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385 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
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412: Rahul Vohra, Head of Superhuman Mail: From Onboarding Users by Hand to an AI-Native Productivity Suite
2 november 2026 · 51 min
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Rahul Vohra is Head of Superhuman Mail and the founder of the email app formerly known as Superhuman, which he led as CEO until its 2025 acquisition by Grammarly. Grammarly has since taken the Superhuman name, and the combined company is building an AI-native productivity suite across Superhuman Mail, Grammarly, Coda, and Superhuman Go to transform enterprise workflows across millions of users and over 50,000 organizations.
A computer scientist and serial entrepreneur, Rahul studied at Cambridge University before launching Rapportive, the first Gmail plug-in to scale to millions of users, which he sold to LinkedIn in 2012. He is also a prominent angel investor whose fund has invested $50 million in more than 120 companies, including Supabase, Mercury, Writer, Placer.ai, and ClassDojo.
In this episode, Rahul draws on more than a decade of building products and a front-row seat to the AI era, to ask whether more capable software leaves humans with less work or far more of it.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why relying on traditional product launches leads to unsustainable churn, and how white-glove 1-on-1 onboarding builds a feedback loop that achieves product-market fit.
How measuring the percentage of users who would be "very disappointed" without a product provides an actionable engine for writing customer-centric roadmaps.
What Jevons' Paradox reveals about how AI automation surges overall market demand for software engineers, lawyers, and customer support practitioners.
Why the collapse of software development costs shifts long-term startup defensibility from writing code to cultivating taste, restraint, and distribution.
How uniting email, writing, and workspace tools into a proactive AI companion eliminates administrative friction while amplifying human creativity.
What executive advice for professionals facing technological disruption emphasizes about asserting personal agency to become truly AI-native.
Explore the conversation
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411: Jeremy Burton, GM of Observability at Snowflake: The Data Layer Was Never a Commodity. It’s the Whole Game
26 oktober 2026 · 44 min
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Jeremy Burton is the General Manager for Observability Business Unit at Snowflake following the acquisition of Observe, the developer-centric observability platform where he served as CEO. A veteran enterprise technology executive with a thirty-year career spanning Silicon Valley, Jeremy previously served as Executive Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Development at Dell, President of Products at EMC, and CEO of Serena Software, with earlier leadership roles at Symantec, Veritas, and Oracle. He has served on Snowflake’s board of directors since 2015 and sits on the McLaren Racing Advisory Board.
In this episode, Jeremy draws on watching customers go from collecting a petabyte of data in a decade to generating one every two days to make the case that without a real data foundation, enterprises will either get the wrong answer from their AI, or burn a fortune getting to the right one.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why pointing AI agents at hundreds of terabytes of telemetry burns tokens fast, and what Jeremy says has to change first.
How an AI agent facing 10 sources of truth can deliver the wrong answer with total confidence.
Why Jeremy calls the LLM “a new animal in the zoo,” and what that means for anyone trying to monitor AI agents.
How AI agents are starting to build the knowledge graphs that once took human implementation teams to create.
Why evals are becoming essential to running an LLM, and what a single model release can do to existing applications.
What Jeremy would tell his younger self stepping off the plane to meet Mark Benioff, and the career superpower he undervalued.
Explore the conversation:
00:00 Intro and AI Fun Fact: Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical and Anthropic's Vatican Address
04:08 Introducing Jeremy Burton, GM for Observability at Snowflake and Former CEO of Observe
07:09 The Observe Origin: Pitching Observability as a Unified Data Problem Natively on Snowflake
10:20 Observability as a Data Problem: Metrics,… -
410: Johanna Jackman, Chief People Officer at Freshworks: Responsible AI Isn’t Slow. It’s Bold, With Human Judgment
19 oktober 2026 · 47 min
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Johanna "JJ" Jackman is the Chief People Officer at Freshworks, the global cloud-based customer service and IT service management platform serving over 75,000 corporate clients worldwide. With an international career across six countries, JJ began her professional journey in the Australian mining industry before transitioning into high-growth technology.
Prior to joining Freshworks in 2023, she served as Chief People Officer at Airtable, Chief Human Resources Officer at Pure Storage, and Vice President of HR at LinkedIn during its formative scaling era, and currently sits on the Board of Directors at Grafana Labs.
In this episode, JJ sits down with Dan to discuss why modern employee experience requires transitioning from traditional organizational charts to workflow-centric platforms, how HR functions as Customer Zero to eliminate operational friction across enterprise IT and HR services, why executive leaders must share responsibility with employees for continuous AI fluency, and how the convergence of human judgment with digital teammates is redefining workforce planning and career mobility.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why evaluating enterprise software transformation requires abandoning rigid organizational charts in favor of end-to-end, workflow-centric employee experiences.
How serving as "Customer Zero" allows internal people teams to co-design IT and HR service platforms that eliminate administrative friction for global workforces.
What the creation of dedicated AI enablement roles reveals about shifting corporate strategy from traditional headcount planning to dynamic capability modeling.
Why fostering organizational resilience requires a mutual commitment between employers and workers to maintain continuous AI fluency and career relevance.
How enterprise leaders can establish transparent guardrails to ensure autonomous algorithms inform decision-making without supplanting human judgment.
What a data-driven, structured job s…
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409: Ryan Gavin, CMO at Slack: AI Is Single-Player. Slack Is Betting on Multiplayer
12 oktober 2026 · 42 min
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Ryan Gavin is Chief Marketing Officer at Slack, the global collaboration platform used by more than 200,000 organizations across 150 countries. Since joining Slack, Ryan has helped drive a 250% increase in revenue while championing the launch of Slack's AI-first capabilities and agentic integrations.
A seasoned technology executive, Ryan previously served as Chief Growth Officer at Convoy and held senior leadership roles at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, where he managed multi-billion-dollar business units.
In this episode, Ryan draws on watching hundreds of enterprise AI rollouts up close to make the case that dropping agents into an organization without a strategy doesn't just fail to help, it actively backfires.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why single-player AI tools fail to deliver enterprise productivity gains, and how deploying autonomous agents into collaborative, multiplayer environments unlocks hidden software value.
How a conversational interface connects unstructured team dialogue with structured CRM data, allowing employees to query enterprise systems without opening underlying software tabs.
What the concept of "headless software" reveals about democratizing access to sales and operational insights across non-technical departments.
Why transparent, step-by-step reasoning and strict permission inheritance are essential for building trust when introducing AI tools into enterprise workflows.
How leading organizations elevate Slack from a conventional IT collaboration expense into a core strategic driver for company-wide AI adoption.
What executive advice for emerging professionals highlights the enduring value of curiosity, creativity, and adaptability in a rapidly changing job market.
Explore the conversation
00:00 Show Intro, a Team Human Success Story, and Meet Ryan Gavin
03:44 Ryan Gavin's Path to Becoming CMO of Slack
04:57 Slack's New Job in the Age of AI Agents
07:53 Designing SlackBot to Strengthen Human Co…
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SE 31: Kartik Sakthivel, CIO at John Hancock | Live from Ai4 2026
8 oktober 2026 · 35 min
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Kartik Sakthivel is the Chief Information Officer at John Hancock, the life insurer that turned 164 years old in April 2026 and is part of Manulife. Before joining, he spent eight and a half years at LIMRA and LOMA, the oldest and largest trade association in financial services, which gave him a view across carriers few technology leaders ever get.
Recorded live from the floor of Ai4 2026, this lightning round explores what it takes to bring AI into a company founded during the Civil War, and why he tells his teams that what they build today becomes the legacy for the next 164 years.
Kartik and host Dan Turchin dig into why he believes every technology leader should think of themselves as a business leader first, how a regulated industry decides what to fast track and what to slow down, and what he says to people who are watching a machine learn to do the thing that made them valuable.
What You'll Learn
Why uptime and mean time to repair are table stakes for a modern technology organization, and what Kartik measures instead
How a highly regulated business draws the line between internal AI that gets fast tracked and anything customer facing that does not
Why there are more AI pilots in insurance than planes at a major airport at peak hour, and how to find use cases that are neither too small to matter nor too large to finish
The question he asks every time the business brings him an AI idea, and why the answer is sometimes something far simpler
What he tells colleagues watching automation absorb part of their role, and where the time that comes back should be reinvested
🎙️ Part of our Ai4 2026 compilation series.
Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19816277
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Kartik on LinkedIn
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408: Cesar Carvalho, CEO of Wellhub: The Risk Isn't AI. It's How Fast You Grow.
5 oktober 2026 · 41 min
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Cesar Carvalho is the co-founder and CEO of Wellhub, the corporate well-being platform connecting millions of employees to top-tier fitness, mindfulness, therapy, nutrition, and sleep partners across 18 countries.
Since founding the company as Gympass in 2012, Cesar has raised nearly $900 million in venture funding, reached a $2.4 billion valuation, and grown Wellhub to serve over 50,000 corporate clients worldwide.
In this episode, Cesar sits down with Dan to discuss why treating employee wellness and business performance as opposing forces is a false dichotomy. Tune in to hear his perspective on why AI should be leveraged to fund employee reskilling rather than justify job cuts, how Wellhub's AI wellness coach scales hyper-personalized care to millions of subscribers, why less than 10% of global healthcare spending goes toward prevention, and how pivoting during the 2020 pandemic transformed a near-death crisis into a multi-product wellness ecosystem.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why framing corporate wellness as an adversary to business performance is a false dichotomy, and how employee health directly drives bottom-line execution.
How granting employees 30 minutes of paid work time daily to experiment with AI tools fosters a culture of innovation and continuous reskilling.
What the structural imbalance between preventive "well care" and reactive "sick care" reveals about the urgent need to redesign enterprise benefits.
