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Knowledge Distillation Podcast

Technology EN ↓ 17 episodes

Knowledge Distillation: The Rise of the AI Analyst Welcome to Knowledge Distillation – a series exploring how AI Analysts are transforming the future of data work. We look at practitioners becoming AI Analysts, founders building AI Analyst tools, VCs backing the AI Analyst wave, and market analysts mapping the trend. Each episode uncovers what it means to be an AI Analyst today – the workflows being reinvented, the skills analysts need now, and the promises AI is keeping or breaking. From prompt engineering to context management, we dive into the real conversations shaping this role. Let’s dis...

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Episodes

17# Kelly Wortham (Forward Digital, Test & Learn Community, Experimentation Island) on Why Agentic Commerce Breaks Experimentation, Measuring What Visitors No Longer Do, and Optimizing for Machines 19.05.2026 50:34

In this episode of Knowledge Distillation, Katrin Ribant speaks with Kelly Wortham – founder of Forward Digital and the Test & Learn Community, a network of several thousand experimentation practitioners, and curator of the Experimentation Island conference. Kelly came into the industry from academia and social sciences, where running experiments meant clipboards in shopping malls and t-...

16# Gal Rapoport (Kahoona, Amazon, AWS Inferentia) on Digital Body Language, Why Agentic Commerce Needs a New Web, and How to Derive Intent from Anonymous Traffic 27.04.2026 51:20

In this episode of Knowledge Distillation, Katrin Ribant speaks with Gal Rapoport – co-founder and CEO of Kahoona, a company building what he describes as the context and memory layer the web never had. Gal’s background in AI goes back well before the current hype cycle: he helped build what became AWS Inferentia and AWS Trainium at Amazon, then joined the Alexa Shopping team as its fi...

15# John Lovett (Seer Interactive, Web Analytics Demystified, Digital Analytics Association, Forrester, Jupiter Research) on What Makes an Analyst an AI Analyst, Detecting Agentic Browsers in Your Traffic, and What 5,000 Olympic Prompts Reveal About How L 10.04.2026 1:01:08

John Lovett has seen every chapter of digital analytics from the inside. He started as a marketer curious about how messages reach people, moved through analyst roles at Jupiter Research and Forrester, co-founded Web Analytics Demystified with Eric Peterson, served as president of the Digital Analytics Association during the pivotal renaming from “web” to “digital” analytic...

14# Simo Ahava (Co-founder: Simmer, Partner: 8-bit-sheep, Co-host: Standard Deviation Podcast) on Teaching Technical Marketers When AI Removes the Incentive to Learn, Why Critical Thinking Is the Skill AI Can’t Replace, and What Agentic Commerce Means for 25.03.2026 1:05:26

In this episode of Knowledge Distillation, Katrin Ribant speaks with Simo Ahava – quite simply the person the entire digital analytics and technical marketing community turns to when they need to understand how things actually work. Simo has been writing about web analytics, tag management, and the Google marketing stack since 2010, and his blog at simoahava.com has become the definitive tec...

13# Scott Brinker (Creator of the MarTech Landscape and Chief MarTech, HubSpot, Ion Interactive) on the SaaS Apocalypse, Why Software Isn’t Dead but Its Moats Are Changing, Why Context Engineering Is the Real Analyst Job Now, and Why Technology Changes Ex 16.03.2026 1:07:26

In this episode of Knowledge Distillation, Katrin Ribant speaks with Scott Brinker – the creator of the Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic, the map of the martech industry that started with 150 logos in 2011 and now tracks over 14,000. Scott spent eight years as VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, where he built out their partnership and integration ecosystem. He holds degrees from...

12# Eliot Durbin (General Partner, Boldstart Ventures – Clay, Snyk, Crew AI, Wiz, Kustomer, Keycard…) on the SaaS Apocalypse Hype, Betting on People Over Products, What Actually Compounds at Inception and the Skills That Survive Every Cycle 09.03.2026 53:01

In this episode of Knowledge Distillation, Katrin Ribant speaks with Eliot Durbin, General Partner at Boldstart Ventures – one of enterprise software’s most active inception-stage funds, with a portfolio that includes Clay, Snyk, Wiz, Crew AI, Kustomer, and Keycard, among others. Boldstart was founded in April 2010 with a $1M first fund and pioneered what Eliot calls “inception i...

11# June Dershewitz (Co-founder: InvestInData, Web Analytics Wednesdays, Former President: Digital Analytics Association) on 25 Years of Watching Analysts Reinvent Themselves, Why Data Leaders Are Betting Their Own Money on the AI Stack, and What Commun 02.03.2026 59:35

In this episode of Knowledge Distillation, Katrin Ribant talks with June Dershewitz – a pioneering analytics leader who has been at the center of the data community for over two decades. June started her career in web analytics in 1999, co-founded Web Analytics Wednesdays (the industry gathering that launched a thousand local analytics communities), served as President of the Board of the Di...

10# Tim Wilson (Sr. Analytics Director: Search Discovery, Head of Solutions: Facts & Feelings, Co-host: Analytics Power Hour, Co-author: Analytics the Right Way) on Thinking Before Measuring in the Agentic Commerce Era 20.02.2026 1:27:05

In this episode of Knowledge Distillation, Katrin Ribant talks with Tim Wilson – one of the most respected voices in digital analytics, widely known as the Quintessential Analyst (a title he’ll deny but absolutely deserves) and equally famous for climbing on a soapbox and delivering the kind of rants that somehow leave you smarter when he’s done. Tim has been working with digital...

