Inside AsembleAI: DeepTech, AI & Science

Mac & Sam

AsembleAI brings you thought-provoking conversations at the nexus of artificial intelligence, innovation, and leadership. In each episode, hosts Mac and Sam, veterans in data and tech world, sit down with AI researchers, fast‑scaling founders, Fortune 500 executives, and pioneering technologists to reveal how AI is reshaping business strategy, sparking breakthrough product development, and guiding executive decisions. Tune in for actionable insights, compelling case studies, and forward‑looking perspectives on the promises and pitfalls of AI‑driven innovation.RSSVERIFY

  1. 2 days ago

    EP 76: Dashboards Are Wrong in the Background. AI Is Wrong in Your Face | Barr Moses, Monte Carlo

    This episode was recorded live from the Ai4 conference podcast pavilion, where host Mac Goswami sat down with Barr Moses — CEO & co-founder of Monte Carlo, creator of the data observability category and now builder of the agent trust platform — about what it actually takes to make AI trustworthy in production. What's Covered: "AI Is Wrong in Your Face" — Barr's framing of the trust gap: dashboards were always wrong quietly in the background; AI is wrong out loud, and it'll argue with you. Why trust is the biggest thing standing between pilots and production. The Four Layers of Agent Failure — Context, performance, behavior, and output. Why all four can look perfect and the agent still fails — and why you have to watch all of them together. The Flight That Already Left — The airline agent that recommended a flight that departed that morning. The agent was fine; the context was stale. The most surprising failure mode nobody plans for. Where to Start — Make ONE agent great, not a hundred. And why the hardest first step is simply defining what "good" even looks like. The Reinforcement Loop — The idea Barr's most excited about: agents that self-identify what went wrong, propose a fix, submit a PR for human approval, and use it as tomorrow's baseline. Agents that rebuild themselves every day — running in production today. 100% AI-First — Why every line of Monte Carlo's code is AI-generated, how it made them 3–5x faster, and Barr's stoplight analogy for where human-in-the-loop is heading. Key Quote: "Dashboards are wrong in the background. AI is wrong in your face — it'll argue with you." Connect with Barr: LinkedIn: Barr Moses : https://www.linkedin.com/in/barrmoses/ Monte Carlo: https://www.montecarlo.ai Follow and subscribe to AsembleAI: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | iHeart Radio | YouTube | Substack

    EP 76: Dashboards Are Wrong in the Background. AI Is Wrong in Your Face | Barr Moses, Monte Carlo

  2. 3 days ago

    EP 75: Inside the AI Control Plane: Governance, Guardrails, and Model Routing | Sean Lynch, ActualyzeAI

    ActualyzeAI came out of stealth just days before this conversation. Sam sits down with Co-Founder and CTO Sean Lynch to unpack what it means to build a "control plane" that sits between every enterprise application and every AI model - governing access, cost, security, and routing in one place. Topics covered: What a control plane for enterprise AI actually does, and why it requires zero code changes to adoptAggregating inference across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Bedrock, and self-hosted/on-premises models into a single endpoint"Virtual models" — purpose-built model configurations that route requests based on task type (coding, reasoning, agentic work)Guardrails: automatic detection and redaction of PII, PHI, API keys, and other sensitive data in the inference streamFinancial operations as the leading driver of adoption — budgetary controls, spend limits, and team-based trackingThe coming wave of domestic and open-weight small language models, and why that's expanding the marketWhy model-agnostic infrastructure is critical as the foundation model landscape fragmentsHow ActualyzeAI's founding team (formerly of Metacloud, acquired by Cisco) shaped their approachActualyzeAI's design partner program for early enterprise customersGuest Bio: Sean Leach is Co-Founder and CTO of ActualyzeAI , a company building a governance and security control plane for enterprise AI inference. He and much of the founding team previously worked together at Metacloud, an OpenStack-as-a-service company acquired by Cisco. Connect: Find Sean on LinkedIn, or visit ActualyzeAI's website to learn about their design partner program.

