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

Dan O'Connell, former founder and CEO of TalkIQ which was acquired by Dialpad, discusses the future of cloud communications. Dan's vision for helping teams sell more with less churn led to Dialpad becoming a unicorn last year having raised $100M at a $1.2B pre-money valuation.  Exceptional investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures are betting on Dialpad's ability to convert legacy telephony infrastructure into cloud-native, SaaS systems using AI to analyze voice transcripts.Listen and learn...Dan's entrepreneurial journey from incubator to launch to fundraising to acquisition.Why TalkIQ was really three startups in one... and how Dan navigated his team through the process of finding one big customer problem to fix.Why voice will soon be the primary computing interface.The challenges of developing NLP technology for voice transcription and AI-based analytics.What Dan learned from nearly a decade at Google... and, more important, what he learned not to do.References in the episode...AI and the Future of Work with Rory O'DriscollDialpad raises $100M at a $1.2B valuationWesley Chan from Felicis Ventures

Dion Hinchcliffe has been reporting on and prognosticating about the future of work for more than 20 years. He speaks with 100s of global CIOs annually about how to use technology to deliver great employee experiences. In this discussion, Dion shares mind-boggling stats about IT spending patterns and provocative thoughts about how to fix what's broken in the workplace.Listen and learn...The real definition of "digital transformation"Why CIOs have the shortest tenure in the C-suiteWho spends more on IT... than IT!What % of IT budgets go to innovation... and why that number is pathetically low. How the technology in your pocket will be very different in a decade.Resources mentioned in this episode:AI and the Future of Work with Mark SettleDion's perspective on the "New CIO Mindset" Dion's websiteDion on TwitterDion's Hierarchy of Digital Employee Experience NeedsAntWorks RPA

John Whaley has been programming since age five. He has been a lecturer at Stanford in Computer Science, a founding CTO, and a founding CEO. John raised a large series A in 2017 and has sold two companies. Oh, and he's out to save the world from passwords. UnifyID is a pioneer in the use of biometric data stored on mobile devices to authenticate users.Listen and learn...How John's personal journey led to the founding and successful acquisition of UnifyID by Prove.About the ethical implications of giving Big Tech access to your biometric data.Why "being yourself should provide enough information to uniquely identify you."What John means when he says "data isn't the new oil... it's the new kryptonite."John's bold prediction for when passwords will no longer be the predominant form of authentication (spoiler alert: it's sooner than you think).Thanks to Vinay Prabhu for the introduction to John.

Filip Dousek is a successful entrepreneur having sold his last company to Workday. He's also the author of Flock Without Birds, a two-part novel that challenges how the whole relates to its parts. Stories, Filip's company, is solving the problem of extracting insights about people from massive datasets to be able to answer questions about diversity, organizational behavior, and skills gaps. He also discusses the challenges of growing a startup in Prague.Listen and learn...Why enterprises don't use the data they generate to make better decisionsThe hard technical challenge of extracting insights about people and teams from large datasetsWhat it means to "look at data through the prism of graphs and relationships"Why founding Stories in Prague created an opportunity for talent arbitrageAbout our defensible advantages as humans vs. AIReferenced in this episode:Alchemist AcceleratorWorkdayFlock Without Birds

Jason Wojahn has been building companies and helping enterprises use technology for nearly 30 years. He learned a few things before launching Thirdera, the largest pure-play ServiceNow partner, earlier this year. Jason shares his perspectives on the right ways to introduce innovation to clients... and also the right way to reward innovation within his own team. Thirdera has created a brand that is fun and a culture that empowers everyone to do their best work.Listen and learn...Why there's still room to disrupt in the crowded ServiceNow partner ecosystemHow Thirdera works with clients to define their innovation agendaWhat Jason means by "being e-lingual is as important as being bilingual" Why "we’re in the early innings of cloud... and we haven’t even dressed for the field yet in AI." Oh, and listen to our discussion with Marc Talluto from 2019 for insight into the story behind Thirdera.

