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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Ariel Assaraf is the CEO and co-founder of Coralogix, a leading observability platform that most recently raised $115 million at a unicorn valuation. He started the company in 2014, and today Coralogix serves more than 4,000 customers, monitors more than 500,000 applications, and processes over 3 million events per second.
Before co-founding Coralogix, Ariel served in Israel's Elite Intelligence Unit 8200, where the sheer scale and complexity of data he worked with made one thing clear: existing architectures weren't built for what was coming. He later joined Varent Systems, a homeland security company, leading automation, integration, and QA.

In this episode, Ariel draws on more than a decade of building at the frontier of data infrastructure to argue that observability is no longer just a tool for preventing downtime. It is becoming the most truthful, real-time source of intelligence any company owns.
In this conversation, we discuss:
The evolution from the data collection era ("oil phase") to a landfill crisis, and now the AI-driven "brain phase" where telemetry has become the most valuable raw material for business decision making
How Coralogix separates the data plane from the control plane, storing data in open format on the customer's own infrastructure to enable data ownership, infinite retention, and freedom from vendor lock-in
Why Ariel invested over $100 million in R&D to build query engines that always return answers, not constrained by predefined schemas that agents will quickly exceed
 How SREs evolve from reactive incident responders into autonomous operators as agents like Ollie, Coralogix's AI agent, take over incident triage, root cause analysis, and narrative generation
The emerging role of the AI-forward product manager who sits between customer needs and autonomous agents, reshaping how software gets built, priced, and sold in real time
How Ariel thinks about linear versus exponential impact as a leadership principle, and why the intuition to prioritize exponential value is something agents will never replicate

Explore more in the conversation:
00:00 Welcome & AI's societal impact paradox
01:53 AI Fun Fact: New data on productivity and employment
04:15 Introducing Ariel Assaraf and the Coralogix origin story
05:15 Evolving data architecture: from oil to landfill to brain phase
07:28 Coralogix's data ownership and open format advantages
13:27 From telemetry data lake to autonomous, agent-driven analytics
20:00 Building scalable, answer-guaranteeing query engines for complex data
25:44 The future of natural language interfaces like Olly for SREs and DevOps
28:15 Orchestrating multiple AI agents for better decision-making
30:20 Responsibility, autonomy, and the evolving role of customer success
35:37 How Coralogix turns telemetry into strategic business decisions
38:18 Linear vs. exponential value in your career

Resources:
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AI fun fact article
On How Personalized Healthcare Is Being Transformed Through AI and the Human Microbiome

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Maryjo Charbonnier is the former CHRO and Executive Advisor at Kyndryl, the world's largest provider of IT infrastructure services , with more than 70,000 employees across roughly 60 countries. When Kyndryl was spun out of IBM in 2021 as one of the largest public company spin-offs in history, Maryjo helped build its culture and people strategy from the ground up, which is why she and others have called it the world's largest startup.
She has spent nearly two decades as a public company CHRO on both sides of the Atlantic, including Wolters Kluwer (traded on the Dutch exchange) and Broadridge Financial Solutions, after a formative run at PepsiCo where she led change management for Frito-Lay. She was named CHRO of the Year in the Netherlands and earned her MBA at Southern Methodist University.
In this episode, Maryjo draws on a career spent leading messy transformations and building a 70,000-person workforce to argue that as AI automates tasks and chunks of jobs, the work that defines a career is moving from what you know to how you judge, lead, and decide, and most organizations are not teaching for it yet.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why Maryjo “seeks the heat” in messy transformations and what she learned leading HR through turnarounds, spin‑offs, and large‑scale change.
How Kyndryl defined the “Kyndryl way” with six core behaviors and uses culture as an operating plan in the world’s largest startup.
Why HR must focus on which skills are rare and most valuable, and how Kyndryl’s Make Yourself Discoverable campaign turned skills into a strategic asset.
How AI-powered career profiles, skills-based redeployment, and role-specific AI curricula were intentionally designed to show Kyndryls that AI is an asset to their career, not a threat to it.
Why Maryjo believes HR has three roles in AI, including reshaping commercial work and building an AI governance council that balances speed with risk.
How leadership “ORE” (organizational design, risk management, empathy) and human skills like change management and people leadership will define careers in an AI‑enabled workplace
Resources:
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Maryjo on LinkedIn
AI fun fact article
On How Rory O'Driscoll Explains Success Modes for AI Companies and Three Essential Startup Strategies
Episode with Keith Sonderling, then an EEOC Commissioner and now the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Labor