How an AI-powered wellness coach expands personalized fitness and mindfulness guidance from hundreds of thousands to millions of corporate subscribers.
Why strict data minimization policies and phased beta testing provide a trusted framework for deploying AI in sensitive health environments.
What pivoting a global business model during the 2020 pandemic teaches founders about mission alignment, resilience, and turning near-death moments into catalysts for growth.
Explore the conversation:
00:00 Show Intro and New…
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SE 30: Todd Barr, CEO at Axonis | Live from Ai4 2026
1 oktober 2026 · 22 min
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Todd Barr is the CEO of Axonis and has spent his career in high growth software infrastructure, living through the shift from Unix to Linux, the rise of DevOps, and the blockchain era before landing in AI. Axonis was built by technical founders with 25 years each in large scale infrastructure across government, defense and intelligence, where sharing the underlying data was never an option.
Recorded live from the floor of Ai4 2026, this lightning round explores why you do not have to centralize your data to start doing AI, and what it takes to make a decision you can defend later.
Todd and host Dan Turchin dig into what an auditable decision actually records, how governance can live at the data node instead of the application layer, the distance between collecting sensor data and acting on it, and why Todd believes decisions themselves are about to become a category of data.
What You'll Learn
Why centralizing your data is not a prerequisite for AI, and how a federated architecture holds up when nodes go offline and come back
What an auditable decision captures: the data used, the model and its version, the reasoning, and the person who attested to it
How attribute based access control decides what each operator or agent is allowed to see, enforced at the data itself
The sensor to decision gap, and how a flood management team went from raw readings they could not interpret to acting on them in real time
Why collecting data and acting on it are two different problems, and what opens up once that distance closes
What becomes possible once decisions are stored as data, from the cost of each decision to who in the organization decides better
🎙️ Part of our Ai4 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19816277
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Todd on LinkedIn
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407: Daniel Chait, CEO at Greenhouse: Inside the Doom Loop Where AI Screens AI-Written Resumes
28 september 2026 · 43 min
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Daniel Chait is the co-founder and CEO of Greenhouse, the industry-leading hiring software platform designed to help enterprise organizations build fair, structured, and effective recruiting processes. He has been a technology entrepreneur in New York for more than 20 years.
He started Greenhouse about 15 years ago on a simple conviction: companies that follow structured hiring practices get better results, and job seekers deserve a process that is fair and transparent. Today he is leading the company through a reinvention for the AI era, including the acquisition of Ezra AI Labs to bring transparent, conversational AI tools to job seekers and hiring teams alike.
In this episode, Daniel draws on two decades of building companies where every hire lands directly on the bottom line to ask what candidates and employers both need answered: can AI make hiring more human when it is already making it feel less so?
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why candidates and employers using AI at the same time is creating a doom loop that shuts real humans out.
Why AI-led interviews worry so many job seekers, and what it takes for a conversation with an AI to feel fair.
Why using AI to automatically reject most applicants is tempting, and why Greenhouse said no to itWhy AI-polished resumes are making every candidate look the same, and how hiring can move beyond the resume.
How AI can replicate human bias at light speed, and why Daniel says no vendor should ask you to take their word for it.
What Daniel tells anxious workers, from new grads to senior leaders, about disruption, opportunity, and reinventing a career with AI.
Explore the Conversation
0:00 Welcome Back and This Week's AI Fun Fact
4:48 Meet Daniel Chait, Co-Founder and CEO of Greenhouse
7:55 From a Soulless Consulting Job to Founding a Company
10:43 Reinventing the Applicant Tracking System
15:23 How AI Has Already Reshaped Hiring and Job Seeking
21:11 What the Candid AI Interview Report …
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SE 29: Andrew Rabinovich, former Upwork CTO | Live from Ai4 2026
24 september 2026 · 26 min
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Andrew Rabinovich is the former CTO of Upwork and has spent 25 years in machine learning and computer vision, long before AI was fashionable. After a PhD in computer vision at UCSD, he worked at Google. He then spent five years at Magic Leap building mixed reality devices before founding Headroom, a video conferencing company that Upwork acquired.
Recorded live from the floor of Ai4 2026 in August, this lightning round explores what happens when you actually measure how much of a real job an AI agent can finish.
Andrew and host Dan Turchin dig into Upwork's shift from a matching marketplace to a work delivery platform, the meta agent that breaks a job into atomic units of work, how the platform proves a freelancer is human, and more.
What You'll Learn
How Upwork is evolving from a matchmaking marketplace into a work operating system, and how its meta agent decomposes a single job into atomic units of work
What Upwork's AI productivity index revealed when agents were tested against real jobs already completed by human freelancers
Why every agent on the platform is paired with a human expert, and how that pairing changes both the speed and the quality of the result
How proof of humanness works in practice, from identity verification to AI video interviews, and what happens when the system gets it wrong
Why agents may soon become the demand side of the marketplace, calling human experts in real time to verify what they cannot
🎙️ Part of our Ai4 2026 compilation series.
Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19816277
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn
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406: Mahe Bayireddi, CEO of Phenom: AI May Be Replacing Your Job Right Now, But Not the One You'll Have Next
21 september 2026 · 37 min
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Mahe Bayireddi is the CEO and co-founder of Phenom, the global HR technology platform he launched in 2011 with the mission to help a billion people find the right job.
Under his leadership, Phenom has raised over $160 million, achieved unicorn status, and consistently ranked among the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing private companies. A serial entrepreneur with a deep technical foundation, Mahe previously co-founded SnipSnap and Bijol Health. He holds BE and MS degrees in computer science.
In this episode, Mahe sits down with Dan Turchin to unpack why "AI is taking your job" is the wrong framing, and why the real question is where you sit, what you do, and how deeply you understand the business around you.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why replacing jobs and replacing the job you'll have tomorrow are two very different things, and why irreplaceability comes down to understanding the business, not just being intelligent.
Why raw machine intelligence falls short in enterprise HR, and why true workforce alignment requires AI systems built on deep business understanding.
How culture, structure, and strategy form a company's "organizational DNA," and why most companies fail at execution, not strategy.
How a five-dimensional rubric of talent zones, industries, roles, locations, and culture creates hyperpersonalized workflows instead of one-size-fits-all automation.
Why frontline workers and specialized knowledge practitioners experience AI as an amplifier of capability rather than a displacement force.
What enduring over 100 venture capital rejections teaches founders about developing "cockroach" resilience and leading through persistent industry skepticism.
Explore the Conversation
00:00 Intro & AI Fun Fact
04:27 Meet Mahe Bayireddi, Phenom CEO
06:36 AI Is Your Ally, Not Enemy
09:29 What Hiring Got Wrong
10:43 Culture as Organizational DNA
12:26 Why Agent Interviews Won't Scale
16:47 Bias and AI Responsibility
19:00 Fraud Agents by Regi…
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SE 28: They Might Be Agentic, But We Have Agency: Leaders from Upwork, Axonis, and John Hancock on Where the Human Belongs | Live from Ai4 2026
17 september 2026 · 27 min
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Walk the floor at an event like Ai4 and most of the conversation is about what machines can now do on their own. The question that kept surfacing in our conversations was quieter, and harder: where do humans belong when machines can think?
In this special compilation episode of AI and the Future of Work, we bring you three conversations recorded live at Ai4 2026 in Las Vegas. This is the first episode of our four-part Ai4 series.
A talent marketplace, a data infrastructure company, and a 164 year old life insurer. Three businesses that could not be more different, and three leaders who arrived at the same answer from opposite directions.
What connects them is not caution about automation. All three are automating serious amounts of work. What they share is that the requirement was built in on purpose, because the outcome depends on someone being answerable for it.
Featured Guests
Andrew Rabinovich, former Upwork Chief Technology Officer. Full conversation: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19855791
Todd Barr, CEO at Axonis. Full conversation: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19890804
Kartik Sakthivel, Chief Information Officer at John Hancock. Full conversation: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19925796
What You'll Learn
What happens when you measure how much of a real job an agent can actually finish, and why that number should change what you let it do unsupervised
The one line in hiring that should never be crossed, no matter how capable the technology becomes
Where human agency actually lives once the work itself is handed off, and why how it gets done may matter less than we assume
Why collecting data and acting on it are two different problems, and what opens up once that distance closes
The question worth asking before any AI project starts, and why the answer is sometimes something far simpler than AI
What to say to someone watching a machine learn to do the thing that made them valuable, and wher…
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405: Nick Mehta, Former CEO of Gainsight, on Agentic Overload, Machine Consciousness, and Leading with Radical Humility
14 september 2026 · 51 min
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Nick Mehta is a serial entrepreneur, executive leader, and the former longtime CEO of Gainsight, where he helped define and scale the multi-billion-dollar category of modern Customer Success.
Widely revered across the technology ecosystem as a beloved mentor and a CEO's role model, Nick pairs sharp business instincts with an infectious, human-first leadership style and an insatiable curiosity for philosophy, mathematics, and cognitive science.
In this highly anticipated annual conversation, Nick sits down with Dan for an unfiltered, cathartic deep dive into the psychological toll of the AI era.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why the transition from passive software tools to autonomous agents triggers acute "brain fry," and the psychological friction that occurs when machines begin directing human managers.
How the anthropological framework of BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, and Incomprehensible) explains workplace anxiety, and why the traditional fear of missing out is shifting into the cognitive strain of managing agents that demand constant input.
What Richard Dawkins' dialogue with Claude reveals about the debate between functionalists and biological essentialists, and why Nick remains skeptical of claims surrounding synthetic consciousness.
How Douglas Hofstadter's concept of "strange loops" and self-referential observation offers a powerful mental model for the future of recursive machine intelligence.
