SHIFT

What if the standard approach to responsible AI, built around aspirational values like fairness and transparency, is fundamentally broken in the age of AI agents? 

We Meet: 

Reid Blackman is the author of the new book The Ethical Nightmare Challenge and the founder of AI ethics consultancy Virtue.

Episode Links:

Reid and Jennifer are speaking at the Drawing Room Salon on May 20:

https://thedrawingroom.ai/

Reid's new book:

https://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Nightmare-Challenge-Avoid-Worst-ebook/dp/B0GRC1ZP...

How do you build intelligent systems that people trust? Then, how do you keep that trust when things go wrong? Because when things do, it’s not the tech that loses face but the brand people relied on. 

This episode was taped before a live audience on stage at the HumanX Conference in San Francisco.

We Meet: 

Radha Basu, Founder & CEO of iMerit

Shuman Ghosemajumder, Co-founder & CEO of Reken

Andrea Thomaz, Co-founder & CEO of Diligent Robotics

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT...

Capital One is the largest issuer of credit cards in the U.S. It’s also one of the largest banks, and car finance companies, in the country.  We learn from its experience building proprietary AI across fraud prevention, agentic workflows, customer experience, and risk and compliance in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet: 

Capital One’s Head of AI Foundations Milind Naphade 

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garr...

Engineers charged with maintaining secure and reliable sites and services need to be able to observe what’s going on inside their systems. That observability data helps them spot issues sooner,  fix problems faster, and learn from the whole experience.

A live conversation from the stage at the HumanX Conference in San Francisco.

We Meet: 

Christine Yen is the Co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb,

Jennifer Tejada is the CEO and chairperson of PagerDuty

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jenn...

Best-known as the creator of ImageNet, we meet the Godmother of AI, Dr. Fei-Fei Li In the latest installment of our oral history project. She's a Chinese-American computer scientist and the creator of ImageNet - the dataset that made rapid advances possible in this field of AI that helps computers take meaningful information from things like photos and videos.

We Meet: 

Stanford University's Fei-Fei Li, author of "The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI" and the founder of World Labs

Credits:

Each day more than 11,000 people in the US turn 65 years old. It adds up to more than 4,000,000 people a year, and the labor force that serves them is struggling to keep up with that demand - a problem that’s unlikely to go away anytime soon. 

We explore this shift and how might technology be used to help people age in place in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet: 

Chia-Lin Simmons is the CEO of Logic Mark

Credits:

This epis...

 Lately, it feels like you can’t go more than a few minutes without hearing someone talk about AI agents, and there’s a very good reason for that. Agents are doing more work, more quickly and in more places, and we’ve developed ways to help them retain knowledge from things they’ve done, and then build upon those experiences.

But what if the experience agents gain on a job changes the work product in ways we didn’t predict? How do you make sure that agent does what you want it to do? This episode, we explore...

Astro Teller, Alphabet’s Captain of Moonshots, joins us for a conversation about the importance of failure, workplace culture in a moonshot factory, and not throwing away your shot.

We Meet: 

Astro Teller is the Captain of Moonshots at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

This episode originally ran in...

How to handle cybersecurity challenges posed by AI agents is about the hottest security topic going at the moment. If you’re wondering why that is, it’s because agents are built to take action - to do things on our behalf - and that challenges a core assumption that’s baked into companies security: that humans make the decisions. 

Tailscale is a Canadian Unicorn and one of the country’s fastest growing tech companies, thanks in large part to its popularity with AI companies, and increasingly with AI bots too.

CEO Avery Pennarun joins us in the...

How much do we know about the way organizations are adopting agentic AI, and what it means for the human employees working alongside?  Our friends at The MIT Sloan Management Review did a deep dive on these questions and several more late last year, and they found some pretty surprising things.

This week, we’re going to talk about what those things might mean for companies as we continue to unpack this latest phase of agentic rollouts.

We Meet: 

Sam Ransbotham is a professor of analytics at Boston College, the edit...

Critical minerals are in just about every device you can think of, and there’s a global race underway to find and finance the production of these materials because they’re in short supply. 

This week, we hear how Earth AI uses predictive algorithms to find new deposits and how TechMet’s capital and partnerships carry those opportunities through to production and market impact.

We Meet: 

Roman Teslyuk is the CEO/CTO of EARTH AI              

Brian Menell is the CEO of TechMet 

Credits:

This episode...

As regulatory expectations rise, and financial crime grows more complex, risk management is shifting from static checks to continuous intelligence. From the stage at this year’s Web Summit Qatar, we looked at how AI and advanced data analytics are transforming compliance workflows.

We Meet: 

Joel Lange is the executive vice president and general manager of Dow Jones Risk and Research

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music fro...

What would you say if someone offered you a taste of a salmon filet that doesn’t contain fish?

The protein content, carbs, and even the omega 3s are basically the same, but what it doesn’t contain are things like microplastics and mercury. 