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Trond Undheim is a futurist, innovation expert, and research scholar at Stanford University whose work spans governments, startups, and leading academic institutions. His ideas have been featured in outlets including Forbes, The Boston Globe, Fast Company, Fortune, and MIT News, and he previously hosted the Futurized podcast.
He holds a PhD in AI and cognition from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and is the author of eight books, including The Platinum Workforce, which explores how to train and hire for the twenty-first century’s industrial transitions. 
In this episode, Trond draws on decades of interdisciplinary work on emerging technologies, systemic risk, and workforce transitions to argue that system awareness, not traditional knowledge, will determine who thrives in an AI-defined economy.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why Trond says knowledge has become superfluous, and what that claim means for how we define expertise in an AI era.
Why cutting junior hires to cash in on AI efficiencies bakes a failure mode into your organization.
What “system awareness” looks like in practice, and how it changes the way leaders think about skills and careers.
Why socio-technical thinking matters, and how treating humans and machines as mutually constitutive systems reshapes AI design and governance.
Why humanity is unprepared to operate at gigascale, and what megaproject research suggests about the cost of that gap.
How The Platinum Workforce maps twelve durable skill domains, from socio-technical capabilities to maker and maintenance skills, that will outlast multiple AI waves.
Explore this conversation:
00:00 Intro and AI Fun Fact: Pew Research Americans More Concerned Than Excited About AI
04:22 Introducing Trond Undheim, Futurist and Author of The Platinum Workforce
05:09 Why the Workforce Is the Single Biggest Lever for Human Survival
09:08 System Awareness: The Only Knowledge That Matters in the AI Era
15:06 Socio-technical Systems: Co-Evolution of Humans and Technology
17:54 Human Agency Over Technology: Who Really Sets the Rules
23:24 The Human Skills AI Cannot Replace: Making, Maintaining and Place Maximizing
31:12 Workforce Preparation for the AI Era: Training Juniors and Experimentation
34:08 Macro Challenges: Giga-Scale Projects and Management at Scale
45:33 The Augmented Workforce: What AI Integration Must Look Like in 10 Years
54:39 Where to Connect with Trond Undheim and Learn More About The Platinum Workforce

Resources:
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Trond on LinkedIn
AI fun fact article
On How AI Will Transform Tax Filing: Insights from Daniel Marcous, Founder and CTO of April and Former CTO of Waze

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Lev Gonick is the CIO at Arizona State University, one of the largest and fastest-growing universities in the United States, with over 200,000 students across campuses in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Washington, and 35 partner institutions around the world. He won an ORBIE Award in 2023 as a top large Enterprise CIO, was named a Top 50 Educational Technology Influencer by EdScoop in 2022, and holds a PhD in International Political Economy from York University.
Before joining ASU, he was one of the rare CIOs who came from the classroom, having spent the first decade of his career as a teacher and researcher before pioneering online learning in the 1990s, long before it became an industry. 
In this episode, Lev draws on more than 40 years at the intersection of technology and education to make the case that AI is not the disruptor of higher education, it is the accelerant, and that the institutions treating it that way are already building what everyone else is still debating.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why AI is not the disruptor of higher education, and what has actually been driving the disruption for decades
How ASU went from survival mode during the 2009 financial crisis to building the largest online learning operation in the country, and why the same instinct is now driving its AI strategy
What ASU's data from 200,000 students using AI daily actually reveals about which skills will endure and which ones will not
How the role of university faculty is fundamentally changing in the AI era, and why the hardest question has nothing to do with cheating
What the "Agentic self" means for creatives, and how a unique course taught by Will.i.am is helping students protect and amplify their creative futures.
How the traditional responsibilities of the Chief Information Officer are expanding beyond basic operations to actively shaping institutional strategy and innovation.
 
