As NASA’s longest-running Chief Administrator, Dan Goldin ushered in an era of “faster, better, cheaper” that prioritized safety while pushing the organization forward. He joins Robb and Josh to discuss his approach to innovation and kick some holes in fallacies like the iron triangle, which he calls “horsepuckey.” Goldin was at the helm of major projects, including a redesign of the International Space Station, and various Mars exploration programs. Robb and Josh dig into his profound 50/50 rul...
Feb 21, 2025•40 min•Season 5Ep. 4
Did the US Copyright office just declare that AI is the artist, not the tool? Does their new report raise more questions than it answers? Robb and Josh welcome back Ed Klaris, Managing Partner at Klaris Law and Columbia Law professor, for part two of their discussion on the office’s ongoing Copyright and Artificial Intelligence report, focusing on copyrightability. Klaris returns with critical insights into what these updates to copyright law mean with more and more people now using generative A...
Feb 14, 2025•31 min•Season 5Ep. 3
Blaise Agüera y Arcas, author and CTO of Technology & Society at Google, returns to the podcast to talk about his new work, What is Life? . This limited-edition, pocket-sized book is the first part of a larger print project with MIT Press and Antikythera titled What Is Intelligence? . What is Life? draws fascinating parallels between the life-building chemical reactions taking place in natural chimneys deep in our oceans and the work of Alan Turing and John von Neumann in the mid-twentieth c...
Jan 31, 2025•52 min•Season 5Ep. 2
Anna Lembke, MD, author of the New York Times bestseller Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence , joins Robb and Josh for a discussion about the perils and promise of AI. As a psychiatrist and Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University, Dr. Lembke shares critical insights into the power and nature of behavioral addiction, and how technology and digital media are impacting the dopamine systems in our brains. Drawing from her experience...
Jan 17, 2025•1 hr•Season 5Ep. 1
Active inference is a “first principles” approach to understanding behavior and the brain, framed in terms of a single imperative to minimize free energy. The free energy principle describes systems that pursue paths of least surprise, minimizing the difference between predictions based on their model of the world and their sense and associated perception. Dr. Thomas Parr is a practicing clinician and prominent researcher in the field of theoretical neuroscience and he currently works as a...
Dec 20, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 4Ep. 16
Despite being a massive piece of the bigger AI puzzle, computer vision doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves. Robb and Josh welcome Dr. Jason Corso, Professor of Robotics at University of Michigan for an In Action episode that explores the complexity and power of machines that can see. Jason is the Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Voxel51, which is backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, and in this episode he demonstrates open-source tools available for working with massive d...
Dec 06, 2024•53 min•Season 4Ep. 15
What’s it like to build an AI agent? Daniel Lametti, Associate Professor of Psycholinguistics at Acadia University, Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, and Senior Academic Advisor to OneReach.ai, returns to Invisible Machines to demonstrate how easy it can be to create and iterate on AI agents. Like other In Action episodes, you’ll watch as we walk through the practical realities of building these systems. This time, see how professor Daniel Lametti creates an objective-based AI agent t...
Nov 26, 2024•30 min•Season 4Ep. 13
Robb and Josh are joined by Ed Klaris, Managing Partner at Klaris Law, Columbia Law professor, and CEO of KlarisIP, for a conversation about the fate of generative tools like LLMs and AI models that produce audio and video. From Ed’s viewpoint, giant tech companies used stolen content to train the powerful AI models that have quickly changed the world around us. The trio discuss the question of whether or not it’s lawful for us all to use generative AI tools and how IP and copyright law will imp...
Nov 12, 2024•51 min
Jieun Kiaer is the Professor of Korean Linguistics at Oxford and her new book, The Future of Syntax: Asian Perspectives in an AI Age, explores the complexity within Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, arriving at insights that veer away from traditional approaches to formal syntax. The book also revisits Marc Prensky’s “digital native” concept, laying the groundwork for a new generation of technology users, “AI natives.” Jieun joins Robb and Josh for a conversation about the promise and per...
Oct 31, 2024•37 min
Marc Prensky is widely known for coining the terms “digital native” and “digital immigrant”—both now in the Oxford English Dictionary. In this episode, Marc joins Josh for a conversation about the shortcomings of our current education system and how AI might help inspire and enable a new generation of "AI natives" to design their own future. The two discuss the challenges that companies face in adjusting to this new technology paradigm, as well as the potential benefits and risks that conversant...
Oct 17, 2024•38 min
With consumer use of AI technology outpacing enterprise adoption, the fear of companies using AI to get rid of employees has been flipped on its head into legitimate threat to the existence of companies as we know them. There’s nothing preventing consumers from using generative tools to disrupt large companies—for example, using a fleet of AI agents to flood and debilitate a call center to take advantage of a promotion. Harsha Gowda and Nitin Bhudia, respectively the CTO and Director of Innovati...
Oct 01, 2024•1 hr 21 min
Digital twins are critical to the orchestration of AI agents, providing the context they need to create meaningful experiences quickly and efficiently. Robb and Josh welcome Dr. Michael Grieves for a conversation about the origins of the concept, which he developed while working with NASA in the 2010s. The architecture required for orchestrating AI agents relies on different types of digital twins that may emerge within an organization, touching on physical elements, temporal data, and collectio...
Sep 20, 2024•1 hr 9 min
As AI agents continue to alter the way people interface with technology, Robb and Josh were eager to speak with journalist Matt Alston about his popular Business Insider article “Everyone hates Workday.” In this deep exploration of our multifaceted interactions with machines, Matt reminds us that Workday’s UX is different across a whole spectrum of users, and that generally speaking, people don’t like using software. The patterns we follow when operating software end up shaping our thinking, and...
Sep 12, 2024•1 hr 4 min
As AI agents continue to remake the way we communicate with machines, what will become of SaaS companies? In this episode, Robb and Josh are joined by Janelle Teng, Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners’ San Francisco office, who recently noted that “2024 has not been kind to SaaS companies” on her Next Big Teng blog. A Stanford scientist and former product manager at Salesforce, Janelle explains why she is bullish on the multi-agent approach to automation. The trio also discuss the ramifi...
Sep 05, 2024•1 hr 12 min
Sophie Bushwick is a regular contributor to Science Friday on NPR and has previously worked for Scientific American and Popular Science. As the Senior News Editor at New Scientist, she joined Robb and Josh in exploring anthropomorphism and AI. Sophie’s work reminds us that our introduction to pocket computers came with the heavily anthropomorphized Tamagotchi pets of the late '90s. As we head into the era of conversational machines, Sophie brings her insights to a conversation about the pros and...
Aug 29, 2024•59 min
Micro UIs are powerful interfaces built on-the-fly by. We've talked about micro UIs a lot on this podcast, as they are a critical component of AI agents, adding graphical functionalities to an automated conversational experience. Micro UIs let AI agents show users interactive elements—like maps, secure payment interfaces, dynamic graphs, and explainer videos—rather than just describing them. In this episode, we're joined by Cole Gentile, Solutions Designer at OneReach.ai, to demonstrate micro UI...
Aug 22, 2024•46 min
There are many lenses through which we can view the world, and that's especially true when considering the technologies associated with artificial intelligence. In this episode, James Bridle, author of Ways of Being, joins to explore a multitude of perspectives relating to our ongoing relationship with technology. James’ book explores the interplay between animals, plants, and machines in the search for planetary intelligence. James offers a broad vision of "thinking" systems that draws from bio...
Aug 15, 2024•1 hr 14 min
We're rounding out our deep dive on organizational AGI with Aaron De Smet, a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company who helped identify "The keys to organizational agility" with colleagues back in 2015. As we discussed in our first episode on organizational AGI, agility is a key component to making the journey feasible. Aaron has been exploring organizational AGI for years and connects the dots between organizational longevity and the technologies associated with AI. This conversation examines the...
Aug 08, 2024•1 hr 8 min
We're entering an age when software will be written on-the-fly, by machines, to meet individual needs—an era of ephemeral applications. This will have a massive impact on the emergence of artificial general intelligence (also called AGI or singularity) and Ben Goertzel returns for a lively discussion about the scope of this dawning era. Ben helped to popularize the term singularity and, as the founder and CEO of SingularityNET (https://singularitynet.io/), has long been working to democratize ac...
Aug 01, 2024•1 hr 6 min
How do AI agents fit into a strategy for increasing a business' longevity? Imagine having a conversational operating system for your organization that was always learning. The advanced orchestration of AI agents can create a broader technology ecosystem that sets a trajectory for organizational AGI. Whereas artificial general intelligence, or AGI, refers to a system of artificial intelligence that meets or surpasses human capabilities across a whole range of cognitive tasks. organizational AGI s...