Join us for a factory tour of a startup called New School Foods for a peek at the next-generation of plant-based protein.

We Meet:  

New School Foods CEO Chris Bryson

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jen...

It’s not just AI software that’s rapidly shifting. One could argue that the very map of high performance computing is being redrawn, from OpenAI investing more than $10-billion in wafer-scale chips to breakthroughs in quantum research that are making that architecture much more useful. 

This episode was taped in front of a live audience in Davos, Switzerland, on stage at The Drawing Room: AI and Exploration Salon held alongside the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum. 

We Meet: 

Cerebras Systems CEO and Co-Founder Andrew Feldman

IonQ CE...

Figuring out what it takes to make agentic AI work in a high-stakes, real-world environment is front and center these days, because for the most part, we’re still figuring that out.

At this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, we get a first-hand look at the shift that’s taking place from agent demos to what a successful deployment looks like.

We Meet: 

Shibani Ahuja is the SVP of Enterprise IT Strategy at Salesforce

Credits:

This episode of SHIF...

How do you feel about the use of artificial intelligence in the hiring process? Whether it sounds like a good way to remove human bias, a bad idea that could bake in machine bias, or something in between, you won't want to miss our deep dive  with author and journalist Hilke Schellmann at the P&T Knitwear Bookstore in Manhattan.

This episode was taped in collaboration with All Tech is Human in New York City. 

Credits:

We Meet: 

Hilke Schellmann is an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter and assistant pro...

This week, we bring you an episode of another podcast anchored by our host, Jennifer Strong, called The Next Innovation. In it, we sit down with other prominent tech journalists to discuss the biggest tech trends to watch in 2026 - including how the different iterations of AI, including agentic AI, will shape the future of cybersecurity, finance, healthcare, and defense. 

We Meet:

Freelance journalist Jeff Wilser has written for The New York Times, Wired, Time Magazine and many others. He’s also the author of 8 books.

London-based editor Charlotte Jee is...

A live conversation about the state of the space industry with serial space entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian, a co-founder of Axiom Space, Intuitive Machines, Quantum Space, and more, from the mainstage at Collision Conference in Toronto, Canada.

This episode first published on June 26th, 2024. 

We meet: 

Dr. Kamal "Kam" Ghaffarian

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

We meet a founder questioning the wisdom of the Turing Test as he works to address the loneliness epidemic among the elderly, in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet: 

Intuition Robotics Founder Dor Skuler, maker of the ElliQ digital companion

Credits:

SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

This episode first published in August 2024. 

The application of artificial intelligence to help discover new medicines could become one of the more transformative ways we use this tech in the near term. A key player in this space is Recursion Pharmaceuticals. Its outgoing CEO Chris Gibson takes us on a tour of the world's largest phenomics lab in Salt Lake City, Utah.

We Meet: 

Recursion Co-Founder Chris Gibson

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original m...

What if voting in a primary could be as simple as reaching for your phone? This week, Bradley Tusk's TED Talk about this topic was named one of the ten essential TED Talks of 2025, and we're revisiting the episode we taped with him about mobile voting for our oral history project.

We Meet: 

Bradley Tusk, Founder & CEO of Tusk Holdings 

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and...

What happens when machines start telling us what we want to hear—and when users start depending on them for emotional connection? Join us for a live conversation about the psychology and liability of chatbots.

We Meet:  

Meg Marco is Harvard Berkman Klein Center’s Senior Director of the Applied Social Media Lab.

New York Times Tech Reporter Kashmir Hill is also the author of YOUR FACE BELONGS TO US.

Jordi Weinstock is a Senior Advisor to Harvard’s Institute for Rebooting Social Media. 

Credits:<...

We join the MIT community in New York for an event focused on AI, innovation, and the evolving role of tech in society. 

SandboxAQ is a Google spinout that combines AI Large Quantitative Models and deep expertise in physics, biology, and chemistry in order to work on a wide range of hard problems, such as the prototyping of new materials and chemicals for manufacturing. Andrew McLaughlin is the company’s chief operating officer. We sat down to chat after he made the case to the room that the future of AI may not be large language models, but...

Join us for a deep dive on the relationship between trust and artificial intelligence as we unpack a flash poll from Edelman, the world's largest PR firm.

We Meet:  

Margot Edelman, Global Technology Practice Lead for Edelman

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

How do we move quantum computing from scientific milestone to measurable business value? 

It’s not an easy question to answer. 

When I first started covering this tech even the physicists charged with building such machines doubted the feasibility of the whole idea. That's no longer the case today, but the bar for quantum, especially compared to AI, remains almost impossibly high. 

This episode was taped before a live audience at Web Summit, Europe's largest tech conference, in Lisbon, Portugal.

We Meet:  

Alice & Bob Co-founder & CEO Théau...

