Inside AsembleAI: DeepTech, AI & Science

Mac & Sam
  • 5.0 (8)
  • Technology

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. 1d ago

    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

  2. 2d ago

    EP 68: Filling Europe's Labor Gap with Humanoids | Olle Bergstedt, CEO, Kalk Robotics

    Europe is short 5.4 million industrial laborers, and the gap is widening as younger generations move away from manufacturing work. Sam sits down with Olle Bergstedt, CEO of Kalk Robotics, to talk about how humanoid robots can help close that gap — without replacing the humans already on the floor. Topics covered: Kalk Robotics' focus on manufacturing and industrial humanoid deployment across EuropeWhy Europe faces a 5.4 million labor shortage — and the generational shift driving itPartnering with Chinese hardware manufacturers rather than competing against themKalk's reverse-engineered deployment process: site visits, strategic planning, then custom skill-pack developmentThe "gap-fill, not replace" philosophy for introducing humanoids into facilitiesThe ABC framework for identifying tasks suited to humanoid robotsCurrent accuracy benchmarks for humanoid deployments (50–60%) and the path to higher precisionHDCC (Humanoid Developer Control Center) — Kalk's proprietary training and operating systemHow US business leaders can explore bringing Kalk's robots into their facilitiesOlle's take on job-loss fears raised by figures like Geoffrey Hinton at AI4Guest Bio: Olle Bergstedt is CEO of Kalk Robotics, a Swedish company developing and deploying humanoid robots for the manufacturing and industrial sectors across Europe, with additional teams in Canada, Austria, and Sydney. Connect: Find Olle on LinkedIn to learn more about Kalk Robotics.

    EP 68: Filling Europe's Labor Gap with Humanoids | Olle Bergstedt, CEO, Kalk Robotics

  3. 3d ago

    EP 67: "Humanity Was Dead. 36 Survivors Remained." — A Sci-Fi Author on AI, War & Our Future | Douglas Swatski

    This episode was recorded live from the Ai4 conference podcast pavilion on the final day, where host Mac Goswami sat down with science-fiction author Douglas Swatski about his novel — two alien AI civilizations at war, humanity caught in the middle — and the ideas about AI, optimization, and our future that run underneath it. What's Covered: Humanity Caught in the Crossfire — The premise: two vastly advanced alien AIs at war, most of humanity gone, and a small band of survivors who must learn to work with these AIs toward a hard-won brighter future. Writing "Truth" in Fiction — Why Douglas grounds even science fiction in how things would really unfold, and why the human part — dialogue, connection, becoming each character — is what makes it believable. "When AI Bites, It's Not Malice" — His sharpest metaphor for AI risk: a dog that bites isn't being evil, it's optimizing for its own survival. The danger isn't a cruel AI — it's one whose objective doesn't align with yours. In his story, a civilization optimized for war can't pull itself back. Is Human Labor Becoming Obsolete? — Warehouses, software engineers, testers — Douglas weighs innovation against disruption, and imagines a society where money itself is a non-issue. Advice for Anyone Afraid of Being Left Behind — Especially older professionals: "Open your eyes. Try to learn and understand what it is as it relates to you. You have a role to play — go play it." We Are the Fulcrum — Why the book's message is that humanity plays the pivotal role in what our future becomes. Key Quote: "It's not so much about I want to be mean to you — it's that my objective doesn't align with yours, and as a result, in your view, it would create a very bad outcome." Connect with Douglas: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dswatski/ Website: djswatski.com Follow and subscribe to AsembleAI: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | iHeart Radio | YouTube | Substack

    EP 67: "Humanity Was Dead. 36 Survivors Remained." — A Sci-Fi Author on AI, War & Our Future | Douglas Swatski

  4. 4d ago

    EP 66: The Intelligence Dividend - Rethinking AI as Market Creation, Not Cost-Cutting | Rohit, LotusPetal AI

