Me, Myself, and AI
Discover what separates AI success from AI hype. In this series from MIT Sloan Management Review, AI winners share their secrets and success stories from the front lines. Explore the future of artificial intelligence with leaders from companies like YouTube, Cisco, and Hugging Face who are turning AI's potential into measurable business value.
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An Industry Benchmark for Data Fairness: Sony’s Alice Xiang
<p>On today’s episode, Sam talks with Alice Xiang, global head of AI governance at Sony and lead research scientist for AI ethics at Sony AI, about what it actually takes to put responsible artificial intelligence into practice at scale. </p> <p>Alice shares how Sony moved early on AI ethics and why governance, not just principles, is now the real challenge as AI spreads across products and workflows. The conversation dives into FHIBE, Sony’s publicly available and ethically sourced benchmark for evaluating bias in computer vision, and why measuring fairness is often harder than fixing it. Along the...
AI Is Not Improving Productivity: Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu
<p>In this bonus episode, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu joins Sam to challenge some of the most common assumptions about artificial intelligence’s future. Drawing on his book Power and Progress, Daron argues that technology doesn’t have a fixed destiny — and that today’s choices will determine whether AI boosts workers or simply accelerates automation and inequality. He makes a case for focusing on new tasks that complement human skills, rather than replacing them, and warns that current incentives push AI toward centralization and automation by default. The conversation tackles productivity myths, reliability risks, and why regulation should proactiv...
Connecting Language and (Artificial) Intelligence: Princeton’s Tom Griffiths
<p>In this bonus episode, Princeton University professor and artificial intelligence researcher Tom Griffiths joins Sam to unpack The Laws of Thought, his new book exploring how math has been used for centuries to understand how minds — human and machine — actually work. </p> <p>Tom walks through three main frameworks shaping intelligence today — rules and symbols, neural networks, and probability — and he explains why modern AI only makes sense when you see how those pieces fit together. </p> <p>The conversation connects cognitive science, large language models, and the limits of human versus machine intelligence. Along the way, Tom and Sam dig...
Hungry for Learning: Wendy’s Will Croushorn
<p>On today’s episode, Wendy’s product manager Will Croushorn joins Sam to share how FreshAi, the fast-food restaurant’s voice-based AI ordering system, is reinventing the drive-through experience for millions of customers. From handling 200 billion ways to order a Dave’s Double burger to making fast food more accessible for guests in multiple languages, Will reveals how empathy and innovation will positively impact the future of convenience. Learn how his team turns speech data into insight, builds trust in automation, and can even hide a few Easter eggs in your next order. Read the episode transcript here. That's a wrap o...
Science, Innovation, and Economic Growth: OpenAI’s Ronnie Chatterji
<p>On this episode, OpenAI’s chief economist Ronnie Chatterji describes how artificial intelligence is reshaping both the economy and scientific innovation. Ronnie discusses the dual economic impacts of AI — the near-term boost from infrastructure investments like chips and data centers, and the longer-term productivity gains as AI tools integrate into enterprises and consumer life. Beyond consumer convenience, he notes, the key question for economists and corporate leaders alike is when — and how — AI will unlock sustained economic value inside organizations.</p> <p>Tune in for Ronnie's perspective on how AI can help researchers test ideas faster, combine insights across discipli...
Creating More, Not Less, With AI: GeekWire’s Todd Bishop
<p>AI isn’t taking jobs — it’s changing what jobs are. On today’s episode, GeekWire’s Todd Bishop joins host Sam Ransbotham to dive into how artificial intelligence is reshaping work, learning, and creativity — not by replacing humans but by amplifying what we can do. </p> <p>From classrooms where students use AI on exams to newsrooms rethinking how news stories get written, they explore the opportunities (and headaches) of this new era. It’s a smart, funny, and refreshingly real look at how we’re all learning to work with our newestcoworker — artificial intelligence. Read the episode transcript here.<...
From Rabbit Holes to Recommendations: Reddit’s Vishal Gupta
<p>Vishal Gupta, engineering manager, machine learning at Reddit, joins the podcast to explain how the social media community platform uses artificial intelligence to improve user experience and ad relevance. Much of the advertising work relies on increasingly sophisticated recommender systems that have evolved from simple collaborative filtering to deep learning and large language model–based systems capable of multimodal understanding.</p> <p>Vishal and Sam also explore the philosophical and ethical aspects of AI-driven platforms. Vishal emphasizes the importance of balance — between exploration and exploitation in recommendations, between advertiser goals and user experience, and between human- and machine-generated content. He a...
Personalization and Innovation in a Regulated Industry: Experian’s Kathleen Peters
<p>Kathleen Peters brings a background with digital communications companies and tech startups to her role as Experian’s chief innovation officer. On this episode, Kathleen shares a bit about Experian’s Innovation Lab, outlining some of its projects and explaining how the recent democratization of generative AI tools has made even more innovative thinking possible, both for tech experts and for contributors who have other core competencies. Read the episode transcript here.</p> <p>Guest bio:</p> <p>As Experian’s chief innovation officer, Kathleen Peters explores new ways to solve market challenges in identity, risk, and fraud detection. She an...
Never Fight a Megatrend: Cisco’s Jeetu Patel
<p>Cisco is well known for its data, networking, security, and collaboration products. On today’s episode, Cisco’s president and chief product officer, Jeetu Patel, joins Sam for a discussion about artificial intelligence, a “megatrend” Jeetu sees as perhaps more significant than the development of the internet or the automobile because of its ability to build on past technological advances.</p> <p>Jeetu and Sam discuss how to manage AI and how to staff for it — Jeetu argues that replacing less experienced or younger workers with technology deprives organizations of key perspectives and new ideas, and instead advocates for developing...
Protection, Provenance, and Prompts: YouTube’s Angela Nakalembe
<p>A chemical engineer by training, Angela Nakalembe worked in the sciences and management consulting before landing at YouTube as the company’s engineering program manager for trust and safety.</p> <p>At YouTube, Angela explains, AI has become a first line of defense against harmful content. The technology not only accelerates content moderation tasks but makes the process more humane, by filtering out problematic content before it reaches a human reviewer. To combat the proliferation of AI-generated content that may be hard to discern from assets created by humans, YouTube, its parent company Google, and others have joined the Co...
