I recently caught up for a morning coffee with Charles Sansbury, CEO of Cloudera. We spoke about how AI is changing how leaders view data infrastructure and the significance of organizations capable of operating at exascale. Charles shared how his conversations with Fortune 50 companies have shifted from theoretical AI applications to practical concerns about return on investment, data quality, and infrastructure. A key part of this transition is the emerging trend of ‘private AI’ - targeted mod...
Mar 03, 2025•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast For Tom Chatfield, a British technology philosopher and author, there is nothing inevitable about technological progress. In his latest book, ‘Wise Animals: How Technology Has Made Us What We Are’ he explores how humans have co-evolved with technology throughout history. In our discussion, Tom deconstructed the common narrative of technological inevitability, using examples like the Incas' use of wheels only as toys and the complex history of Gutenberg's printing press to illustrate how technolo...
Nov 03, 2024•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast On a recent trip to Toronto, I caught up with Yao Morin, the global CTO of JLL, a commercial real estate company. We discussed JLL's early adoption of generative AI technology, despite the real estate industry's traditionally conservative approach to new technologies. Yao explained how JLL has implemented AI tools like JLLGPT to process vast amounts of unstructured data in multiple languages, making it easier for employees to access and utilize information from contracts, research reports, and o...
Oct 14, 2024•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ahead of the London Frieze Art Fair, I spoke with one of the world’s most fascinating artists, Von Wolfe, who for a number of years now has explored the intersection of art, technology, and artificial intelligence. As we sat in his studio in front of an oversized oil canvas and a sophisticated technology stack, Von Wolfe shared with me his unique approach to using machine learning and generative AI to create art. Our conversation delved into the history of art, from Renaissance masters to contem...
Oct 08, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tim Fu, founder of Studio Tim Fu, is one of the world’s leading experts in leveraging AI in architecture and construction. Fu established his practice in 2023 after working at Zaha Hadid Architects, and now heads a diverse team of architects and technologists, creating innovative workflows and designs that embrace AI's transformative power in architectural practice. Most recently, he was chosen to be a collaborating artist with OpenAI's new Sora generative AI platform.
Jul 29, 2024•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast How will AI change jobs? There are a lot of theories, and as of yet, scant conclusive evidence. However, if you did have to pick a 'canary in a coal mine' to understand the impact of generative AI on the future of work, one place to start would be the global freelance workforce. To understand how machine intelligence might be influencing how freelancers get things done, I spoke with Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com, one of the world's leading online job marketplaces.
Jun 22, 2024•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast We are familiar with the rise of AI generated art, but what impact will these emerging technologies having on more traditional forms of artistic expression? To explore that question, I spoke with Virginia Damtsa, a renowned curator of contemporary art, who has worked with everyone from Peter Gabriel to Ai Weiwei, Cornelia Parker, Olafur Eliasson, Annette Messager and others.
Jun 15, 2024•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast On a recent visit to Barcelona, I sat down with Marco Bertini, one of the world’s foremost experts on dynamic pricing. Bertini is a professor of marketing at Esade University and the author of the book, ‘The Ends Game: How Smart Companies Stop Selling Products and Start Delivering Value,’ which examines how technology and society stimulate accountability, prompting companies to profit from the outcomes they deliver rather than the offerings they bring to market.
May 08, 2024•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ben Waber is one of the world’s leading experts on people analytics and organizational culture. He is the founder of Humanyze and a professor at MIT. We caught up in Tokyo to discuss the future of work and the impact of large language models (LLMs) on productivity.
Apr 28, 2024•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast I sat down with Pierre-Yves Calloc'h, Chief Digital Officer at Pernod Ricard, to discuss the company's journey in embracing AI, algorithms and automation to drive marketing effectiveness, sales performance, and consumer engagement. Pernod Ricard, known for its extensive portfolio of brands such as Absolut Vodka, Jameson, and Ballantine's, has been at the forefront of leveraging AI to make data-driven decisions and personalize consumer experiences.
