AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace, Business, Ethics, HR, and IT for AI Enthusiasts, Leaders

Dan Turchin
  • 4.9 (34)
  • Technology
  • Updated Weekly

🏆 Ranked #3, Best 30 HR Tech Podcasts in the US — Million Podcasts (2026). Host Dan Turchin, PeopleReign CEO, explores how AI is changing the workplace. He interviews thought leaders and technologists from industry and academia who share their experiences and insights about artificial intelligence and what it means to be human in the era of AI-driven automation. Learn more about PeopleReign, the system of intelligence for IT and HR employee service: http://www.peoplereign.io.

  1. 397: Transforming Skills into Visibility Through AI with Maryjo Charbonnier, Former CHRO & Executive Advisor at Kyndryl

    19h ago

    397: Transforming Skills into Visibility Through AI with Maryjo Charbonnier, Former CHRO & Executive Advisor at Kyndryl

    Send us Fan Mail Maryjo Charbonnier is the former CHRO and Executive Advisor at Kyndryl, the world's largest provider of IT infrastructure services , with more than 70,000 employees across roughly 60 countries. When Kyndryl was spun out of IBM in 2021 as one of the largest public company spin-offs in history, Maryjo helped build its culture and people strategy from the ground up, which is why she and others have called it the world's largest startup. She has spent nearly two decades as a public company CHRO on both sides of the Atlantic, including Wolters Kluwer (traded on the Dutch exchange) and Broadridge Financial Solutions, after a formative run at PepsiCo where she led change management for Frito-Lay. She was named CHRO of the Year in the Netherlands and earned her MBA at Southern Methodist University. In this episode, Maryjo draws on a career spent leading messy transformations and building a 70,000-person workforce to argue that as AI automates tasks and chunks of jobs, the work that defines a career is moving from what you know to how you judge, lead, and decide, and most organizations are not teaching for it yet. In this conversation, we discuss: Why Maryjo “seeks the heat” in messy transformations and what she learned leading HR through turnarounds, spin‑offs, and large‑scale change.How Kyndryl defined the “Kyndryl way” with six core behaviors and uses culture as an operating plan in the world’s largest startup.Why HR must focus on which skills are rare and most valuable, and how Kyndryl’s Make Yourself Discoverable campaign turned skills into a strategic asset.How AI-powered career profiles, skills-based redeployment, and role-specific AI curricula were intentionally designed to show Kyndryls that AI is an asset to their career, not a threat to it.Why Maryjo believes HR has three roles in AI, including reshaping commercial work and building an AI governance council that balances speed with risk.How leadership “ORE” (organizational design, risk management, empathy) and human skills like change management and people leadership will define careers in an AI‑enabled workplaceResources: Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Maryjo on LinkedInAI fun fact articleOn How Rory O'Driscoll Explains Success Modes for AI Companies and Three Essential Startup StrategiesEpisode with Keith Sonderling, then an EEOC Commissioner and now the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Labor

    37 min
  2. 396: Trond Undheim, Author of The Platinum Workforce, on Why Knowledge Is Becoming Superfluous and System Awareness Is the Skill That Lasts

    Jul 6

    396: Trond Undheim, Author of The Platinum Workforce, on Why Knowledge Is Becoming Superfluous and System Awareness Is the Skill That Lasts

    Send us Fan Mail Trond Undheim is a futurist, innovation expert, and research scholar at Stanford University whose work spans governments, startups, and leading academic institutions. His ideas have been featured in outlets including Forbes, The Boston Globe, Fast Company, Fortune, and MIT News, and he previously hosted the Futurized podcast. He holds a PhD in AI and cognition from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and is the author of eight books, including The Platinum Workforce, which explores how to train and hire for the twenty-first century’s industrial transitions.  In this episode, Trond draws on decades of interdisciplinary work on emerging technologies, systemic risk, and workforce transitions to argue that system awareness, not traditional knowledge, will determine who thrives in an AI-defined economy. In this conversation, we discuss: Why Trond says knowledge has become superfluous, and what that claim means for how we define expertise in an AI era.Why cutting junior hires to cash in on AI efficiencies bakes a failure mode into your organization.What “system awareness” looks like in practice, and how it changes the way leaders think about skills and careers.Why socio-technical thinking matters, and how treating humans and machines as mutually constitutive systems reshapes AI design and governance.Why humanity is unprepared to operate at gigascale, and what megaproject research suggests about the cost of that gap.How The Platinum Workforce maps twelve durable skill domains, from socio-technical capabilities to maker and maintenance skills, that will outlast multiple AI waves.Explore this conversation: 00:00 Intro and AI Fun Fact: Pew Research Americans More Concerned Than Excited About AI 04:22 Introducing Trond Undheim, Futurist and Author of The Platinum Workforce 05:09 Why the Workforce Is the Single Biggest Lever for Human Survival 09:08 System Awareness: The Only Knowledge That Matters in the AI Era 15:06 Socio-technical Systems: Co-Evolution of Humans and Technology 17:54 Human Agency Over Technology: Who Really Sets the Rules 23:24 The Human Skills AI Cannot Replace: Making, Maintaining and Place Maximizing 31:12 Workforce Preparation for the AI Era: Training Juniors and Experimentation 34:08 Macro Challenges: Giga-Scale Projects and Management at Scale 45:33 The Augmented Workforce: What AI Integration Must Look Like in 10 Years 54:39 Where to Connect with Trond Undheim and Learn More About The Platinum Workforce Resources: Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Trond on LinkedInAI fun fact articleOn How AI Will Transform Tax Filing: Insights from Daniel Marcous, Founder and CTO of April and Former CTO of Waze