Why pursuing automation purely for commercial efficiency creates massive personal and societal opportunity costs, and how tech leaders can weigh business optimization against life-altering scientific breakthroughs.
What a tech executive's front-row seat as a parent to college seniors reveals about the job market crisis facing new graduates in business and computer science.
EXPLORE THE CONVERSATION
00:00 Welcome to Episode 404: Dan and Nick's Annual Public Therapy Session
04:34 When AI Shifts from Passive Tool to Demanding Man…
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404: Ilan Peleg, CEO of Lightrun, on Shifting Observability Left, and Why He Keeps AI Agents Read-Only in Production
7 september 2026 · 41 min
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Ilan Peleg is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lightrun, the autonomous remediation platform built to debug and fix software problems before they ever reach a customer. Lightrun is one of the fastest growing companies in the AI observability space, having raised $110 million from elite venture firms including Accel, Insight Partners, and Sorenson Capital. Its technology now runs inside mission critical systems at Salesforce, Citibank, and the New York Stock Exchange.
Before founding Lightrun, Ilan spent years as a software developer, watching code succeed in testing and then fail in ways no one could predict once it met real users at scale. That frustration became the founding thesis for a company built around a bold idea: self healing software.
In this episode, Ilan draws on his experience building line level, real time telemetry for some of the world's most demanding production environments to make the case that AI reliability depends on grounded evidence, not bigger models, and that the future belongs to practitioners who know how to work with it, not around it.
In this conversation, we discuss:
How AI agents shift software debugging from reacting to outages to preventing them before they ever reach production
Why site reliability engineers are being asked to rethink their entire relationship with automation and manual firefighting
The difference between AI workflow automation startups and the ones that will actually survive the next platform shift
What actually happens when an AI agent doesn't have the grounded evidence it needs to complete a task correctly
Why a founder chose to keep his AI observability platform read only, even when customers asked for more autonomy
The architectural bet behind real time, line level telemetry that makes self-healing software possible at enterprise scale
Explore the Conversation
00:00 Intro and Fun Fact
04:21 Introducing Ilan Peleg
04:52 The Lightrun Origin Story
08:32 Software in an AI Era
10:38 Trac…
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403: Nancy Wang, CTO at 1Password, on Why Identity Is the Tech Problem of the Decade
31 augustus 2026 · 44 min
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Nancy Wang is the Chief Technology Officer at 1Password, where she leads the global engineering team securing the digital safety and identities of millions of prosumers, families, and enterprise workloads.
An expert in building highly scalable systems and data protection platforms, she holds seven patents in cloud infrastructure and serves on the boards of early-stage cybersecurity leaders, including Observo AI, which was recently acquired by SentinelOne to power the data intelligence layer for its SIEM products.
Prior to joining 1Password, she became the youngest person ever promoted to Director and General Manager at AWS, at age 31, leading AWS Data Protection to serve 98% of the Fortune 500 and building a multi-billion dollar business within five years.
She also helped build cloud and data protection products at Rubrik, held engineering roles at Google and in the U.S. intelligence community, and now brings a rare combination of deep infrastructure expertise and security-first product thinking to the age of AI agents.
In this episode, Nancy sits down with Dan to explore the massive security responsibilities of the agentic era.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why the transition to autonomous AI agents doesn't require brand-new credentials, and how familiar principles of human and machine identity extend to the agentic era.
How a proprietary confidential computing architecture built on specialized enclaves protects sensitive user data, even in the event of a catastrophic central breach.
Why 1Password actively chose not to release a public Model Context Protocol (MCP) server despite intense market pressure.
How a specialized DevOps agent trained on human incident response can learn to navigate real-time outages, runbooks, and cloud traffic monitoring.
Why AI is compressing the cost of execution in software, and why the real career advantage now shifts toward taste, judgment, systems thinking, and deep fluency with AI tools.
Why priorit…
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402: Russ Fradin, CEO of Larridin, on the AI Power User Gap and Why Change Management Is the Real Bottleneck
24 augustus 2026 · 48 min
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Russ Fradin is the co-founder and CEO of Larridin, the enterprise AI measurement platform that raised $17 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Bloomberg Beta and Gradient Ventures. Larridin sells to CIOs and CFOs, and answers a question most companies still cannot answer for themselves: which AI tools are being used, by whom, at what level of proficiency, and where they are actually driving productivity.
A veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur with three decades of experience leading high-growth technology companies, Russ previously co-founded and served as CEO of Dynamic Signal (now Firstup), Adify, and SocialShield, and was the first employee at Flycast, one of the internet’s pioneering ad networks.
In this episode, Russ sits down with Dan to share the brutal and beautiful realities of building companies in the Bay Area. Tune in to hear his seasoned perspective on why successful AI integration requires ancient change management principles rather than new software licensing, the operational gap between power users and passive users, and why the most at-risk professionals in the AI era are not the ones you think.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why a third party measurement company shows up every time money floods into a category, and what that pattern predicts for enterprise AI.
What actually happens after you deploy AI to 3,000 employees, and why the gap that opens up is a change management problem, not a technology one.
Why revenue growth cannot tell you whether to renew a multimillion dollar AI contract, and why the vendor's own numbers will not either.
What the stark division between organizational power users and casual users reveals about the actual bottleneck in modern workplaces
Why token-spend leaderboards can accelerate adoption, and why they become unsustainable once employees learn how to game them.
What the reality of task automation means for the future of knowledge work, and why the threat to specific w…
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SE 27: AI and the Next Generation: What We Can Learn from Them (International Youth Day Special Episode)
20 augustus 2026 · 25 min
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Every August 12, the world observes International Youth Day, and this past July 15 marked World Youth Skills Day. Both are good moments to remember what we owe the people entering the workforce: paths, tools, and advice that inspire them, not warnings that scare them.
In this special August compilation episode of AI and the Future of Work, we bring back four former guests whose conversations point to the same idea: AI is not a threat. It is an opportunity, and the people starting their careers right now hold an unfair advantage. They have not spent years absorbing policies and habits that are already obsolete, so they get to begin from what is possible instead of unlearning what used to be true.
From building AI into daily work, to leadership teams learning from their newest employees, to understanding what becomes more valuable when AI makes creation easier, this episode explores how the next generation is approaching work differently.
The conversations point to a broader shift: as AI takes on more of the repetitive work and makes production cheaper, human judgment, creativity, curiosity, taste, intention, and the ability to identify the right problems become more important.
Featured Guests
Kourtney Cross, Business Analyst at Leidos and ServiceNow Rise Up graduate. Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/18741521]
Andrea Iorio, Keynote Speaker and Author of Between You and AI, formerly Chief Digital Officer at L'Oreal Brazil. Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/18662632]
Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital. Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/18982636]
Matt Britton, CEO of Suzy and Author of Generation AI. Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/18792172]
What You'll Learn
How an analyst early in his career built AI into his daily work, and why he wen…
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Dr. Ben Goertzel, SingularityNET CEO and BGI Labs Founder, on Why Stacking Tools Around an LLM Won't Get Us to AGI
17 augustus 2026 · 53 min
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Dr. Ben Goertzel is the researcher most often credited with popularizing the term "Artificial General Intelligence," a phrase he helped bring into wide use when he co-published a book under that title in 2005.
He is the founder of SingularityNET and the architect behind OpenCog Hyperon, open-source cognitive architectures built on the conviction that large language models alone cannot get humanity to true AGI. His current project, ASI:Chain, is designed to put AGI systems on a decentralized blockchain infrastructure so that no single company, government, or actor can ever seize control of them. He is also the founder of BGI Labs, an organization focused on developing decentralized, democratic, and Beneficial General Intelligence (BGI).
In this episode, recorded live at the AGI-26 Conference, Ben draws on nearly four decades of AI research, from coding neural nets as a teenager to building today's neuro-symbolic systems, to make the case that the biggest risk in AGI is not the technology itself, but who ends up holding the switch.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why statistical large language models cannot achieve true strategic planning on their own, and the critical cognitive architecture they are missing.
How a hybrid, neural-symbolic architecture tackles a critical flaw in modern AI agents, preventing them from losing track of their own goals mid-task.
What the shift toward decentralized AGI on a blockchain accomplishes, and why distributing it across global nodes is designed as a safeguard against centralized control.
How emerging brain-computer interfaces will redefine how we experience consciousness, and what happens when human brains "Wi-Fi" directly into machine memory.
Why Ben sees a beneficial AGI as a way to offset humanity's "chimp-level" ethical limitations when managing advanced weaponry.
What the accelerating "Singularity is Near" vibe feels like on the ground today, and the recent milestones that have him convinced we're…
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401: Theresita Richard, CHRO at Patagonia: AI Won't Fix Your Culture, It Will Expose It
10 augustus 2026 · 43 min
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Theresita Richard is Chief People and Culture Officer at Patagonia, where she is approaching her third anniversary with the company. Before Patagonia, she built her career across some of the most recognized names in retail, including Home Depot, Target, Starbucks, and Nordstrom, after starting out as an industrial engineer leading a two-year project on how new technology was reshaping manufacturing work.
At Patagonia, Theresita carries the responsibility of stewarding a culture built around a single, deceptively simple mission: to be in business to save the home planet. That means holding the tension between profit and purpose in every decision, and now, figuring out where AI fits into a company that has always insisted on doing things the harder, more human way.
In this episode, Theresita draws on a career that began in manufacturing automation and has led her to guard the soul of one of the most purpose-driven companies in the world, to argue that AI will not fix a broken culture. It will only reveal it, and the responsibility to get that right has never been more real.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why Patagonia evaluates potential hires based on purpose alignment rather than culture fit, and how the company builds an environment where people stay for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.
How Patagonia's "pair clarity with choice" principle lets culture self-select who belongs, without anyone having to enforce it.
