#363 Build Your Personal Brand at Work | Dorie Clark, Executive Education Faculty at Columbia Business School

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1. 

   13 Jul 2026 · 51 min

   #368 AI Agents Are Now Your Database's Main User | Reynold Xin, Co-Founder at Databricks

   For forty years, the rule held that transactional and analytical databases had to be separate systems, connected by fragile pipelines that move data from one to the other. That assumption is now being questioned. As AI agents start generating the majority of database activity, the old architecture is being redesigned around speed, scale, and a single copy of governed data. For anyone who works with data day to day, this raises practical questions. Do you still need separate systems for live and historical data? What happens to the pipelines you maintain? And how does your stack change when…

2. 

   6 Jul 2026 · 52 min

   #367 Don't Build on Jell-O: How to Make Agentic AI Reliable with Dan Klein, CTO at Scaled Cognition

   Across the AI industry, capability has exploded while trustworthiness has lagged badly behind. The same technology that writes fluent prose can invent a refund policy that was never real, and most of those errors are subtle enough that no one notices. As more teams hand high-stakes work to AI — in banking, healthcare, customer service — the cost of confident mistakes adds up fast. So how common are hallucinations, really? Can chaining models together or adding humans to the loop fix it? And is reliability something you can design into a system from the start? Dan Klein is the CTO and…

3. 

   29 Jun 2026 · 49 min

   #366 Can AI Agents Outperform a Data Scientist? | James Zou, Professor at Stanford University

   AI agents are no longer limited to automating routine tasks like customer support or report generation. Research labs and pharmaceutical companies are beginning to deploy teams of specialist AI agents capable of designing experiments, analyzing data, and proposing new hypotheses — in some cases producing results that outperform human experts. For data scientists and researchers, this raises urgent questions: Where do AI agents excel in scientific workflows today, and where do they fall short? How do you build an agent that can genuinely innovate rather than just replicate what's already been…

4. 

   22 Jun 2026 · 53 min

   #365 Your 90 Day Blueprint for AI Success with Charlene Li, Author of Winning with AI

   Most organizations know AI matters, but few have turned that conviction into a written plan. Ambition and hope are everywhere; a clear roadmap tied to business strategy is rare. For teams on the ground, this gap shows up as scattered initiatives, tools nobody fully uses, and a lot of activity that never adds up to real value. So where do you actually start? How do you move from a long list of use cases to a focused plan you can execute? And who in the organization should own the job of turning AI into business results? Charlene Li is a New York Times bestselling author and strategic advisor…

5. 

   15 Jun 2026 · 44 min

   #364 How to Enable Agentic Commerce with Nell Thomas, VP of Data at Shopify

   AI agents are starting to handle parts of the shopping journey that used to require human judgment — discovery, comparison, checkout. But behind every agent recommendation is a massive, invisible layer of data infrastructure. Product catalogs need to be structured, inventory synced in real time, pricing accurate, and quality signals clear. For data engineers and teams building at companies like Shopify, this shift means rethinking how data flows through systems and what "good enough" quality actually means. How do you ensure data is ready for AI? And how is this reshaping what data teams…

6. 

   1 Jun 2026 · 48 min

   #362 How to Have a Machine Learning Career in 2026 | Marina Wyss, Senior Applied Scientist at Twitch

   The role of the machine learning engineer is being rewritten in real time. AI coding assistants are absorbing parts of the day-to-day, planning and evaluation are eating up more of the week, and the lines between machine learning engineer, AI engineer, and data scientist are blurrier than ever. For anyone working in data and AI — or trying to break in — this shift changes what skills are worth investing in, what employers actually screen for, and how interviews are run. What's still worth learning? What does a competitive portfolio look like? And how do you stand out when a thousand…

7. 

   25 May 2026 · 49 min

   #361 If You Want AI to Work, Fix This Boring Thing First with Veronika Durgin, VP of Data at Saks

   Every conversation about AI in data eventually arrives at the same question: which roles survive, and which ones get automated away? Generative AI can already draft SQL, build dashboards, and run exploratory analysis — but it still can't sit with a business stakeholder and untangle what "customer" actually means across five teams. For data professionals, that shifts the day-to-day from production work toward translation, modeling, and judgment. So which skills are worth doubling down on? Which roles are becoming central, and which are quietly disappearing? And what should anyone hiring — or…

8. 

   18 May 2026 · 57 min

   #360 What's Your Biggest AI Ethical Nightmare? | Reid Blackman, CEO at Virtue Consultants

   Most AI ethics conversations sound the same: be fair, be transparent, be accountable. The values are right, but in practice they don't get teams out of bed in the morning. Executives nod along, employees take the compliance training, and meanwhile real risks like hallucinations, cascading failures, and autonomous agents acting at scale slip through. So what shifts when teams stop chasing an ethical ideal and start naming the specific disasters they want to avoid? Who needs to be in the room to spot them? And what kind of training actually changes how people use AI day to day? Reid Blackman…

9. 

   12 May 2026 · 44 min

   #359 My Best Friend is AI with Valerie Tiberius, Professor of Philosophy at University of Minnesota

   Valerie Tiberius is the Paul W. Frenzel Chair in Liberal Arts and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. She is an expert in ethics, moral psychology, and well-being, and the author of five books including What Do You Want Out of Life? and the forthcoming Artificially Yours: Real Friendship in a World of Chatbots (Princeton University Press, May 2026). She previously served as President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association. In the episode, Richie and Valerie explore the purpose of friendship and whether AI can replicate it, the benefits and risks…

10. 

    4 May 2026 · 58 min

    #358 How AI Agents Will Work While You Sleep | Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Professor at Carnegie Mellon

    Almost every AI agent demo lands in roughly the same place: it works most of the time, looks remarkable, and then fails in a way no one anticipated. Self-driving cars hit this wall a decade ago, and agents are running into it now. For data and AI teams, the question is no longer whether agents can complete a task — it's whether they can complete it reliably enough to remove the human reviewer. Which categories of work tolerate a 90% success rate? Which absolutely don't? And where should the next layer of guardrails sit? Ruslan Salakhutdinov is a UPMC Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie…