AI and the Future of Work

Host Dan Turchin, PeopleReign CEO, explores how AI is changing the workplace. He interviews thought leaders and technologists from industry and academia who share their experiences and insights about artificial intelligence and what it means to be human in the era of AI-driven automation. Have an idea for an episode? Want to recommend a guest? Send proposals to info@peoplereign.io.

  • Episode Number : 95

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

    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.

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • 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.

    References in this episode:

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 94

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

    Matt Cowellstarted 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!

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • 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…

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 93

    Dan Grunfeld, Director at Lightspeed and author of “By the Grace of the Game”, discusses leadership, entrepreneurship, and basketball

    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.

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • 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:

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 92

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

    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.

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • 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

     

    References in this episode:

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 91

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

    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.

    Show more

    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:

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 90

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

    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.

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • 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:

     

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 89

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

    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.

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • 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!

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 88

    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

    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 :).

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • 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:

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 87

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

    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 :).

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • 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!

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 86

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

    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.

    Show more

    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…

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 85

    Rene Morkos, CEO and Founder of ALICE Technologies, shares how algorithms are changing the construction industry

    René Morkos, CEO and Founder of ALICE Technologies, grew up wanting to build things. That passion led him to degrees in Construction Management and an adjunct professorship at Stanford. In 2015, he founded ALICE to improve the efficiency of complex construction projects. Rene has since raised nearly $40M from an incredible list of investors including Lightspeed, Merus, and Future Ventures.

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • What René learned from his first job after college working on construction sites in Afghanistan
    • Why ConstructionTech has attracted nearly $6B since 2014
    • How algorithms figure out what 6,000 people on a construction site should do every day
    • What the world will be like in ten years when technology is fully adopted in the construction industry
    • Why “startups are really just R&D departments for large companies”
    • What’s hard about building startups…that they don’t teach you in CEO school

    References in the episode…

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 84

    Gary Bolles, best-selling author of The Next Rules of Work, shares how to manage through disruption and find your passion

    Gary Bolles, entrepreneur, venture advisor, and best-selling author, is a deep thinker who established roots in Silicon Valley in the 80s to pursue his joint passions for technology and exploring what he calls the three boxes of life – learning, work, and leisure. He’s the author of The Next Rules of Work which was published August 31. He’s also the chair for the Future of Work at Singularity University and the founder of eParachute among other companies. Oh, and his LinkedIn courses have helped train more than 800,000 students.

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • How the son of a laid off minister became one of the foremost authorities on the future of work
    • What opportunities are being created by “The Great Reset”
    • How technology is redefining work… and redefining our identity as humans
    • What it means that we’re moving from a “workforce” to a “worknet”
    • About the $10 million exercise… and why it’s the best way to find your passion
    • Why living the acronym “PACE” is the best way to ensure future career success

    References in today’s episode…

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 83

    Derek Steer, CEO and founder of Mode, discusses the future of work for data analysts and the biggest tragedy in BI today

    Derek Steer cut his teeth as a data analyst at Facebook and Yammer more than a decade ago. He co-founded Mode in 2013 to make it easier to ask questions about data and get better answers faster. Mode has since raised four rounds of funding including a recent $33M round from an exceptional group of investors. 52% of Fortune 500 companies use Mode and Derek has grown the team to more than 300 employees. Derek’s vision: “drive the time to do analysis down to zero.” He’s well on his way!

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • What Mode’s doing to “unlock the power of human reasoning”
    • What Derek learned about tools for data analysts from Facebook and Yammer
    • Why there will always be a need for analytics frontends even amid competition from data warehouses like Snowflake
    • The future of work for data analysts
    • The biggest tragedy in BI today

    References in this episode:

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 82

    Jeff Meyerson, entrepreneur and author of “Move Fast: How Facebook Builds Software”, shares important advice for Zuck

    Jeff Meyerson, entrepreneur, musician, technologist, and author of the acclaimed “Move Fast: How Facebook Builds Software”, discusses the stranglehold Big Tech has on developer tools and how the future of software development may be quite different from the present.

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • What Jeff learned about sales from playing poker
    • How Facebook builds software… and how it can avoid being evil
    • Why React is the “Linux of the frontend of the web”
    • The development tools Jeff’s most excited about
    • Why Zuck’s not a good leader
    • What Jeff will tell Zuck when they finally meet

    References in this episode…

     

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 81

    Krishna Gade, CEO and Founder of Fiddler, discusses the importance of AI explainability

    Krishna Gade was an engineering leader at Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook before realizing AI is eating software… and responsible AI is essential. He turned a passion for “trustworthy AI” into a company that recently raised $32M to make AI explainable.

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • Why AI explainability matters… and how to instrument it in AI models
    • What developers need to know to ensure AI models don’t make bad decisions
    • What legislators need to know when creating frameworks to regulate “responsible” use of AI
    • How Apple fumbled AI explainability when issuing credit cards through Goldman Sachs
    • Krishna’s top lesson learned as a first-time CEO

    References in this episode:

     

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 80

    Neelima Parasker, CEO of SnapIT Solutions, shares the recipe for making high-quality STEM education accessible to all

    Neelima Parasker started coding at a young age. Inspired by her entrepreneur mother, she studied Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering before eventually starting SnapIT Solutions. Neelima’s passion for investing in unproven talent has guided her as a leader. She’s an active entrepreneur coach and is involved in many civic organizations in and around the Kansas City area.

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • The single most important lesson for parents looking to cultivate a love of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math in their kids.
    • How Neelima has built a culture around her belief that we should “use technology to grow people, not the other way around.”
    • How glass ceilings for women and under-represented minorities can be shattered.
    • How governments should take responsibility for improving access to STEM education.
    • Why Neelima isn’t afraid of bots taking jobs because “our faults make us human.”

    References in today’s episode…

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 80

    Rachel Chalmers, Partner at Alchemist Accelerator, discusses what’s required to eliminate bias in startup funding

    Rachel Chalmers aspired to be an English professor before being inspired by a technology journal to relocate from Ireland to San Francisco. She has since covered over 1,000 startups as an industry analyst and invested in many more as an investor. Rachel is passionate about representing the under-represented and encouraging all those who have been told they can’t live their dreams. This is a must-listen for entrepreneurs who have ever felt disadvantaged by circumstances out of their control. It’s also the episode in which I volunteer to chair the Chalmers 2024 campaign.

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • The burn rate rule of thumb for startups
    • Why “venture capital wants to perpetuate itself”
    • The origins of the Silicon Valley myth that “all talent is concentrated in white males”
    • How to eliminate institutional biases that constrain women and under-represented minorities when raising money and building companies
    • How Rachel is defining the future workplace where humans and machines collaborate

    References in this episode:

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 79

    Dr. Zehra Cataltepe, CEO of Tazi.ai, discusses the meaning of responsible AI and how she’s saving the planet…one model at a time

    Dr. Cataltepe is an accomplished scientist and entrepreneur… with a social conscience. She has published more than 100 academic papers and is a three-time recipient of the “Women Entrepreneur of the Year” award. Dr. Cataltepe and her team believe building and managing AI models should be something anyone can do… even her 70 year old mother who is a farmer in Turkey :). Tazi’s vision is to make AI explainable, accessible, and configurable for “mere mortals”.

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • What’s required to deploy AI that is easy to understand, monitor, and update by business people without data science or computer science backgrounds
    • How to apply micro-segmentation to detect and eliminate bias in data and models
    • Why “bring your own model” may solve critical issues related to data privacy and data bias
    • How reducing the complexity of AI also will limit its environmental footprint
    • How insurance companies are using AI trained with telematic data to determine driver risk and premiums
    • Why the Turkish saying “even the snake eats the earth one bite at a time” represents Dr. Cataltepe’s vision for the future of AI
    • Thanks to the Alchemist Accelerator team for the introduction to Dr. Cataltepe!
    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 78

    Ken Gonzalez, ITSM pundit, shares the one trend that will define IT strategy for the next decade

    Ken Gonzalez has spent the better part of 35 years as an IT practitioner, CIO advisor, and industry analyst. He has fielded more than 2,500 inquiry calls and contributed to some of the most impactful IT trends. Ken’s advisory work focuses on IT metrics and organizational change. Hear Ken share the one workplace technology shift that all organizations must make to remain competitive in the next decade.

    Show more

    Listen and learn…

    • What it means for IT to adopt a “product management mindset”
    • How Ken helped a client save $750,000
    • Why most enterprise IT teams “overestimate their process maturity”
    • The role AI will play in defining IT strategy (hint: it’s not what you think)
    • Jargon alert: “KTLO” = “keep the lights on”

    References in this episode…

    Show less
    Play

  • Episode Number : 77

    Dan O’Connell, CSO/CRO at Dialpad and founder of TalkIQ, discusses NLP in cloud telephony and his entrepreneurial journey from Google to founder to a quick exit

    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.

    Show more

    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…

    Show less
    Play

Listen to AI and the Future of Work

About PeopleReign

Get Support

support@PeopleReign.io

Mon-Fri, 8AM – 6PM, PT

© 2025 PeopleReign. All rights reserved.

Go to Top