Data Science With Sam

Sam sits down with Ethan Lyon — principal AI engineer, Denver-based, MIT professional education background — for one of the most technically honest conversations on the show. Ethan has built AI systems, thrown them away, and learned more from the failures than the wins. He coined the term "cognitive surrender" to describe the mistake most AI builders make: handing everything to the AI without understanding it, and wondering why the project falls apart. This episode is a practitioner's guide to building AI systems that actually hold up — data trust, MCP architecture, knowledge graphs, self-improving skills, and the planning-first workflow that changes everyt...

Sam sits down with Dr. Zahra Timsah — co-founder and CEO of Igentic AI and author of The AI CEO — for a direct conversation about what AI is actually doing to leadership. Dr. Timsah holds a PhD in biochemistry and an MBA in strategy, has led AI transformation at IQBia, Mass Mutual, and GSK, and has advised the FDA and US Senate on AI policy. She's also one of the clearest voices making the case that the AI era is a particular opportunity for women who know how to seize it.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

▪ What "...

Sam sits down with Shawn Kercher — Co-Founder & CEO of HummingAgent.ai — to cut through the noise around AI agents. Shawn built his company on a simple but powerful observation: most AI products are just ChatGPT wrappers. HummingAgent is his answer — a full-custom software shop that builds private, in-environment AI workflows for companies that run on real data, messy CRMs, and processes that only exist in someone's head.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE

▪ Why generic AI tools fail in real business environments — and what full-custom actually means

▪ The wrapper test: if Anthropic ad...

Shashank Akinapalli is a Senior Data Engineer at TCS where he leads cloud data lakehouse initiatives and real-time streaming architectures for supply chain intelligence. With 14 years of experience across IBM DataStage, Databricks, Snowflake, dbt, AWS, and Spark-based ecosystems, he has previously worked with USAA in banking and Blue Cross Blue Shield in healthcare.

IN THIS EPISODE:

▪ The biggest architectural shift when migrating from IBM DataStage to a modern cloud lakehouse — and why the technical migration is the easier half, while reconstructing encoded business knowledge is the real challenge

▪ How to choose between Snowflake and Da...

Karima Sharif-Ali — known affectionately in the industry as the Fresh Princess of Media — is the SVP of Strategic Accounts at Doceree, a platform transforming point-of-care communications for healthcare brands. Over her career, Karima has shaped the marketing journeys of more than 100 pharmaceutical and medical device brands across agencies including WPP, Publicis, and IPG MediaBrands. She is a thought leader featured in AdWeek and MM+M, co-founder of the Women of Color Affinity Group (now the Mosaic Collective Leadership), and a global board member of the Healthcare Businesswomen's Association. She holds an MBA from Rosemont College and a BA in Comm...

Jim Spignardo is the Director of Cloud Strategy and AI Enablement at ProArch, a global IT services and consulting firm. With 25 years in IT spanning network engineering, cloud, cybersecurity, and strategic consulting, Jim advises executive teams on modernisation, operational resilience, and AI-enabled transformation that delivers measurable business value. He is the architect behind ProArch's Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption playbook, which has been deployed with clients across financial services, credit unions, and enterprise organisations. Jim is also the author of The AI Turning Point, available on Amazon, and publishes the Control All Innovate newsletter on LinkedIn, where he writes approximately three...

If you ever had a document you wished you could just ask questions to - without it leaving your computer, wouldn't be pretty good from data privacy perspective? In this episode, Sam sits down with Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer - Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, co-founder of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and founder and CEO of Synsira, creator of KIND — for one of the most historically grounded AI conversations we've had on this show.

He holds two Guinness World Records: his program Chinook became the first computer to beat a human world champion in an...

Most companies have spent years buying tools, running pilots, and building dashboards - and they still can't answer the questions leadership needs answered. The problem isn't the technology. It's that no one fixed the foundation first.