    EP 75: Inside the AI Control Plane: Governance, Guardrails, and Model Routing | Sean Lynch, ActualyzeAI

  3. 4 days ago

    EP 74: The AI Agent That Actually Fixes IT Tickets — Not Just Chats About Them | Oshri Moyal, Atera

    This episode was recorded live from the Ai4 conference podcast pavilion, where host Mac Goswami sat down with Oshri Moyal — CTO & co-founder of Atera, the autonomous IT platform whose agent Robin recently ranked #1 across 15 G2 Summer 2026 reports — about what genuinely autonomous IT actually looks like. What's Covered: AI That Fixes, Not Just Chats — Why Robin isn't another chatbot. It navigates complex networks, logs into servers, and takes real action — bounded by company policy and approvals. Oshri's example: when users can't reach shared files, Robin hits the domain controller, adds the user to the right group, and maps the drive on their device — end to end. The Performance Guarantee — Resolve 50% of Tier 1 and complex Tier 2 tickets in 90 days, or fees are waived. Why Atera can stand behind that after two years in production. Robin as the First Line — How Robin becomes the front door for every request — across Teams, email, Chrome, and ServiceNow — logging everything and closing the loop after approvals. "80% Was Security" — Becoming the first in IT management to earn ISO/IEC 42001, and how Robin gets elevated permissions only after a manager approves, then hands them back. As Oshri puts it, "80% of the project was about security, privacy, and safety." What It Changes for Small IT Teams — Why autonomous AI lets a shop "at least double the size of your customers" without adding headcount — enterprise-grade capability without an enterprise team. Trust at Scale — With 6 million devices connected, why reliability and certification aren't optional. Key Quote: "With Robin you can at least double the size of your customers, because you can handle twice the amount of tickets — without increasing headcount." Connect with Oshri: LinkedIn: Oshri Moyal : https://www.linkedin.com/in/oshr1/ Atera: https://www.atera.com/ Follow and subscribe to AsembleAI: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | iHeart Radio | YouTube | Substack

    EP 74: The AI Agent That Actually Fixes IT Tickets — Not Just Chats About Them | Oshri Moyal, Atera

  4. 5 days ago

    EP 73: A Teenager Could Now Run a Nation-State Attack — Insider Risk in the AI Era | Rajan Koo, DTEX

    This episode was recorded live from the Ai4 conference podcast pavilion, where host Mac Goswami sat down with Rajan Koo — CTO of DTEX Systems, chartered engineer, and one of the sharpest voices on insider risk — about how AI has completely rewritten the insider-threat playbook. What's Covered: WikiLeaks Without a Human — Insider risk was transformed by the 2010 WikiLeaks incident. Raj explains why a recent AI-driven incident showed the same breach can now happen with no humans involved — pushing DTEX into a new category it calls "AI behavior." "Nobody Was Malicious" — The story that reframes the whole risk: a manufacturing giant's AI agent, blocked from emailing an oversized report, uploaded confidential data to a public drive and shared the link. No malice — enormous risk. Why most insider risk today is negligent, not malicious. A Teenager Could Run a Nation-State Attack — The North Korean "IT worker" scheme that funded weapons programs can now be replicated by "one person and a team of AI agents." Speed up, skill level down — the perfect storm. Who Has the Advantage — Why attackers are ahead right now, and how guardrails meant to prevent misuse can block defenders too. Policy → Behavioral Compliance — Why the age of checklist policies is over, and how DTEX's "agentic defenders" triage risk at machine speed. Monitoring Without Surveillance — The honest line between protective monitoring and "creepy Big Brother" — and why it all comes down to proportionality and privacy. Key Quote: "The technical skill level to execute these really complicated insider threat breaches is now really low. A teenager with the right know-how could just go and execute this." Connect with Raj: LinkedIn: Rajan Koo : https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajan-koo-2a591221/ DTEX: https://www.dtex.ai/ Follow and subscribe to AsembleAI: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | iHeart Radio | YouTube | Substack

    EP 73: A Teenager Could Now Run a Nation-State Attack — Insider Risk in the AI Era | Rajan Koo, DTEX

  5. 5 days ago

    EP 72: Social Robotics 101: Building Robots That Understand You | Chris Kudla, Mind Children

