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

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Dr. John Boudreau, future of work pioneer and former Cornell professor, discusses the new definition of work Nov 06, 2023

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Dr. John Boudreau is a luminary in the future of work academic community. He has published more than 50 books and articles. His scholarly research is published in Management Science, Academy of Management Executives, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Personnel Psychology. Features on his work have appeared in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Fast Company and Business Week, among others.

Dr. Boudreau helped establish and then directed the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies (CAHRS), at Cornell University, where he was a professor for over 20 years, before his current position as Research Director for the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California.
Thanks to friend of the podcast David Creelman for the intro to Dr. Boudreau!

Listen and learn...

How Dr. Boudreau got his start as an academic in HRTech
What inspired Dr. Boudreau to make work life better for employees everywhere
How Dr. Boudreau defines work (the most enlightened definition we've heard)
How to build high-functioning teams
Why diverse teams don't perform better
How alternative work and workers are redefining the labor force
Why jobs don't equal work and degrees don't equal jobs
What does it mean to be human when your colleague is a bot
Why ATM machines led to more human bank tellers being hired
About the rise of internal talent marketplaces
Which skills AI will never automate

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Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com and Soar, discusses how genAI studios launch AI-first companies Oct 30, 2023

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Today's guest has been bringing families together online since 1997 when he founded Ancestry.com which has served more than 13 billion profiles, amassed 40 billion people records, and generated over a billion dollars in revenue. He followed that up with FamilyLink which he founded in 2007 and today has more than 50 million users.

For the past several years, Paul Allen has been on a new adventure having founded Soar.com in 2017. He and the team are connecting employees to stories from trusted sources to help them make better, more informed decisions.

Soar indexes millions of hours of video and audio content in domains as diverse as academic lectures, political hearings, and stump speeches. Not surprisingly, he and the team are using AI to make all that content discoverable and accessible.

Paul is a sought after speaker, a director of the Human Justice Foundation, and is one of the most mission-driven entrepreneurs of our generation.

Listen and learn...

Paul's number one business lesson
How Paul "uplifts humanity" with AI
Why the "factory education system" doesn't work
Why AGI won't be the end of civilization
How an AI studio for audio transcription works
The role of CitizenGPT... and why it won't hallucinate
How AI is restoring lost human connections
How to detect and mitigate the danger of deepfake video content using a blockchain
What it means to be an ethical publisher of content in the age of AI
Paul's (not so obvious) secret to success

References in this episode...

Denise Hemke, Chief Product Officer at Checkr and former Workday GM, discusses using AI to reduce bias in the hiring process Oct 23, 2023

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Anyone who has ever hired a new employee knows how important and broken the background check process is. The experience is awful for candidates and employers. Plus, it's inherently unfair for under-represented and non-traditional candidates. Imagine a world where hiring the best people is easier and faster and all forms of verification data are provided automatically from trusted sources.

Today's guest is making that vision a reality. Denise Hemke is the Chief Product Officer at Checkr, the amazing company making employee screening more fair for everyone. Checkr has raised nearly $700M since its founding in 2014. Denise heads up product management, design, and program management after having served in various leadership roles at Workday including most recently GM for Analytics. Denise is also the San Francisco chapter lead for the excellent organization Products That Count started by friend of the podcast SC Moatti.

Listen and learn...

How to fix the broken background check process
How to give candidates with non-traditional backgrounds access to the labor force
How technology is making the hiring process more fair and helping workers get paid faster
How to use AI to reduce bias in hiring decisions
How AI used for background checks should be regulated
What Denise learned about building customer communities as a General Manager at Workday

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Tyler Foster, Evolv AI CTO, discusses the future of AI to help brands connect with consumers Oct 16, 2023

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AI is here to accelerate the world's creativity. In fact, it's one of the things generative AI does best. Imagine a world where personalized campaigns help products you love find you. Today's guest did just that and he created Evolv AI to help brands connect with customers across all digital channels.

Tyler Foster is the CTO of Evolv AI, a platform that helps brands improve conversion and experiment faster. He started the company with CEO Michael Scharff in 2019 and together they've grown it into an early leader in AI-first digital experimentation having helped brands like Safelite, DirectTV, and Verizon. Prior to Evolv AI, Tyler was the founding CEO and Chief Architect of Senient Systems and an early Software Engineer at Cloudera.