9# Josh Silverbauer (From the Future, The Third Party Show) on Why Agentic Measurement Is a Construction Not a Migration, The Black Box of Instant Checkout Attribution and What Universal Analytics Migration Taught Us About What’s Coming 13.02.2026 54:25

Josh Silverbauer is Head of Analytics and CRO and Partner at From the Future, where he architects data layers and analytics implementations for brands navigating the messiest parts of measurement. He’s also the host of The Third Party Show – a comedy-musical talk show for digital marketing – and the creator of a rock opera about an alien named Cookie who loses his universe when U...

8# Sani Manić (NoHacks Podcast, Search Engine Journal, WordPress Core Contributor) on Why 35 Years of Web Infrastructure Isn’t Ready for AI Agents, Making Boring Sexy Again, and How GA4 Analysts Are Accidentally Prepared for What’s Coming 06.02.2026 52:44

“We have so much trash in terms of websites that AI is now supposed to ingest and give us something meaningful. It’s not going to work.” Sani Manić has spent 15+ years optimizing websites for speed, accessibility, and technical health. A contributor to Search Engine Journal and WordPress Core, he’s now turned that expertise toward a new challenge: making the web work for AI...

7# Yaniv Makover (Nokia, Anyword) and Avigad Oron (Microsoft, Vitalert, Ask-Y) on Building AI Before ChatGPT, Why Context Management Is Everything, The Enterprise Security Nightmare Nobody Talks About and Why Full-Stack Skills Beat Specialization in the A 19.01.2026 1:12:37

“My mom called me about this cool thing called an LLM. I was like, I’ve been working on this for 10 years.” Yaniv Makover, CEO of Anyword, joins Avigad Oron, Head of Technology for Ask-Y, Two AI engineers with combined 40 years of experience dissect their ChatGPT moment and what it means for the future of work. We discuss the architecture decisions behind enterprise AI-from RAG a...

6# Jim Gianoglio (Cauzal Analytics, MMM Hub, Measure Up) on The Dual Life of the AI Analyst, Building vs. Using AI Tools, and How to Future-Proof Your Career by Automating the Bottom of Your To-Do List 07.01.2026 49:52

Jim Gianoglio has worn every hat in marketing-from photographer to creative director to SEO specialist to data scientist. Now he runs Cauzal Analytics, a boutique consultancy focused on marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing, and co-hosts MMM Hub, a community and newsletter for measurement practitioners. He also co-hosts the Measure Up podcast and built the session board app that digiti...

5# Patrick Thompson (Atlassian, Iteratively, Amplitude, Clarify) on Why Clean Data Matters More in the AI Era, The Difference Between Using AI as a Tool vs a Crutch, and Building the Muscle of Data-Informed Decision Making 23.12.2025 41:51

What happens when AI meets bad data? Patrick Thompson has been building and using data tools for over 15 years. He started in growth at Atlassian, then co-founded Iteratively-a data quality platform acquired by Amplitude in 2021-where he became Director of Product. Patrick knows what it takes to build data layers, event pipelines, semantic layers, and quality monitoring systems. He knows what brea...

4# Michael Helbling (Search Discovery, Stacked Analytics, The Analytics Power Hour) on 20 Years in the Trenches, Why Trust Is the Real Bottleneck, and The Difference Between Data Retrieval and Actual Analysis 15.12.2025 1:26:35

A very special episode of Knowledge Distillation with Michael Helbling, co-founder and co-host of the Analytics Power Hour podcast and founder of Stacked Analytics. Michael has spent two decades building analytics programs as both consultant and practitioner, and he’s not one to sugarcoat anything. Together we break down why dropping an LLM on your data warehouse won’t magically produc...

3# Shomik Ghosh (Boldstart Ventures, Top Tier Capital Partners) on The VC POV on Hype Cycles, Why AI Is an Enablement Shift, and First Principles Thinking About the Skills AI Won’t Replace 02.12.2025 1:12:32

In this episode of Knowledge Distillation, Katrin Ribant speaks with Shomik Ghosh, a Silicon Valley VC who has lived through multiple tech hype cycles from both the investing and operating sides. Together they break down how hype forms, peaks, crashes, and ultimately reshapes roles – from DevOps to data science and now the rise of the AI analyst. Shomik explains why this generative AI wave i...

2# Mike Driscoll (Co-founder: Metamarkets, Rill, Data Collective VC) on Building for AI Analysts and the New Analytics Skillset 27.11.2025 53:30

In this episode of Knowledge Distillation, Katrin Ribant talks with Mike Driscoll – co-founder and CEO of Rill Data and co-inventor of Apache Druid. Mike reflects on the early days of big data, the birth of real-time analytics, and what it meant to be an analyst in 2010. Together, they explore how today’s challenges have shifted from scale to maintaining analytical context across complex wor...

1# Martin Kihn (Digitas, Gartner, Salesforce) on the AI Agent Revolution and Skills that Keep Analysts Relevant 21.11.2025 42:11

In this kickoff episode of Knowledge Distillation , host Katrin Ribant sits down with Martin Kihn, AI strategist at Salesforce and author of Agent Force . Together they explore how the role of the data analyst is shifting from manual data wrangling to orchestrating AI-powered workflows. Martin breaks down why understanding LLMs, prompt engineering, and AI-generated code is becoming essential for m...