AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace, Business, Ethics, HR, and IT for AI Enthusiasts, Leaders and Academics

Matt Cowell started QuantHub in 2018 to help upskill and reskill employees to prepare for careers in data and AI. The QuantHub data skills platform exists to satisfy the growing demand for data-fluent team members. Amazing organizations like Uber and Southern Company use QuantHub to improve data literacy for employees. Plus, Matt's the first Alabamian on the podcast. Roll tide!Listen and learn...How a Chemist landed in IT and eventually became a venture-backed entrepreneurWhy there's a need for a "Duolingo for data literacy"What are the skills required for "data citizens" vs. "data storytellers"Why "every employee will soon be a knowledge worker"Why data literacy will be part of general education requirements in the futureReferences in this episode...Gary Bolles on AI and the Future of WorkPanos Siozos on AI and the Future of WorkBryan Talebi on AI and the Future of WorkDerek Steer on AI and the Future of Work

Dan Grunfeld, former professional basketball player and operator at Lightspeed Venture Partners, discusses the parallels between sports and entrepreneurship. His grandma's escape from the Holocaust inspired him to share her story, one he has been writing for five years. Dan's family history is inspirational. His advice for entrepreneurs is timeless.Listen and learn...Why professional basketball is a lot like entrepreneurshipDan's lessons from experiencing hardship on the court... and how to recover from setbacksHow the best entrepreneurs find product-market fitHow his 96 year-old grandma was saved twice by Raoul Wallenberg Why Dan says "...basketball was sent from heaven for my family"Dan's advice about discipline for aspiring authors: "if you snooze once, you can snooze every day."References in this episode:Rene Morkos on AI and the Future of WorkPanos Siozos on AI and the Future of WorkBernie and Ernie on ESPN 30 for 30Dan on Twitter: @dan_grunfeldDan's personal site: DanGrunfeld.com

Matt Compton's a restless tinkerer from Indianapolis who started Filo.co to solve a problem he had. He needed something better than Zoom to be able to spend more time with his family without being on the road three weeks a month. He and his co-founders joined a venture studio and built the prototype for Filo.co in four weeks. Now it powers virtual employee events for an impressive list of companies.Listen and learn...What's really required to make virtual events productiveHow Filo's better than ZoomHow Anaplan crushed sales kickoff using FiloThe future of virtual spacesWhy we don't need a metaverseReferences in this episode:Gary Bolles on AI and the Future of WorkNeelima Parasker on AI and the Future of WorkFilo.co

Phil Heltewig, co-founder and CEO of Cognigy, the low-code conversational AI platform for managing customer service bots, discusses how new AI technologies are improving the support experience. Phil started Cognigy in 2016 with two co-founders and has since raised $55M from Insight Partners among others. The team is now about 100 employees and boasts  an amazing customer list including Lufthansa and Bosch.Listen and learn...What Teddy Ruxpin has to do with the future of conversational AI.About the highs and lows of the entrepreneurial journey: "...there are days when you're wondering if you can make payroll..."How customer service bots "are designed to help humans in call centers, not replace them."What are the biggest technical challenges when applying NLP in narrow enterprise domains with limited training data.How Cognigy thinks about mitigating the impact of bias in AI models.Why your experience re-booking your flight will be much better in the future.References in this episode:Cognigy on TwitterCognigyAI and the Future of Work with Panos Siozos

Dr. Panos Siozos, LearnWorlds CEO, went from academic to high-tech CEO and raised $32M from Insight Partners to help creators monetize e-learning courses. Dr. Siozos is our first guest from Cyprus and his story about building a remote-first, global team should inspire international entrepreneurs everywhere. As Dr. Siozos says, "everyone has something to teach... that someone else wants to learn." This is a great opportunity to understand the future of learning... in 30 minutes.Listen and learn...How Dr. Siozos transitioned from being an academic and researcher to a high-tech CEOWhy creators need a better platform to share and monetize custom e-learning coursesHow technology is redefining the learning experience and why "the industrial education experience" is antiquated How future innovation in the areas of AI, AR, and VR will increase engagement rates for e-learningWhy Dr. Siozos says "...learning is the only superpower we possess as humans."References in this episode:Bryan Talebi, Ahura AI CEO, on AI and the Future of WorkJordan Husney, Parabol CEO, on AI and the Future of WorkLearnWorldsPodchaser token: 9h5nXFjBF3PXuSmfUzrE