    55 min
  3. 395: Lev Gonick, CIO at Arizona State University: Why Higher Education Must Disrupt Itself and the New Definition of AI Literacy

    Jun 29

    395: Lev Gonick, CIO at Arizona State University: Why Higher Education Must Disrupt Itself and the New Definition of AI Literacy

    Send us Fan Mail Lev Gonick is the CIO at Arizona State University, one of the largest and fastest-growing universities in the United States, with over 200,000 students across campuses in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Washington, and 35 partner institutions around the world. He won an ORBIE Award in 2023 as a top large Enterprise CIO, was named a Top 50 Educational Technology Influencer by EdScoop in 2022, and holds a PhD in International Political Economy from York University. Before joining ASU, he was one of the rare CIOs who came from the classroom, having spent the first decade of his career as a teacher and researcher before pioneering online learning in the 1990s, long before it became an industry.  In this episode, Lev draws on more than 40 years at the intersection of technology and education to make the case that AI is not the disruptor of higher education, it is the accelerant, and that the institutions treating it that way are already building what everyone else is still debating. In this conversation, we discuss: Why AI is not the disruptor of higher education, and what has actually been driving the disruption for decadesHow ASU went from survival mode during the 2009 financial crisis to building the largest online learning operation in the country, and why the same instinct is now driving its AI strategyWhat ASU's data from 200,000 students using AI daily actually reveals about which skills will endure and which ones will notHow the role of university faculty is fundamentally changing in the AI era, and why the hardest question has nothing to do with cheatingWhat the "Agentic self" means for creatives, and how a unique course taught by Will.i.am is helping students protect and amplify their creative futures.How the traditional responsibilities of the Chief Information Officer are expanding beyond basic operations to actively shaping institutional strategy and innovation.  Explore this conversation: 00:00 Intro and AI Fun Fact: Blue Books vs AI Rethinking Academic Integrity04:25 Introducing Lev Gonick, CIO at Arizona State University05:17 From Classroom Teacher to Academic Disruptor at ASU08:16 ASU Principled Innovation and the Design Build Approach to AI13:23 Co-Creating with Industry: AWS Zoom and the GSV Summit at ASU17:35 Soft Skills Are Smart Skills: Rethinking AI Literacy in Higher Ed23:25 Rethinking Assessment: What Faculty Must Adapt to in the AI Era27:01 Why a College Degree Still Matters in the Age of AI30:37 From YouTube to ASU: Meeting Learners Where They Are34:22 Disrupt or Be Disrupted: ASU Mission to Reach 300000 Students35:57 From Operator to Strategist: The New Playbook for the Modern CIO40:26 Connect with Lev Gonick and Arizona State University  RESOURCES Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Lev on LinkedInAI fun fact article: Blue Books Are Making a Campus Comeback via Axios, by Josephine WalkerOn what most entrepreneurs get wrong when pitching to VCs.

