The Neuron: AI Explained

This is the #1 request we get every week: how to actually use agents to save time in your business.

We’re bringing in James McAulay, founder of The Agent Accelerator, for a practical crash course on what AI agents are, how they work, and how beginners can start using them to get real work done.

James has spent the past year building at the front lines of the agent economy. After helping ElevenLabs grow from $110M to more than $300M in annual recurring revenue, he launched a fully AI-native business that reached $80K in monthly revenue by its third month and recorded its first $200K+ month by month five.

He did it without a single employee or a dollar spent on paid ads. Instead, James delegates work to multiple AI agents every day.

Through The Agent Accelerator, James now teaches founders, CEOs, and their teams how to become AI-native. The program has trained more than 400 people across 100 companies, including startups, 200-person organizations, and the UK Government. Participants report automating an average of five hours of manual work every week after four weeks.

In our session, James is going to teach:

EVERYTHING you need to build helpful, proactive agents in Claude Cowork/Code

He'll walk through the following concepts:
• Quick primer on agent foundations: how do we move from prompting a chatbot to delegating Agentic work
• Starting your second brain: the key files that make the biggest difference
• Tips & tricks for optimizing Claude's behavior with CLAUDE.md
• Skills
- where to find good ones
- how to create great ones
• And his 4-level framework for proactive agents that work without being prompted in Cowork and Code

Format will be a blend of James teaching concepts, screensharing, and showing demos of his own setup.

Whether you have experimented with a few AI tools or have no idea where to begin, this session will help you understand what agents can realistically do and how to start using them.

Learn more about James and The Agent Accelerator:https://agentaccelerator.ai/

What happens when the most capable AI lives in the cloud, but the work you want it to do is too private, expensive, or repetitive to send there every time?

Dr. Olena Zhu, Head of AI Solutions & Ecosystem for Intel’s Client Computing Group, joins Corey Noles and Grant Harvey to explain Intel’s vision for hybrid AI: systems that route each task to the right place, whether that is a local model on a PC, a larger model on an edge server, or a frontier model in the cloud.

The conversation explores why cloud-only AI may be difficult to scale, how an orchestration layer decides where work should run, and how Intel’s new SuperClaw beta combines local and remote intelligence. Dr. Zhu also explains how hybrid agents could conduct deep research without exposing confidential data, why routing and auditability matter when agents fail, and why the next wave of useful AI may come from specialized agents built for specific jobs.

Listen for a practical look at the tradeoffs among capability, privacy, cost, reliability, and control, and what it could mean when powerful AI agents begin running partly on the computers we already own.

Try Intel SuperClaw: https://aibuilder.intel.com/#/superclaw
Intel AI Builder: https://aibuilder.intel.com/
Intel SuperClaw GitHub: https://github.com/intel/intel-ai-builder/tree/main/superclaw
Intel’s SuperClaw overview: https://newsroom.intel.com/opinion/solving-the-agentic-ai-trilemma-cost-scale-and-data-security

Subscribe to The Neuron for daily AI news and analysis built for humans: https://www.theneurondaily.com/

Sponsored by Nerdio: Get a demo of Nerdio Manager for Enterprise today:

Update! The definitive follow-along walkthrough guide is ready! Check it out here: https://theneuron.ai/explainer-articles/how-to-publish-an-ai-built-iphone-app-to-the-app-store/

Building an app with AI is getting easier. Getting it through Apple's doors is still a different adventure.

Join Corey Noles and Grant Harvey live on Thursday, July 30 at [10AM PT / 12PM CT / 1PM ET] as they walk through what it actually takes to move an AI-built app from a working prototype into TestFlight and the Apple App Store.

In this livestream, we'll cover:
📱 Setting up App Store Connect
🧪 Preparing your app for TestFlight
📝 Creating your App Store listing
🖼️ Making screenshots and store assets
🔒 Answering Apple's privacy questions
🚀 Uploading and submitting your build
✅ Navigating Apple's review process
⚠️ The mistakes, delays, and confusing steps we ran into
💡 What we'd do differently next time

Whether you're using AI coding tools, no-code platforms, or building from scratch, this beginner-friendly walkthrough will help you get your app across the finish line.

💬 Bring your questions and click Notify Me so YouTube reminds you when we go live.

🔔 Subscribe to The Neuron for practical AI news, tools, tutorials, and conversations that help you understand what matters and what to do with it: https://www.youtube.com/@theneuronai?sub_confirmation=1

📰 Read The Neuron Daily:https://www.theneurondaily.com/

AI can now help almost anyone turn an idea into a working prototype. But what happens when that vibe-coded experiment needs to become secure, reliable software that real customers can trust—and pay for?

Corey Noles and Grant Harvey speak with Deap Ubhi, Global Director of Technology for Startups at AWS, about AWS Startup Advisor, an AI-powered builder assistant designed to bring AWS architecture, security, cost, deployment, and scaling guidance directly into a founder’s workflow.

Deap explains why generative AI has compressed startup iteration cycles from months into days or hours, how nontechnical founders can test ideas before making major technical investments, and why human judgment, product taste, and focus matter even more when building becomes dramatically easier. The conversation also explores the crucial leap from proof of concept to production, including the infrastructure, authentication, resilience, observability, and security decisions that first-time builders may not know to ask about.

Listen to hear how Startup Advisor works inside tools including Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, VS Code, and Kiro—and why the next generation of founders may start with an AI coding agent and a virtual AWS solutions architect on their shoulder.

For more practical conversations about how AI is changing work, business, and technology, subscribe to The Neuron and The Neuron: AI Explained.
https://www.theneurondaily.com/

Explore AWS Startup Advisor:https://aws.amazon.com/aws-startups/advisor/

Learn more about the launch:https://aws.amazon.com/aws-startups/from-idea-to-revenue-at-startup-speed-with-ai/

The Neuron Academy helps professionals build practical AI skills they can use right away, with lessons on prompting, workflows, and real workplace use cases. Check out https://theneuronacademy.com/ today!

Join Grant Harvey and Corey Noles live on Thursday, July 23, for a show-and-tell featuring the apps, games, extensions, and delightfully specific tools they’ve built with AI, plus tips to help you build your own without burning through as many tokens.

Corey will demo:
☕ Bean Counter, which tracks how many cups of coffee he has saved
🗂️ Tab Crusher, a Chrome extension for conquering tab overload
✍️ Threadline, his editorial operating system for writers
🎮 Circle Back, a gamified task-management app
🍽️ On Deck, which answers Corey’s eternal question: What should I eat next?

Getting AI to choose his next meal is Corey’s personal AGI benchmark. Pizza arriving through a voice command remains the final boss.

Grant will show:
🌊 FlowState, a focused writing app
🎛️ Orchestrator, a local command center for managing AI chats through APIs
🎬 LTX CineScript, a system that turns a script into an edited film
🐿️ Sqwirl World, a RuneScape-style mini MMO starring squirrels
🧪 Plus other experiments, prototypes, and tools built to solve very specific problems

They’ll explain what each project does, how it was made, how they got it live through trial and error, and what they’ve learned over the past year and a half as non-technical builders creating software with AI.

Building your own apps is one of the best ways to learn what AI can actually do. Your idea may not become the next breakout product, but it can save you time, solve a persistent headache, and be a lot of fun to create.

Whether you want to build an internal tool, automate an annoying task, or finally create the weird app living in your head, this session will show you what is possible.