The Michael Tinglin: The Skeptic in the Room Building the Room

Michael Tinglin is Senior Director of Product Design and Research at Upbound Group, the parent company of Rent-A-Center and Acima. He came up designing high-stakes enterprise and consumer experiences, the HomePath redesign at Fannie Mae, the Retail Price Manager north star at 7-Eleven, and now he's leading design for leasing, rental, and fintech at scale. He's also actively building in AI, TokenWise for token savings and PDF-to-markdown in Claude, plus custom GPTs for product managers and design teams. And still, his LinkedIn feed the last month is wall-to-wall skepticism, OpenAI agents off the rails, Amazon's internal AI cost problem, workplace AI slop, chat data leaks, all of it. This conversation lives in that tension. We cover a lot. Whether AI is in a bubble and what pops it. Augmentation versus replacement, and the uncomfortable idea that the people building this technology might be the first ones it replaces. Organizational strategy for AI adoption inside real enterprises. The infrastructure and resource demands nobody wants to talk about. The AGI question and whether it's coming or getting sold. The role of quantum in what's next. First-party data as the actual moat. The trust problem baked into every AI product shipping today. If you're building AI products, buying AI products, or trying to figure out what's real, this one's for you. Follow the show, drop a comment with where you land on the bubble question, and share with a skeptic. Chapters are in the description. Timestamps below. Want me to also draft the LinkedIn teaser post with the company tags and five hashtags? That's usually the next step in your workflow.