    41 min
  4. 394: Dr. Muthu Alagappan, CEO of Counsel Health: Democratizing Primary Care with Semi-Autonomous AI

    Jun 22

    394: Dr. Muthu Alagappan, CEO of Counsel Health: Democratizing Primary Care with Semi-Autonomous AI

    Send us Fan Mail Dr. Muthu Alagappan is the Founder and CEO of Counsel Health, the company automating access to high-quality, personalized medical advice from doctors. Counsel recently closed a $25M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures, following an $11M seed round that included A16Z, Asymmetric Capital Partners, Floodgate Fund, and Pear VC. He holds an MD from Stanford Medicine and a B.S. in Biomechanical Engineering from Stanford, and was among the earliest AI researchers to publish on clinical applications of machine intelligence. In this episode, Muthu draws on 15 years at the intersection of AI research and frontline clinical medicine to explore the shift toward semi-autonomous care. In this conversation, we discuss: How AI addresses the limitations of traditional primary care by offering a highly personalized, knowledgeable, and always available medical experience.Why patients might leapfrog clinicians in their willingness to adopt AI for medical advice, and how this shift challenges the traditional identity of physicians.What semi-autonomous care actually looks like in practice, and how Counsel Health uses a clinician cockpit to augment human compassion with real-time machine intelligence.How to leverage population-level patterns without compromising patient privacy.Why the double standard applied to AI is misplaced, and why Muthu argues we should hold AI to a much higher benchmark than human doctors simply.What the future of global healthcare could look like when cognitive medical expertise is fully democratized, ensuring that a patient's zip code no longer dictates the quality of care they receive.Explore the Conversation 00:00 Intro & AI Fun Fact: Big Data Limitations and Bias in Clinical AI 03:52 Meet Dr. Muthu Alagappan: From Stanford AI Researcher to Counsel Health CEO 06:51 Why Primary Care Falls Short: The Case for AI-Augmented Medicine 09:05 Human Doctors Are Human: How Patients Are Adopting AI Medical Advice 12:20 Patient Privacy and Population Health: Learning Without Training on Data 14:17 Inside the Clinician Cockpit: Real-Time AI Support for Doctors 16:17 Why Counsel Health Employs Its Own Physicians: Messaging-Based Care 19:00 From Semi-Autonomous to Fully Autonomous Care: Healthcare's Next Era 24:19 AI Ethics in Medicine: Safety Standards, Model Values, and Data Ownership 27:22 The AI Double Standard: Why Machines Deserve a Higher Benchmark Than Doctors 31:07 Founder Lessons: Building a Category-Defining Healthcare AI Company 33:53 Rewriting the Commencement Address: Medicine as Lifelong Learning 35:37 Where to Connect with Dr. Muthu Alagappan and Counsel Health Resources Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Muthu on LinkedInAI fun fact article: Artificial Intelligence in Health Care: The Ethical Frontier via ConexiantOn the future of AI, Silicon Valley and Venture Capital

    37 min
  5. Christine Yen, CEO and Co-Founder of Honeycomb | Live from HumanX 2026

    Jun 18 ·  Bonus

    Christine Yen, CEO and Co-Founder of Honeycomb | Live from HumanX 2026

    Send us Fan Mail Christine Yen is the CEO and co-founder of Honeycomb, the observability platform that helps engineering teams understand what their software is actually doing. A developer by background, she built products at Facebook before co-founding Honeycomb to bring fast, flexible observability to the rest of the world.  Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores what observability means now that both humans and agents are writing, shipping, and debugging code. Christine and host Dan Turchin dig into why the code was never the real source of truth, why "more" has become the watchword of the agentic era, and what it takes for teams to agree on what good actually looks like before they build it. What You'll Learn Why the code was never the real source of truth, and what to observe insteadHow the software development lifecycle is collapsing as PMs, designers, and engineers become buildersWhy the system that writes the code should not be the one that judges itHow defining "good" in plain English keeps quality measurable, whether people or agents build itWhat responsible AI looks like in practice, from disclosure norms to protecting human attention🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363520 Resources Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter.Connect with Christine on LinkedIn.

    18 min
  6. Dr. Ali Agha, CEO and Co-Founder of FieldAI | Live from HumanX 2026

    Jun 18 ·  Bonus

    Dr. Ali Agha, CEO and Co-Founder of FieldAI | Live from HumanX 2026

    Send us Fan Mail Dr. Ali Agha is the CEO and co-founder of FieldAI, where he is building general-purpose "brains" for robots across different forms, environments, and tasks. He has spent nearly two decades in AI autonomy, including years at NASA JPL and research roots at MIT, putting software and intelligence on drones, legged robots, and other platforms.  Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores what it takes to bring AI safely into the physical world, where people already live and work. Ali and host Dan Turchin dig into why reliability is the overlooked challenge of physical AI, why a robot should communicate how confident it is before it acts, and where the line sits between the tasks machines should take on and the ones that should always stay human. What You'll Learn Why reliability, not lab demos, is the real test for AI in the physical worldHow robots that measure and share their own uncertainty earn human trust on the job siteWhy the future of robotics is hundreds of specialized form factors, not one humanoidHow FieldAI targets the dirty, dull, and dangerous work to keep people out of harm's wayWhere the boundary sits: the creative, strategic, and human-touch decisions that stay with people🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363520 Resources Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter.Connect with Ali on LinkedIn.

