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
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

Looking for a faster, more intelligent way to manage your inbox? Try Superhuman Mail and connect your favorite AI tools to email and calendar workflows—all from one place. Get started here: https://superhuman.com/mail/signup

Send us Fan Mail
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

Send us Fan Mail
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

Send us Fan Mail
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:
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
Connect with Ariel on LinkedIn
AI fun fact article
On How Personalized Healthcare Is Being Transformed Through AI and the Human Microbiome

Send us Fan Mail
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
 
Explore the Conversation
00:00 Intro and AI Fun Fact: Bias in AI Hiring Tools and Your Rights as an Applicant
03:46 Meet Maryjo Charbonnier: CHRO at Kyndryl, the World's Largest IT Infrastructure Provider
05:29 Seek the Heat: Why Career Growth Lives Where the Problems Are
07:19 Building Culture at the World's Largest Startup: Why Kyndryl Doesn't Say "Employees"
09:58 The Real Function of HR: Helping Human Beings Excel at Work
12:35 The Employee-Employer Relationship When Everyone Fears an AI Replacement
15:45 The Three Roles of HR in AI and Defining the Skills That Matter Most
19:05 Make Yourself Discoverable: Operationalizing Skills Data From 1.0 to 3.0
23:15 Leadership in the Age of AI: Closing the Trust Gap With the ORE Framework
28:51 The Future Org Chart: Why Every New Technology Brings a Boom of Jobs
31:51 Advice to the Kids: Why You Get Paid for People Leadership, Not Just Smarts
35:28 Where to Connect With Maryjo Charbonnier and Kyndryl
 
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