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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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
 
RESOURCES
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Lev on LinkedIn
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.
LIVE EVENT: 
See how leading enterprises are using agentic AI to give employees back 4–6 productive hours every week. Join PeopleReign CEO Dan Turchin for a live demo on June 25, 2026.
Register here: https://go.peoplereign.io/live-demo-how-agentic-ai-is-being-used-by-global-enterprises

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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
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
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 

LIVE EVENT: 
See how leading enterprises are using agentic AI to give employees back 4–6 productive hours every week. Join PeopleReign CEO Dan Turchin for a live demo on June 25, 2026.
Register here: https://go.peoplereign.io/live-demo-how-agentic-ai-is-being-used-by-global-enterprises

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Dr. Jaime Lien is the Chief Scientist and a co-founder of Archetype AI, where she is building a foundation model that turns complex sensor data into meaning people can actually act on. A signal processing scientist by training, she earned her PhD working on RF imaging from satellites and later helped develop the first radar embedded in consumer smartphones at Google, before leaving with four colleagues to start Archetype AI. 
Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores how AI can read the rich, non-human signals all around us and translate them for the people who rely on them.
Jaime and host Dan Turchin dig into how machines distill signal from noise, why a reasoning and communication model matters more than a straight-to-action one, and why keeping a human in the loop is a requirement, not a feature, when the stakes are physical.
What You'll Learn
How AI separates meaningful signal from noise across the sensors already around us
Why Archetype builds a reasoning and communication model, not a straight-to-action one
Why keeping a human in the loop is treated as a requirement, not an optional feature
How interpretability and explainability have to be designed in from the start, not added later
Why discovering something new about the physical world matters more than automation alone
🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363520
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter.
Connect with Jaime on LinkedIn.
 
LIVE EVENT: 
See how leading enterprises are using agentic AI to give employees back 4–6 productive hours every week. Join PeopleReign CEO Dan Turchin for a live demo on June 25, 2026.
Register here: https://go.peoplereign.io/live-demo-how-agentic-ai-is-being-used-by-global-enterprises

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In this special compilation episode of AI and the Future of Work, we are bringing you four conversations recorded live on the show floor at HumanX 2026. This is the second and final compilation of our three-part HumanX Live series.
Our first compilation explored how AI amplifies the human potential it can never replace. This one turns to the technical side, and to a question that gets harder the more these systems touch our lives: how do you build AI you can actually trust not to fail when it matters most? 
As technology reaches further into the moments that count (the systems that monitor our health, drive our cars, and work alongside us on the job), these four builders share how they design for accountability, safety, and harmony between people and machines.
What You'll Learn
Why reading code is no longer enough, and how observing real outcomes (not system metrics alone) is the only way to know whether AI is actually serving the people who depend on it
What "AI values" are, and why companies will soon need shared norms for how people disclose, review, and engage with work produced by agentic systems
How robots earn trust on a job site by measuring their own uncertainty, asking questions, and communicating their intentions before they act
Why the most valuable place for automation is the dirty, dull, and dangerous work humans were never meant to do, and what that means for keeping people safe
Why physical AI should be built first as a reasoning and communication model that can explain its thinking to people, rather than one that jumps straight to action
How "harness engineering" moves teams beyond prompt and context engineering, and why orchestrating several frontier models together can outperform any single one
Featured Guests
Christine Yen, CEO and Co-Founder of Honeycomb. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19362645 
Dr. Ali Agha, CEO and Co-Founder of FieldAI. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19362711 
Dr. Jaime Lien, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist of Archetype AI. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363341 
XD Huang, Chief Technology Officer of Zoom. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363454 

Inspired by something you heard in this episode? Share your favorite insight about the future of work and tag us on social:
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And don't forget to subscribe to AI and the Future of Work for more conversations with the leaders shaping what comes next.

Explore the Full HumanX 2026 Series
This episode is part of a special three-part series recorded live at HumanX 2026:
Episode 1: Special conversation with Stefan Weitz, CEO of HumanX: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19210355
Episode 2: Compilation featuring the CEOs of Scribe, Operative Games, and Dataiku, and the Chief Business Officer of Zensai: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257142

LIVE EVENT: 
See how leading enterprises are using agentic AI to give employees back 4–6 productive hours every week. Join PeopleReign CEO Dan Turchin for a live demo on June 25, 2026.
Register here: https://go.peoplereign.io/live-demo-how-agentic-ai-is-being-used-by-global-enterprises

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XD Huang is the CTO of Zoom, where he is leading the company's shift from hosting meetings to completing work, a vision he calls conversation to completion. He joined Zoom after 30 years at Microsoft, where he served as Azure AI CTO and a Technical Fellow and helped ship Azure OpenAI Services. A pioneer in speech recognition for four decades, he led the Microsoft team that first reached human parity in transcribing conversational speech. 
Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores what it takes to turn everyday conversation into finished work.
XD and host Dan Turchin dig into Zoom's federated approach to AI, the cost and accuracy tradeoffs hidden inside every model decision, and why, after a career spent solving the hardest technical problems, he believes taste and judgment are the qualities that still belong to people.
What You'll Learn
What "conversation to completion" means for the way work actually gets done
How Zoom's federated approach combines multiple frontier models into one stronger result
Why every AI decision is a tradeoff between cost and accuracy, and how to control for it
How an open ecosystem lets the same AI work across Zoom, Google, Microsoft, and in-person meetings
Why taste and judgment are the qualities XD hires for that AI cannot replace
🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363520
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter.
Connect with XD on LinkedIn.
 
LIVE EVENT: 
See how leading enterprises are using agentic AI to give employees back 4–6 productive hours every week. Join PeopleReign CEO Dan Turchin for a live demo on June 25, 2026.
Register here: https://go.peoplereign.io/live-demo-how-agentic-ai-is-being-used-by-global-enterprises