Apr 20, 2024•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Byron Reese, an acclaimed author, futurist, and entrepreneur shares his insights on the concept of ‘Agora’, a superorganism formed by the collective interactions of human beings. Drawing parallels complex adaptive systems like beehives, Reese argues that just as individual bees come together to create an entirely new organism with emergent properties, humans too form a higher-order entity through their differentiated roles and interactions.
Apr 14, 2024•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast What are the new challenges that generative AI is creating for copyright law? In this episode, I speak with Matt Hervey, the head of AI law at Gowling, to explore the legal intricacies surrounding the creation of content and ideas by large language models. In our discussion, Matt sheds light on the complex landscape of AI ownership, highlighting the differences in legal frameworks across various jurisdictions, such as the UK, EU, and US.
Apr 07, 2024•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mikko Hyppönen is a renowned Finnish cybersecurity expert and the Chief Research Officer at WithSecure. In our discussion, we delved into the rapidly evolving landscape of cybersecurity threats, particularly focusing on the impact of artificial intelligence and large language models
Mar 31, 2024•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dave Johnson is Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Officer at Moderna, where he is responsible for all enterprise data capabilities from data engineering, data integration, data science, and software engineering. Johnson holds a PhD in Information Physics and has over 15 years of experience in software engineering and data science. He has spent more than a decade working exclusively in enterprise pharma and biotech companies.
Nov 03, 2021•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast - What if within the span of the next decade, we could live for an additional ten years or more? A hundred years ago, advances in infection control and public health led to a near doubling of the human life span. For us to achieve a similar feat today, we will need more than just scientific breakthroughs. Despite the rise of AI, powerful computation platforms and new discoveries in genomics, there is still a gap between everyday medical practice and technological innovation.
Jan 28, 2021•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Brian Christian is one of my favorite writers on AI, with a unique perspective that is very much at the intersection of computer science and philosophy. He is the author of the acclaimed bestsellers ‘The Most Human Human’ and ‘Algorithms To Live By’, which have been translated into nineteen languages. A visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, he lives in San Francisco. His latest book, and the subject of this interview, is ‘The Alignment Problem’.
Dec 09, 2020•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast A US election is far more than just a struggle for the most powerful job in the world, they also provide a glimpse into consumer attitudes and emerging technologies designed to influence opinion. It was during the 2012 US election, for instance, that social media, online data and e-commerce profiling was leveraged for the first time to create a hyper-targeted, digital political campaign, that ultimately swept the Democrats into power. My guest this week, Harper Reed, was intimately involved in t...
Oct 08, 2020•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Despite all the talk about fintech disruption - banking, finance, and payments remain highly regulated industries with well-established competitors who are not standing still - even in this moment of rapid change and digital reinvention. Mastercard is one such company. They created Mastercard Labs as a way of co-creating and innovating with their customers. The idea was to turn external signals into opportunities, and in' doing so, de-risk' them for their clients and for the rest of the organiza...
Oct 01, 2020•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast This new age of smart machines will still need humans - but arguably, they will need to be ones who can think, create and make decisions in very different ways than the workforce of today. As with the first Industrial Revolution, reinventing education will be a priority going forward, especially if we are to survive the automation-led shakeup to jobs. To find out what it might take to transform schools and learning, I spoke with Dr. Shawn K. Smith , an education futurist and chief executive offi...
Sep 24, 2020•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Professor Tim Tangherlini calls himself a computational folklorist. Like many fields of research lately, folklore is a field where both the tools and objects of study are being profoundly reimagined by AI. I came across Professor Tangherlini's work after reading a research paper that he and his team published on using AI to study the structure and dissemination of conspiracy theories. Their research points the way to strategies that might defeat fake news by explaining how the elements of a cons...
