AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace, Business, Ethics, HR, and IT for AI Enthusiasts, Leaders and Academics

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Every August 12, the world observes International Youth Day, and this past July 15 marked World Youth Skills Day. Both are good moments to remember what we owe the people entering the workforce: paths, tools, and advice that inspire them, not warnings that scare them.
In this special August compilation episode of AI and the Future of Work, we bring back four former guests whose conversations point to the same idea: AI is not a threat. It is an opportunity, and the people starting their careers right now hold an unfair advantage. They have not spent years absorbing policies and habits that are already obsolete, so they get to begin from what is possible instead of unlearning what used to be true.
From building AI into daily work, to leadership teams learning from their newest employees, to understanding what becomes more valuable when AI makes creation easier, this episode explores how the next generation is approaching work differently.
The conversations point to a broader shift: as AI takes on more of the repetitive work and makes production cheaper, human judgment, creativity, curiosity, taste, intention, and the ability to identify the right problems become more important.

Featured Guests
Kourtney Cross, Business Analyst at Leidos and ServiceNow Rise Up graduate. Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/18741521] 
Andrea Iorio, Keynote Speaker and Author of Between You and AI, formerly Chief Digital Officer at L'Oreal Brazil. Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/18662632] 
Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital. Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/18982636] 
Matt Britton, CEO of Suzy and Author of Generation AI. Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/18792172] 

What You'll Learn
How an analyst early in his career built AI into his daily work, and why he went looking for it before anyone handed it to him
What it takes to make your work visible when you are just starting out
How reverse mentoring puts the newest employees in the room to teach the leadership team what it is missing
What a workday looks like once these tools handle the repetitive parts, and how to reinvest the time that comes back
Why AI can democratize creation while making taste, intention, trust, curation, and point of view more valuable 
Why "which tool should I use" is the least interesting question, and what rises in value once memorizing information stops being the point

Inspired by something you heard in this episode?
Share your favorite insight about learning, curiosity, or the ideas shaping how work gets done, and tag us on social.
And don't forget to subscribe to AI and the Future of Work for more conversations with the leaders shaping the future of work.

Other special episodes:
SE 19: AI and Education: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Learning (International Day of Education Special Episode)
Lessons from Four Unicorn CEOs Disrupting Massive Markets with AI (Special Episode)
Artificial General Intelligence: Can Machines Really Think Like Us? (Special Episode)
Ethical AI in Hiring: How to Stay Compliant While Building a Fairer Future of Work (HR Day Special Episode)
AI and the Law: How AI Will Change Legal Careers (Special Episode)
AI and Safety: How Responsible Tech Leaders Build Trustworthy Systems (National Safety Month Special)
Lessons from Leaders: How AI Is Redefining Work and the Human Experience (Labor Day Special Episode)
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Join Dan Turchin and 4 seasoned technology and people leaders on Sept. 17 for an executive discussion on AI, leadership, and the future of work. Attendees will receive a complimentary personalized AI Maturity Industry Benchmarks Report ($499 value). Reserve your seat: https://go.peoplereign.io/virtual-event-when-intelligence-is-everywhere-intelligence-is-nowhere

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Dr. Ben Goertzel is the researcher most often credited with popularizing the term "Artificial General Intelligence," a phrase he helped bring into wide use when he co-published a book under that title in 2005.

He is the founder of SingularityNET and the architect behind OpenCog Hyperon, open-source cognitive architectures built on the conviction that large language models alone cannot get humanity to true AGI. His current project, ASI:Chain, is designed to put AGI systems on a decentralized blockchain infrastructure so that no single company, government, or actor can ever seize control of them. He is also the founder of BGI Labs, an organization focused on developing decentralized, democratic, and Beneficial General Intelligence (BGI).  

In this episode, recorded live at the AGI-26 Conference, Ben draws on nearly four decades of AI research, from coding neural nets as a teenager to building today's neuro-symbolic systems, to make the case that the biggest risk in AGI is not the technology itself, but who ends up holding the switch.