Jul 25, 2024•1 hr 1 min
In April, our co-host Robb Wilson was asked to join Jess Larsen on the Innovation & Leadership podcast to discuss AI agents and taking an agentic approach to workflow automation at an organizational level. As AI agents take center stage, we're reposting this conversation here to spread the word on the pitfalls orgs can avoid—and the best practices they can follow. Robb shares his hard-wrought lessons in AI adoption, including how to foster a culture of innovation by starting small, iterating rap...
Jul 11, 2024•54 min
Tanmay Bakshi is a technology wunderkind. He started coding when he was only four years old and his first iOS app was released just five years later, when he was nine. An autodidact and deeply curious technologist, Tanmay works as an AI and application architect for IBM, where he's been involved with ongoing automation efforts with McDonald's. Tanmay joins Robb and Josh for an exploration of anthropomorphism, user experience, and the flexibility required to succeed with the shifting technologies...
Jun 13, 2024•59 min
Journey into the innovative mind of Tom Gruber, co-founder of Siri and Chief AI Strategy Officer of Sherpa.ai. Robb and Josh welcome Tom for an enlightening exploration of humanistic AI—systems that augment and collaborate with humans, rather than replacing or competing with them. Using federated machine learning, Tom is working with Sherpa.ai to train advanced generative models on data in ways that maximize privacy and security. This creates opportunities to create safer personalized experience...
Jun 07, 2024•56 min
Greg Vert, Principal and HR Transformation Leader at Deloitte, returns to Invisible Machines to discuss the ways AI agents are changing the way enterprises approach HR. Building on the conversation they had in back in season one—in the wake of OpenAI's release of ChatGPT— Robb and Josh invite Greg to explore how the simple idea of AI as the UI will launch widespread systemic change. They also talk about how intentionality and empathy can foster better automated experiences for employees as large...
May 30, 2024•1 hr 17 min
Legendary tech journalist Kara Swisher joins Robb and Josh for a discussion about the early days of Silicon Valley and the shape of things to come. Her Boom Town column in The Wall Street Journal covered the early days of the internet, giving her access to key players like Marc Andreessen, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sheryl Sandberg, and Mark Zuckerberg. Swisher joins Robb and Josh to share insights from her new memoir, Burn Book, which reveals the tangled relationships between tech's la...
May 23, 2024•34 min
Learn about the inner workings of AI agents by watching conversational experiences in action. Annie Harshberger, Lead Experience Architect at OneReach.ai (https://onereach.ai/) takes Robb and Josh through an interactive demo of AI agents swarming together to automate complex scheduling requests. Annie has designed hundreds of conversational experiences orchestrating generative AI and other tools. Here, she shares insights into the design process as well as the coordinated effort taking place beh...
May 17, 2024•44 min
As the second wave of AI-led disruption takes shape, we're seeing and hearing a lot more about AI agents. Analogous to the Intelligent Digital Workers (IDWs) described in Age of Invisible Machines, AI Agents are more complex that they appear and many organizations are discovering that they aren't structured to allow these agents to perform meaningful work. Robb Wilson (CEO and co-founder of OneReach.ai) and Josh Tyson explore the real nature of AI agents, what kinds of technology ecosystems they...
May 09, 2024•32 min
Daniel Lametti and Joanna Kuc join Robb and Josh to share the advanced chatbot they created for a research project in mental health. Dan Lametti is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Dan taught and conducted research in experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, and is also the Director of Academic Fellowships at OneReach.ai. Joanna is a Data Scientist at Compass Pathways as well as a PhD Candidate in Experimental Psychology at U...
May 02, 2024•26 min
As conversational AI continues to change the nature of UX, we're excited to bring you a practical (and thorough) conversation about hiring design talent with Aaron Cooper, Senior Director of Digital Experience at Banner Health. Aaron has lead the creation of multiple products involving conversational AI at companies like Honeywell and Optum Health, and was generous enough to open up about what he's looking for when hiring design talent and how he makes sure key people within his organization are...
Apr 18, 2024•57 min
As the former Chief Knowledge Officer at NASA, Roger Forsgren has a unique understanding of maintaining the administration's renowned gold standard of data management in extremely high-pressure environments. Having worked his way up from a mechanical engineering position with the space administration, Roger joins Robb and guest host Mike Lee for a conversation about the unique rhythms of data organization, retrieval, and maintenance. Exploring ideas from his book "Lean Knowledge Management: How ...
Apr 12, 2024•55 min
