Stop Overthinking, Start Building: Why Nobody Fails at Agent Building in This AI Workshop

When you ask members of the Agent.ai community who helped them first believe they could build, one name comes up again and again: Mike Redbord. Known affectionately as the “Human Helper,” Mike has taught thousands of people to build their first AI agents through Agent.ai’s workshops. His sessions are part classroom, part creative jam session, part community experiment, and they have become a proving ground for what's possible when ordinary people take their first step into agent building.

What makes Mike’s story especially compelling is not only his ability to guide others, but his perspective. Before joining Agent.ai, Mike spent years scaling SaaS businesses, leading HubSpot’s global customer success team through $500M ARR and building Service Hub into one of HubSpot’s fastest growing products. He understands what it takes to empower people at scale. Today, he applies those same lessons to a new frontier: helping people gain the confidence to build with AI.

Fear Is the First Barrier

When people walk into one of Mike’s workshops, they often arrive with a mix of curiosity and hesitation. AI feels exciting but intimidating. Is their idea too small? Too silly? Will their boss think it is not “serious” enough?

“There’s a lot of self-doubt,” he explains. “It’s like doing anything new ... trying to drive a car for the first time. Everything feels hard and scary. But as soon as people experience that first success, the fear melts away.”

For Mike, the magic happens when people realize they don't need to be engineers or technical experts to build something real. The hardest part is not the code, it's the ideation. Narrowing in on a small, repeatable task and turning it into an agent is what unlocks progress. Once participants experience that “aha moment,” the path forward suddenly looks much clearer.

Why Building Together Works

Here's the remarkable part: In all of Mike’s workshops, with thousands of participants over the past year, not a single group has failed to build something in an hour. The secret, Mike believes, is co-learning.

When people build together, something shifts. Ideas come faster. The work feels less intimidating. And when groups share their finished agents at the end of a session, the act of showing their peers what they have created delivers powerful validation.

“If you walk into a workshop with trepidation and two hours later you're showing off your agent in front of your peers, that’s incredibly validating,” Mike says. “It’s not just about the software. It’s about the human factors, creating safe spaces, celebrating progress, and making people feel confident.”

That sense of community is not simply a feel-good bonus. It's the mechanism that makes learning stick. Participants cement new skills and walk away more likely to apply them again in a higher-stakes environment.

The Joy of Play

One of the most surprising lessons Mike has learned is that some of the most valuable workshop agents are not professional tools at all. They're playful, personal, sometimes quirky.

From ukulele teachers to golf swing coaches to restaurant evaluators for specific diets, these agents might not revolutionize a company, but they matter deeply to the people who built them. In Mike’s view, that's exactly the point:

“Through the act of play, people unlock creativity, overcome their fear of failure, and discover what's possible when they start experimenting with AI.”

Play lowers the stakes. It turns building into exploration. Once people have experienced the joy of making something that matters to them personally, they are more prepared to imagine how agents could make a difference in their work.

Iteration Beats Perfection

If there's one mantra Mike returns to again and again, it's this: Stop overthinking and start building.

In workshops, he often sees groups spin in circles debating the “perfect” feature set. That is when he steps in with a reminder: “Just build the very first thing and respond to it.”

More often than not, people are surprised by how much the first version can already do. Sometimes GPT handles steps they assumed they would need to wire up manually. Sometimes unexpected features emerge out of the box. The lesson is clear: Iteration is more powerful than chasing perfection.

“People talk a lot about the ways AI surprises you in bad ways,” Mike notes, “but we see much more often it surprises people in good ways.”

From Curiosity to Imperative

Mike’s perspective is not limited to the workshop room. He has also seen the broader cultural shift around AI firsthand.

At INBOUND 2024, he remembers chasing people down with Agent.ai t-shirts just to spark conversations. Many attendees were curious about AI but hesitant to try. Fast forward to INBOUND 2025 in San Francisco, and the picture was completely different.

“That was an AI conference,” Mike recalls. “Everybody now knows this is the way. They're on board. The question is not ‘why AI?’ anymore, it's ‘how do I do this?’”

For builders, that shift means opportunity. The hunger for practical solutions has never been greater, and the need for hands-on learning has never been more urgent. Workshops are no longer a novelty. They're becoming a critical on-ramp for people who want to participate in the next wave of technology.

Looking Ahead

So, where does Mike see agent building going next? He believes the future lies in templates and customization. Just as website builders once relied on themes they could tweak, Mike predicts a wave of “off-the-shelf” agents designed for specific use cases. Builders will not always start from scratch. Instead, they will edit, adapt, and personalize agents to fit their unique needs.

That democratization will create even more opportunities for new builders to join the movement. “Nobody fails in our workshops,” Mike says. “And that tells me there is no class of people who cannot do this. With the right mindset and the right community, everybody can build.”

Join the Workshop

The future of AI will not be built in isolation. It will be built together, through community and co-learning. If you've been curious about agents but hesitant to start, there's no better way to experience that first breakthrough than by joining a workshop. By the end, you'll go from idea to working agent, and you will do it alongside peers who are on the same journey.