Why AI does not create new problems inside a company, and why AI will always amplify the cracks and biases already present in our foundations.
Why enlightened leadership in a rapidly shifting technological landscape requires extreme vulnerability, community building, and the courage to sit with difficult questions.
How the conversation around AI in the workplace must shift from driving pure efficiency to genuinely nourishing the human soul and promoting human flourishing.
How a grandfather with a third-grade education taught…
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400: Wade Foster, Zapier CEO: What Happens When Every Knowledge Worker Gets a Coding Engine
3 augustus 2026 · 40 min
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Wade Foster is the CEO and co-founder of Zapier, the workflow automation and AI orchestration platform used by more than 4 million people to connect over 7,000 work apps. Since launching in the Y Combinator Summer 2012 batch, Zapier has automated more than 81 billion tasks, users have built more than 25 million Zaps, and the company has bootstrapped its way to a valuation north of $5 billion.
He holds degrees in industrial engineering and business administration from the University of Missouri, and has spent more than a decade on a single problem: making the tools people work in every day work for them instead of against them. He is also one of the show's rare repeat guests. His first conversation with Dan was in January 2024, back when coding agents mostly did not work.
In this episode, Wade draws on running the automation layer that sits between thousands of enterprise tools to argue that the frontier model leap of late 2025 handed every knowledge worker an engineer, and that the companies still waiting on returns are the ones that never changed how the work itself gets done.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why the late 2025 model leap means every knowledge worker now has an engineer, and what that changes about ordinary work.
Where deterministic workflows still beat AI at work, and why the most sophisticated teams refuse to choose between the two.
What happens when white collar workers start pasting API keys into files, and the third option most security leaders are missing.
Why Wade says culture, not tooling, is the real constraint, and what leaders get wrong when the board demands AI first.
Why individuals report real AI gains while their organizations report none, and what has to be rethought before that gap closes.
How Zapier built its AI Fluency Framework from its own teams, and why version one was already dated the day it shipped.
Explore this conversation:
00:00 Welcome to Episode 400
02:01 AI Fun Fact: Is Agentic AI the En…
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399: Vasant Dhar, NYU Stern Professor, on the New Divide: Superhuman With AI or Dependent on It?
27 juli 2026 · 45 min
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Vasant Dhar teaches data science at NYU's Stern School of Business and has spent more than 45 years at the frontier of artificial intelligence. He brought machine learning to Wall Street in the 1990s and founded SCT Capital Management, one of the first machine learning based hedge funds.
He hosts the Brave New World podcast, downloaded more than a million times, where he has interviewed Nobel laureates, technologists, and global thinkers on the implications of AI. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Wired, and MIT Technology Review. His latest book, Thinking with Machines, traces AI from its origins to the present.
For more than forty years, Vasant has built systems that sat right on the edge of human trust. People had to decide whether to rely on them or walk away.
In this episode, he makes a stark claim: AI will not just change how we work; it will sort us into two groups. One uses it to extend their judgment. The other slowly hands that judgment over. The gap comes down to habits you are forming today, not some distant future.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why trusting AI comes down to just two variables, and the simple test Vasant has applied since his Harvard Business Review piece a decade ago
The bifurcation Vasant believes AI is about to create, splitting humanity into two groups, and which side you do not want to be on
What tennis great Roger Federer's win rate reveals about succeeding with algorithms, and the counterintuitive math behind every winning edge
Why the edge returns to humans the moment everyone runs the same algorithms, and what only people can do in situations no system has seen
The one word in the title Thinking with Machines that Vasant says matters most, and what it asks of how we work alongside AI
The areas of life where Vasant argues we may need to restrict AI entirely, and the legal framework we already have to govern it
Explore the Conversation
00:00 In…
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398: Ariel Assaraf, CEO and Co-Founder of Coralogix, on How AI Turns Observability into Business Intelligence
20 juli 2026 · 44 min
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Ariel Assaraf is the CEO and co-founder of Coralogix, a leading observability platform that most recently raised $115 million at a unicorn valuation. He started the company in 2014, and today Coralogix serves more than 4,000 customers, monitors more than 500,000 applications, and processes over 3 million events per second.
Before co-founding Coralogix, Ariel served in Israel's Elite Intelligence Unit 8200, where the sheer scale and complexity of data he worked with made one thing clear: existing architectures weren't built for what was coming. He later joined Varent Systems, a homeland security company, leading automation, integration, and QA.
In this episode, Ariel draws on more than a decade of building at the frontier of data infrastructure to argue that observability is no longer just a tool for preventing downtime. It is becoming the most truthful, real-time source of intelligence any company owns.
In this conversation, we discuss:
The evolution from the data collection era ("oil phase") to a landfill crisis, and now the AI-driven "brain phase" where telemetry has become the most valuable raw material for business decision making
How Coralogix separates the data plane from the control plane, storing data in open format on the customer's own infrastructure to enable data ownership, infinite retention, and freedom from vendor lock-in
Why Ariel invested over $100 million in R&D to build query engines that always return answers, not constrained by predefined schemas that agents will quickly exceed
How SREs evolve from reactive incident responders into autonomous operators as agents like Ollie, Coralogix's AI agent, take over incident triage, root cause analysis, and narrative generation
The emerging role of the AI-forward product manager who sits between customer needs and autonomous agents, reshaping how software gets built, priced, and sold in real time
How Ariel thinks about linear versus exponential impact as a leadership principle, …
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397: Maryjo Charbonnier, Kyndryl's Former CHRO & Executive Advisor, on Transforming Skills into Visibility with AI
13 juli 2026 · 37 min
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Maryjo Charbonnier is the former CHRO and Executive Advisor at Kyndryl, the world's largest provider of IT infrastructure services , with more than 70,000 employees across roughly 60 countries. When Kyndryl was spun out of IBM in 2021 as one of the largest public company spin-offs in history, Maryjo helped build its culture and people strategy from the ground up, which is why she and others have called it the world's largest startup.
She has spent nearly two decades as a public company CHRO on both sides of the Atlantic, including Wolters Kluwer (traded on the Dutch exchange) and Broadridge Financial Solutions, after a formative run at PepsiCo where she led change management for Frito-Lay. She was named CHRO of the Year in the Netherlands and earned her MBA at Southern Methodist University.
In this episode, Maryjo draws on a career spent leading messy transformations and building a 70,000-person workforce to argue that as AI automates tasks and chunks of jobs, the work that defines a career is moving from what you know to how you judge, lead, and decide, and most organizations are not teaching for it yet.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why Maryjo “seeks the heat” in messy transformations and what she learned leading HR through turnarounds, spin‑offs, and large‑scale change.
How Kyndryl defined the “Kyndryl way” with six core behaviors and uses culture as an operating plan in the world’s largest startup.
Why HR must focus on which skills are rare and most valuable, and how Kyndryl’s Make Yourself Discoverable campaign turned skills into a strategic asset.
How AI-powered career profiles, skills-based redeployment, and role-specific AI curricula were intentionally designed to show Kyndryls that AI is an asset to their career, not a threat to it.
Why Maryjo believes HR has three roles in AI, including reshaping commercial work and building an AI governance council that balances speed with risk.
How leadership “ORE” (organizational design, …
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396: Trond Undheim, Author of The Platinum Workforce, on Why Knowledge Is Becoming Superfluous and System Awareness Is the Skill That Lasts
6 juli 2026 · 55 min
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Trond Undheim is a futurist, innovation expert, and research scholar at Stanford University whose work spans governments, startups, and leading academic institutions. His ideas have been featured in outlets including Forbes, The Boston Globe, Fast Company, Fortune, and MIT News, and he previously hosted the Futurized podcast.
He holds a PhD in AI and cognition from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and is the author of eight books, including The Platinum Workforce, which explores how to train and hire for the twenty-first century’s industrial transitions.
In this episode, Trond draws on decades of interdisciplinary work on emerging technologies, systemic risk, and workforce transitions to argue that system awareness, not traditional knowledge, will determine who thrives in an AI-defined economy.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why Trond says knowledge has become superfluous, and what that claim means for how we define expertise in an AI era.
Why cutting junior hires to cash in on AI efficiencies bakes a failure mode into your organization.
What “system awareness” looks like in practice, and how it changes the way leaders think about skills and careers.
Why socio-technical thinking matters, and how treating humans and machines as mutually constitutive systems reshapes AI design and governance.
Why humanity is unprepared to operate at gigascale, and what megaproject research suggests about the cost of that gap.
How The Platinum Workforce maps twelve durable skill domains, from socio-technical capabilities to maker and maintenance skills, that will outlast multiple AI waves.
Explore this conversation:
00:00 Intro and AI Fun Fact: Pew Research Americans More Concerned Than Excited About AI
04:22 Introducing Trond Undheim, Futurist and Author of The Platinum Workforce
05:09 Why the Workforce Is the Single Biggest Lever for Human Survival
09:08 System Awareness: The Only Knowledge That Matters in the AI Era
15:06 Socio-…
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395: Lev Gonick, CIO at Arizona State University: Why Higher Education Must Disrupt Itself and the New Definition of AI Literacy
29 juni 2026 · 41 min
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Lev Gonick is the CIO at Arizona State University, one of the largest and fastest-growing universities in the United States, with over 200,000 students across campuses in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Washington, and 35 partner institutions around the world. He won an ORBIE Award in 2023 as a top large Enterprise CIO, was named a Top 50 Educational Technology Influencer by EdScoop in 2022, and holds a PhD in International Political Economy from York University.
Before joining ASU, he was one of the rare CIOs who came from the classroom, having spent the first decade of his career as a teacher and researcher before pioneering online learning in the 1990s, long before it became an industry.