Aug 27, 2020•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast We talk about disruption all the time, but are we really ready to make the profound changes that come with true transformation? Many companies set disruption as their goal, and even believe that by shaking up their market, they will achieve high levels of growth. For Charlene Li, leaders have all it all backwards. Disruption doesn't create growth; instead, growth creates disruption.
Aug 20, 2020•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rodrigo Mendoza is co-founder and CEO of Quine, a company building hyper-fluid interfaces between software developers and the labour markets. Previous to Quine, Rodrigo was an academic, a venture capital professional, and a freelance data-scientist. Rodrigo holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Oxford, where he was also a postdoctoral researcher in Machine Learning.
Aug 13, 2020•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nick Walton is CTO and Co-Founder at Latitude, and creator of AI Dungeon. He has been working on deep learning technology for the last several years, working at autonomous vehicle companies and in a deep learning research lab at Brigham Young University. What makes AI Dungeon so interesting and relevant to the near future, is that it demonstrates the radical creativity that is possible when you combine a good idea with the heavy lifting of a Cloud AI system that can be generally applied to multi...
Aug 06, 2020•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Workplace transformation has never been more important than now, in this time of crisis. So what does it take to build and sustain a culture that is not only innovative and creative, but capable handling constant reinvention? Is the fact that it is difficult and uncomfortable, the very reason we should do it anyway? Dr Adam Fraser is a human performance researcher and consultant who studies how organizations adopt a high performance culture to thrive in this challenging and evolving business lan...
Jul 30, 2020•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Austin Grossman is one of my favorite authors. His books (including my personal recommendation, ‘Crooked’) typically reveal an alternate version of the reality you thought you were living in. Given that, his side gig as a design consultant to the video games and mixed reality industry makes total sense. Most recently, he also served as Director of Interactive Design at Magic Leap. We spoke about the emergence of XR (or extended reality), and the challenges of creating content and telling stories...
Jul 24, 2020•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast While for many of us ‘working from home’ has been a new and unexpected challenge, for some companies, remote is how they were designed from the beginning. Zapier, a leading software automation platform, is one such of these. However, what makes Zapier a fascinating case study is not just their lack of physical offices, but the systems, workflows and practices that they have evolved to make their distributed organization function effectively. In this interview, I chat with Zapier’s CEO and co-fou...
Jul 16, 2020•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our experience of reality is about to change. XR, which incorporates augmented and virtual reality, has shifted from a niche technology to consumer prime time. Now the question is how do we start to design compelling experiences, commercial partnerships and digital ecosystems to unlock the potential of this new medium. XR will change everything from the way we build digital retail stores to how a meeting planner might envision the space for a live event. My guest, Raffaella Camera, is working cl...
Jul 09, 2020•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mars, Incorporated was already well advanced in their plans for digital transformation before the crisis hit. However, when I spoke to Sandeep Dadlani, the company’s Chief Digital Officer, he explained that the pandemic led Mars to embrace a new internal clock speed. Sandeep Dadlani joined Mars, Incorporated as Global Chief Digital Officer in September 2017, and has responsibility for working with Mars' global business segments to drive its digital transformation agenda, while delivering effecti...
Jun 25, 2020•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Now that the pandemic has plunged us into the world's largest remote work experiment, what are we learning about the kind of culture that supports distributed organizations? And how do leaders build a cultural operating system for a time of crisis and change? To answer this question, and to also understand how data is changing our understanding of performance and transformation - I spoke with Didier Elzinga, the CEO and co-founder of Culture Amp – one of the world’s fastest growing technology st...
Jun 18, 2020•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Regardless of your profession, one of the most important steps to becoming a better decision maker is knowing how to quantify uncertainty. That applies if you are a scientist, a poker player or a business leader. And while it is not unusual to apply probabilistic approaches to applications like robots or environmental monitoring - what is more challenging and potentially revolutionary is using similar strategies to more effectively fight crime or prevent bushfires. One of the leading thinkers in...
Feb 03, 2020•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
