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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Mel Engle, CEO of Predictive Oncology, shares how AI is curing cancer Dec 12, 2021

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Mel Engle, executive and cancer survivor, has spent more than 30 years in and around the intersection of healthcare and technology. He's now the CEO of Predictive Oncology using AI and patient data to develop personalized cancer treatments. Mel discusses how research from Carnegie Mellon is being commercialized to accelerate the future of healthcare.
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How Mel and his team have turned cancer detection and prevention into a data problem.
How to use AI to figure out which tumor types can be healed by which chemical compounds to reduce the time required to develop new cancer treatments.
How to mitigate the impact of bias in patient data when using AI to make high-stakes decisions.
How long before AI will be more accurate at detecting cancer than human doctors.
What's ahead for AI in healthcare for the next decade.

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Matt Cowell, CEO at QuantHub, shares why the future workforce needs to be data literate Dec 05, 2021

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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!
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How a Chemist landed in IT and eventually became a venture-backed entrepreneur
Why 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 future

References in this episode...

Gary Bolles on AI and the Future of Work
Panos Siozos on AI and the Future of Work
Bryan Talebi on AI and the Future of Work
Derek Steer on AI and the Future of Work

Dan Grunfeld, Director at Lightspeed and author of "By the Grace of the Game", discusses leadership, entrepreneurship, and basketball Nov 26, 2021

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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.
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Why professional basketball is a lot like entrepreneurship
Dan's lessons from experiencing hardship on the court... and how to recover from setbacks
How the best entrepreneurs find product-market fit
How 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 Work
Panos Siozos on AI and the Future of Work
Bernie and Ernie on ESPN 30 for 30
Dan on Twitter: @dan_grunfeld
Dan's personal site: DanGrunfeld.com

Matt Compton, CEO and Co-founder of Filo.co, shares why Zoom isn't what teams need to host virtual meetings Nov 21, 2021

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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.
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What's really required to make virtual events productive
How Filo's better than Zoom
How Anaplan crushed sales kickoff using Filo
The future of virtual spaces
Why we don't need a metaverse

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Phil Heltewig, CEO of conversational AI platform Cognigy, on the future of customer service automation Nov 14, 2021

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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 Twitter
Cognigy
AI and the Future of Work with Panos Siozos

Dr. Panos Siozos, Founder and CEO of LearnWorlds, raised $32M to build a novel edtech company that's helping creators monetize custom courses Nov 07, 2021

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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.
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How Dr. Siozos transitioned from being an academic and researcher to a high-tech CEO
Why creators need a better platform to share and monetize custom e-learning courses
How 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-learning
Why 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 Work
Jordan Husney, Parabol CEO, on AI and the Future of Work
LearnWorlds

Podchaser token: 9h5nXFjBF3PXuSmfUzrE

Scott Zoldi, FICO Chief Analytics Officer, discusses how AI and your data are used to make decisions about fraud and credit risk Oct 31, 2021

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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.
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How Scott's team uses AI to make automated decisions using consumer data
Why Scott's priorities are "explainability first and performance second"
Why the principles of "humble AI" are as important as the principles of ethical AI
What's required to increase public trust in AI-based decisions
What's the role of data scientists in the future when AutoML is prevalent
What Scott means when he says "models aren't biased when they're built, they're only biased in production"

References in this episode:

Thanks to Benjamin Baer for the intro to Scott!

Bindu Reddy, CEO of Abacus AI, discusses the latest in AI research and what's required to make developing AI apps as easy as building web pages Oct 24, 2021

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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 :).
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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 AI
How AI is being used to reduce customer churn
Why 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 bad

References in this episode:

Krishna Gade on AI and the Future of Work
Jeff Meyerson on AI and the Future of Work
Abacus.ai
Bindu on Twitter

Charity Majors, CTO and co-founder of honeycomb, discusses observability, how to build great software, and what she learned not to do from Facebook Oct 17, 2021

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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 :).
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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 data
How Charity defines observability
What it means to practice observability-driven development (ODD) and why it should replace test-driven development (TDD)

References in this episode:

Thanks to Rachel Chalmers for making this episode happen!

Kai Nunez, Vice President of Research & Insights at Salesforce, shares the secret to making tech teams own responsibility for AI ethics Oct 10, 2021

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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 technology
How 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 Benioff

References in this episode...

Krishna Gade from Fiddler on AI and the Future of Work
AI ethics at Salesforce

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