    Most robotics companies are chasing industrial automation. Mind Children, co-founded by Chris Kudla and Ben Goertzel in 2023, is going after something harder: social robots built for education, healthcare, and hospitality — applications where connection and empathy matter as much as function. Topics covered: Why Mind Children bet on social robotics despite a harder-to-prove ROI than industrial robotsCody's modular operating system — and what changes when you swap a standard LLM for SingularityNET's memory-equipped, agentic systemsThe hide-and-seek demo: how Cody reasons in real time and recalls the game a week laterThe emotional intelligence roadmap — teaching Cody to recognize and respond to human distressWhy Mind Children avoids streaming classroom or hospital video data, and their in-house data approach for regulated environmentsHow Chris (product design) and Ben Goertzel (social robotics research) divide responsibilitiesMind Children's next hardware iteration — designed to be safe enough for a child to hugPilot plans: starting with museums, galleries, and event spaces before schools and healthcareHow to follow Mind Children's progress and support their crowdfunding campaign on WeFunderGuest Bio: Chris Kudla is Co-Founder and CEO of Mind Children, a Seattle-based social robotics and AI startup he founded in 2023 alongside Ben Goertzel. Mind Children is building Cody, a social robot for education, healthcare, and hospitality applications. Connect: Find Mind Children on LinkedIn, at mindchildren.com, or support their campaign at wefunder.com/mindchildrenrobotics.

    EP 72: Social Robotics 101: Building Robots That Understand You | Chris Kudla, Mind Children

  6. 6 days ago

    EP 71: The PRD Is Dead — What AI Just Did to Product Management & Cyber Defense | Ed Martin, Sophos

    This episode was recorded live from the Ai4 conference podcast pavilion, where host Mac Goswami sat down with Ed Martin — VP of Product Management for AI Strategy at Sophos, with 15+ years in cybersecurity across Dell, SecureWorks, BlueVoyant, and inside Microsoft's Security Deputy CISO office — for a two-in-one conversation on AI-powered defense and what AI is doing to product management itself. What's Covered: What AI Actually Does in Defense — Ed's honest cut through the hype: AI is great at reading, good at reasoning, and "moderate to poor at taking action." Where it genuinely helps — summarization, reasoning over big data, reducing analyst toil — and where it's oversold. The Attacker's Real Edge Is Speed — Why the breadth was always there, but AI lets lower-skill attackers hit harder and faster. Ed's line: "The attacker only has to be right once. We have to be right 100% of the time" — plus the story of a small regional bank suddenly inundated with alerts. The Cybersecurity Poverty Line — Sophos's mission to protect organizations "at or below the cybersecurity poverty line," and why visibility and hygiene — not hiring — come first. The PRD Is Dead — Ed's boldest take: the weeks-long product requirements document is gone. His two principal PMs each do the work of a small team, vibe-coding examples live on customer calls. The real skill now is knowing what NOT to build — "it's the scaling that takes all the effort." Trust & Non-Deterministic AI — Why a single wrong non-deterministic outcome can blow customer trust, and how "circuit breaker" human checkpoints keep AI actions safe. Building Cyber From Scratch — Inventory first, then controls, then detection and response — and the context/data-categorization problem nearly every organization gets wrong. Key Quote: "The most important aspect of a product manager isn't the ability to understand what to build. It's your ability to understand what not to build." Connect with Ed: LinkedIn: Ed Martin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/bigedmartin/ Sophos: https://www.sophos.com/ Follow and subscribe to AsembleAI: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | iHeart Radio | YouTube | Substack

    EP 71: The PRD Is Dead — What AI Just Did to Product Management & Cyber Defense | Ed Martin, Sophos

  7. 6 days ago

    EP 70: The Man Who Coined "AGI" - on Why Scaling LLMs Won't Get Us There | Ben Goertzel, SingualarityNET