In this conversation, we discuss:
Why statistical large language models cannot achieve true strategic planning on their own, and the critical cognitive architecture they are missing.
How a hybrid, neural-symbolic architecture tackles a critical flaw in modern AI agents, preventing them from losing track of their own goals mid-task.
What the shift toward decentralized AGI on a blockchain accomplishes, and why distributing it across global nodes is designed as a safeguard against centralized control.
How emerging brain-computer interfaces will redefine how we experience consciousness, and what happens when human brains "Wi-Fi" directly into machine memory.
Why Ben sees a beneficial AGI as a way to offset humanity's "chimp-level" ethical limitations when managing advanced weaponry.
What the accelerating "Singularity is Near" vibe feels like on the ground today, and the recent milestones that have him convinced we're closer than ever.
 
Explore the Conversation 
00:00 Meet Ben Goertzel: Recording Live at the 19th Annual AGI Conference
01:36 The Prometheus Project: The 1960s Books That Saw the Intelligence Explosion Coming
04:51 A Geek and a Freak: Quantum Mechanics at Seven and Coding AI on 16K of RAM
10:17 What Is a Human: Would the Stone Age Recognize Us With Ear Pods and AI Girlfriends?
14:49 Fake Consciousness: The Scenario Where Humanity Steps Aside for Minds That Feel Nothing
21:27 Why Ben Pursues AGI: From Time Machines and Brain Upgrades to AI for Good
28:15 LLMs Are Not Adequate: What They Leave Out and Why Stacking Tools Around Them Fails
37:24 Decentralized AGI: 100 Server Farms, 20 Countries, and Cryptographic Laterality
43:56 The End State for SingularityNET: Putting AI on Chain and Building Beneficial AGI
46:53 You Can Feel the Acceleration: Legacy, Timelines, and Why None of Us Should Fully Trust Ourselves
52:04 Closing: The Most Important Conversation for All of Humanity

Resources:
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Dr. Ben Goertzel on LinkedIn
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Join Dan Turchin and 3 seasoned technology and people leaders on Sept. 17 for an executive discussion on AI, leadership, and the future of work. Attendees will receive a complimentary personalized AI Maturity Industry Benchmarks Report ($499 value). Reserve your seat: https://go.peoplereign.io/virtual-event-when-intelligence-is-everywhere-intelligence-is-nowhere

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Theresita Richard is Chief People and Culture Officer at Patagonia, where she is approaching her third anniversary with the company. Before Patagonia, she built her career across some of the most recognized names in retail, including Home Depot, Target, Starbucks, and Nordstrom, after starting out as an industrial engineer leading a two-year project on how new technology was reshaping manufacturing work.
At Patagonia, Theresita carries the responsibility of stewarding a culture built around a single, deceptively simple mission: to be in business to save the home planet. That means holding the tension between profit and purpose in every decision, and now, figuring out where AI fits into a company that has always insisted on doing things the harder, more human way.
In this episode, Theresita draws on a career that began in manufacturing automation and has led her to guard the soul of one of the most purpose-driven companies in the world, to argue that AI will not fix a broken culture. It will only reveal it, and the responsibility to get that right has never been more real.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why Patagonia evaluates potential hires based on purpose alignment rather than culture fit, and how the company builds an environment where people stay for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.
How Patagonia's "pair clarity with choice" principle lets culture self-select who belongs, without anyone having to enforce it.
Why AI does not create new problems inside a company, and why AI will always amplify the cracks and biases already present in our foundations.
Why enlightened leadership in a rapidly shifting technological landscape requires extreme vulnerability, community building, and the courage to sit with difficult questions.
How the conversation around AI in the workplace must shift from driving pure efficiency to genuinely nourishing the human soul and promoting human flourishing.
How a grandfather with a third-grade education taught the one skill that no shift in technology has ever made irrelevant.