Scott Zoldi, FICO Chief Analytics Officer and PhD in Theoretical Physics, shares how to use AI responsibly. FICO uses consumer data and machine learning models to make decisions ranging from fraud to credit risk. Hundreds of thousands of signals can be used to make a single decision by comparing new data with historical data. Scott's team is focused not just on making accurate decisions but also ensuring the signals used and the decision-making process are bias-free.Listen and learn...How Scott's team uses AI to make automated decisions using consumer dataWhy Scott's priorities are "explainability first and performance second"Why the principles of "humble AI" are as important as the principles of ethical AIWhat's required to increase public trust in AI-based decisionsWhat's the role of data scientists in the future when AutoML is prevalentWhat Scott means when he says "models aren't biased when they're built, they're only biased in production"References in this episode:Scott's blog posts at FICO@ScottZoldi on Twitter Facebook's AI experiment gone awryAmazon's facial recognition failureThanks to Benjamin Baer for the intro to Scott!

Bindu Reddy, CEO and co-founder of Abacus AI, was a product exec at Google and Amazon and an accomplished entrepreneur before setting out to make AI model management accessible to non data scientists. Bindu has since raised more than $40M from investors like Index Ventures, Coatue, Ram Shriram, Deep Nishar, and others. Her team is investing in core AI research and building a platform to make it easy to deploy models trained on deep neural nets with tabular data. Hear Bindu's vision... then go follow her on Twitter for provocative tweets like the one we discuss in this episode :).Listen and learn...How Bindu became an AI enthusiast after an algorithm helped her previous company increase revenue 40%What Bindu learned at Google and AWS... and what she has had to un-learn to grow Abacus AIHow AI is being used to reduce customer churnWhy Bindu's vision is to make creating and managing AI models "as easy as creating podcasts or websites" Why building bias into AI models isn't necessarily badReferences in this episode:Krishna Gade on AI and the Future of WorkJeff Meyerson on AI and the Future of WorkAbacus.aiBindu on Twitter

Charity Majors, CTO and co-founder at honeycomb, grew up in rural Idaho and dropped out of college. This is her unlikely journey from pianist to successful high-tech entrepreneur. She's a pioneer in the monitoring and observability space who  turned her learning at Facebook into a company focused on helping developers find and fix bugs faster. Charity's opinionated, thoughtful, and one of the most outspoken critics of, well, the status quo :).Listen and learn...What motivated Charity to start a career in tech having been a "perennial dropout"Why "ops has a well-deserved reputation for masochism"Why Charity says the "Kool-aid at Facebook is strong and potent" Why it's impossible to troubleshoot software bugs with high cardinality dataHow Charity defines observabilityWhat it means to practice observability-driven development (ODD) and why it should replace test-driven development (TDD)References in this episode:Charity's personal siteCharity on TwitterCharity's manifesto on observabilityThanks to Rachel Chalmers for making this episode happen!

Kai Nunez, VP Research & Insights at Salesforce, didn't always know she wanted to pursue a career in AI because it didn't exist as a field. Her dad was a linguist and she became interested in human-computer interaction at a young age. Kai's deep concern for values-based leadership and operating with integrity led her to become a leading voice in the DEI and AI ethics communities. Today, her teams are creating a culture of awareness about the impact tech has on underserved populations. She's a passionate advocate for educating teams to do the right thing... even when nobody's looking.Listen and learn...About Salesforce's real "biggest competitor"Why DEI matters in technologyHow Kai lives the value of "being a respectful truthteller"Why the future of software includes data audits to mitigate the risk of bias  What happened when Kai presented an unpopular idea to Marc BenioffReferences in this episode...Krishna Gade from Fiddler on AI and the Future of WorkAI ethics at Salesforce

René Morkos, CEO and Founder of ALICE Technologies, grew up wanting to build things. That passion led him to degrees in Construction Management and an adjunct professorship at Stanford. In 2015, he founded ALICE to improve the efficiency of complex construction projects. Rene has since raised nearly $40M from an incredible list of investors including Lightspeed, Merus, and Future Ventures. Listen and learn...What René learned from his first job after college working on construction sites in AfghanistanWhy ConstructionTech has attracted nearly $6B since 2014How algorithms figure out what 6,000 people on a construction site should do every dayWhat the world will be like in ten years when technology is fully adopted in the construction industry Why "startups are really just R&D departments for large companies"What's hard about building startups...that they don't teach you in CEO schoolReferences in the episode...ALICE TechnologiesALICE on TwitterAI and the Future of Work with Rachel Chalmers from Alchemist Accelerator