Tiernan Ray is an accomplished journalist who has written extensively for publications like ZDNet, the New York Times, Barron’s, CNN Money, Fortune, and Bloomberg. He famously launched coverage of machine learning for Barron’s back in 2015 with a cover story called “The Cloud Chip”.In this wide-ranging discussion, Tiernan shares how the principles of ethics should be applied to AI based on his thorough analysis of current research.Listen and learn...Why the field of AI ethics requires "those with authority to also have responsibility" for outcomes.How to instrument explainability into automated decisions made by algorithms and why explainability is like the paradox of Schrodinger's cat.How AI ethics is challenging because we're reducing topics like justice and fairness to algorithms whose behavior is dictated by objective functions.What Tiernan means when he says AI regulators can't be trusted to "grade their own homework".Why your personal data may soon be managed on a blockchain as a new layer of the traditional OSI stack.Resources referenced in this episode...Tiernan's treatise on ethical AI... and its companion pieceThe Technology LetterFiddler.ai

Bryan Talebi learned the value of education after fleeing Iran and living in a Turkish refugee camp. He worked for NASA at age 16 and, after helping lead many successful startups, started Ahura to disrupt the education system "which hasn't changed in 150 years". Bryan realized the millions of workers being displaced by automation need a way to more rapidly prepare for careers in the labor market of the future.Listen and learn...What skills are required to succeed in the new labor marketWhat impact a single robot can have on an entire factory of skilled laborersHow biometric data can be used to optimize the learning processWhat employers are doing to up-skill rather than replace current employeesWhy "AQ" is replacing IQ and EQ as the way to find 10x talentContact Bryan and Ahura AI for more information:www.ahuraai.combryan@ahuraai.com@bryantalebi3D

Milin Desai was an executive at VMware before taking the CEO role at Sentry last year. Since then, he led a $60M funding round that valued the company at $1B. An exceptional group of investors including Accel and NEA as well as new investor BOND participated. In this discussion with Dan Turchin, Milin openly shares the challenges of growing a startup and where there's room for innovation in the crowded monitoring space.Listen and learn...What all other monitoring vendors are missing that created an opportunity for SentryWhat Sentry does better than the legacy APM vendorsThe dirty secret of DevOpsWhy NoOps won't replace DevOps any time soonThe one non-technical skill that has helped Milin most in his careerThanks to Banjot Chanana for the introduction to Milin!

Slater Victoroff is a machine learning expert and science fiction writer who is never shy when sharing opinions about AI and the future of technology. His passion for giving unstructured content meaning led to the founding and success of Indico. The company has since raised $36M from an impressive set of investors including Jump Capital and Sandbox Ventures. In this discussion, hear how Slater went from dorm room programmer to entrepreneur.Listen and learn...How Indico was launched by pineapple and onion pizza consumed from 5:00 PM to 5:00 AM on Sunday nights. What it was like to found the company as CEO then later hire a replacement to become CTO. How Slater defends his 2012 comment that "the war is over... deep learning lost."How NLP is being used to unlock value trapped in unstructured data.Why every knowledge worker "needs a bionic arm".Why Slater says AGI, artificial general intelligence, doesn't exist as a concept.Follow Slater @sl8rv on Twitter.

A first on the show this week... we meet a guest whose digital twin has its own YouTube channel. Dr. Mark van Rijmenam is a futurist, best-selling author, and entrepreneur. He is a popular keynote speaker about issues related to how we co-exist with technology in an increasingly digital world.Listen and learn....Why it is we're living in "exponential times"How future societies will be organized by "digitalism" instead of "liberalism" based on who can access and control dataWhy blockchains as a technology are currently about at the maturity level of the internet in 1997What Dr. Mark means when he says "...be prepared to reinvent yourself every five to ten years"Resources mentioned in the episode:The Future is Faster Than You Think by Peter DiamandisCoded Bias, the documentaryWeapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'NeilCharlene Li on AI and the Future of WorkBill Davidow on AI and the Future of Work