Ilan Man is the Founder and CEO of Paradox Machines, a data and AI consultancy incubated through the Infinity Venture Studio in New York. A Data & AI leader with deep hands-on experience across the full stack strategy, engineering, and analytics - Ilan has built and scaled data functions at high-growth companies, including an exited consultancy, across multiple industries. 

Paradox M...

An independent evaluation of Snowflake's Cortex Analyst found 6 in 10 AI-generated queries were wrong — but they all compiled and ran without a single error. That's not a model problem. That's a missing harness problem.

Pradnesh Patil is the Co-Founder and CEO of Altimate AI — a platform bringing agentic AI to data engineering with tools trusted by Fortune 500s and downloaded more than 1 million times across 200+ countries. Before Altimate, he spent a decade in product leadership at Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, and VMware.

IN THIS EPISODE:

▪  The five components of an agentic data engineer...

We are letting AI make life-changing financial decisions without requiring it to explain itself. The CFPB says 'insufficient information' is no longer an acceptable reason to deny a loan. The EU AI Act classifies credit scoring as high-risk. And more than half the US workforce - gig workers, fractional leaders, solopreneurs - is still scored by models built for a 1950s economy.

Tamara Laine is the Founder and CEO of MPWR AI and an Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist turned fintech executive. Her reporting on ethical AI at Amazon and Northrop Grumman earned her an Emmy. Her work...

McKinsey says 88% of organizations are using AI. Only 6% are getting real value. Sumaiya Shrabony argues the gap isn't technical - it's trust. And the people best equipped to see that barrier are almost never in the room when AI rollout strategy gets written.

Sumaiya is Technical Program Manager and Data Infrastructure Lead at the University of Colorado Denver, managing 200 data pipelines across a 530-user analytics environment. She came to the US from Bangladesh at 19 and learned every institutional system from the outside - and built DataReady, a four-agent AI readiness audit tool, along the way.

...

In this episode, Sam sat down with guest Dr. Mohammad explore what it actually takes to build emotional intelligence into a physical machine - from the technical layers of facial expression recognition and voice intonation analysis to the user experience decisions that matter most when your users are vulnerable, lonely, and elderly.

IN THIS EPISODE:

▪  How a postdoc in a psychology department became the career-defining moment that connected engineering with human wellbeing — and led to two decades of social robotics research

▪  Artificial emotional intelligence in practice: sensing facial expressions, eye gaze, head pose...

74% of organizations hope to grow revenue through AI. Only 20% are actually doing it. That gap isn't a technology gap — it's a design gap. And today's guest has a name for what's missing: the reward signal.

Alexander Liss is a Data and AI Scientist based in Denver, Colorado, with a 30-year career across analytics, strategy, data science, machine learning, and AI. He's built systems that solve established problems in novel ways, and the long-term problem on his radar is ensuring AI tools provide responsible augmentation of human ability. His research includes Attention Fine Tuning (AFT) - a method fo...

Most AI governance is a policy document that nobody enforces. And in high-stakes environments - legal, healthcare, finance - that gap between policy and architecture is where disasters happen. In this episode, Dan Driver, founder of Driver AI Agency, walks through exactly how he built CaseReady Intake AI: a legal AI system with governance baked into every architectural decision, zero hallucination risk by design, prompt injection blocked at the pipeline, and a single architectural choice that cut per-call compute costs by over 99%.

Dan is not a lawyer. Not a developer by trade. He's a 25-year problem-solver with...

What if ADHD - penalised in classrooms and boardrooms for decades - is actually the competitive advantage in an AI-driven world? Palantir CEO Alex Karp said the future belongs to neurodivergent thinkers. The podcast guest Mark Stiltner has been living proof of that for years.

Mark is Senior Director of Content and Web Marketing at Rapyd, the fintech unicorn powering payments across 100+ countries. Background in journalism and advertising from CU Boulder. Trained CMOs and senior marketing teams on AI adoption. Openly ADHD — and has published 50+ AI-assisted books through DungeonMatters.com, three of which are current bestsellers on Dr...

