Artificial Insights: Conversations About AI

Students are already finding their own ways to use AI. Can schools do a better job of showing them how to use it well? In part 1 of our student special , Aasha argued that schools need more AI literacy and less fear. In part 2 , Keya described the tension students feel when AI is helpful and suspicion is high. In part 3 , Maizah named the deeper dilemma of living with a tool that is everywhere. In...

What happens when AI is everywhere in a student’s life, but school mostly talks about it as something to avoid? In part 1 of our student special, Aasha called for AI literacy instead of fear . In part 2, Keya described what it feels like when trust breaks down around student work . In part 3 of 4, Maizah widens the lens again: she talks about what it's like to grow up with AI as a constant presenc...

Students are already building AI into how they learn—are schools can help them use it well? In part 1 of our student special on AI and education, Aasha raised the question of what schools are actually preparing students for . In part 2 of 4 of our student special on AI and education, Daniel speaks with Keya, a Grade 12 student balancing classes, sports, work, and plans for what comes after graduat...

What happens when schools focus so hard on detecting AI that students start reshaping their own writing just to avoid suspicion? In part 1 of 4 of our student special on AI and education, Daniel speaks with Aasha, a Grade 12 student from Waterloo, founder of Youth Tech Labs, and a young leader already helping other students think more clearly about AI, privacy, and what meaningful learning should...

Schools are trying to figure out AI in real time, but students are already living with the results. In this special repost episode, Daniel brings back a short conversation with Pat Belliveau to open our student series on AI and education. Pat raises a hard question: if AI is already part of the world students are growing up into, what does it mean for schools to treat it mainly as a threat? There...

What would you do if you had to start an AI consultancy from scratch today? In this bonus clip, Daniel asks Pat Belliveau of Gambit Co exactly that. And Pat does what he does so well: he shares practical advice without posturing: Start with someone in your network. Solve one real problem. Do it well enough to earn a case study. Then, build from there. Thanks, Pat, for being refreshingly candid, qu...

AI feels easy right up until a team tries to ship it. Patrick Belliveau of Gambit Co joins Daniel to talk about the messy middle between a promising prototype and something a business can actually trust. In this candid conversation, Daniel and Pat reflect on what changed between year one and year two of building an applied AI company. Pat explains why Gambit moved from fixed-price projects to reta...

AI can automate matching and readiness checks in lending. It cannot automate trust. In this bonus clip, Daniel asks Sharmeen Aqeel how Lyyvora will scale as borrower volume grows. Sharmeen’s answer is simple: at an early-stage fintech, one broken interaction can damage credibility. Even if AI produces the "right" output, a human still needs to verify, interpret context, and provide real connection...

Clinics get stuck in lending for a frustratingly simple reason: the process is hard to navigate. The information exists, lenders are willing, and qualified borrowers do get funded. But the path is not accessible, especially when you're running a clinic and don't have time to decode criteria buried across pages, videos, and jargon. Sharmeen Aqeel is the founder and CEO of Lyyvora , and she treated...

AI licensing can sound like a moral argument until you look at the product constraints. If the best material is behind paywalls and contracts, “just scrape it” stops working. In this bonus clip, Daniel pressures the obvious skeptical question: if big AI companies can afford lawsuits, why bother building fair, legal access at all? Julie Trelstad’s answer is practical. She expects the next wave of A...

AI has been trained on the world’s writing. Now, we have to figure out how creators prove ownership, set permissions, and get paid when their work is used. Julie Trelstad has spent 30 years inside publishing’s biggest technology shifts, from desktop publishing to eBooks to print-on-demand to self-publishing. In this episode, she explains why AI is forcing publishing into a new kind of rights era,...

When AI threatens your job, the real risk is clinging to the parts of work that are already predictable. In this bonus short, Daniel Manary and Dave Boyce (Winning by Design, author of Freemium ) talk about the fear many people feel right now: AI is coming for my job. Dave argues that AI doesn't replace you as a human unless you keep trying to do work AI should handle. The path forward is to autom...

