Invisible Machines podcast by UX Magazine

Most enterprises are under board pressure to deploy AI agents. Sudhir Hasbe argues the harder shift is upstream: you cannot scale intelligence on missing context—and graph databases are how organizational data becomes knowledge agents can actually reason over. In this episode, Sudhir joins Josh Tyson and Robb Wilson to map the pathway to organizational AGI (bounded expertise, not omniscient AGI),...

Everyone wants to talk about agents and models. Jeff McMillan, starts where almost nobody else does: the foundation. In this episode, Jeff McMillan, founder of McMillanAI, former Head of Firmwide AI at Morgan Stanley, and advisor on enterprise AI, maps AI as a stack: high-quality accessible data → semantic layer (knowledge graphs, RAG) → control and governance → models → orchestration → applicatio...

Most organizations treat a bigger context window like a cheat code: dump every document in, skip the data work, ship. Jonathan Frankle, Chief AI Scientist at Databricks, says that's still wrong. This is Jonathan's return visit to Invisible Machines — a conversation recorded last summer, released ahead of Databricks Data + AI Summit. His first appearance (season 2) was the MosaicML-era craft conver...

Mastercard's central AI team receives roughly a thousand requests a year from across the organization. A few years ago, most of them were for chatbots. Today, most are for AI agents. Federico Cohen Freue, Executive Vice President of AI & Data Operations at Mastercard, has watched this shift in real time and knows exactly what it reveals about how enterprises are (and aren't) thinking about AI....

Most AI strategies are just a buying plan: literacy workshop → vendor shortlist → adoption scoreboard. Brian Evergreen (Founder of The Future Solving Company, author of Autonomous Transformation ) argues that this sequence explains a lot of failure, and it isn’t strategy at all. In this episode, Brian reframes the job: set the technology aside long enough to name the new value you want to exist, i...

In season one of Shell Game, Evan Ratliff sent a voice AI version of himself out into the world. In season two, he launched a startup staffed entirely by AI agents. What he ended up with was a live experiment in what these systems actually do and what they do to us. Each of the agents working for Hurumo has a name, a role, a personality, and an expanding, though usually unreliable, memory. Kyle th...

Most organizations treat crisis as a failure state. Marina Nitze sees it as a window. Nitze served as Chief Technology Officer of the Department of Veterans Affairs (the largest civilian agency in the country) during the healthcare.gov collapse. She helped rescue it, helped stand up the US Digital Service, and came out the other side with a question she and her colleagues have been pursuing ever s...

There's a book about artificial intelligence that doesn't start with Sam Altman. It doesn't start with Elon Musk. It starts in 1994, at Cambridge, where a teenager named Demis Hassabis is reading Gödel, Escher, Bach and concluding, before most of his professors would have agreed, that first-order logic can't be the full answer to building intelligence. Sebastian Mallaby spent years inside that sto...

The IRS has roughly 60,000 fax machines, and nobody can get rid of them. Not because there’s a law that says you have to use them (there almost certainly isn’t), but because likely decades ago a memo got written, somebody interpreted fax machines as the most secure transmission method, and that memo calcified into what Jennifer Pahlka calls "folk law," a perceived rule that nobody can locate, nobo...

Most organizations are still implementing AI as point solutions, dropping new technology into existing workflows to do the same work, just slightly better. The real value lies in system solutions that completely transform how organizations operate. Avi Goldfarb, economist and co-author of Prediction Machines, joins Robb and Josh to explain why AI adoption follows predictable economic principles an...

Joshua Gans, economist and co-author of Prediction Machines (and holder of the Skoll Chair in Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto) joins Robb and Josh to reframe how enterprise leaders should think about AI. Rather than chasing the hype around artificial intelligence, Gans argues we should understand AI as an advance in computational...

Before enterprises can deploy AI agents that actually work, they need something most organizations don't have: a single, authoritative source of truth. Joe DosSantos, Workday’s VP of Enterprise Data and Analytics, joins Robb and Josh for a wide-ranging conversation about canonical knowledge, the semantic layer, and why data governance, a concept from the 1990s, has suddenly become essential for AI...

