AI-Curious with Jeff Wilser

Can a 23-year-old video game help train the next generation of AI agents? In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Hilmar Pétursson, CEO of Fenris Creations, the studio behind EVE Online, about why Google DeepMind has invested in the company and why EVE may be one of the hardest tests for artificial intelligence. EVE Online is not just a space game. It is a persistent virtual civilization with...

What happens when AI stops being just a software story and starts showing up in towns, power grids, zoning fights, data centers, and business workflows? In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Sharon Goldman, longtime AI journalist (most recently senior reporter at Fortune) who’s now the founder of Ground Level AI, which focuses on the real-world impact of the AI boom: infrastructure, data cen...

What if the only way to stay human in the age of AI is to become something more than human? In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with D. Scott Phoenix, partner at 50 Years and co-founder of Vicarious, about one of the most provocative arguments in AI: we cannot stop AI, we cannot control AI, so humans may need to enhance themselves to stay at the center of civilization. Scott lays out the thesis...

What if the most important part of AI is the part nobody talks about, not the chatbot, but the map underneath the world? In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with John Lenahan, Head of Esri’s Global Commercial Services team, about geospatial AI, GIS, and why “where” may be the missing context in so much of today’s AI conversation. We explore how maps become far more powerful when they layer in i...

What does the bleeding edge of AI actually look like inside a small team, before the big labs turn it into a polished product? In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Elijah Spencer, Chief of Staff at Miden, about the practical workflows power users are building right now with AI coding tools, research agents, and custom automation. We explore how Elijah uses tools like Claude Code, Codex, and...

What happens when your next customer is not a person, but an AI agent shopping on their behalf? The way we buy things online may be about to change a lot faster than most people realize. In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Chi Zhang, cofounder and CEO of Kite, about agentic commerce and the infrastructure that could make AI agents true economic actors instead of just helpful assistants. We...

In a year when the frontier AI labs are spending tens of billions on training runs and scaling their teams into the thousands, one of 2026's fastest-growing agentic AI companies has exactly one employee. His name is Arthur Vandelay. His company is Mojo Agentic AI. And his revenue, with zero outside funding and a Fortune 100 client roster, is on track to clear $30 million this year. In this ep...

What if the future of AI is not just better text, better image, and better video models stitched together, but something closer to a unified mind? In this episode of AI-Curious , we talk with Caroline Ingeborn, COO of Luma AI , about the company’s bet on “unified intelligence” and why that may be a fundamentally different path toward AGI. We explore why Luma believes training across modalities tog...

What if the future of AI is not bigger models in bigger data centers, but smaller ones running quietly on the devices you already use every day? In this episode of AI-Curious , we talk with Jeffrey Li, COO of Liquid AI , about why the next phase of AI may depend less on giant cloud models and more on small , specialized models that run directly on phones, laptops, cars, and other edge devices. We...

It’s happening everywhere. And no one’s really talking about it. What happens when your employees are already using dozens of AI tools your company never approved? In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Rick Caccia, co-founder and CEO of Witness AI, about the rise of “shadow AI” inside enterprises and why it has become one of the biggest practical challenges in AI adoption. We explore how emp...

What happens when an AI prediction does not just forecast the future, but helps create it? In this episode of AI-Curious , we talk with philosopher and ethicist Carissa Véliz about AI ethics, AI privacy, predictive AI, and the hidden power of algorithmic decision-making. We explore how AI systems used in hiring, lending, insurance, and other high-stakes settings can become self-fulfilling propheci...

What if the job you have today will soon require a completely different set of skills?  In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Dan Roth, Editor in Chief of LinkedIn, about what LinkedIn’s data reveals about the future of work, the rise of AI literacy, and why deeply human skills may matter more than ever. We dig into LinkedIn’s “Skills on the Rise” research, what employers are actually lookin...

What does it actually look like to use AI tools in the real world, beyond the usual chatbot prompts and hype? In this episode of AI-Curious, Jeff Wilser shares five AI tools and workflows that are shaping how he works right now, from Claude Code and personalized news briefings to NotebookLM, multi-model prompting, and using AI to write more closely in your own voice. The goal is not to offer a com...