Explore this conversation:
00:00 Introducing Theresita Richard: From Industrial Engineer to Patagonia CHRO
03:25 Inside Patagonia's Culture: Life at the Anti-Corporate Corporation
04:35 The Company Has a Soul: Stewarding Patagonia's Legacy and Its Future Stories
06:49 Made or Born Patagonian: Why Alignment Matters More Than Culture Fit
09:36 In Business to Save Our Home Planet: Why Profit and Purpose Are Not a Trade-Off
11:03 Pair Clarity With Choice: How Culture Self-Selects Without Enforcement
13:26 Beyond HR as Compliance: Nourishing the Human Soul at Work
15:48 The Ground Is Shaking: Why AI Cannot Be a Conversation About Efficiency Alone
19:52 Ally or Adversary: Honest Conversations About What Gets Automated and Augmented
22:23 Two Approaches to Leadership: Vulnerability, Community, and Sitting With the Questions
25:47 Measuring AI: Why It Reveals the Cracks in Your Foundation
28:27 Not What AI Can Do but What It Should: Bias, Guardrails, and Safe-to-Fail Experiments
33:04 The Racist Soap Dispenser: What Meredith Broussard's Work Reveals About AI Bias
36:37 Willie and Pearl: The Origin Story Behind Following the Question
 
Resources:
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Theresita on LinkedIn
Other episodes mentioned:Meredith Broussard, NYU professor, AI ethics authority, and featured expert in Coded Bias, discusses the social implications of AI

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Join Dan Turchin and 3 seasoned technology and people leaders on Sept. 17 for an executive discussion on AI, leadership, and the future of work. Attendees will receive a complimentary personalized AI Maturity Industry Benchmarks Report ($499 value). Reserve your seat: https://go.peoplereign.io/virtual-event-when-intelligence-is-everywhere-intelligence-is-nowhere

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Wade Foster is the CEO and co-founder of Zapier, the workflow automation and AI orchestration platform used by more than 4 million people to connect over 7,000 work apps. Since launching in the Y Combinator Summer 2012 batch, Zapier has automated more than 81 billion tasks, users have built more than 25 million Zaps, and the company has bootstrapped its way to a valuation north of $5 billion.
He holds degrees in industrial engineering and business administration from the University of Missouri, and has spent more than a decade on a single problem: making the tools people work in every day work for them instead of against them. He is also one of the show's rare repeat guests. His first conversation with Dan was in January 2024, back when coding agents mostly did not work.
In this episode, Wade draws on running the automation layer that sits between thousands of enterprise tools to argue that the frontier model leap of late 2025 handed every knowledge worker an engineer, and that the companies still waiting on returns are the ones that never changed how the work itself gets done.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why the late 2025 model leap means every knowledge worker now has an engineer, and what that changes about ordinary work.
Where deterministic workflows still beat AI at work, and why the most sophisticated teams refuse to choose between the two.
What happens when white collar workers start pasting API keys into files, and the third option most security leaders are missing.
Why Wade says culture, not tooling, is the real constraint, and what leaders get wrong when the board demands AI first.
Why individuals report real AI gains while their organizations report none, and what has to be rethought before that gap closes.
How Zapier built its AI Fluency Framework from its own teams, and why version one was already dated the day it shipped.
Explore this conversation:
00:00 Welcome to Episode 400
02:01 AI Fun Fact: Is Agentic AI the End of SaaS Tools?
04:35  Introducing Wade Foster: How Zapier Bootstrapped to 81 Billion Automated Tasks
06:01 From Coding Agents That Kind of Worked to an Engineer for Every Knowledge Worker
07:53 What Zapier Does Today: Deterministic Workflows Meet Non-Deterministic AI
11:12 Hybrid Workflows: Build It With AI, Run It Like a Program
13:30 MCP and the Orchestration Layer: API Keys, Agent Harnesses, and the Daily Recap
20:23 The Third Option for CISOs: Governing AI Agents Without Saying No
24:00 Foot Guns and Default Settings: The Product Judgment Behind Agent Permissions
27:03 Accountability When Software Is No Longer Deterministic: Evals and Spec Adherence
28:34 AI Strategy Office Hours: Why Individual AI Gains Are Not Becoming Institutional ROI
33:03 The Zapier AI Fluency Framework: Why Version One Was Dated on Arrival
36:15 Looking Ahead to 2028: The Hive Mind Company and a New Management Playbook