Ben Goertzel, the researcher who helped popularize the terms "AGI" and “singularity”, as one of the most influential modern champions and systematizers of AGI, returns to Invisible Machines to discuss the decentralization of AI and what's actually missing from today's most advanced systems with Robb Wilson and Josh Tyson. As enterprises rush to deploy AI agents and LLMs reshape workflows, a critic...

We’re in a moment when organizations are approaching agentic AI backwards, chasing flashy use cases instead of building the scaffolding that makes AI agents actually work at scale. Erika Flowers, who led NASA’s AI Readiness Initiative and has advised Meta, Google, Netflix, and Intuit, joins Robb and Josh for a frank and funny conversation about what's broken in enterprise AI adoption. She dismantl...

As 2025 draws to a close, Robb and Josh look back on some of the conversations they had this year both on the podcast and advising major enterprises and government leaders to offer their predictions for agentic AI in 2026. With major disruptive forces like outbound AI in the hands of consumers and agent runtime environments allowing organizations to create scalable infrastructure for AI agents, ne...

How did a Dutch company most people haven’t heard of come to hold the fate of AI? Marc Hijink, author of Focus — The ASML Way joins Josh and Robb to explore the insatiably precise process of producing the chips that power GPUs, and with them the AI taking shape all around us. Marc is a financial reporter and technology columnist for the Dutch daily newspaper NRC, and Focus is the result of decades...

Omar Santos is a Distinguished Engineer directing AI Security at Cisco . He’s here for a frank conversation about the realities of security in the agentic era. As more software is created on-the-fly by AI agents at the request of humans, security has to become an ever-present layer. Security will be built into complete agent runtime environments and will require constant human oversight and interv...

As the CEO and Co-founder of Apollo GraphQL, Matt DeBergalis has a lot to say about the ways that organizations can confront their inherent complexity and build reliable systems for AI to flourish. He joins Robb and Josh to talk about how GraphQL has made it easier for developers to build meaningful, AI-powered solutions. As an open-source language for APIs, GraphQL makes data fetching more precis...

Josh and Robb get together to share a short but deep dive into agent runtime environments. Agent runtimes are the missing piece in the many AI projects out in the world that never reach production. Robb explains how runtimes allow businesses to orchestrate AI agents so they can collaborate around business objectives and drive real ROI. Runtimes also give agents access to canonical “source-of-truth...

Brian Solis , is a digital anthropologist and futurist who serves as the Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow and is the former Head of Global Innovation at Salesforce. Brian is a bestselling author of Lifescale , The End of Business as We Know It , and Mindshift , which helps leaders learn how to see emerging trends, harness disruptive forces, and use them to fuel growth.  Brian joins Rob...

As Global Head of AI at PayPal, Prakhar Mehrotra is looking deeply at the ways agentic AI is affecting commerce — particularly timely given PayPal and Google’s recent announcement of a multiyear strategic partnership to advance various commerce solutions. He joins Josh and Robb for a layered conversation that speculates on the shape of future marketplaces, where machines are bidding and setting pr...

Cassie Kozyrkov returns for a deep dive into the decision science behind a truly AI-first approach to technology adoption. Cassie was Google’s first Chief Decision Scientist and currently advises world leaders and executives on how to optimize their most critical decisions. In this episode she explains why AI is now our memory prosthesis and offers sage guidance on how individuals and organization...

Bryan Catanzaro was instrumental in the adoption of GPUs for powering machine learning, which has effectively turned NVIDIA from a graphics processing hardware company into a $4T AI powerhouse. Bryan joins Robb and Josh to talk about his journey in AI and how the unique psychology and power structures at NVIDIA enables the company to continually meet the moment in surprising ways. They also discus...

In her instant New York Times bestseller, Empire of AI , journalist Karen Hao distills more than a decade of in-depth research into a detailed account of OpenAI’s rise to power and why leadership at the company abandoned their promise to keep their research open.  Karen joins Robb and Josh for a deep dive into murkiness surrounding what artificial general intelligence (AGI) actually represent...

Award-winning journalist Stephen Witt sits down with Josh and Robb to share insights from his latest book, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip . There’s a deep connection between Nvidia’s GPU chips and the neural networks powering the LLMs at the center of agentic AI. Witt’s book provides a captivating biography of Huang that details his radical appro...