For as far as we’ve come with AI and robotics, there’s still a huge gap when it comes to combining the two. AI excels in the digital space, and in the physical world, robots are often pre-programmed. That’s where physical AI comes in. It’s critical for things that can’t tolerate the kinds of mistakes that are common in today’s statistics based AI, like self driving cars or managing the power grid. In the latest installment of our oral history project, we meet a central figure in these efforts, MIT's Daniela Rus.

We...

Astro Teller, Alphabet’s Captain of Moonshots, joins us for a conversation about the importance of failure, workplace culture in a moonshot factory, and not throwing away your shot.

We Meet: 

Astro Teller is the Captain of Moonshots at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

This episode originally ran in...

AMD provides high-performance computing power that runs everything from your gaming console and personal laptop, to the giant supercomputers and AI systems that power the cloud. Its head of AI discusses the move from sequential to massively parallel processing, and the company's strategy to embed AI from big cloud machines to tiny client devices.

We Meet:  

AMD’s SVP for AI Vamsi Boppana

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with ori...

We explore how one group is using AI to help people talk, listen and understand in large groups, in hopes of counteracting forces that have undermined our ability to communicate online, in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet:  

Yasmin Green, CEO of Jigsaw, an incubator within Google 

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

What do you think it would be like to lead AI efforts and the overall digital transformation of the CIA? This week, we find out as we dive into a world of espionage and secrets in the latest installment of our oral history project. 

We Meet:  

Retired Deputy CIA Director for Digital Innovation Jennifer Ewbank 

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jac...

How we build products, why we build them, and what we think they’re for have always changed, but these days developers and engineers who love things like product roadmaps might find the current AI scene a little disorienting. That’s because there often isn’t a roadmap. If there is? It’s constantly changing.

This week, we meet the CTO of IBM Research and she tells us about the current landscape and what she imagines for the future. 

This episode was recorded at TEDAI in Vienna, Austria. 

We Meet:  

IBM Re...

Agentic AI is one of the hottest topics going in tech circles, but if pinning down exactly what we’re talking about feels a bit like a moving target, it’s not your imagination. What agents are capable of doing is changing almost as quickly as what people want to do with them. 

We Meet:  

VP of Agentic AI at AWS Swami Sivasubramanian

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens, and special thanks to Dajana Doskoc and Alina Nikoloa...

What’s an astronaut’s time worth? Answering that question is not a perfect science, but at more than $100,000 an hour (not counting salary - that's just to keep one alive) on the International Space Station, it’s safe to say it’s more than you want to pay for bagging up trash. 

This week, we take a field trip in New York City to see some space robots that could help with this problem. 

We Meet:  

Icarus Robotics CEO Ethan Barajas 

Icarus Robotics CTO Jamie Palmer 

C...

Might a lack of legacy healthcare tech infrastructure in rural communities offer an advantage over mature markets? A  founder makes the case in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet:  

Homeward Co-Founder & President Amar Kendale

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

You've likely heard that artificial intelligence is gobbling up electricity and drinking water, and causing a global race to build more energy capacity. 

Have you ever stopped to consider why? Or what we’re doing to bring compute power and sustainability closer together?

This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at TechBBQ, the largest tech conference in the Nordics. It's held each year in Copenhagen, Denmark.

We Meet:  

Caspar Høgh, Co-Founding Partner Noon Ventures 

Yasser Nour, CTO & Co-Founder Lotus Microsystems

Ruben...

EU AI Act architect and lead author Gabriele Mazzini shares his experience drafting the law. He also talks about his concerns with implementation and its potential impact on European competitiveness, and how that led him to quit his job, in the latest installment of our oral history project.

This episode was recorded at TEDAI in Vienna and originally ran in 2024.

We Meet:

MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate & MIT Connection Science Fellow Gabriele Mazzini

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong...

One of the world's hottest AI startups, Builder.AI, imploded earlier this year. We dig into what actually went down at the company and what journalists and investors can learn from the experience. 

We Meet:  

Journalist Varsha Bansal

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Despite our best efforts, sometimes what we say we want isn’t precisely what we mean. Nowhere is that felt more acutely than when we’re giving instructions to a machine, whether that’s coding or offering examples to machine learning systems. We unpack the alignment problem in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet: 

Brian Christian, University of Oxford researcher, and author of The Alignment Problem 

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was m...

In all the noise about AI agents it’s easy to miss a fundamental change that’s taking place. For these agents to be effective, people have to feel safe delegating things to them. When we do? How we use this tech starts to feel less like a tool and more like real collaboration. 

This week, we explore agentic powered legal work in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet:  

Thomson Reuters Chief Product Officer David Wong

Credits:

This episode of SHI...

What would you say if someone offered you a taste of a salmon filet that doesn’t contain fish?  

The protein content, carbs, and even the omega 3s are basically the same, but what it doesn’t contain are things like microplastics and mercury. 

Join us for a factory tour of a startup called New School Foods for a peek at the next-generation of plant-based foods.

We Meet:  

New School Foods CEO Chris Bryson

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jenn...