"Run experiments" is easy advice. Measuring them inside a real customer journey is the hard part. Dave Boyce has lived through multiple SaaS eras, from $1.2M ACV enterprise deals to $1,200 self-serve motions. Now, as Product lead and Executive Chair at Winning by Design, he works with growth-stage companies to rebuild their revenue systems for an AI-shaped market. In this conversation, Daniel and...

An AI-written encyclopedia can sound coherent and still be wrong and that gap matters more than it first appears. In this bonus short, Daniel Manary and William Beutler of Beutler Ink and The Notability Company look at the first real challenger to Wikipedia's long-standing dominance. They discuss Grokipedia, Elon Musk's AI-generated encyclopedia: why its entries can feel clearer and more complete...

Wikipedia has become one of the quiet foundations of modern AI. In this episode, Daniel explores why large language models rely so heavily on Wikipedia, both as training data and as a real-time citation source. Its concise structure, dense linking, and topic-first writing make it ideal for machines, even as fewer humans read it directly. Daniel is joined by Bill Beutler, founder of Beutler Ink, wh...

This season, we’re not talking about models, benchmarks, or demos. We’re talking about how AI is reshaping how humans work, coordinate, and judge as tools get better at remembering, acting, and contextualizing. With context increasingly automated, wisdom and judgment matter more, not less. We’ll hear from builders, operators, researchers, and leaders wrestling with how experience, trust, value, an...

Artificial Insights is a podcast about how AI is changing economics and work, and what happens once the technology moves beyond demos and into real organizations. The podcast features conversations with founders, operators, and thinkers who are close to the work. People building AI products. People deploying them inside teams. And people who have already learned where AI helps and where it quietly...

This special Christmas and New Year bonus episode is a pause. We're looking back at 2025 and thinking about what surfaced across a year of conversations with builders, executives, philosophers, and operators working close to AI. Across industries and roles, the same shift kept appearing. Work isn't disappearing per se... but it is changing. Flipping. Humans are moving upstream. Away from direct ex...

Across healthcare, nonprofits, construction, and creative tools, the same shift kept appearing. AI is moving work from impossible to practical. This special wrap up episode closes out Season 4 by revisiting a handful of moments that captured that shift most clearly. Rather than focusing on replacement or marginal efficiency gains, AI is removing constraints around memory, time, coordination, and e...

Regulation and innovation rarely move at the same speed. In this bonus clip, Daniel Manary and David Proulx talk about who should shape the future of AI. David argues that the people building modern systems understand both the risks and the capabilities far better than policymakers who lack technical grounding. He contrasts Europe’s tendency to regulate early with the United States’ focus on innov...

One of the things David Proulx is most proud of is building an AI agent that has handled more than 100,000 mental health conversations without a single hallucination. David is the Chief AI Officer at HoloMD, where an AI agent becomes a third party in the Therapeutic Alliance. The patient wants to feel better. The psychiatrist guides their care. HoloMD adds a daily point of contact that checks in,...

Most AI conversations describe personalization as if it were new. In this bonus clip, Alex Maier explains why the real shift is not personalization itself, but how agentic systems read context and respond to a person's actual state the moment they ask a question. Alex describes how onWater uses prompts, sentiment, language patterns, and user actions to understand experience level and intent. He co...

Most companies stop at “ask the bot a question”. onWater wants to go further, building an app that can answer “Should I go today?” and then quietly handle everything that comes after yes. In this episode of Artificial Insights, Daniel talks with Alex Maier, now President of onWater. His team has been working on a simple idea with complicated stakes: help people decide where to fish or paddle, unde...

AI is currently in a transitional moment: a new tool being used to make old kinds of content. But, what if AI can do more than just help us create the same old things faster and better? In this bonus clip, Daniel Manary and Ahmad Iqbal step back from product and design to explore how AI is a new creative medium that could change how people make, share, and experience ideas. Drawing on the work of...

What if "designing well" no longer requires years of training, and the real work becomes choosing the story to tell? In this episode of Artificial Insights, host Daniel Manary interviews Ahmad Iqbal, product lead and Head of MENAP at Canva, about what it really means to design for accessibility in the age of AI. Ahmad helped launch Canva’s first generative AI features and shares how the company's...