Listen and learn...

How a farmhand and SCUBA diver became an AI developer
How AI is helping brands target consumers
The tradeoff between personalization and data collection
How to eliminate bias in automated decisions
Will AI eliminate creative jobs?
How society needs to adapt to new definitions of work imposed by AI
Why we need to disconnect ideas from tools and processes
What does it mean that we're entering a "post-truth" era?
Why AI is more fair than humans

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Tim Guleri, Managing Director @ Sierra Ventures, discusses what he's looking to fund in gen AI... and what most entrepreneurs get wrong Oct 09, 2023

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Tim Guleri has had a remarkable run at Sierra Ventures since 2001. He has invested in transcendent companies including Sourcefire and MakeMyTrip which both went public. Before that, Tim had a successful career as an entrepreneur and exec at companies like Scopus and Octane which was acquired by Epiphany in 2000.

Sierra has one of the strongest future of work and AI portfolios that includes companies like Paro, Krisp, and SupportLogic which acquired Emtropy Labs which was founded by great former guest Harish Batlapenamurthy. In full disclosure, Sierra and I are both investors in ArmorCode.
Listen and learn...

Why the most successful venture investors were previously entrepreneurs
Tim's thesis for investing in gen AI customer journey company Simulate
How Tim identifies "gen AI whitewashing" when hearing pitches
Why gen AI is more than just another platform shift
How gen AI startups can beat Big Tech incumbents
Why all companies are ultimately "financial products"
Sierra's primary data from CIOs: "...they're spending money on use cases that unlock employee productivity"
What Tim means by "build horizontally but execute vertically"
Which jobs AI will eliminate vs. augment
Tim's "one that got away" pitch from his early days at Sierra

References in this episode...

According to CNBC, 69% of U.S. adults are uncomfortable with AI that can mimic human thinking
Ashu Garg from Foundation Capital on AI and the Future of Work
Rory O'Driscoll from Scale Venture Partners on AI and the Future of Work
Sierra Ventures

Adam Nathan, CEO and Founder of Almanac, discusses the future of collaboration for remote teams and how GenAI is improving productivity Oct 02, 2023

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We've had interesting conversations about remote-first work with leaders like Jordan Husney, Parabol CEO, and Darren Murph who at the time was the global head of remote work at GitLab (thank you Darren for the intro to Adam). Today's guest has been building a platform to make distributed teams productive since long before it was fashionable. Adam Nathan founded Almanac in January of 2019 to challenge incumbents like Microsoft Office and Google's GSuite.

Since then, he and the team have enabled organizations like Cisco, Credit Karma, and ByteDance to collaborate in shared workspaces.

Adam has raised more than $40M to date across two rounds from a legendary group of investors that includes Floodgate, Tiger Global, and General Catalyst. Prior to Almanac, Adam did his undergrad at Duke and he received his MBA from Harvard. He's also an active volunteer for The Salvation Army.

Listen and learn...

How being a product manager at Apple and Lyft inspired Adam to start a company to avoid wasting time at work
What's unique about remote-first work
Why remote teams need structure and transparency to be productive
How to eliminate time wasted in meetings without losing opportunities to build trusted relationships
How to charge for new LLM features in SaaS products
Why we tolerate LLM hallucinations
Where there's a gap in the market for a better collaboration experience
What Adam has learned from his entrepreneurial journey

References in this episode...

Jordan Husney from Parabol on AI and the Future of Work
Darren Murph from GitLab on AI and the Future of Work
Why we need to shut down AI development to prevent AGI
Almanac.io

Durga Malladi, Qualcomm SVP and GM and "Godfather of 5G", discusses the future of AI in mobile tech Sep 25, 2023

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Durga Mulladi is the SVP & GM for Technology Planning & Edge Solutions at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., the iconic company best known for enabling cell phones via its CDMA technology and chipsets that were first demonstrated in 1985. Durga has been an integral part of Qualcomm's growth having spent nearly 26 years there in various technology leadership roles.

He holds 578 patents, is a senior member of IEEE, received his PhD in '98 from UCLA, and was awarded Qualcomm's IP excellence award. Durga's list of accolades and accomplishments goes on for days. We're all fortunate to learn from a wireless pioneer and true tech legend.
Listen and learn...