You want to run AI locally. You have questions: What hardware do I actually need? Which framework should I use? How much will this cost? What's the realistic performance?

In this episode, Sam brings back Trent Rossiter, founder of Logical Data Solutions, for a practical walkthrough of building a production-grade local AI lab. Trent has built real systems for enterprise clients, tested frameworks on multiple hardware stacks, and made the hardware choices that matter. This is not theory. This is what actually works.

WHAT WE COVER:

▪  Hardware & Framework Choices: VRAM is the critical met...

What if the next generation of computers wasn't made of silicon — but of living human neurons? Not simulated neurons, not artificial neural networks inspired by biology, but actual brain cells grown in a lab, connected to electrodes, and used to process information. That's not science fiction anymore. It's happening right now at FinalSpark, a Swiss startup building the world's first remotely accessible biocomputing platform.

In this episode, Sam talks with Dr. Ewelina Kurtys, a neuroscientist with a PhD in brain imaging and a postdoctoral researcher at King's College London, about how living neurons could revolutionise computing — and why...

Jensen Huang took the stage at SAP Center in San Jose on March 16th and announced that NVIDIA now expects one trillion dollars in chip orders through 2027 — double the forecast from just one year ago. Sam breaks down the five biggest stories from GTC 2026 in under 10 minutes.

In this episode: the Vera Rubin platform (7 new chips, 5 rack types, built for inference and agentic AI), the Groq 3 LPU (NVIDIA's $20B inference play), NemoClaw (the enterprise-ready agentic AI stack built on viral open-source project OpenClaw), the autonomous vehicle announcement with Uber and seven major automakers, and the Nemotron Coalition fo...

There's no international treaty governing AI, no agreed definition of "safe AI," and nobody with actual authority over frontier model deployment. A handful of CEOs make decisions with civilizational implications while governance structures lag years behind.

This episode examines who's responsible for AI governance. The current state? Fragmented and lagging. The US has no comprehensive federal AI legislation—Biden's executive order was rolled back under Trump. The EU AI Act is most comprehensive but heavy provisions don't kick in for years. China's regulation focuses on censorship over safety. The UK AI Safety Institute does serious work but ha...

In January 2025, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released DeepSeek R1—a model matching GPT-4 class performance at a fraction of the training cost. It wiped $600 billion off NVIDIA's market cap in a single day. Twelve months later, the ripple effects are still reshaping the AI industry.

This episode cuts through the "China beats America" headlines to explain the actual technical and economic implications. DeepSeek R1 benchmarked comparably to OpenAI's O1 on reasoning tasks. The shock wasn't performance—it was cost. DeepSeek claimed under $6 million in training costs versus hundreds of millions for comparable Western models.

What chan...

Everyone's talking about agentic AI, but there's a gap between the hype ("AI will do your job for you") and the reality, which is more nuanced and frankly more interesting. The word "agentic" has officially crossed from technical jargon into buzzword territory—simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Everyone's using it, few can define it precisely. This episode cuts through the noise to explain what agentic AI systems actually are, what they can and cannot do today, and the realistic implications for people working in data, tech, and knowledge work.

What is an agent? Traditional AI interaction: you send a...

For years, AI in drug discovery has been a promise—billions invested, hundreds of papers published, dozens of startups founded, but actual drugs coming out the other end? Not yet. This is changing in 2026. Several AI-discovered drug candidates are now entering mid-to-late stage clinical trials. This is the year the receipts arrive for AI in drug discovery.

The biotech industry is calling 2026 a landmark year. For a sector that's been hyped as much as it's been scrutinized, the fact that we're finally getting real clinical data on AI-designed drug candidates is a big deal. Multiple candidates discovered an...

Every major AI summit has been held in San Francisco, London, or Washington — until now. In this episode, Sam breaks down what happened when Google CEO Sundar Pichai flew to New Delhi to open India's AI Impact Summit, and why it sent a clear geopolitical signal about the future of AI's global expansion.

