Jul 13, 2026 · 18 min · 9 segments
What does it actually take to launch AI successfully inside a business? In this episode of The AI Guys Podcast, Lee Dickson and Rich Swier break down the four essential roles every company needs to…
Rich SwierHost
Lee DixonHost
But You're going to have the functional expert, basically the person that you feel like knows the business that can help kind of guide the path that everything's going to go down.
So this is going to be someone that actually knows the tech, understands the stack that you guys are in.
If you're not a SaaS or software type company, you're still going to have someone there that needs to be able to understand how things get plugged in.
You're gonna have the agent user, which essentially is someone who's gonna be working with the agent.
Think of that operational portion, someone that's gonna be doing the human user feedback and the training.
And then you've got an agent integration specialist, basically the person that connects all of those systems together.
Not to say that you might not put, you know, some areas out there, you know, weigh them a little bit differently, but these are the core four that we feel like every business should be able to identify.
Okay, Lee handles this portion, Rich handles this portion, because if you don't have that, you're going to kind of be, you know, driving without a map.
Yeah, I mean, I think part of the challenge that companies have, whether they have internal resources or they have to leverage vendors, is to really understand what that team makeup looks like.
Now, there are cases, obviously, for smaller companies or even for companies that don't have a high level of IT infrastructure.
But, you know, we can start with the first one, which is probably the most critical one.
but it's the easiest one to find, right? It's the functional expert, right? The domain expert for that specific use case.
So for example, if you're going to be doing a support agent, you want to find the person who really understands your support infrastructure, your support team, you know, that's the go-to person, the person that trains the newest support hires and so forth, right? And if it's a sales, then it's the sales manager or the sales or best salesperson, whatever, whoever that you denote as the functional expert.
And when you say functional expert, it doesn't just mean understanding your business processes, your standard operating procedures, the role that it is that they take on.
But it's also kind of understanding kind of the nuance of how it interacts with your systems, right? Your systems record, your CRMs.
They have to have an understanding of what the workflows look like as they kind of trickle in and touch other departments, right? So when you do create a sales proposal, You know, what is the process of doing that? And then how does it get handed off, for example, to billing? Or if you are going to basically follow up on a lead, what's the messaging that marketing is kind of pushing on you to kind of close or understand how to push a demo? You know, all these things that come into play, the interoperable components of the business.
They're the ones that are probably going to curate and or create your instructional documents that go into your vector store, right? The training documents that ultimately are going to drive the brain of the AI.
And that's going to range from things like You know, here are the common FAQs or here's all the content that we have, you know, from messages that we send out to successful opportunities that we felt that, you know, worked well from a messaging perspective.
You know, all these elements that kind of live in our minds and or live in documents, you know, spread across SharePoint or wherever it might be.
that have to come together and it's a lot harder than people think, but that to assign to that functional expert, the ability to do what they need to do to get that information into the AI agent is like number one, right? That, and everybody kind of looks at their business differently.
But You're going to have the functional expert, basically the person that you feel like knows the business that can help kind of guide the path that everything's going to go down.
So this is going to be someone that actually knows the tech, understands the stack that you guys are in.
If you're not a SaaS or software type company, you're still going to have someone there that needs to be able to understand how things get plugged in.
You're gonna have the agent user, which essentially is someone who's gonna be working with the agent.
Think of that operational portion, someone that's gonna be doing the human user feedback and the training.
And then you've got an agent integration specialist, basically the person that connects all of those systems together.
Not to say that you might not put, you know, some areas out there, you know, weigh them a little bit differently, but these are the core four that we feel like every business should be able to identify.
Okay, Lee handles this portion, Rich handles this portion, because if you don't have that, you're going to kind of be, you know, driving without a map.
Yeah, I mean, I think part of the challenge that companies have, whether they have internal resources or they have to leverage vendors, is to really understand what that team makeup looks like.
Now, there are cases, obviously, for smaller companies or even for companies that don't have a high level of IT infrastructure.
But, you know, we can start with the first one, which is probably the most critical one.
but it's the easiest one to find, right? It's the functional expert, right? The domain expert for that specific use case.
So for example, if you're going to be doing a support agent, you want to find the person who really understands your support infrastructure, your support team, you know, that's the go-to person, the person that trains the newest support hires and so forth, right? And if it's a sales, then it's the sales manager or the sales or best salesperson, whatever, whoever that you denote as the functional expert.
And when you say functional expert, it doesn't just mean understanding your business processes, your standard operating procedures, the role that it is that they take on.
But it's also kind of understanding kind of the nuance of how it interacts with your systems, right? Your systems record, your CRMs.
They have to have an understanding of what the workflows look like as they kind of trickle in and touch other departments, right? So when you do create a sales proposal, You know, what is the process of doing that? And then how does it get handed off, for example, to billing? Or if you are going to basically follow up on a lead, what's the messaging that marketing is kind of pushing on you to kind of close or understand how to push a demo? You know, all these things that come into play, the interoperable components of the business.
They're the ones that are probably going to curate and or create your instructional documents that go into your vector store, right? The training documents that ultimately are going to drive the brain of the AI.
And that's going to range from things like You know, here are the common FAQs or here's all the content that we have, you know, from messages that we send out to successful opportunities that we felt that, you know, worked well from a messaging perspective.
You know, all these elements that kind of live in our minds and or live in documents, you know, spread across SharePoint or wherever it might be.
that have to come together and it's a lot harder than people think, but that to assign to that functional expert, the ability to do what they need to do to get that information into the AI agent is like number one, right? That, and everybody kind of looks at their business differently.
Every episode on Radar is fully transcribed, speaker-labeled, and rich with metadata. Here is a taste of this one. Try Radar for free to see the rest.
3 of 4
Why AI Projects Fail
Discover why 85% of AI efforts flop
No-Code Agent Building
Building enterprise agents without writing a line
Role of the Power User
Meet the power user stress testing everything
+1 more clip · 4 min 15 sec of audio in all
7 of 17
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
All 4 clips — the highlight moments, each cut as its own audio, with a title and a speaker
All 9 segments — the transcript broken into labeled sections, every ad read marked
All 17 topics — jump to every other episode discussing the same subject
Every related episode — other shows Radar links to this one
No account is needed to search Radar.