Durga's insights from more than 25 years pioneering wireless technology
An insider's view of Qualcomm's formula for success
How networks and chips enabled the birth of the smartphone
Qualcomm's AI roadmap
How soon we can expect LLMs running locally on phones
How AI takes advantage of the unique capabilities of 5G networks
How to figure out what transactions happen on the device vs. in the cloud
How LLM fine-tuning may soon happen on the edge of the network or on the device
What size LLMs can be run locally while managing power consumption
How to improve consumer trust in LLMs

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May Habib, CEO of Writer, discusses LLMs and the future of co-pilots for content generation Sep 18, 2023

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In 2020 when today's guest founded her company the transformer architecture was relatively new and OpenAI was a science experiment funded by Elon Musk to ensure that AGI benefits all humanity. She and her team commercialized an early version of a co-pilot for writing content long before we appreciated the value of next-word prediction.

Since then, May Habib and the team have raised $21M from an exceptional group of investors including Insight Partners and Gradient Ventures. Today, Writer helps company authors comply with style and brand guidelines and also ensure grammatical accuracy. It's used by an amazing list or organizations including Spotify, Intuit, and Uber.

Prior to Writer, May co-founded Qordoba and was a Global Shaper for the World Economic Forum after graduating from Harvard with a BA in Economics.

Listen and learn...

How May got her start in NLP
What enterprise leaders don't understand about the current state of generative AI
How to speak to your data using LLMs
Why Writer uses graph databases instead of vector databases for generative AI
How Writer mitigates the impact of bias, copyright infringement, and halluciations when using LLMs
How AI is being used to replace tasks people hate... without eliminating jobs
How AI helps users with neurodiversity issues like ADHD
How May navigated a tough company pivot

References in this episode...

Mona Akmal, Falkon CEO, on AI and the Future of Work
Alex Capecelatro, Josh.ai CEO, on AI and the Future of Work
Making the web more accessible with AI for those with disabilities

Pete Erickson, Modev founder, shares how he built the world's largest community for conversational AI enthusiasts Sep 11, 2023

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Today's guest created one of the largest communities for conversational AI and generative AI enthusiasts. Pete Erickson is the founder of Modev which hosts the popular VOICE & AI conference and also others including the GovAI Summit.
Pete started the company back in 2009 and has since produced over 150 events across 89 countries that have connected more than 125,000 people. Pete and the team have created communities for tech companies like Samsung and Amazon. Today, we get a glimpse into the mind of a great entrepreneur who is focused on making AI education accessible to everyone.
Listen and learn...

How Modev went from a few people in a pizza shop... to a conversational AI event with more than 1,000 attendees
How Modev trained developers to build Alexa skills... in 2009
How new AI regulation is impacting the generative AI developer community
How Pete would regulate generative AI
About Sam Altman's request to Congress for OpenAI to be regulated
Should we expect AI vendors to regulate themselves?
What we can learn from GDPR in Europe about forthcoming AI regulation
How AI will transform the entertainment industry
Which jobs will be replaced by AI... and which ones are future-proof
What big news Pete will be announcing at the Voice & AI conference

References in this episode...

Nick Adams, Managing Partner at Differential Ventures, discusses how to get your generative AI startup funded Sep 04, 2023

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Entrepreneurs wonder what it’s like to be a VC. And VCs without an operating background often don’t understand the grit required to turn an idea into a successful business. The best investors have been successful operators first.

Today’s guest is one of those. Nick Adams founded Differential Ventures in 2017 to invest in B2B, data-first seed-stage companies. Since then, Nick and the team have invested in an impressive group of companies including Private AI, Ocrolus, and Agnostiq.

Before Differential, Nick helped grow companies like OPower and RAGE Frameworks in sales, marketing, and product leadership roles. Today we get to learn about how to innovate and grow a startup when the product is a venture fund.

Listen and learn...

How being an investor and entrepreneur are similar
The most outrageous pitch Nick has heard... and how it involved porn
How being a baseball player trained Nick to be a venture capitalist
Nick's advice for what to do after closing a big sales deal
Where there are opportunities for generative AI entrepreneurs to get funded
How AI is being used to design circuit boards
Nick's most recent investment... and what made him decide to write the check
What Nick is telling Congress we need to do to regulate AI

References in this episode...

Why generative AI is desperately in need of regulation
Metafold, new Differential investment
Dan Grunfeld from Lightspeed on AI and the Future of Work

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