In this episode, Lev draws on more than 40 years at the intersection of technology and education to make the case that AI is not the disruptor of higher education, it is the accelerant, and that the institutions treating it that way are already building what everyone else is still debating.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why AI is not the disruptor of higher education, and what has actually been driving the disruption for decades
How ASU went from survival mode during the 2009 financial crisis to building the largest online learning operation in the country, and why the same instinct is now driving its AI strategy
What ASU's data from 200,000 students using AI daily actually reveals about which skills will endure and which ones will not
How the role of university faculty is fundamentally changing in the AI era, and why the hardest question has nothing to do with cheating
What the "Agentic self" means for creatives, and how a unique course taught by Will.i.am is helping students protect and amplify their creative futures.
How the traditional responsibilities of the Chief Information Officer are expanding beyond basic operations to actively shaping institutional strategy and innovation.
Explore this conversation:
00:00 Intro and AI Fun Fact: Blue Books vs AI …
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394: Dr. Muthu Alagappan, CEO of Counsel Health: Democratizing Primary Care with Semi-Autonomous AI
22 juni 2026 · 37 min
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Dr. Muthu Alagappan is the Founder and CEO of Counsel Health, the company automating access to high-quality, personalized medical advice from doctors. Counsel recently closed a $25M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures, following an $11M seed round that included A16Z, Asymmetric Capital Partners, Floodgate Fund, and Pear VC.
He holds an MD from Stanford Medicine and a B.S. in Biomechanical Engineering from Stanford, and was among the earliest AI researchers to publish on clinical applications of machine intelligence.
In this episode, Muthu draws on 15 years at the intersection of AI research and frontline clinical medicine to explore the shift toward semi-autonomous care.
In this conversation, we discuss:
How AI addresses the limitations of traditional primary care by offering a highly personalized, knowledgeable, and always available medical experience.
Why patients might leapfrog clinicians in their willingness to adopt AI for medical advice, and how this shift challenges the traditional identity of physicians.
What semi-autonomous care actually looks like in practice, and how Counsel Health uses a clinician cockpit to augment human compassion with real-time machine intelligence.
How to leverage population-level patterns without compromising patient privacy.
Why the double standard applied to AI is misplaced, and why Muthu argues we should hold AI to a much higher benchmark than human doctors simply.
What the future of global healthcare could look like when cognitive medical expertise is fully democratized, ensuring that a patient's zip code no longer dictates the quality of care they receive.
Explore the Conversation
00:00 Intro & AI Fun Fact: Big Data Limitations and Bias in Clinical AI
03:52 Meet Dr. Muthu Alagappan: From Stanford AI Researcher to Counsel Health CEO
06:51 Why Primary Care Falls Short: The Case for AI-Augmented Medicine
09:05 Human Doctors Are Human: How Patients Are Adopting AI Medical Advice
12:… -
SE 26: Designing AI for Accountability and Harmony with Leaders from Honeycomb, FieldAI, Archetype AI, and Zoom | Live from HumanX 2026 Special Episode
18 juni 2026 · 30 min
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In this special compilation episode of AI and the Future of Work, we are bringing you four conversations recorded live on the show floor at HumanX 2026. This is the second and final compilation of our three-part HumanX Live series.
Our first compilation explored how AI amplifies the human potential it can never replace. This one turns to the technical side, and to a question that gets harder the more these systems touch our lives: how do you build AI you can actually trust not to fail when it matters most?
As technology reaches further into the moments that count (the systems that monitor our health, drive our cars, and work alongside us on the job), these four builders share how they design for accountability, safety, and harmony between people and machines.
What You'll Learn
Why reading code is no longer enough, and how observing real outcomes (not system metrics alone) is the only way to know whether AI is actually serving the people who depend on it
What "AI values" are, and why companies will soon need shared norms for how people disclose, review, and engage with work produced by agentic systems
How robots earn trust on a job site by measuring their own uncertainty, asking questions, and communicating their intentions before they act
Why the most valuable place for automation is the dirty, dull, and dangerous work humans were never meant to do, and what that means for keeping people safe
Why physical AI should be built first as a reasoning and communication model that can explain its thinking to people, rather than one that jumps straight to action
How "harness engineering" moves teams beyond prompt and context engineering, and why orchestrating several frontier models together can outperform any single one
Featured Guests
Christine Yen, CEO and Co-Founder of Honeycomb. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19362645
Dr. Ali Agha, CEO and Co-Founder of FieldAI. Listen to the full conversat…
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XD Huang, CTO at Zoom | Live from HumanX 2026
18 juni 2026 · 22 min
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XD Huang is the CTO of Zoom, where he is leading the company's shift from hosting meetings to completing work, a vision he calls conversation to completion. He joined Zoom after 30 years at Microsoft, where he served as Azure AI CTO and a Technical Fellow and helped ship Azure OpenAI Services. A pioneer in speech recognition for four decades, he led the Microsoft team that first reached human parity in transcribing conversational speech.
Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores what it takes to turn everyday conversation into finished work.
XD and host Dan Turchin dig into Zoom's federated approach to AI, the cost and accuracy tradeoffs hidden inside every model decision, and why, after a career spent solving the hardest technical problems, he believes taste and judgment are the qualities that still belong to people.
What You'll Learn
What "conversation to completion" means for the way work actually gets done
How Zoom's federated approach combines multiple frontier models into one stronger result
Why every AI decision is a tradeoff between cost and accuracy, and how to control for it
How an open ecosystem lets the same AI work across Zoom, Google, Microsoft, and in-person meetings
Why taste and judgment are the qualities XD hires for that AI cannot replace
🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363520
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter.
Connect with XD on LinkedIn.
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Dr. Jaime Lien, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist of Archetype AI | Live from HumanX 2026
18 juni 2026 · 22 min
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Dr. Jaime Lien is the Chief Scientist and a co-founder of Archetype AI, where she is building a foundation model that turns complex sensor data into meaning people can actually act on. A signal processing scientist by training, she earned her PhD working on RF imaging from satellites and later helped develop the first radar embedded in consumer smartphones at Google, before leaving with four colleagues to start Archetype AI.
Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores how AI can read the rich, non-human signals all around us and translate them for the people who rely on them.
Jaime and host Dan Turchin dig into how machines distill signal from noise, why a reasoning and communication model matters more than a straight-to-action one, and why keeping a human in the loop is a requirement, not a feature, when the stakes are physical.
What You'll Learn
How AI separates meaningful signal from noise across the sensors already around us
Why Archetype builds a reasoning and communication model, not a straight-to-action one
Why keeping a human in the loop is treated as a requirement, not an optional feature
How interpretability and explainability have to be designed in from the start, not added later
Why discovering something new about the physical world matters more than automation alone
🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363520
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter.
Connect with Jaime on LinkedIn.
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Dr. Ali Agha, CEO and Co-Founder of FieldAI | Live from HumanX 2026
18 juni 2026 · 20 min
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Dr. Ali Agha is the CEO and co-founder of FieldAI, where he is building general-purpose "brains" for robots across different forms, environments, and tasks. He has spent nearly two decades in AI autonomy, including years at NASA JPL and research roots at MIT, putting software and intelligence on drones, legged robots, and other platforms.
Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores what it takes to bring AI safely into the physical world, where people already live and work.
Ali and host Dan Turchin dig into why reliability is the overlooked challenge of physical AI, why a robot should communicate how confident it is before it acts, and where the line sits between the tasks machines should take on and the ones that should always stay human.
What You'll Learn
Why reliability, not lab demos, is the real test for AI in the physical world
How robots that measure and share their own uncertainty earn human trust on the job site
Why the future of robotics is hundreds of specialized form factors, not one humanoid
How FieldAI targets the dirty, dull, and dangerous work to keep people out of harm's way
Where the boundary sits: the creative, strategic, and human-touch decisions that stay with people
🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363520
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter.
Connect with Ali on LinkedIn.
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Christine Yen, CEO and Co-Founder of Honeycomb | Live from HumanX 2026
18 juni 2026 · 18 min
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Christine Yen is the CEO and co-founder of Honeycomb, the observability platform that helps engineering teams understand what their software is actually doing. A developer by background, she built products at Facebook before co-founding Honeycomb to bring fast, flexible observability to the rest of the world.
Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores what observability means now that both humans and agents are writing, shipping, and debugging code.
Christine and host Dan Turchin dig into why the code was never the real source of truth, why "more" has become the watchword of the agentic era, and what it takes for teams to agree on what good actually looks like before they build it.
What You'll Learn
Why the code was never the real source of truth, and what to observe instead
How the software development lifecycle is collapsing as PMs, designers, and engineers become builders
Why the system that writes the code should not be the one that judges it
How defining "good" in plain English keeps quality measurable, whether people or agents build it
What responsible AI looks like in practice, from disclosure norms to protecting human attention
🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363520
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter.
Connect with Christine on LinkedIn.
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393: Dan Roth, Editor in Chief at LinkedIn, on Career Skills Rewarded in the AI Age
15 juni 2026 · 37 min
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Dan Roth is the Editor in Chief and a Vice President at LinkedIn, where he has led the world's largest professional editorial operation since 2011. Business Insider once called him the most powerful business journalist on the internet, and over more than a decade he has helped turn LinkedIn from a networking site into a global media platform, building out its editorial team, top voices, and Influencer Program. He also hosts the popular This Is Working podcast.