What happens when AI stops being a productivity tool and starts reshaping the structure of work itself? In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Kelly Monahan, a future of work and AI advisor, about what AI may actually do to the workplace over the next few years, and why the reality is likely to be messier than both the hype and the fear suggest. We dig into the tension between using AI for au...

What happens when a business school decides AI isn’t a bolt-on elective, but the operating system for how students learn marketing, finance, entrepreneurship, and leadership? In this episode of AI-Curious, we’re back with David Marchick , Dean of the Kogod School of Business , to see what changed after his earlier promise to become the country’s first AI-first business school . We dig into what “A...

What happens when AI makes the news feel like it was made just for us, and the “ objective ” version quietly disappears? Here we have something of a “ very special episode ” of AI-Curious. I was recently in Davos during World Economic Forum week , and was honored to speak on a panel on the Future of Media . This is that panel.  We dig into the trust crisis in journalism, the attention economy, and...

Something I don’t usually say: This is one of my favorite conversations I’ve ever had in the AI space. Truly.  The setup: What happens when an AI agent stops being a tool and starts acting like a coworker? In this episode of AI-Curious , we talk with Dan Botero , who built an AI agent named Octavius Fabrius using OpenClaw . Octavius didn’t just chat or summarize. He applied to hundreds of jobs, bu...

What happens when AI agents start talking to each other in public, at scale, and we have to figure out how humans fit into that world? In this episode of AI-Curious , we explore the “Moltbook moment” through a special live panel recorded at the Summit on Human Agency , convened by the Advanced AI Society (hat tip to Michael Casey and Tricia Wang.) Instead of a standard one-on-one interview, we mod...

What happens when a social network is built for AI agents, not humans, and millions of bots start posting, debating, and “performing” identity in public? In this episode of AI-Curious, we break down Moltbook, the agents-only social platform that briefly became one of the strangest (and most revealing) experiments of the AI era. We unpack what Moltbook is, why it matters, and what it suggests about...

What does it take to make AI adoption stick in a high-stakes, heavily regulated industry, without triggering job-loss panic? In this episode of AI-Curious, we have a hyper-specific case study of AI adoption. Host Jeff Wilser talks with Krista Snelling (CEO and Chairman) and Matthew March (CIO and EVP) of West Coast Community Bank about their practical playbook for rolling out AI the right way: gov...

What happens when software stops just “chatting” and starts acting in the real world, across real workflows, with real consequences? In this episode of AI-Curious, the Head of AI at Cognizant goes deep on AI agents and agentic workflows: what they are, why enterprises are investing heavily, and what it actually takes to make agent systems reliable and safe at scale. We unpack what separates an AI...

Is AI quietly creating more work than it’s replacing, and are we measuring the job market the wrong way? In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with the CEO of Upwork, Hayden Brown, about what the platform is seeing across the global freelance economy, and why the “AI is killing jobs” narrative can miss what’s happening at the edges of the market. We also dig into how to adopt AI inside an organiz...

What does “human-first AI” actually look like when you have to make decisions under pressure, hit numbers, and keep trust intact? In AI-Curious, we talk with Kate O’Neill — “the Tech Humanist” and author of What Matters Next — about how leaders can adopt AI in ways that strengthen human outcomes instead of quietly eroding culture, morale, and customer experience. We dig into why so many AI initiat...

What happens when the world’s most-used creative tools get smarter — and creators worry they’re losing the wheel? In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Eric Snowden, Senior Vice President of Design at Adobe, about how Adobe is weaving AI into Photoshop, Lightroom, Acrobat, and beyond — while trying to keep the tools respectful of craft, muscle memory, and the human spark. We dig into the big...

What happens when AI can “read the whole internet” but the internet stops volunteering its best work? In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Tony Stubblebine, CEO of Medium, about what he calls AI’s “broken social contract” with the web, and why the next era may be less about a “dead internet” and more about a dead public internet. We unpack the incentives that made the open web thrive, how A...