How to Raise Your Agent Episode 4 | Alec Coughlin, Principal at BairesDev & Host of “AI with Alec”

This week on How to Raise Your Agent, we welcome Alec Coughlin, Principal at BairesDev and host of AI with Alec, into the SmarterMarkets™ studio. David Greely sits down with Alec to discuss the challenges on the journey to integrating AI and AI agents into your business, offering practical advice for navigating that transformation.

We continue our series How to Raise Your Agent with Ryan Kurt, Founder & CEO of The AI Lab. David Greely sits down with Ryan to discuss how AI and AI agents are transforming our companies and our economy. They talk about the big questions that business leaders should be asking right now and what the companies that are successfully navigating this moment are doing differently.

This week, we present SmarterMarkets™ Encore: Ideas Worth Repeating. We’re bringing back an episode that we brought you last May with Michael DiRienzo, President & CEO at The Silver Institute.   During the conversation, David Greely and Michael discuss the outlook for silver, its role in the energy transition, and the role it can and should play in investor portfolios and in our financial system in the 21st century. Those topics are as relevant now as they were last year.   One update: last year, we discussed that at the time, silver appeared undervalued as it took 100 ounces of silver to buy 1 ounce of gold. Of course, silver prices have climbed over the past year. Now it only takes roughly 60 ounces of silver to buy 1 ounce of gold in the physically deliverable gold and silver futures markets now trading on Abaxx Exchange in Singapore.  

On our second installment of How to Raise Your Agent, we welcome Michelle Finneran Dennedy back into the SmarterMarkets™ studio. Michelle is Chief Data Strategy Officer at Abaxx Technologies. David Greely sits down with Michelle to discuss what business leaders and managers will need to do to adapt to a world where their teams include both people and agents – and how they should be thinking about integrating agents into their teams, including how to raise and govern them.

This week, we kick off our new series, How to Raise Your Agent, with Ian Forester, Head of the recently launched Abaxx Labs at Abaxx Technologies.   David Greely sits down with Ian to discuss how AI agents are changing how humans interact with computers and the internet – and why Abaxx Labs introduced its Agents++™ open source library for using digital identity and verifiable credentials for the identity and authorization infrastructure needed for working with agents.  

We present a Special Episode of SmarterMarkets™, bringing you exclusive interviews from the FT Commodities Global Summit 2026. SmarterMarkets™ returned to Lausanne, Switzerland for the 15th edition of the Financial Times Commodities Global Summit, where we caught up with summit participants on the important issues of the day. The theme for this year's summit was ‘finding the advantage in a fragmented world.’ The conversations were focused on the state of our supply chains and the increasing stakes of the ongoing conflict in Iran. We've compiled a selection of those interviews into this Special Episode of SmarterMarkets™. If you would like to listen to the full interviews, they are available on the SmarterMarkets™ Presents media portal. They’re also available on our second podcast channel, SmarterMarkets™ Presents. Our guests are: Leslie Hook – Natural Resources Editor, Financial Times Helima Croft – Managing Director and the Head of Global Commodity Strategy and MENA Research, RBC Capital Markets Robert Friedland – Executive Co-Chairman, Ivanhoe Mines & Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO, I-Pulse Brian Menell – CEO & Chairman, TechMet Gracelin Baskaran – Founding Director, Critical Minerals Security Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies Ruth Crowell – CEO, LBMA Alasdair Were – Head of Environmental Markets, Abaxx Exchange  

This week on SmarterMarkets™,  we present a special episode Subterranean Supply Chain Blues with Robert Friedland, recorded this past week at the FT Commodities Global Summit 2026 in Lausanne, Switzerland. Robert is Executive Co-Chairman of Ivanhoe Mines and Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of I-Pulse.   SmarterMarkets™ host David Greely sat down with Robert after his keynote at the FT Summit, where he shared his perspectives on the state of the world and the current role of metals, mining, and markets.  

On this week’s installment of Weathering Decarbonization, we welcome Martin Malinow, CEO of Parameter Climate, into the SmarterMarkets™ studio. David Greely sits down with Martin to discuss his work building weather and climate risk transfer markets from the days of Enron to today. They talk about where these markets are now, where they're going, and what we need to be doing to get them there.

This week, we continue our Weathering Decarbonization series by welcoming Mike Prokop back into the SmarterMarkets™ studio. Mike is Executive Consultant at the Clean Hydrogen Buyers Alliance. David Greely sits down with Mike to discuss the challenges and the progress that's been made building U.S. Gulf Coast hydrogen and ammonia markets – and what comes next.

We present a Special Episode of SmarterMarkets™, bringing you exclusive interviews from S&P Global’s CERAWeek 2026. SmarterMarkets™ was in Houston last week for CERAWeek to partner with S&P Global. We sat down with participants at the energy industry's most influential annual conference. The theme for this year's conference was Convergence and Competition: Energy, Technology, and Geopolitics – and the implications of the conflict in Iran were on everyone's mind. We’ve compiled a selection of those interviews into this Special Episode of SmarterMarkets™. If you would like to listen to the full interviews, they are available on the SmarterMarkets™ Presents media portal. They’re also available on our second podcast channel, SmarterMarkets™ Presents. Our guests are: Arjun Murti – Partner at Veriten & Publisher of "Super-Spiked" on Substack Susan Sakmar – Visiting Professor at University of Houston Law Center & Board Member of Flex LNG Jeff Currie – Chief Strategy Officer of Energy Pathways, Carlyle Radhika Krishnan – Chief Product and Technology Officer, Quorum Software Michael Greenstone – Director, Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) David Keith – Founding Faculty Director, Climate Systems Engineering Initiative, University of Chicago