Two companies, one receipt, verified on your machine. Plus every replay from the Lunch and Learn series and three slide decks, no forms, no gates.
First, an apology. This email was supposed to land last week and didn't. The Lunch and Learn series wrapped, the replays needed editing, the events site needed finishing, and the newsletter was the thing that slipped. So this one is a catch-up, and it's a full one.
Here's the short version. Four Lunch and Learns ran, more than 270 of you registered, and all four recordings are now on YouTube, along with the slides from my sessions. Summer Pricing for All Things Open ends today, and Todd set up an extra 25% off for this community. Next Tuesday we're hosting the webinar I'm most excited about this year, and it's free. And Build an Agent Day Atlanta is down to its last early-bird seats.
I've been through enough platform shifts to know the pattern. We built the web, then bolted on SSL. We did DevOps, then realized we needed DevSecOps. Now everyone's shipping agents, and the question "can you prove what it did?" is getting the same shrug security got in 1998. That's next Tuesday's webinar, and it's further down. But if you do one thing with this email today, grab your All Things Open ticket with 25% off before Summer Pricing ends tomorrow.
50+ AI Workshops and Sessions at All Things Open
Summer Pricing ends tommorrow, Friday, September 18. All Things AI members get an extra 25% off.
More than 50 AI-specific workshops and sessions are on the schedule at All Things Open, Monday, October 19 and Tuesday, October 20 in downtown Raleigh. That's close to a full AI conference inside the Southeast's biggest open source event.
Monday is the hands-on day. I'm teaching an extended workshop on AI Agents and Vibe Coding, and John Willis of AI CIO is running AI for DevSecOps. There are also two-hour sessions on building and hardening agents with open source tools, a voice agent bootcamp, and All Things Claude. Tuesday adds 40-plus AI sessions across the conference tracks.
Today is the last day for Summer Pricing, so register now to save. And our co-founder Todd Lewis set up something for this community: an additional 25% off through the link below. Click it, hit the orange "Get Tickets" button, pick your ticket, and the discount is already applied.
Want to look first? See the AI session summary.
Prove What Your Agent Did
Tuesday, September 22 | 12:00 PM ET | Online, 30 minutes, demo first
Your AI agent did something. Now prove it to someone who doesn't work for you.
Most agent governance stops at "here are our logs." That satisfies your own team. It does not satisfy a customer, a partner, or a regulator. They want evidence they can check themselves, with tools they can read.
That's what makes this an open source story. Imran Siddique, Chief Product Officer at OPAQUE Systems, created the Agent Governance Toolkit, an MIT-licensed policy and sandboxing layer for AI agents that Microsoft now maintains on GitHub. He also founded agentrust-io, the open home of the TRACE attestation spec, cMCP, and the Agent Manifest. Steven Mih, founder and CEO of Action State, runs a free public witness service that any agent log can use.
Together they'll show the TRACE Registry: a public, append-only record of agent evidence with signed checkpoints and an open source verifier. On September 7, the registry sent a 287-byte checkpoint to an independent witness and got back a 264-byte receipt that verifies from published bytes, with no network calls to either company. They'll run that verification live, walk through what the receipt proves and what it doesn't, and take your questions. Everything they show, you can clone and run yourself.
I'm hosting, and I'll be pushing both of them on whether this time is actually different. Thirty minutes, demo first, then your questions.
Prefer Meetup or LinkedIn? RSVP on All Things AI (Live) or the LinkedIn event.
Every Replay From the Lunch and Learn Series, Plus the Decks
The series is done, and it was the best-attended thing we've run outside the conference. Don Shin of CrossComm drew the biggest crowd with Tokenomics 101, Build Skills taught a room full of you how to write your first skill, and Vibe Coding got its promised do-over after the audio gremlins cut round one short. All four recordings are up, and the decks from my sessions are free to grab.
Replays on YouTube
🎥 Tokenomics 101: Why Your AI Bill Keeps Climbing — Don Shin on why turn 20 of a chat costs more than turn 2, the caching lever most people miss, and when to stop asking an LLM and just write code.
🎥 Vibe Coding for Business Users — From a plain-English description to a working web app you own outright, no builder fees, no lock-in.
🎥 Teach Your AI Agents How You Work — What a skill is, how to write your first one, and how the same file works across the AI tools you already use.
🎥 Vibe Coding, Take Two: Drop the Vibes, Ship Production Apps — The software development lifecycle the way a business owner should hear it: a checklist for keeping AI-built apps from becoming AI-built messes.
Slides
📄 Build Skills: Teach Your AI Agents How You Work (PDF) — The deck from the September 8 session.
📄 Vibe Coding, Take Two (slides) — The deck from the September 15 session.
📄 How Small IT Consulting Firms Can Build and Sell AI Services to Enterprise Customers (PDF) — My September 9 talk at the ITServe Alliance Raleigh chapter.
Everything lives in one Google Drive folder if you'd rather grab it all at once.
Get Your First Real Agent Working in Atlanta
If the vendors are going to sell you an AI coworker, you should know how to hire one. That's the point of Build an Agent Day, the one-day workshop that put 116 builders in a room in Charlotte this summer, and it lands at Atlanta Tech Village in Buckhead on Monday, November 16.
Eight hours, three agent stacks, one working agent you take home. You'll scope a job an agent can actually finish, then build: an autonomous research agent in Manus, a hands-on session with ChatGPT on your own data, and a Claude Cowork agent customized for a task from your actual job. You leave with an implementation plan, not a demo.
Early-bird is $297 for the first 100 registrants ($397 after), and as of this writing there are 43 early-bird seats left. Most employers reimburse it under professional development. Full refunds until the registration deadline, and tickets are transferable.
📬 Since Your Last Email: The AI Enterprise
If you're newer here, All Things AI is part of The AIE Network, our family of AI publications read by more than 250,000 business professionals. The flagship is The AI Enterprise, four free editions a week on putting AI to work in your business.
This week: Touches vs. Habits. Half of America has used AI. Fifteen percent actually works with it. The whole week was about closing that gap.
AI Tangle — Half of America Uses AI. Fifteen Percent Actually Works With It. — The data on what companies bought versus what their people use.
AI Lessons — How to Make AI a Habit for One Task — Daily users got there by automating one recurring task, not by willpower.
AI Advantage — Stop Opening a New Tab — Why AI inside the tools you already use beats a standalone app for building the habit.
AI Deep Dive — The Adoption Number Is a Lie of Averages — What the adoption stats hide, and the number you should be tracking instead.
Last week: The Week AI Got Hired. OpenAI, xAI, and Nvidia spent a week selling labor instead of software. Start with The Week AI Got Hired and then How to Get an Agent to Finish the Job.
🎟️ Upcoming Events
Tuesday, September 22 — Online — Prove What Your Agent Did — Free 30-minute webinar at 12:00 PM ET with Imran Siddique of OPAQUE Systems and Steven Mih of Action State; register on WebinarJam.
Monday, October 19 – Tuesday, October 20 — All Things Open RTP — All Things Open 2026 — Year 14 of the Southeast's biggest open source conference at the Raleigh Convention Center, with 150+ sessions, 50+ of them on AI; 25% off for this community.
Monday, November 16 — Build an Agent Day — Build an Agent Day Atlanta — Eight hours, three stacks, one working agent at Atlanta Tech Village; early-bird $297 for the first 100 registrants.
AI is moving fast. We're here to make sure no one gets left behind. Thank you for being part of a community that learns together and builds responsibly.
Best Regards,
Mark & Todd
