Month 9 at the AI Lab: Voice Agents with Pure AI
Notes from the September 24th meetup. Anmar Mahmod of Pure AI took us inside a Voice AI system handling calls for 44+ retail locations across the Midwest, then built a working voice agent live. Plus, a look ahead to October's deep dive into AI 3D engineering.
AI Builders Meetup: AI Voice Agents
September 24th was about the quiet shift happening in Voice AI: the move from demo to infrastructure. Anmar Mahmod of Pure AI led the night, and instead of hand-waving at "AI phone calls," he broke down what's actually under the hood.
How a Voice Agent Actually Works
Anmar walked the room through the full stack: speech recognition on the way in, the language model in the middle doing the reasoning, the integrations that let the agent actually do something, and the real-time response budget, which is the part that makes or breaks the experience. Latency isn't a detail here. If the pause is too long, the illusion breaks and the caller hangs up.
Production, Not a Prototype
The case study was the thing that landed. Anmar showed a Voice AI system running inside an organization that supports 44+ retail locations across the Midwest: how it fields business requests, connects to the tools those locations already run on, and stays reliable under real call volume. That's a different conversation than a weekend demo: it has to work on the hundredth call as well as the first.
Building One Live
To close, Anmar built a small, functional voice agent live, from concept to working agent, so the room could watch the pieces come together instead of taking his word for it. Plenty of folks followed along on their laptops.
Anmar is an AI automation builder and the founder of Pure AI, a St. Louis-based shop building custom AI systems for businesses. He also runs an AI automation school and community, teaching people to design, build, and deploy these systems themselves.
As always, we opened with AI news and left room for people to stand up and share a quick win or tool that's saving them time.
News at the Lab: Golden Pear Funding Takes Over
This month the lab got a full takeover. Golden Pear Funding, a financial services company with a remote workforce, brought the team together in person for a week of heads-down work. Eleven people flew in from as far as California and Boston to spend the week building internal webapps for a big tech migration project.
The space fit everyone great: one big room to figure things out in, good coffee, and the garage door open. There's something a remote team can only get from being physically together, and the lab turned out to be exactly the kind of room for it.
Coming Up: From Idea to 3D Prototype
On October 22nd we're going deep on AI 3D engineering. Local tech entrepreneur and investor Michael McNeil joins us to show off Autonomyware, a new AI 3D engineering product, and walk us from an idea all the way to a near market-ready 3D prototype, likely with live demos. If the room wants to, we'll go very deep into the CAD engineering topic.
With Michael's background setting up data centers and managing software teams, expect to veer into AI self-hosting, hardware tinkering, and software development too. Come with questions.