Over 15 years watching professionals navigate every major shift in the workplace, from the rise of social media to the agentic AI era, Dan has developed a clear and counterintuitive view of what actually drives a durable career. In this episode, he draws on LinkedIn's data from over a billion members to make the case that the skills employers are hunting for right now are not the ones most professionals are building, and that the gap between what AI can produce and what humans can offer is closing faster than anyone is prepared for.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why AI has commoditized knowledge itself, and what professionals actually come to LinkedIn for that no chatbot can give them
What separates content that spreads beyond your network from content that stays stuck inside it, and what LinkedIn's systems are really looking for
Why AI is a great tool for getting your voice out, and the exact moment it starts working against you instead
The mindset Dan drills into his team about passion and failure, and the one thing he says you are never allowed to get wrong
How a mission-driven company resists the pull to chase clicks and ad revenue, and what Dan's old-world instincts taught him to unlearn
The two categories of skills surging in demand right now, and why the second list is the one most people overlook
Explore this conversation:
00:00 Intro and AI Fun Fact: Stop Giving AI Human Adjectives
04:10 Introducing Dan Roth, Editor in Chief at LinkedIn
05:50 Leadership Lessons from …
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392: Sophia Kianni, CEO of Phia, on Scaling to 1.4 Million Users Through Feedback, Experimentation, and AI-Driven Efficiency
8 juni 2026 · 23 min
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Sophia Kianni is the co-founder and CEO of Phia, an AI shopping agent with more than 1.4 million users that has raised over $43 million from an investor list that includes Kris Jenner, Sara Blakely, and Hailey Bieber. Sophia and her co-founder built the company out of their Stanford dorm room on a single thesis: in the future, every consumer will have a personal AI shopping assistant.
Sophia is also the co-host of The Burnouts, a podcast with more than 600,000 followers and over 200 million downloads. Earlier in her career, she founded Climate Cardinals, the world's largest youth-led climate nonprofit with more than 20,000 volunteers, and became the youngest United Nations advisor in U.S. history.
In this episode, Sophia draws on her experience building high-velocity ventures before the age of 25 to challenge how founders think about feedback, team culture, content creation, experimentation, and workflow efficiency. She also makes a compelling argument for how AI should be used at work: removing friction from the parts of a workflow that drain time and energy without adding value.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why the intersection of social and shopping looked like a solved problem to most founders, and the gap that Sophia and her co-founder saw inside their Stanford dorm room
How Sophia thinks about team building as company building, and the specific qualities she screens for before resumes, credentials, or experience
How a consumer-first mindset and relentless customer feedback help Phia iterate faster and build a product users love
Why building close to your user is still the most underrated advantage in AI, and what most founders miss when they try to scale it
Why Phia and The Burnouts built data-oriented content engines that operate like scientific labs, testing hooks, fonts, retention curves, and B-roll as measurable variables rather than relying on creative instincts alone
How Sophia uses AI tools like Adobe Firefly to increase…
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SE 25: What AI Can't Replace, with the CEOs of Scribe, Operative Games, and Dataiku, and the CBO of Zensai | Live from HumanX 2026 Special Episode
4 juni 2026 · 28 min
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In this special compilation episode of AI and the Future of Work, we are bringing you four conversations recorded live on the show floor at HumanX 2026. This is the second episode of our three-part HumanX Live series.
In an era dominated by headlines about displacement and disruption, these four founders share a grounded optimism about what AI cannot replace: human judgment, creativity, and the drive to do work that matters.
Each of these leaders is building in a different space, but they arrived at the same conviction. The companies and people poised to win in the AI era are not the ones moving fastest to automate. They are the ones who understand what humans are uniquely built to do, and build systems that make space for it.
What You'll Learn
Why most organizations cannot answer a basic question: how does work actually get done here, and why that gap is now a strategic liability
How AI-powered learning can shift employee development from a compliance obligation to a genuine driver of engagement
Why storytelling will remain a human craft, and what the Pixar transition teaches us about navigating creative disruption
The case for asynchronous AI collaboration, where systems work overnight and humans return to exercise judgment
Why optimism about the human worker is not naive, and what the data actually shows
How to balance AI use cases that replace humans with those that create new value and grow the economy
Featured Guests
Jennifer Smith, CEO & Co-founder of Scribe. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257070
Robin Daniels, Chief Business Officer at Zensai. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257107
Jon Snoddy, CEO of Operative Games. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257113
Florian Douetteau, CEO of Dataiku. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257…
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Florian Douetteau, CEO at Dataiku | Live from HumanX 2026
4 juni 2026 · 20 min
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Florian Douetteau is the CEO and co-founder of Dataiku, the enterprise AI platform he has been building for over a decade to make data and AI accessible at scale. Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores how the rise of agents is reshaping the role of data teams and what a genuinely AI-native way of working looks like in practice.
Florian and host Dan Turchin go deep on where agentic AI actually creates economic value, why most enterprises are still thinking about agents the way people thought about websites in 1997, and what it means for humanity when machines start doing things we thought only humans could do.
What You'll Learn
How Dataiku evolved from data science platform to full agent studio for the enterprise
Why business teams need to become their own AI enablers, not just consumers of data insights
What a truly agentic workday looks like for knowledge workers in the near future
Why the dystopian AI narrative misses the use cases that actually grow the economy
What it means to be human when intelligence is no longer exclusively a human trait
🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257142
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Florian on LinkedIn
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Jon Snoddy, CEO at Operative Games | Live from HumanX 2026
4 juni 2026 · 24 min
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Jon Snoddy is the CEO of Operative Games and a veteran storyteller with a career spanning NPR, Lucasfilm, Disney Imagineering and a co-venture with Spielberg and Sega. Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores what happens when you combine Disney-level character craft with large language models to create a completely new kind of interactive storytelling.
Jon and host Dan Turchin dig into how Operative builds AI-powered characters that feel emotionally real, what the entertainment industry gets wrong about the AI disruption, and why small studios have an edge that no major franchise can buy.
What You'll Learn
How Jon went from Disney Imagineering to building AI characters you can call on the phone
Why emotional fidelity matters more than photorealism in AI-driven storytelling
How Operative thinks about guardrails, ethics and responsible AI in immersive entertainment
What the Pixar disruption can and cannot teach us about the AI moment in entertainment
Why big studios are watching but not moving, and why that's an opportunity for startups
🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257142
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Jon on LinkedIn
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Robin Daniels, Chief Business Officer at Zensai | Live from HumanX 2026
4 juni 2026 · 20 min
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Robin Daniels is the Chief Business Officer at Zensai and a seasoned tech executive with stints at Salesforce, LinkedIn, Box and WeWork. Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores what it really takes to create an environment where people are motivated to grow, learn and do their best work every day.
Robin and host Dan Turchin dig into why most LMS platforms have failed employees, how AI is changing the relationship between learning and performance, and why investing in people is not just the right thing to do but a proven path to better business outcomes.
What You'll Learn
Why 80% of employees are disengaged and what organizations can do about it
How AI-powered learning delivers the right skills at the right moment, not generic compliance training
How Zensai uses AI to coach managers and strengthen the employee-manager relationship
Why proving the link between learning and performance is the key to making L&D a strategic priority
Why the future belongs to humans who combine technical skills with taste, judgment and soft skills
🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257142
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Robin on LinkedIn
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Jennifer Smith, CEO at Scribe | Live from HumanX 2026
4 juni 2026 · 21 min
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Jennifer Smith is the CEO of Scribe and a former McKinsey consultant turned venture capitalist who interviewed over 1,200 enterprise CIOs before founding her company. Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round covers how AI is helping organizations finally understand how work actually happens inside their teams.
Jennifer and host Dan Turchin explore why even Fortune 500 leaders don't truly know how their companies operate, and what that means for AI transformation.
What You’ll Learn
Why process visibility comes before any AI initiative
How Scribe maps workflows across 600,000+ companies
Responsible AI and building a data-driven culture
Humans and agents working side by side
Helping people spend more time on the work they love
🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257142
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Jennifer on LinkedIn
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391: Andrew Palmer from The Economist on Why AI Productivity Isn’t Showing Up Yet
1 juni 2026 · 46 min
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Andrew Palmer is a long-time editor and columnist at The Economist, where he writes the widely read Bartleby column on work and life. He also hosts Boss Class, one of The Economist's most popular podcasts, whose most recent season explored generative AI in the workplace, a topic Andrew approached not just as a journalist, but as a self-described unsophisticated user determined to get smarter by doing.
In this episode, Andrew draws on his reporting and interviews with leaders across industries to offer an outside-in view of where AI adoption actually stands, and why the gap between the hype and the reality is not a sign of failure, but of how complex change really is.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why AI adoption faces three distinct barriers (behavioral, technical, and organizational) and why solving one without the others leaves productivity gains stranded.
Why structural reskilling frameworks (like Denmark's flexicurity model and Singapore's voucher-based lifelong learning system) offer a more credible response to AI disruption than waiting for policy to catch up.
Why Johnson & Johnson's "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach to AI experimentation produced a Pareto effect (15% of projects generating 85% of value) and what they changed as a result.
How the AI productivity boom is real at the individual level but not yet showing up in aggregate data, and why Andrew believes that gap is a question of time, not technology.
Why enlightened corporate leadership requires transparency about potential job disruption and a commitment to adjacent career planning rather than performative optimism.
What work in 2036 might look like, and why Andrew's most unsettling prediction has nothing to do with jobs, and everything to do with privacy.
Explore this conversation:
00:00 Introduction to AI and the Future of Work episode 391
01:14 AI fun fact: AI legislative speed versus technological advancement
03:51 Meet Andrew Palmer The Economist Bartleb…
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390: Automate the Work, Amplify the Humanity, with Snowflake's CPO Arnnon Geshuri
25 mei 2026 · 44 min
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Arnnon Geshuri is Chief People Officer at Snowflake, where he leads culture development, talent strategy, and organizational design at one of the world’s leading data cloud companies. His career spans decades of scaling high-growth technology organizations, including leadership roles at Google, Livongo Health, and Tesla, where he oversaw its growth from a 400-person startup to a 35,000-person transportation juggernaut.
