Inside Inbound 2025 with Matthew Stein: AI Agent Buzz and Practical Builder Takeaways - Ep 17

Learn more and connect with Matthew Stein:

• Matthew’s LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/steinmatthew/ 
• Matthew’s Agent AI Profile - https://agent.ai/human/Chefmattrock

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*We wanted to take advantage of the recent momentum of the Inbound 2025 conference and are putting together a few episodes that dive into those insights with conversations from select insiders. Matthew here is the first of those conversations.

At Inbound 2025, one thing was undeniable: AI agents were everywhere.

As Matthew Stein, executive producer of Prompted Builder Stories and part of the Agent.ai team, put it:

“AI is definitely front and center stage, everywhere you look.”

This year’s conference wasn’t just about buzzwords. It was about building. The Agent.ai booth gave attendees space to post ideas on a Bright Ideas Board and then walk over to the Builder Support Station, where Matthew and the team sat down with screens open and started turning those ideas into prototypes — often in under an hour.

What stood out wasn’t just how much attention AI agents drew, but how engaged people were in translating curiosity into action. Some attendees came with vague notions (“can AI help my sales team?”), while others brought specific, costly problems. In both cases, builders could help define the problem and spin up working solutions.

As Matthew shared:

“Sometimes they’re incredibly vague… Other people came in with an extremely discreet idea… and we solved some of those building pretty cool prototypes in, you know, under an hour.”

The energy was hands-on, collaborative, and optimistic. The takeaway? Builders aren’t just theorizing about agents anymore — they’re making them real.

Across dozens of conversations, Matthew noticed clear patterns:

• Ops leads the way. Beyond sales and marketing, operations teams brought some of the most compelling use cases — where agents can eliminate repetitive workflows and unlock scale.
• Clear problem definitions win. Good agent ideas start with specific, bounded problems. Bad ones are fuzzy (“find my spiritual center”). The best? Precise tasks with measurable outcomes.
• The payoff is real. Time saved, money saved, errors reduced — those were the consistent benefits.

One standout story came from a translation company that still hired interns to manually count words in non-Latin scripts so they could price projects:

“That’s a perfect idea of something that helps save money, saves time, and reduces a bunch of grunt work.”

Within 45 minutes, the team had a prototype that handled Arabic and Greek documents with 95% accuracy — freeing interns from mind-numbing work and helping the company scale faster.

Matthew boiled it down simply:

“Basically we think of an agent as something that takes input, does a multi-step process that leverages tools, … and then returns output to you.”

And the litmus test for value?

“They need to solve painful problems, save meaningful time and money, have a thoughtful user experience, and create genuine value.”

Inbound 2025 showed how quickly builders are moving from ideas to working prototypes. And Matthew sees a clear trajectory:

“You’re going to see people jumping between applications less and less as these agents do a better job of stitching together the different places where you work.”

The message to builders is clear: start with well-defined problems, lean on the community, and build agents that deliver measurable impact.

Or in Matthew’s own words:

“I want to see what people are gonna go build. … Build things that you think will genuinely help people and share them.”