Explore this conversation:
00:00 Intro and AI Fun Fact: Blue Books vs AI Rethinking Academic Integrity
04:25 Introducing Lev Gonick, CIO at Arizona State University
05:17 From Classroom Teacher to Academic Disruptor at ASU
08:16 ASU Principled Innovation and the Design Build Approach to AI
13:23 Co-Creating with Industry: AWS Zoom and the GSV Summit at ASU
17:35 Soft Skills Are Smart Skills: Rethinking AI Literacy in Higher Ed
23:25 Rethinking Assessment: What Faculty Must Adapt to in the AI Era
27:01 Why a College Degree Still Matters in the Age of AI
30:37 From YouTube to ASU: Meeting Learners Where They Are
34:22 Disrupt or Be Disrupted: ASU Mission to Reach 300000 Students
35:57 From Operator to Strategist: The New Playbook for the Modern CIO
40:26 Connect with Lev Gonick and Arizona State University
 
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AI fun fact article: Blue Books Are Making a Campus Comeback via Axios, by Josephine Walker
On what most entrepreneurs get wrong when pitching to VCs.

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Dr. Muthu Alagappan is the Founder and CEO of Counsel Health, the company automating access to high-quality, personalized medical advice from doctors. Counsel recently closed a $25M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures, following an $11M seed round that included A16Z, Asymmetric Capital Partners, Floodgate Fund, and Pear VC.
He holds an MD from Stanford Medicine and a B.S. in Biomechanical Engineering from Stanford, and was among the earliest AI researchers to publish on clinical applications of machine intelligence.
In this episode, Muthu draws on 15 years at the intersection of AI research and frontline clinical medicine to explore the shift toward semi-autonomous care.
In this conversation, we discuss:
How AI addresses the limitations of traditional primary care by offering a highly personalized, knowledgeable, and always available medical experience.
Why patients might leapfrog clinicians in their willingness to adopt AI for medical advice, and how this shift challenges the traditional identity of physicians.
What semi-autonomous care actually looks like in practice, and how Counsel Health uses a clinician cockpit to augment human compassion with real-time machine intelligence.
How to leverage population-level patterns without compromising patient privacy.
Why the double standard applied to AI is misplaced, and why Muthu argues we should hold AI to a much higher benchmark than human doctors simply.
What the future of global healthcare could look like when cognitive medical expertise is fully democratized, ensuring that a patient's zip code no longer dictates the quality of care they receive.
Explore the Conversation
00:00 Intro & AI Fun Fact: Big Data Limitations and Bias in Clinical AI
03:52 Meet Dr. Muthu Alagappan: From Stanford AI Researcher to Counsel Health CEO
06:51 Why Primary Care Falls Short: The Case for AI-Augmented Medicine
09:05 Human Doctors Are Human: How Patients Are Adopting AI Medical Advice
12:20 Patient Privacy and Population Health: Learning Without Training on Data
14:17 Inside the Clinician Cockpit: Real-Time AI Support for Doctors
16:17 Why Counsel Health Employs Its Own Physicians: Messaging-Based Care
19:00 From Semi-Autonomous to Fully Autonomous Care: Healthcare's Next Era
24:19 AI Ethics in Medicine: Safety Standards, Model Values, and Data Ownership
27:22 The AI Double Standard: Why Machines Deserve a Higher Benchmark Than Doctors
31:07 Founder Lessons: Building a Category-Defining Healthcare AI Company
33:53 Rewriting the Commencement Address: Medicine as Lifelong Learning
35:37 Where to Connect with Dr. Muthu Alagappan and Counsel Health

Resources
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Connect with Muthu on LinkedIn
AI fun fact article: Artificial Intelligence in Health Care: The Ethical Frontier via Conexiant
On the future of AI, Silicon Valley and Venture Capital