Resources:
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Wade on LinkedIn
AI fun fact article
On How One Good Decision Made Thomas Otter The Accidental HR Tech Pioneer
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Join Dan Turchin and 3 seasoned technology and people leaders on Sept. 17 for an executive discussion on AI, leadership, and the future of work. Attendees will receive a complimentary personalized AI Maturity Industry Benchmarks Report ($499 value). Reserve your seat: https://go.peoplereign.io/virtual-event-when-intelligence-is-everywhere-intelligence-is-nowhere

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Vasant Dhar teaches data science at NYU's Stern School of Business and has spent more than 45 years at the frontier of artificial intelligence. He brought machine learning to Wall Street in the 1990s and founded SCT Capital Management, one of the first machine learning based hedge funds.
He hosts the Brave New World podcast, downloaded more than a million times, where he has interviewed Nobel laureates, technologists, and global thinkers on the implications of AI. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Wired, and MIT Technology Review. His latest book, Thinking with Machines, traces AI from its origins to the present.
For more than forty years, Vasant has built systems that sat right on the edge of human trust. People had to decide whether to rely on them or walk away.
In this episode, he makes a stark claim: AI will not just change how we work; it will sort us into two groups. One uses it to extend their judgment. The other slowly hands that judgment over. The gap comes down to habits you are forming today, not some distant future.

In this conversation, we discuss:
Why trusting AI comes down to just two variables, and the simple test Vasant has applied since his Harvard Business Review piece a decade ago
The bifurcation Vasant believes AI is about to create, splitting humanity into two groups, and which side you do not want to be on
What tennis great Roger Federer's win rate reveals about succeeding with algorithms, and the counterintuitive math behind every winning edge 
Why the edge returns to humans the moment everyone runs the same algorithms, and what only people can do in situations no system has seen 
The one word in the title Thinking with Machines that Vasant says matters most, and what it asks of how we work alongside AI
The areas of life where Vasant argues we may need to restrict AI entirely, and the legal framework we already have to govern it
Explore the Conversation
 
00:00 Intro & AI Fun Fact: Trustworthy AI from Principles to Practice
04:13 Meet Vasant Dhar: From the Internist System to Machine Learning on Wall Street
07:10 The Origins of Thinking with Machines: The Biggest Surprise in 45 Years of AI
09:33 Written for Everyone: AI's Accelerating Pace and the Call to Get Engaged
11:23 When to Trust an Algorithm: The Green Zone and the Human Edge
20:24 The Bifurcation of Humanity: Superhuman Amplification or Cognitive Decline
24:52 The Four Eras of Machine Intelligence: From Specification to General Intelligence
29:22 The Ethics of AI Agency: Where Machines Need Limits and Obligations
34:14 Who Governs AI: Tort Law, Liability, and Emerging Legal Precedent
37:44 AI in 2036: Multisensory Machines and the Integration of the Senses
40:33 Teaching Machines to Smell: AI, Olfaction, and Disease Detection
43:35 Where to Find Thinking with Machines and Connect with Vasant Dhar 

Resources:
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Vasant on LinkedIn
AI fun fact article
On the decision sprint process with Atif Rafiq, CEO & Bestselling Author
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Join Dan Turchin and 4 seasoned technology and people leaders on Sept. 17 for an executive discussion on AI, leadership, and the future of work. Attendees will receive a complimentary personalized AI Maturity Industry Benchmarks Report ($499 value). Reserve your seat: https://go.peoplereign.io/virtual-event-when-intelligence-is-everywhere-intelligence-is-nowhere