, and service companies on Main Street, not the Fortune 500. Hosts David Walker and Mitchell Turner bring two very different backgrounds. David is a residential home builder in Western North Carolina with a career spanning farming, consulting, and corporate intelligence work. Mitchell is a 25-year tech veteran who lost his job to AI and now helps people build with it. Each episode starts with a real business problem and walks through how they actually solved it: what worked, what failed, and what they'd do differently. Topics include standard operating procedures, meeting and call recording, automated daily briefings, AI agents and guardrails, and the human side of change, including the question of whether you should be afraid. No hype, no jargon for its own sake, and no AI company paying them to say any of it. Just honest, tested lessons for owners who want to make more by losing less. Answers are everywhere. We're here for the questions.

Episodes

Latest Episodes

Oct 9, 2026

55 min

In the first episode, David Walker and Mitchell Turner introduce themselves and explain how a home builder and a burned-out software engineer ended up building an AI system for a small business together.
David describes his first attempt with AI, a marketing-focused consultant that didn't deliver. Mitchell shares how AI cost him his tech job, then brought him closer to people than ever. Together they explain why they started with standard operating procedures built from blameless employee interviews, and why voice became the most important tool in their stack.
Then comes the turning point: the February 7th problem. Everyone in a recorded meeting heard that a job site would reopen on February 7th, yet when the day arrived, almost no one had been scheduled. That failure led to the "daily kickoff," an AI-generated briefing for every active job. The real breakthrough came when the team stopped asking AI to "make something" and gave it the 50+ questions their employees actually needed answered every day.
They also take on the first "Should I Be Afraid?" segment: running autonomous AI agents, why guardrails matter, why AI mistakes deserve the same perspective as human ones, and what it means to separate your identity from your job title.
Next week: the AI Constitution. Download the free template at margentics.com/constitution.

Oct 9, 2026

55 min