Throughout his career, he has consistently chosen companies that demand a people function as innovative, as creative, and as forward-thinking as the business itself. And across every role, he has focused on one core idea: the people function must evolve as fast as the business itself, grounded in data, experimentation, and trust.
In this episode, Arnnon draws on that experience to challenge how leaders think about AI in the workplace, arguing that the real opportunity is not automation alone, but redefining how humans contribute, decide, and grow inside modern organizations.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why the people function must speak the language of data and analytics to influence engineering-led organizations and earn credibility in high-growth, technical environments
The shift from transactional HR to a strategic role focused on connection, education, and rebuilding trust after workforce disruption and disconnection during COVID
How Snowflake frames AI adoption by automating repetitive work, augmenting creative tasks, and preserving human judgment in decisions that require empathy and context
Why employees adopt AI faster when leaders encourage curiosity, remove fear of experimentation, and make tools accessible through simple interfaces like natural language
The risks of over-automating decisions like hiring and performance reviews, and why removing human accountability breaks trust inside organizations
How building a culture of experimentation, measurement, and iteration allows people leaders to scale organizat…
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SE 24: Special Episode: Why Real AI Progress Starts With Saying "I Don’t Know", with Stefan Weitz, CEO of HumanX - Live from HumanX 2026
21 mei 2026 · 49 min
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In this special episode of AI and the Future of Work, we are bringing you an exclusive conversation recorded live on the show floor at the HumanX 2026 event. This full interview kicks off a special three-part series, with the upcoming two episodes releasing in a compilation format. To start things off, we are sharing our uncut conversation with the man who made this entire gathering possible.
Stefan Weitz is the Co-founder and CEO of HumanX, an organization and premier event dedicated to cutting through the AI hype to find practical, world-changing applications. He joined Microsoft in 1996, working alongside leaders like Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer on iconic product launches and foundational tech like Bing and Windows.
In this live episode, Stefan draws on his extensive product development background to explain why our survival in the AI era depends on treating technology as an evolving tool and why the most powerful thing a leader can say today is "I do not know".
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why relying on focus groups and lean product development is the wrong approach for building breakthrough AI hardware and software.
The reason established tech giants risk losing the AI race if they rely solely on distribution over building superior products.
How AI differs fundamentally from all previous human tools and why its ability to learn creates unprecedented exponential growth.
Why the speed of current technological adaptation threatens to outpace our natural ability to transition roles and find new purpose.
The danger of anthropomorphizing artificial intelligence and why framing it as human creates unnecessary fear and resistance.
How saying "I do not know" has become the most powerful leadership tool in a non-deterministic technology landscape.
Resources:
Connect with Stefan on LinkedIn
Explore the Full HumanX 2026 Series
This episode is part of a special three-part series recorded live at HumanX 2026:
Episode 2: Compilation fea…
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389: Building AI for Human Connection, Not Dopamine Hits, with Robb Wilson, CEO of OneReach.ai
18 mei 2026 · 43 min
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Robb Wilson is the CEO and co-founder of OneReach.ai, an agent-building platform focused on complex enterprise use cases across healthcare, government, and telecommunications. A serial entrepreneur and former creative executive at Time Warner, Robb has spent decades working at the intersection of design and technology. He is also the co-owner of UX Magazine, a global community of more than 640,000 members, and the author of two bestselling books, including Age of Invisible Machines.
His career spans designing high-stakes systems like the Boeing 787 cockpit to building conversational AI platforms that rethink how humans interact with technology. Along the way, he earned an Academy Award nomination for Technical Achievement, reflecting his ability to bridge creativity and engineering at scale.
In this episode, Robb draws on that rare combination of design, product, and systems thinking to challenge how companies are adopting AI today, and why most are optimizing the wrong layer of the problem.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why companies are using AI to accelerate outdated software instead of rethinking what software should be, and how this creates the illusion of progress without meaningful change
The fundamental mismatch between human communication and traditional interfaces, and why conversational interaction exposes how poorly most software has been designed for real users
What “getting AI” actually means inside organizations, and why productivity gains often hide the fact that teams are still building systems they plan to replace
The concept of “invisible machines” and why the future of AI is not better interfaces, but removing interfaces entirely to prioritize human interaction over system interaction
Why evaluating AI systems based on what they do misses the point, and how understanding how they learn becomes the more critical question for decision-makers
The tension between building AI that drives engagement versus AI that streng…
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388: From AI Hype to Real Deployment: What Enterprise Leaders Keep Getting Wrong, with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies
11 mei 2026 · 45 min
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Matt Fitzpatrick is the CEO of Invisible Technologies, an AI platform used to improve models for more than 80% of the world’s leading AI companies, including Microsoft, AWS, and Cohere. The company has raised $100 million and scaled to $134 million in revenue, making it one of the fastest-growing AI companies globally.
Before joining Invisible, Matt was the Global Head of QuantumBlack Labs at McKinsey, where he led large-scale AI and data engineering efforts and helped enterprises move from experimentation to production.
In this episode, Matt draws on years spent inside enterprise AI deployments to challenge the gap between model progress and real-world adoption, and to explain why most organizations still struggle to turn AI into measurable business outcomes.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why enterprise AI adoption lags far behind model performance improvements, and why most organizations still struggle to turn technical progress into real business impact
The hidden role of messy, fragmented legacy data, and why decades of accumulated systems make it nearly impossible to deploy reliable AI at scale
Why defining “good” output in generative AI is far harder than expected, and how unclear standards stall deployment across high-stakes enterprise workflows
The case for redesigning workflows from scratch, and why layering AI on top of existing processes fails to create meaningful efficiency gains
Why most AI initiatives fail due to lack of business ownership, and how separating technology teams from operators prevents projects from reaching production
How fear-driven narratives about job loss are slowing adoption, and why AI is more likely to shift work toward higher-value tasks than eliminate roles entirely
Explore this conversation:
00:00 Intro and Fun Fact
03:57 Matt Fitzpatrick's Path From McKinsey to Invisible Technologies
09:56 Scaling Enterprise AI with Modular Platforms and Clean Data
12:44 The Crucial Role of Expert Human Fee…
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SE 23: Special Episode: Inside the 2026 Work Trend Index with Matt Firestone, General Manager for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agents
7 mei 2026 · 23 min
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Your employees are already ahead of you on AI. The data is in and the question is no longer whether this is happening, but what leaders choose to do about it.
That is one of the key findings from Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index, and it is the starting point for this week's special episode. PeopleReign CEO Dan Turchin sits down with Matt Firestone, General Manager at Microsoft leading product marketing for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agents, to unpack what trillions of anonymized signals across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem reveal about how AI is actually changing work right now.
What pairing telemetry with survey responses and in-house research reveals about the gap between where employees actually are and where their organizations think they are is striking. And the numbers on how organizations reward, or fail to reward, the people already doing this work will make most leaders uncomfortable. The bottleneck, it turns out, isn't where most people expect it.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why the job of a leader has shifted from designing transformation strategy to changing systems and culture
How the report reframes agentic AI collaboration, not as a threat to human agency, but as an expansion of it
What "frontier firms" and "frontier professionals" actually means, and why it's a mental model and rallying cry, not a marketing term
How building in the open, leaders experimenting visibly and removing the stigma of getting things wrong, is one of the most quantifiably impactful things a manager can do
Why agent adoption on the Microsoft 365 ecosystem is growing at a rate that will surprise even the optimists
Explore this conversation:
00:00 Intro
01:14 Inside Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index
02:22 Telemetry, Not Just Surveys: What the Data Reveal
03:09 Employees Are Ahead of Their Managers on Agentic AI
04:37 The Transformation Paradox and Broken Reward Systems
06:15 More Agentic AI, More Human Agency: The 49% Finding
09:28 How Lead…
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387: Agentic AI, Stablecoins and the Future of Money. Most Institutions Are Solving the Wrong Problem, with Emmanuel Daniel, Founder of TAB Global
4 mei 2026 · 1 uur 5 min
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Emmanuel Daniel is an author, advisor, and global thought leader on geopolitics, the future of finance, and their intersection with business and society.
As the founder of the research and consulting house TAB Global and a recognized top 10 global influencer in the Fintech Power50, Emmanuel has spent decades looking under the hood of the global economy to understand how nations and institutions truly interact.
In this episode, Emmanuel draws on 25 years of building relationships with central bankers, policymakers, and fintech leaders across 157 countries to make the case that the disruption most financial institutions are bracing for is not the one that is actually coming, and that the leaders asking the wrong questions today will have no runway left when the real inflection point hits.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why financial markets distracted everyone from the real AI disruption, and what happens to large organizations when agentic AI finally reaches the Internet of Things.
Why the end user no longer interacts with your bank's app directly, and what that means for every institution investing in UX.
Why Emmanuel argues that debt is the economy, and why the conversation about U.S. debt-to-GDP is asking the wrong question entirely.
Why state-promoted digital currencies are structurally designed to fail, and what China's eCNY after 8 years in pilot reveals about the limits of government-driven innovation.
Why stablecoins have enabled a parallel global economy that traditional banking missed, and what that signals for the institutions still holding the rails.
Why originality of thought is the one human capability AI cannot replace, and why Emmanuel says AI is of no use to you if you cannot form the right questions yourself.
Resources:
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Emmanuel on LinkedIn
AI fun fact article
On How AI Voice Assistants Will Make Meetings More Productive
Other episodes mentioned:
3…
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386: Pace, Noise, and What's Really Blocking AI Transformation at Work, with Tom Scott, CEO of Wrike
27 april 2026 · 39 min
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Tom Scott is the CEO of Wrike, the work management platform trusted by over 20,000 customers including Walmart Canada and Sony Pictures Television, across more than 140 countries and nearly 2 million end users.