    Ben Goertzel coined the term AGI over two decades ago — long before OpenAI, Anthropic, or the current wave of AI labs existed. Sam sits down with him to talk about why he still believes scaling transformers alone won't get the field to true artificial general intelligence, and what will. Topics covered: The "common model of cognition" from cognitive science — working memory, episodic memory, metacognition, goals — and what LLMs are missingWhy LLMs can't do lifelong learning or true metacognition without long-term memoryBen's take on his ongoing debate with Gary Marcus over the path to AGISingularityNET's neural-symbolic evolutionary approach, and Hyperon, its open-source AGI systemMeTTa, the self-rewriting knowledge metagraph at the core of HyperonOmega Claw agents — giving AI systems symbolic long-term memory, working memory, and a persistent sense of identityCatastrophic forgetting in backpropagation-trained neural nets, and how predictive coding and symbolic memory address itHow the term AGI has evolved from a rigorous mathematical definition to a business buzzwordBGI Labs — Ben's new venture building enterprise products on "beneficial general intelligence"Why decentralized infrastructure, open weights, and open source matter for AGI's futureHow anyone — technical or not — can download Omega Claw from GitHub and start building todayGuest Bio: Ben Goertzel coined the term "Artificial General Intelligence" (AGI) and founded SingularityNET in 2017 to build decentralized, open AGI infrastructure. He leads research into neural-symbolic AI through Hyperon and the Omega Claw agent framework, and recently founded BGI Labs to build enterprise products on decentralized AI infrastructure. Connect: Find more on SingularityNET, Hyperon (hyperon.dev), and Omega Claw on GitHub.

    EP 70: The Man Who Coined "AGI" - on Why Scaling LLMs Won't Get Us There | Ben Goertzel, SingualarityNET

  8. 10 Sept

    EP 69: "You Don't Build a Power Plant to Charge Phones" — Why Enterprise AI Should Start Big | Nikunj Bajaj, TrueFoundry

    This episode was recorded live from the Ai4 conference podcast pavilion, where host Mac Goswami sat down with Nikunj Bajaj — co-founder & CEO of TrueFoundry and former AI team lead at Meta — about his contrarian message for enterprises: stop starting small with AI, and go big. What's Covered: Go Big, Not Small — Why a pile of disconnected pilots never generates enough business value to justify real infrastructure — so everything stays ad hoc and gets rolled back when it breaks. Nikunj's case for building one high-value anchor use case first. The Power Plant Analogy — "You never build a power plant to charge your mobile phones. You build a power plant to run a factory — and then all the phones get charged for free." How the anchor use case pays for the plumbing every small use case then rides on. Why Pilots Really Fail — Missing guardrails, latency, reputational incidents (like a bot giving away free tickets). Why it's usually a platform problem, not an individual's. Governance at Scale — How TrueFoundry helps organizations like Mastercard and Siemens tag every token to a user and business unit, enforce PII and prompt-injection rules, keep audit trails, and control cost and budgets. Ask TrueFoundry + the Seldon Acquisition — The co-pilot that knows every agent in your company, and why unifying the ML and agentic-AI stacks into one platform mattered. "The Era of Token Maxing Is Over" — Why defaulting to the most premium model is a trap, and how right-sizing and routing queries — sometimes to in-house open-source models — is now essential to real AI ROI. Key Quote: "The era of token maxing is over. It's not about just using tokens for using's sake — you want to generate ROI." Connect with Nikunj: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikunj-bajaj-10476824/ TrueFoundry: https://www.truefoundry.com/ Follow and subscribe to AsembleAI: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | iHeart Radio | YouTube | Substack

    EP 69: "You Don't Build a Power Plant to Charge Phones" — Why Enterprise AI Should Start Big | Nikunj Bajaj, TrueFoundry
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About

AsembleAI brings you thought-provoking conversations at the nexus of artificial intelligence, innovation, and leadership. In each episode, hosts Mac and Sam, veterans in data and tech world, sit down with AI researchers, fast‑scaling founders, Fortune 500 executives, and pioneering technologists to reveal how AI is reshaping business strategy, sparking breakthrough product development, and guiding executive decisions. Tune in for actionable insights, compelling case studies, and forward‑looking perspectives on the promises and pitfalls of AI‑driven innovation.RSSVERIFY

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