SHIFT

Most geospatial data is gathered by satellites and cameras attached to planes, but a new decentralized network is helping amateur drone pilots capture and contribute ultra high resolution data.  In this week's show, we go fly a drone and learn how that data is helping power next generation apps for things like disaster response. This episode originally ran in June 2025. We Meet:   Alec Wilson, COO...

Enterprises have been slogging through the AI adoption journey, but cybersecurity threat actors have been too. As the time from vulnerability discovery to breach effectively goes to zero, the new cybersecurity playbook is all about how fast you can recover.  We Meet:   Anneka Gupta is the Chief Product Officer at Rubrik  Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from...

AI agents already perform complex tasks, but they largely work alone, even when they're technically connected. But what if they could collectively learn from each other, and collaborate?   Our guest wants you to think about when that transition happened for people, with our own intelligence, some 70,000 years ago, when human intelligence stopped being a solo act and became something we did togethe...

A hundred million degrees Celsius. That’s the brutal reality of commercial fusion. This week, we’re sitting down with industry leaders to discuss the front lines of an energy revolution, from surviving extreme thermal stress to building brand-new supply chains. We Meet:   Joe Paluska is the CMO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems Annie Kritcher is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Inertia Alice Bro...

What do you think it would be like to lead AI efforts and the overall digital transformation of the CIA? This week, we find out as we dive into a world of espionage and secrets in the latest installment of our oral history project.  We Meet:   Retired Deputy CIA Director for Digital Innovation Jennifer Ewbank  Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cille...

Microsoft EVP Jason Zander on the materials breakthrough that closed the gap, how AI agents cut the roadmap in half, and why he believes quantum's real job might be to make AI smarter. We Meet:   Microsoft EVP of Discovery & Quantum Jason Zander  Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from h...

Frank McCourt is an American executive and philanthropist. He’s also the author of  “Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age”. We talk to him about that fight before a live audience in New York City at a gathering held by the responsible technology non-profit, All Tech Is Human. This episode originally aired in 2024. We Meet: Frank H. McCourt, Jr., civic ent...

For as far as we’ve come with AI and robotics, there’s still a huge gap when it comes to combining the two. AI excels in the digital space, and in the physical world, robots are often pre-programmed. That’s where physical AI comes in. It’s critical for things that can’t tolerate the kinds of mistakes that are common in today’s statistics based AI, like self driving cars or managing the power grid....

The spray-and-pray approach to AI investing is dead. Join us as we discuss what it takes to stand out in a saturated market as we move beyond the hype to identify real moats and what’s next for investors in this space.  This episode was taped before a live audience at Web Summit Vancouver.  We meet:  Andy McLoughlin is a seed-stage investor at Uncork Capital focused on B2B software, developer tool...

What if we've all become so focused on what technology is capable of that we've lost track of what children are capable of?   We Meet:  Andrew Sliwinski is the VP and Head of Product Experience for Lego Education.  Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marc...

What if the standard approach to responsible AI, built around aspirational values like fairness and transparency, is fundamentally broken in the age of AI agents?  We Meet:  Reid Blackman is the author of the new book The Ethical Nightmare Challenge and the founder of AI ethics consultancy Virtue. Episode Links: Reid and Jennifer are speaking at the Drawing Room Salon on May 20: https://thedrawing...

How do you build intelligent systems that people trust? Then, how do you keep that trust when things go wrong? Because when things do, it’s not the tech that loses face but the brand people relied on.  This episode was taped before a live audience on stage at the HumanX Conference in San Francisco. We Meet:  Radha Basu, Founder & CEO of iMerit Shuman Ghosemajumder, Co-founder & CEO of Reke...

Capital One is the largest issuer of credit cards in the U.S. It’s also one of the largest banks, and car finance companies, in the country.  We learn from its experience building proprietary AI across fraud prevention, agentic workflows, customer experience, and risk and compliance in the latest installment of our oral history project. We Meet:  Capital One’s Head of AI Foundations Milind Naphade...

Engineers charged with maintaining secure and reliable sites and services need to be able to observe what’s going on inside their systems. That observability data helps them spot issues sooner,  fix problems faster, and learn from the whole experience. A live conversation from the stage at the HumanX Conference in San Francisco. We Meet:  Christine Yen is the Co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb, Jenni...

Best-known as the creator of ImageNet, we meet the Godmother of AI, Dr. Fei-Fei Li In the latest installment of our oral history project. She's a Chinese-American computer scientist and the creator of ImageNet - the dataset that made rapid advances possible in this field of AI that helps computers take meaningful information from things like photos and videos. We Meet:  Stanford University's Fei-F...

Each day more than 11,000 people in the US turn 65 years old. It adds up to more than 4,000,000 people a year, and the labor force that serves them is struggling to keep up with that demand - a problem that’s unlikely to go away anytime soon.  We explore this shift and how might technology be used to help people age in place in the latest installment of our oral history project. We Meet:  Chia-Lin...

 Lately, it feels like you can’t go more than a few minutes without hearing someone talk about AI agents, and there’s a very good reason for that. Agents are doing more work, more quickly and in more places, and we’ve developed ways to help them retain knowledge from things they’ve done, and then build upon those experiences. But what if the experience agents gain on a job changes the work product...

Astro Teller, Alphabet’s Captain of Moonshots, joins us for a conversation about the importance of failure, workplace culture in a moonshot factory, and not throwing away your shot. We Meet:  Astro Teller is the Captain of Moonshots at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with origi...

How to handle cybersecurity challenges posed by AI agents is about the hottest security topic going at the moment. If you’re wondering why that is, it’s because agents are built to take action - to do things on our behalf - and that challenges a core assumption that’s baked into companies security: that humans make the decisions.  Tailscale is a Canadian Unicorn and one of the country’s fastest gr...

How much do we know about the way organizations are adopting agentic AI, and what it means for the human employees working alongside?  Our friends at The MIT Sloan Management Review did a deep dive on these questions and several more late last year, and they found some pretty surprising things. This week, we’re going to talk about what those things might mean for companies as we continue to unpack...

Critical minerals are in just about every device you can think of, and there’s a global race underway to find and finance the production of these materials because they’re in short supply.  This week, we hear how Earth AI uses predictive algorithms to find new deposits and how TechMet’s capital and partnerships carry those opportunities through to production and market impact. We Meet:  Roman Tesl...

As regulatory expectations rise, and financial crime grows more complex, risk management is shifting from static checks to continuous intelligence. From the stage at this year’s Web Summit Qatar, we looked at how AI and advanced data analytics are transforming compliance workflows. We Meet:  Joel Lange is the executive vice president and general manager of Dow Jones Risk and Research Credits: This...

What would you say if someone offered you a taste of a salmon filet that doesn’t contain fish? The protein content, carbs, and even the omega 3s are basically the same, but what it doesn’t contain are things like microplastics and mercury.  Join us for a factory tour of a startup called New School Foods for a peek at the next-generation of plant-based protein. We Meet:   New School Foods CEO Chris...

It’s not just AI software that’s rapidly shifting. One could argue that the very map of high performance computing is being redrawn, from OpenAI investing more than $10-billion in wafer-scale chips to breakthroughs in quantum research that are making that architecture much more useful.  This episode was taped in front of a live audience in Davos, Switzerland, on stage at The Drawing Room: AI and E...

Figuring out what it takes to make agentic AI work in a high-stakes, real-world environment is front and center these days, because for the most part, we’re still figuring that out. At this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, we get a first-hand look at the shift that’s taking place from agent demos to what a successful deployment looks like. We Meet:  Shibani Ahuja is the...