Working Smarter

When AI is at its best, the conversations can feel uncanny—almost magical in their accuracy, relevance, and speed. For that you can thank the AI agents that work together behind the scenes to search, reason, and sift through all your content to get you what you need to do your job. We talk with Jongmin Baek and Marta Mendez, two Dropbox machine learning engineers, about building conversational AI...

How do you build AI that actually understands you and the work you do? It all starts with having the right context.  We talk with Dropbox staff product manager Noorain Noorani and principal engineer Sean-Michael Lewis about the art of context engineering and how Dropbox connects to all the tools your team needs for work—so you get AI that works wherever you do.  ~ ~ ~  Working Smarter is brought t...

Modern work can be frustrating and chaotic—if you don’t have the right tools. From context engineering to multimodal search, go behind the scenes and hear how Dropbox engineers are building AI that actually understands you, so you can focus on the work that matters most. If you’re new to Working Smarter, we’ve travelled from the F1 track to the bottom of a lake, and heard real stories from chefs,...

The world record for fastest pit stop—a mere 1.8 seconds—was set by the McLaren F1 Team at the Qatar Grand Prix in 2023. It’s an incredible feat of speed and choreography; a pit stop that fast can’t happen without a team of people operating at peak human performance. But as Dan Keyworth explains, AI plays a crucial role, too. As the Director of Business Technology at McLaren Racing, Dan is respons...

Iain Thomas is a poet, author, and the Chief Innovation Officer at Sounds Fun—an advertising and creative agency that he co-founded with the belief that human creativity could be enhanced, rather than diminished, with the help of AI. It’s a realization that actually began to dawn on Iain a few years prior, after his mother died. He wasn’t sure how to explain death to his children, so he turned to...

Bespoken Spirits isn’t your typical whiskey distillery. Yes, they’re based in the American bourbon heartland of Lexington, Kentucky, and yes, they often make private label whiskeys for clients. But everything from how Bespoken Spirits distills their whiskey to how they market it is done with the help of AI. Jordan Spitzer, their head of flavor, can finish a whiskey in days instead of years—while p...

Amanda Cupido doesn’t speak Spanish or French. But using AI, she and her team helped a global nonprofit make their internal podcast more accessible to as many employees as possible. Amanda is an audio producer and the founder of a production company called Lead Podcasting. One of her clients is a global nonprofit with over 35,000 employees—and not all of them speak English. So she made them a pitc...

Very few people get paid to visit shipwrecks—but for Stephanie Gandulla, it’s all part of the job. Stephanie is a scuba diver, maritime archeologist, and resource protection coordinator for the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The agency safeguards Lake Huron’s historic shipwrecks, many of which have yet to be discovered. That’s where Katie Skinner comes in. She’s an assistant professor at t...

Ian Ramirez has spent his career finding innovative ways to make mouth-watering meals for clients—and one of his latest ingredients is artificial intelligence. As a chef, culinary consultant, and co-founder of Mad Honey Culinary Studio and Goods, he’s the guy that brands hire to get their product on restaurant menus, and make it look and taste good—whether it’s a sauce, syrup, spread, or spice. Ia...

Working Smarter is back for season two! Starting September 3, we’re going beyond the hype and headlines to bring you stories about real people using AI to do more of what they love about their jobs. From the F1 track to the kitchen—and even the bottom of a lake—learn how new tools are helping creatives, makers, visionaries, and their teams think big, move faster, and focus on the work that matters...

On our final episode this season of Working Smarter we talk to Sophia Wang, an assistant professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University.  Wang leads the school’s ophthalmic informatics and artificial intelligence group, which uses the latest machine learning techniques to analyze electronic health records. In practice, that means looking at disparate sources of data—from doctors’ notes and eye...

For our seventh episode of Working Smarter we’re talking to Drew Houston, the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox.  If you’ve been online long enough, it’s likely Dropbox was your introduction to the cloud. The goal is still more or less the same—give you one organized place for all your stuff—but it’s no longer just about storing and syncing files. A hundred files on your desktop is now a hundred tabs...

For our sixth episode of Working Smarter we’re talking to Pascal Weinberger, the co-founder and CEO of Bardeen, an AI-powered automation platform.  Weinberger wants to help people effortlessly automate repetitive tasks in the apps they already use for work—no code required. His hope is that by removing some of the friction that makes it hard for people to do their jobs, they can use the time they...

For our fifth episode of Working Smarter we’re talking to sports scientist Natalie Kupperman. She’s an assistant professor of data science at the University of Virginia where she studies the use of biometrics, wearables, and AI-powered tools for athlete monitoring in sport. Whether it’s a machine learning algorithm trained on video footage from practice, a force plate sensor in the weight room flo...

For our fourth episode of Working Smarter we’re talking to Babak Hodjat, the chief technology officer for AI research at Cognizant. If you’ve ever used Apple’s smart assistant Siri, then you’re almost certainly familiar with his work. Hodjat has been doing AI research for nearly four decades, and if there’s one thread that runs through his career, it’s how to make working with digital agents feel...

For our third episode of Working Smarter we’re talking to May Habib, the co-founder and CEO of Writer, a generative AI platform for businesses. Writer helps streamline the writing parts of people’s workflows, so they can get to the “thinking part” of their jobs more quickly. For Habib, AI isn’t just about automating mundane or repetitive tasks, but a way to amplify the talent and intelligence of a...

For our second episode of Working Smarter, we’re talking to University of Toronto law professor Abdi Aidid about AI, the law, and the “possibility of an intelligent division of labor between human and machine.” Aidid is interested in how AI can help legal professionals be better at their jobs and improve the delivery of legal services. He’s also the former vice president of legal research for Blue...

For our first episode of Working Smarter we’re talking to Kate Darling, a research scientist at MIT’s Media Lab and author of The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots .  Darling has spent more than a decade studying human-robot interaction through a social, legal, and ethical lens. She’s interested in how people relate to robots and digital constructs, soci...

Welcome to Working Smarter! In this new podcast from Dropbox, learn how people are already using AI at work to collaborate, find focus, and get stuff done—not at some point in the future, but today. Hear founders, researchers, and engineers talk about the problems they’re solving with the help of new and emerging AI tools, and how AI can help you spend more time on the work that matters most. Our...

On our final episode of Remotely Curious, we’ll have a fun conversation with Teresa and Travis McElroy, humorists and hosts of the podcast Shmanners, about how to treat others with respect, come across the way you want to, and avoid embarrassing gaffes.

How can we stay focused in a world full of distractions? In this episode of Remotely Curious, we talk to professor and author Dr. Gloria Mark about the science of attention, the pitfalls of multitasking, and how to stay focused in a distracting digital world.

In this episode of Remotely Curious, we talk to psychology professor and researcher Essi Viding about how to support well-being in a remote work environment. She shares wise and evidence-based ways to care for ourselves, support others, and build resilience.

On today’s episode of Remotely Curious, we talk to professor and behavioral scientist Katy Milkman about why fresh starts are so exciting, ways to use transitional moments as opportunities to experiment, and how to embrace and enjoy change—even when we don’t ask for it. No matter our age or experience, we all feel like the new kid sometimes.

We talk to musician, composer, podcaster, and creative powerhouse Hrishikesh Hirway on how to trust our instincts, the fine line between garbage and good ideas, the magic of creative partnership, and the ways remote work can actually help us stay inspired.

On today’s episode of Remotely Curious, we’ll have some fun talking with fashion historian and professor Deirdre Clemente about how big cultural moments permanently shift our wardrobes, the role of written and unwritten dress codes, and where workwear goes from here.