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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Sophia Kianni is the co-founder and CEO of Phia, an AI shopping agent with more than 1.4 million users that has raised over $43 million from an investor list that includes Kris Jenner, Sara Blakely, and Hailey Bieber. Sophia and her co-founder built the company out of their Stanford dorm room on a single thesis: in the future, every consumer will have a personal AI shopping assistant.
Sophia is also the co-host of The Burnouts, a podcast with more than 600,000 followers and over 200 million downloads. Earlier in her career, she founded Climate Cardinals, the world's largest youth-led climate nonprofit with more than 20,000 volunteers, and became the youngest United Nations advisor in U.S. history.
In this episode, Sophia draws on her experience building high-velocity ventures before the age of 25 to challenge how founders think about feedback, team culture, content creation, experimentation, and workflow efficiency. She also makes a compelling argument for how AI should be used at work: removing friction from the parts of a workflow that drain time and energy without adding value.

In this conversation, we discuss:
Why the intersection of social and shopping looked like a solved problem to most founders, and the gap that Sophia and her co-founder saw inside their Stanford dorm room
How Sophia thinks about team building as company building, and the specific qualities she screens for before resumes, credentials, or experience
How a consumer-first mindset and relentless customer feedback help Phia iterate faster and build a product users love
Why building close to your user is still the most underrated advantage in AI, and what most founders miss when they try to scale it 
Why Phia and The Burnouts built data-oriented content engines that operate like scientific labs, testing hooks, fonts, retention curves, and B-roll as measurable variables rather than relying on creative instincts alone
How Sophia uses AI tools like Adobe Firefly to increase workflow efficiency by removing friction from repetitive tasks, not to replace creative work, but to protect it
The framework Sophia uses to decide whose feedback shapes her decisions and whose she treats as noise

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Jon Snoddy is the CEO of Operative Games and a veteran storyteller with a career spanning NPR, Lucasfilm, Disney Imagineering and a co-venture with Spielberg and Sega. Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores what happens when you combine Disney-level character craft with large language models to create a completely new kind of interactive storytelling.
Jon and host Dan Turchin dig into how Operative builds AI-powered characters that feel emotionally real, what the entertainment industry gets wrong about the AI disruption, and why small studios have an edge that no major franchise can buy.
What You'll Learn
How Jon went from Disney Imagineering to building AI characters you can call on the phone
Why emotional fidelity matters more than photorealism in AI-driven storytelling
How Operative thinks about guardrails, ethics and responsible AI in immersive entertainment
What the Pixar disruption can and cannot teach us about the AI moment in entertainment
Why big studios are watching but not moving, and why that's an opportunity for startups
 🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257142 
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Robin Daniels is the Chief Business Officer at Zensai and a seasoned tech executive with stints at Salesforce, LinkedIn, Box and WeWork. Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores what it really takes to create an environment where people are motivated to grow, learn and do their best work every day.
Robin and host Dan Turchin dig into why most LMS platforms have failed employees, how AI is changing the relationship between learning and performance, and why investing in people is not just the right thing to do but a proven path to better business outcomes.
What You'll Learn
Why 80% of employees are disengaged and what organizations can do about it
How AI-powered learning delivers the right skills at the right moment, not generic compliance training
How Zensai uses AI to coach managers and strengthen the employee-manager relationship
Why proving the link between learning and performance is the key to making L&D a strategic priority
Why the future belongs to humans who combine technical skills with taste, judgment and soft skills
 🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257142 
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Jennifer Smith is the CEO of Scribe and a former McKinsey consultant turned venture capitalist who interviewed over 1,200 enterprise CIOs before founding her company. Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round covers how AI is helping organizations finally understand how work actually happens inside their teams.
Jennifer and host Dan Turchin explore why even Fortune 500 leaders don't truly know how their companies operate, and what that means for AI transformation.
What You’ll Learn 
Why process visibility comes before any AI initiative
How Scribe maps workflows across 600,000+ companies
Responsible AI and building a data-driven culture
Humans and agents working side by side
Helping people spend more time on the work they love
 🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257142 
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Florian Douetteau is the CEO and co-founder of Dataiku, the enterprise AI platform he has been building for over a decade to make data and AI accessible at scale. Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores how the rise of agents is reshaping the role of data teams and what a genuinely AI-native way of working looks like in practice.
Florian and host Dan Turchin go deep on where agentic AI actually creates economic value, why most enterprises are still thinking about agents the way people thought about websites in 1997, and what it means for humanity when machines start doing things we thought only humans could do.
What You'll Learn
How Dataiku evolved from data science platform to full agent studio for the enterprise
Why business teams need to become their own AI enablers, not just consumers of data insights
What a truly agentic workday looks like for knowledge workers in the near future
Why the dystopian AI narrative misses the use cases that actually grow the economy
What it means to be human when intelligence is no longer exclusively a human trait
🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257142
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Florian on LinkedIn