    20 min
  7. Dr. Jaime Lien, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist of Archetype AI | Live from HumanX 2026

    Jun 18 ·  Bonus

    Dr. Jaime Lien, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist of Archetype AI | Live from HumanX 2026

    Send us Fan Mail Dr. Jaime Lien is the Chief Scientist and a co-founder of Archetype AI, where she is building a foundation model that turns complex sensor data into meaning people can actually act on. A signal processing scientist by training, she earned her PhD working on RF imaging from satellites and later helped develop the first radar embedded in consumer smartphones at Google, before leaving with four colleagues to start Archetype AI.  Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores how AI can read the rich, non-human signals all around us and translate them for the people who rely on them. Jaime and host Dan Turchin dig into how machines distill signal from noise, why a reasoning and communication model matters more than a straight-to-action one, and why keeping a human in the loop is a requirement, not a feature, when the stakes are physical. What You'll Learn How AI separates meaningful signal from noise across the sensors already around usWhy Archetype builds a reasoning and communication model, not a straight-to-action oneWhy keeping a human in the loop is treated as a requirement, not an optional featureHow interpretability and explainability have to be designed in from the start, not added laterWhy discovering something new about the physical world matters more than automation alone🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363520 Resources Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter.Connect with Jaime on LinkedIn.

    22 min
  8. SE 26: Designing AI for Accountability and Harmony with Leaders from Honeycomb, FieldAI, Archetype AI, and Zoom | Live from HumanX 2026 Special Episode

    Jun 18 ·  Bonus

    SE 26: Designing AI for Accountability and Harmony with Leaders from Honeycomb, FieldAI, Archetype AI, and Zoom | Live from HumanX 2026 Special Episode

    Send us Fan Mail In this special compilation episode of AI and the Future of Work, we are bringing you four conversations recorded live on the show floor at HumanX 2026. This is the second and final compilation of our three-part HumanX Live series. Our first compilation explored how AI amplifies the human potential it can never replace. This one turns to the technical side, and to a question that gets harder the more these systems touch our lives: how do you build AI you can actually trust not to fail when it matters most?  As technology reaches further into the moments that count (the systems that monitor our health, drive our cars, and work alongside us on the job), these four builders share how they design for accountability, safety, and harmony between people and machines. What You'll Learn Why reading code is no longer enough, and how observing real outcomes (not system metrics alone) is the only way to know whether AI is actually serving the people who depend on itWhat "AI values" are, and why companies will soon need shared norms for how people disclose, review, and engage with work produced by agentic systemsHow robots earn trust on a job site by measuring their own uncertainty, asking questions, and communicating their intentions before they actWhy the most valuable place for automation is the dirty, dull, and dangerous work humans were never meant to do, and what that means for keeping people safeWhy physical AI should be built first as a reasoning and communication model that can explain its thinking to people, rather than one that jumps straight to actionHow "harness engineering" moves teams beyond prompt and context engineering, and why orchestrating several frontier models together can outperform any single oneFeatured Guests Christine Yen, CEO and Co-Founder of Honeycomb. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19362645 Dr. Ali Agha, CEO and Co-Founder of FieldAI. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19362711 Dr. Jaime Lien, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist of Archetype AI. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363341 XD Huang, Chief Technology Officer of Zoom. Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363454  Inspired by something you heard in this episode? Share your favorite insight about the future of work and tag us on social: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/ai-and-the-future-of-work Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aifutureofwork/ And don't forget to subscribe to AI and the Future of Work for more conversations with the leaders shaping what comes next. Explore the Full HumanX 2026 Series This episode is part of a special three-part series recorded live at HumanX 2026: Episode 1: Special conversation with Stefan Weitz, CEO of HumanX: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19210355Episode 2: Compilation featuring the CEOs of Scribe, Operative Games, and Dataiku, and the Chief Business Officer of Zensai: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257142

    30 min
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4.9
out of 5
34 Ratings

About

🏆 Ranked #3, Best 30 HR Tech Podcasts in the US — Million Podcasts (2026). Host Dan Turchin, PeopleReign CEO, explores how AI is changing the workplace. He interviews thought leaders and technologists from industry and academia who share their experiences and insights about artificial intelligence and what it means to be human in the era of AI-driven automation. Learn more about PeopleReign, the system of intelligence for IT and HR employee service: http://www.peoplereign.io.

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