Sam unpacks Google's major commitments announced at the summit — including a $30 million AI for Science Impact Challenge, a new DeepMind partnership with Indian government bodies and universities, a Climate Technology Center, and new fiber optic infrastructure connecting the US, India, and the Southern Hemisphere.

Exploring the rise of OpenClaw, a viral open-source AI project, its capabilities, security risks, and industry impact. Learn how community-driven AI is transforming automation and the importance of security in AI development.

 Key Topics Covered

OpenClaw's development and viral growth Security risks and mitigation in AI bots Industry impact and future of AI agents

Sound Bites

"AI bots going rogue pose significant industry risks." "A bot created a dating profile without permission." "OpenAI is interested in the potential of AI agents."

Resources

Op...

An in-depth analysis of the recent AI controversy involving Anthropic, OpenAI, and the US government, exploring the implications for AI ethics, warfare, and industry dynamics.

Key Topics Covered:

Anthropic's contract with the US Department of Defense Red lines for AI in military use OpenAI's secret Pentagon negotiations Public and industry reactions to AI warfare policies Implications for AI ethics and regulation

Resources

Anthropic's Claude AI - https://www.anthropic.com/claude OpenAI - https://www.openai.com/ US Department of Defense - https://www.defense.gov/ AI Et...

In this episode, Sam Dey interviews Sharmeen, founder of Lyyvora, a platform revolutionizing AI-driven healthcare financing for independent clinics, particularly women-owned practices. They discuss the challenges these clinics face in accessing capital, the innovative human-centered approach Lyyvora employs to streamline the lending process, and the importance of leveraging real data over traditional credit scores. Shermin emphasizes the interconnected challenges in funding, the need for education about diverse lending options, and the commitment to data security. The conversation concludes with a forward-looking perspective on the role of AI in simplifying healthcare financing.

Guest: Sharmeen Aqeel, Founder of Lyyvora<...

Can a machine create art? Should it? And if it does, who owns it?

In this episode, I sit down with Andres—creative technologist, founder of Red Mage, and advocate for equitable AI—to tackle one of the most controversial conversations in tech right now: AI's role in creative industries.

What we discuss:

✅ How generative AI has transformed creativity in just two years

✅ The copyright battleground: Should AI companies compensate artists?

✅ Authenticity vs. automation: Does the creative process matter?

✅ What AI fundamentally CANNOT replicate about human creativity

✅ The d...

Can AI revolutionize cancer treatment? Dr. Sriman Swarup, a practicing oncologist and data scientist at OncoNexus, joins us to discuss where AI is making real impact in oncology today—and where it's falling short. We explore data quality challenges, building trust with patients and physicians, and the path to true precision medicine. Dr. Swarup shares his vision for AI-driven cancer care and why AI should augment doctors, not replace them.

About Our Guest: Dr. Sriman Swarup

Dr. Sriman Swarup is a practicing oncologist and data scientist at OncoNexus, working at the intersection of clinical medicine an...

In this episode of DataScienceWithSam, host Sam sits down with Egbavwa Pela, CEO of InsightsRx.ai, to explore how artificial intelligence is transforming the marketing landscape.

We dive deep into Egbavwa's journey from traditional media and marketing into the AI space, discussing the revolutionary impact AI is having on campaign effectiveness, audience segmentation, and content creation. Our conversation covers practical insights on implementation challenges, best practices for AI adoption, and the evolving skill sets marketing professionals need to stay competitive.

Key Topics Covered:

Join host Sam as he explores how generative AI is reshaping data science with Claire Longo, a seasoned data scientist and AI researcher. From the shift from feature engineering to prompt engineering, to the evolution of data cleaning and the importance of statistical thinking in the age of LLMs, Claire shares practical insights for navigating this rapidly changing field.

