Invisible Machines podcast by UX Magazine
"The enemy of nonsense in AI" | The #1 podcast about agentic AI Join great conversations with experts about the intersections between AI, product design, technology and business. The bestselling authors of Age Of Invisible Machines are joined by other luminaries to continue the conversations that began in their book—the first bestseller about agentic AI. With a newly revised and updated Second Edition that hit the shelves in spring of 2025, Robb Wilson (CEO and Co-Founder of OneReach.ai) and Josh Tyson expand their explorations of disruptive technology with fellow AI insiders, experts, and luminaries working in adjacent realms.
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The Confabulation Machine ft. Evan Ratliff of Shell Game | Invisible Machines Podcast
<p>In season one of Shell Game, Evan Ratliff sent a voice AI version of himself out into the world. In season two, he launched a startup staffed entirely by AI agents. What he ended up with was a live experiment in what these systems actually do and what they do to us.</p><p><br></p><p>Each of the agents working for Hurumo has a name, a role, a personality, and an expanding, though usually unreliable, memory. Kyle the CEO became a character people either loved or hated. A version of Megan from marketing turned up in a...
Crisis Is Your Opening | Marina Nitze | Invisible Machines
<p>Most organizations treat crisis as a failure state. Marina Nitze sees it as a window.</p><p><br></p><p>Nitze served as Chief Technology Officer of the Department of Veterans Affairs (the largest civilian agency in the country) during the healthcare.gov collapse. She helped rescue it, helped stand up the US Digital Service, and came out the other side with a question she and her colleagues have been pursuing ever since: why is it that crisis makes otherwise impossible transformational change possible?</p><p><br></p><p>That question became a firm, Layer Aleph, and now a...
Inside The Infinity Machine ft Sebastian Mallaby
<p>There's a book about artificial intelligence that doesn't start with Sam Altman. It doesn't start with Elon Musk. It starts in 1994, at Cambridge, where a teenager named Demis Hassabis is reading Gödel, Escher, Bach and concluding, before most of his professors would have agreed, that first-order logic can't be the full answer to building intelligence.</p><p><br></p><p>Sebastian Mallaby spent years inside that story. His new book, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, is the most serious attempt yet to explain not just what AI is, but why the people b...
Friction Is the Feature with Jennifer Pahlka | Invisible Machines S7E5
<p>The IRS has roughly 60,000 fax machines, and nobody can get rid of them. Not because there’s a law that says you have to use them (there almost certainly isn’t), but because likely decades ago a memo got written, somebody interpreted fax machines as the most secure transmission method, and that memo calcified into what Jennifer Pahlka calls "folk law," a perceived rule that nobody can locate, nobody can challenge, and everybody treats as immutable.</p><p><br></p><p>Folk law looms large in the American government right now. Cascades of rigidity built from outdated interpretations of rule...
AI Brings Cheap Prediction & Expensive Change ft Avi Goldfarb | Invisible Machines Podcast
<p>Most organizations are still implementing AI as point solutions, dropping new technology into existing workflows to do the same work, just slightly better. The real value lies in system solutions that completely transform how organizations operate. Avi Goldfarb, economist and co-author of Prediction Machines, joins Robb and Josh to explain why AI adoption follows predictable economic principles and why internal resistance, not technology limitations, is the primary barrier to transformation.</p><p><br></p><p>This conversation, recorded back in 2023, reminds us that most organizations continue to struggle with the same issues surrounding systemic change in 2026. Goldfarb's core argument...
What AI as Cheap Prediction Means for Enterprise ft Joshua Gans | Invisible Machines Podcast
<p>Joshua Gans, economist and co-author of Prediction Machines (and holder of the Skoll Chair in Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto) joins Robb and Josh to reframe how enterprise leaders should think about AI. Rather than chasing the hype around artificial intelligence, Gans argues we should understand AI as an advance in computational statistics that drops the cost of prediction, reduces decision-making friction, and fundamentally reshapes organizational structure.</p><p><br></p><p>Many organizations are full of people waiting for phones to ring, managing buffers, absorbing uncertainty. As AI makes prediction...
Why Canonical Knowledge Is the Foundation for Enterprise AI ft Joe DosSantos, VP at Workday
<p>Before enterprises can deploy AI agents that actually work, they need something most organizations don't have: a single, authoritative source of truth. Joe DosSantos, Workday’s VP of Enterprise Data and Analytics, joins Robb and Josh for a wide-ranging conversation about canonical knowledge, the semantic layer, and why data governance, a concept from the 1990s, has suddenly become essential for AI deployment.</p><p><br></p><p>Large language models are predictive engines modeled to anticipate what users probably likely mean. For B2C applications where multiple interpretations are acceptable, this works fine. But enterprises need deterministic truth, not pr...
Ben Goertzel on the Decentralization of AI | Invisible Machines S7E1
<p>Ben Goertzel, the researcher who helped popularize the terms "AGI" and “singularity”, as one of the most influential modern champions and systematizers of AGI, returns to Invisible Machines to discuss the decentralization of AI and what's actually missing from today's most advanced systems with Robb Wilson and Josh Tyson.</p><p><br></p><p>As enterprises rush to deploy AI agents and LLMs reshape workflows, a critical question emerges: who controls the infrastructure? Goertzel argues that while big tech dominates model development, a tension is building between centralized hegemony and decentralized, open systems — the same dynamic that shaped the intern...
Why AI Scaffolding Matters More than Use Cases ft Erika Flowers | Invisible Machines S6E12
<p>We’re in a moment when organizations are approaching agentic AI backwards, chasing flashy use cases instead of building the scaffolding that makes AI agents actually work at scale. Erika Flowers, who led NASA’s AI Readiness Initiative and has advised Meta, Google, Netflix, and Intuit, joins Robb and Josh for a frank and funny conversation about what's broken in enterprise AI adoption. She dismantles the myth of the "big sexy AI use case" and explains why most AI projects fail before they start. The trio makes the case that we're entering a post-software world, whether organizations are ready or n...
5 Predictions for Agentic AI in 2026 | Invisible Machines Podcast S6E11
<p>As 2025 draws to a close, Robb and Josh look back on some of the conversations they had this year both on the podcast and advising major enterprises and government leaders to offer their predictions for agentic AI in 2026. With major disruptive forces like outbound AI in the hands of consumers and agent runtime environments allowing organizations to create scalable infrastructure for AI agents, next year could see seismic changes in the way investors look at companies, and the ways companies look at themselves. Featuring a look at the components of an agent runtime, as well as previews of upcoming...