Tom's path to the CEO seat is anything but conventional. He spent over 20 years leading finance and operations across some of the most hardware-intensive sectors in tech, from building cell towers to running finance at Zebra Technologies and autonomous robotics company Fetch Robotics, before joining Wrike as CFO and transitioning to CEO in July 2023.
In this episode, Tom draws on that rare vantage point (having led through multiple waves of technological disruption) to make a case that the leaders and companies that treat organizational intelligence as a combination of human judgment and AI capability, rather than a replacement of one by the other, are the ones building something that lasts.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why transformation remains stubbornly hard in the AI era, and what leaders consistently underestimate about the real blockers to change
Why the biggest career risk today is not AI itself, but the decision to stop moving up the value stack of your current role
The two words Tom's customers and team use most to describe the current moment: pace and noise, and what that means for leaders trying to drive transformation.
How Tom coaches his leadership team to hire for intensity and ownership over domain expertise, and why that philosophy matters more now than ever
Why a deterministic career plan is no longer a viable strategy, and what curiosity and experience-chasing actually look like as professional operating principles
What Tom believes will be table stakes in the workplace well before 2031, and why the building blocks are already visible today
Explore this conversation:
00:00 Intro and Fun Fact
04:08 Scaling Work Management with Tom Scott, CEO of Wrike
04:47 From Cell Towers to the CEO Seat at Wrike
05:51 …
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SE 22: Authors on Redefining the Human at Work: The Shift from Efficiency to Meaning (Special Episode)
23 april 2026 · 34 min
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In this special April compilation episode of AI and the Future of Work, we’re bringing back six great former guests who published popular books about how AI is redefining humans at work.
The future of work isn't about competing with algorithms. It’s about how we use technology to increase our capacity for trust, express our vulnerability, and discover meaning.
This episode brings together insights from authors who explore how AI is reshaping work and what it means for individuals and organizations.
What You’ll Learn
Why delegating routine tasks to AI frees us to explore our human superpowers like empathy, rational thinking, and compassion.
How the future of knowledge work lies in navigating ambiguity and expressing entirely new ideas.
Why leaders must move beyond monitoring and productivity theater to build cultures of trust and give teams the space to experiment.
How the traditional, contract-based employment model is failing the next generation and what replaces it.
Why the era of the “superhuman” leader is over, and how showing your human side earns loyalty in times of disruption.
How the AI revolution is sparking a massive work quake, and why only you can write your own story and decide what gives you meaning.
Featured Guests
Bernard Marr, Futurist and Bestselling Author of Generative AI in Practice - Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/15441666]
Atif Rafiq, Former Fortune 500 Executive and Author of Decision Sprint - Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/14507445]
Brian Elliott, Executive Advisor and bestselling author of "How the Future Works". - Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/17282891]
Josh Drean, Co-founder of the Work3 Institute and Co-author of Employment is Dead - Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/16473644]
Linda Rottenberg, CEO and Co-f…
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385: From API Management to Agent Control: Why Governing AI Actions Is the Only Path to Enterprise Value, with Oren Michels, Co-Founder and CEO of Barndoor AI
20 april 2026 · 44 min
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Oren Michels is an entrepreneur, investor, board member, and advisor to technology startups in the US and Europe. He is the co-founder and CEO of Barndoor AI, the control plane for agentic AI, and the founder who previously helped define the API management category with Mashery, acquired by Intel in 2013. He is also a Tony-nominated Broadway and Off-Broadway producer whose credits include Romeo+Juliet and Good Night, and Good Luck starring George Clooney.
In this episode, Oren draws on two decades of building foundational infrastructure for the enterprise to make the case that governing AI agents is not a security problem. It is an entirely new category of problem, and most companies do not yet have the vocabulary to describe it, let alone the tools to solve it.
If your agents can already write to your CRM, interpret your instructions, and act without life experience or fear of consequences, who is actually in control?
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why securing AI agents is entirely different from managing APIs, and why traditional security and identity access tools were never designed to handle what agents can do.
The reason most so-called agentic AI is still glorified robotic process automation, and what it will actually take to unlock enterprise value.
How Barndoor AI's "least privilege" framework for agents works, and why the permission logic goes far beyond the identity of the human using the tool.
Why an agent with delete access to your CRM is one probabilistic misfire away from a catastrophic outcome, and why ultimate responsibility always comes back to the humans operating the tools.
The BYO AI parallel to BYOD: why well-meaning employees using personal AI tools with company data may force the enterprise governance moment no one is ready for.
Why the same instinct that took Oren from API infrastructure to Broadway and back to enterprise AI may be exactly the mindset the agentic era demands from its builders.
Explore this conv…
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384: When AI Creates Art, What Stays Human? with Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital
13 april 2026 · 47 min
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Jake Saper is a General Partner at Emergence Capital, one of the most iconic venture firms in enterprise software, with a portfolio that includes Zoom, Gusto, Veeva, and Together AI. Emergence has backed some of the most category-defining B2B companies of the last two decades, and Jake has spent nearly 12 years at the center of that deal flow.
What sets Jake apart is a life lived on both sides of the creativity question: he backs the companies building AI but also performs across genres from blues to metal as a working musician.
In this episode, Jake brings that rare combination of investor rigor and artist instinct to one of the hardest questions AI is forcing us to face, and whether you leave reassured or unsettled may depend entirely on how much of your identity is wrapped up in the work you create.
In this conversation, we discuss:
How AI will democratize the creation of art but commoditize its execution, ultimately causing the value of live, dynamic human performances to skyrocket.
The stunning acceleration of startup growth, with top-quartile B2B software companies now scaling from zero to $1 million in ARR in just four months.
How the flood of AI-generated content is turning attention into the real bottleneck, and why curation and point of view become the new competitive advantage.
Why Jake believes the market will self-regulate the anthropomorphization of AI agents in the workplace, and where that logic has a hard limit.
What Geoffrey Hinton said about building AI "like a mother," why it was both comforting and deeply unsatisfying, and what it reveals about AGI risk.
Why Jake argues disclosure matters during this transition period, but what he actually wants people to ask about art as AI becomes a normal creative tool.
Explore this conversation:
00:00 Why AI Makes It Easier to Build a Demo and Harder to Build a Moat
05:25 From Cell Towers to Venture Capital: Jake Saper's Path to Emergence
08:53 How AI Is Compressing Startup Grow… -
383: From Zero-to-One to a Billion in ARR: Why monday.com Is Rebuilding Its Product Thinking from Scratch, with Daniel Lereya, CPTO at monday.com
6 april 2026 · 42 min
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Daniel Lereya is Chief Product and Technology Officer at monday.com, the AI work platform trusted by 60% of the Fortune 500 and valued at approximately $8 billion. He joined the company when it had 30 people and $4.5M ARR, and has since grown his team from 5 to nearly 900 people as monday.com crossed $1 billion in ARR.
In this episode, Daniel draws on nearly a decade of scaling one of the world's most adopted work platforms to share what it actually takes to rebuild product thinking from scratch when AI changes everything you thought you knew.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why the instincts that made monday.com successful are the exact ones Daniel says had to be dismantled to build AI-first products.
What the critical difference is between building a demo that impresses and an agent that actually works in production, and where most teams get it wrong.
Why Daniel believes wrapping AI inside rigid workflows produces better results than giving agents full discretion, and what monday.com learned the hard way.
What happened when 2,000 of 3,000 monday.com employees started building their own apps in just two weeks, and what it revealed about the future of who gets to build software.
Why Daniel argues that when an AI agent makes a mistake, the real question leaders should be asking has nothing to do with the technology.
Why the biggest barrier to AI adoption is not the technology itself, and what Daniel says companies must stop waiting for before they start.
Explore:
00:00 Why AI Adoption Is Harder Than It Looks
00:53 Introduction + AI Commerce Standards: Google, OpenAI & Visa
04:30 Daniel Lereya's 9-Year Journey Scaling monday.com to $1B ARR
09:00 How AI Forces a Complete Reset in Product Thinking
12:25 The "AI Month" Initiative: Pausing R&D to Rebuild from Scratch
14:57 Building AI Products When the Output Is Non-Deterministic
20:47 What 250,000 Customers Taught Us About AI in the Real World
25:38 Responsible AI: Guardrails, Governance, a… -
382: Are We Building AI Without Half the Population? With Lisa Davis, Author of The Only Woman in the Room
30 maart 2026 · 42 min
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Lisa Davis is a technology executive who has served as CIO and tech leader for some of the world's most complex organizations, including Intel, Blue Shield of California, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Department of Defense.
She is now focused on shaping the next generation of leaders and advocating for women and diverse talent in STEM through her board work, executive coaching, and her forthcoming book, The Only Woman in the Room: How to Win in a Workplace Still Built for Men.
In this episode, Lisa draws on 30+ years leading technology at the highest levels of government and enterprise to make the case that the future of AI depends on who gets to build it, and as long as women remain locked out of those rooms, we are getting it dangerously wrong.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why women's representation in STEM has fallen from 34% in the mid-1980s to 22% today, and why that decline is a crisis for the future of AI, not just the workplace.
Why the real risk isn't the technology itself but the leadership teams making AI decisions without diverse voices at the table.
The structural systems that were never designed for women to thrive, and why redesigning them is a business imperative, not a social favor.
Why current corporate layoffs are being falsely attributed to AI, and what leaders need to start saying out loud.
Why girls begin dropping out of math and science as early as middle school, how cultural norms around "bossiness" suppress leadership potential, and what parents and organizations can do to intervene earlier.
What Lisa says women who finally reach the executive table must do differently, and why most don't.
Resources:
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Lisa on LinkedIn or visit her website to learn more about her book.
AI fun fact article
On how to navigate life transitions with Bruce Feiler, award-winning author and popular TEDx speaker