Key Topics:

In this episode, we sit down with Joya Scarlata, Director of Digital Marketing at Interra Information Technologies (InterraIT), where she has been leading transformative B2B marketing initiatives for nearly 12 years. Joya brings a unique perspective to AI in marketing, combining her background in International Relations with deep expertise in data-driven marketing strategies.

What We Cover: ✨ Joya's AI awakening moment and how her perspective has evolved 

📈 How AI is revolutionizing audience segmentation and content personalization 

🛠️ Game-changing AI tools that are transforming daily marketing operations 

📊 Measuring ROI in AI-enhanced campaigns with specific KPIs 

⚖️ N...

In this thought-provoking episode, we explore the critical intersection of AI governance, ethics, and representation with leaders from the Asian Women Advancing AI (AWAAI). Our guests break down the fundamentals of AI governance, explaining why proper oversight is essential in our rapidly evolving tech landscape. We dive deep into the challenge of creating fair and unbiased AI systems, examining how diverse perspectives are crucial for identifying and preventing algorithmic bias. The conversation tackles the perceived tension between innovation and ethics, revealing why responsible AI development actually leads to better, more robust systems.

We also explore the unique...

Most companies are getting AI transformation spectacularly wrong. In this eye-opening episode, we sit down with data and AI thought leader Nan Li to uncover why adoption—not technology—remains the #1 barrier to AI success.

Forget the buzzwords and empty promises. This is a no-nonsense conversation about what actually works in AI transformation. Nan challenges the conventional wisdom, revealing why starting with "Can we build it?" is the wrong question and sharing the practical framework that successful organizations use instead.

What You'll Learn:

In this episode, the guest breaks down the fundamentals of AI agents in an accessible way for non-technical audiences. From understanding what makes AI agents different from traditional AI systems to exploring their potential future applications, this episode offers a comprehensive introduction to this cutting-edge technology.

AI has evolved from being just a buzzword to becoming an integral part of our workplace wellness programs. But with great power comes great responsibility, and that's exactly what was unpacked in this episode. 

This episode features an esteemed guest from the healthcare sector who shared her perspectives on how AI has become influential in determining optimized health benefits in the workplace and how employers can strike a balance between AI innovation, employee data privacy, and other sensitive factors.

Is the rising popularity of AI impacting the insurance business or its fundamental practices?

Listen to this special episode covering an actuary's unique perspective on how AI may or may not impact core insurance businesses and actuarial practices. The discussion touches upon how the insurance industry can balance the benefits of AI-driven precision with the need for fairness and regulatory compliance, improving data wrangling and processing steps prior to actuarial model building exercises, and how AI can influence overall risk assessment practices in a positive way.

This inspiring episode featuring an AI evangelist who's embracing the AI revolution in remarkable ways. From crafting custom Toastmasters songs to enhancing alumni club communications, our guest shares their journey of discovering generative AI tools in enhancing his creative content creation work. By listening to this episode, you will learn how Practical applications of ChatGPT, Suno AI, and DALL-E in community organizations is transforming creative workflows, especially in public speaking and community engagement. Perfect for retirees, creative enthusiasts, and anyone curious about practical AI applications in everyday life.

Dive deep into the transformative world of AI and data analytics with "Data Decoded: Navigating the AI Revolution". In this informative episode, the guest Vishal unravels the complex landscape of AI/ML driven by data which are reshaping businesses, careers, and technology. From practical integration strategies to emerging trends and critical challenges, this podcast offers an insider's perspective on the AI revolution that's changing everything we know about data.

Generative AI has taken technology world by storm since the inception of ChatGPT in late 2022. As we keep progressing towards a world that will continuously get benefitted by this new technical advent, it's imperative to understand how data scientist, a title which was identified as "The sexiest job in the 21st century" role will get evolve further in upcoming years. 

This podcast tried to shed some lights on that by initiating a thought-provoking discussion between the guest Marina Polupanova, Principle Data Scientist at Bell Labs and the host Sam. 

This episode brings forth a new technology concept "Observability" as the guest speaker shared his perspectives on the following questions: