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

Send us Fan Mail
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

Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Sophia 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

Send us Fan Mail
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
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

Send us Fan Mail
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 
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Jon 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

Send us Fan Mail
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 episode of our three-part HumanX Live series.
In an era dominated by headlines about displacement and disruption, these four founders share a grounded optimism about what AI cannot replace: human judgment, creativity, and the drive to do work that matters.
Each of these leaders is building in a different space, but they arrived at the same conviction. The companies and people poised to win in the AI era are not the ones moving fastest to automate. They are the ones who understand what humans are uniquely built to do, and build systems that make space for it.
What You'll Learn
Why most organizations cannot answer a basic question: how does work actually get done here, and why that gap is now a strategic liability
How AI-powered learning can shift employee development from a compliance obligation to a genuine driver of engagement
Why storytelling will remain a human craft, and what the Pixar transition teaches us about navigating creative disruption
The case for asynchronous AI collaboration, where systems work overnight and humans return to exercise judgment
Why optimism about the human worker is not naive, and what the data actually shows
How to balance AI use cases that replace humans with those that create new value and grow the economy
Featured Guests
Jennifer Smith, CEO & Co-founder of Scribe. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257070 
Robin Daniels, Chief Business Officer at Zensai. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257107 
Jon Snoddy, CEO of Operative Games. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257113 
Florian Douetteau, CEO of Dataiku. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257131 
Inspired by something you heard in this episode? Share your favorite insight about the future of work 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 what comes next.  
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
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

Send us Fan Mail
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 
Resources
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Robin 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