    Most business leaders think of AI as either a cost-cutter or an efficiency multiplier. Rohit V Anabheri, CEO of LotusPetal AI and author of The Intelligence Dividend, argues there's a third and far more valuable layer: compounding — using AI to create entirely new markets and revenue, not just optimize existing ones. Topics covered: Rohit's journey from cybersecurity (Osprey Security) into AI, and the shifts from LLMs to RAG to agentic AI over the past few yearsThe three layers of AI value: subtraction (cost-cutting), multiplication (efficiency), and compounding (market creation)Why Rohit believes "the intelligence problem is solved" for extraction, analysis, and contextual knowledgeHow LotusPetal AI helps small and medium businesses compete for federal and state procurement — where only 5% of qualified businesses currently participate due to compliance complexityVertical AI vs. general-purpose platforms (ChatGPT, etc.) for specialized tasks like proposal writing and capture managementSecurity and compliance: SOC2 compliance, FedRAMP-hosted infrastructure on AWS GovCloud, containerized data, and a no-training-on-customer-data policyWhat The Intelligence Dividend offers readers — a practical workbook for building an AI adoption framework, not just theoryGuest Bio: Rohit is CEO of LotusPetal AI, a vertical AI platform helping small and medium businesses compete for federal and state procurement opportunities. He has spent 11–12 years in the AI space, beginning with his cybersecurity venture Osprey Security, and is the author of The Intelligence Dividend. Connect: Find Rohit on LinkedIn to learn more about LotusPetal AI. The Amazon link for The Intelligence Dividend is available in the show notes.

    EP 66: The Intelligence Dividend - Rethinking AI as Market Creation, Not Cost-Cutting | Rohit, LotusPetal AI

  5. Sep 4

    EP 65: The AI Bottleneck Nobody's Watching | Troy Liljedahl, Backblaze

    Storage is the least glamorous layer of the AI stack — and often the actual reason GenAI pipelines stall between pilot and production. Sam sits down with Troy, Senior Director of Solutions Engineering at Backblaze, to unpack what's really happening under the hood when AI infrastructure fails to scale. Topics covered: What actually happens when a GPU sits idle — and the opportunity cost most teams don't account forWhy storage bottlenecks are the hidden reason enterprise GenAI adoption stallsBackblaze's role as a capacity and data lake tier for companies building their own modelsInside B2 Overdrive: dedicated bandwidth up to a terabit per second, predictable IOPS, and no egress chargesWhy hyperscalers prioritize large foundational model companies over startups and researchers when resources tightenThe financial case for avoiding egress costs when training on tens to hundreds of petabytes of dataSkills engineers need to survive and prosper in the current AI infrastructure landscape — including agent managementAdvice for new grads entering the storage and infrastructure industryWhy Troy sees parallels between today's AI hype cycle and the dot-com bubble — and why the technology shift is still realWhy human interaction and direct customer conversations remain irreplaceable, even as AI reshapes product developmentGuest Bio: Troy is Senior Director of Solutions Engineering at Backblaze, where he leads the team helping AI customers integrate cloud storage and solve data infrastructure challenges. He has nearly a decade of experience in cloud storage and AI infrastructure at Backblaze. Connect: Find Troy on LinkedIn to learn more about Backblaze's AI storage solutions.

    EP 65: The AI Bottleneck Nobody's Watching | Troy Liljedahl, Backblaze

  6. Sep 2

    EP 64: Lack of ROI Is Actually Lack of Trust — Fixing Enterprise AI for Finance | Binny Gill, Kognitos

    This episode was recorded live from the Ai4 conference podcast pavilion, where host Mac Goswami sat down with Binny Gill — CEO & co-founder of Kognitos, holder of ~100 patents, who previously helped scale a company from 20 to 6,000 people and a $7B market cap — about Kognitos's newly launched Context Graph for Finance: deterministic, hallucination-free AI for the office of the CFO. What's Covered: A Genius With Amnesia — Binny's framing of the core problem: an LLM is raw intelligence with no memory. Why prompts (instruction) and context windows (short-term memory) aren't enough, and how a context graph gives AI the long-term memory the brain runs on. The Neuro-Symbolic Harness — How Kognitos runs your English SOPs deterministically — AI that is "not allowed to be creative" on every invoice, only tapping the graph when a real exception appears. Same input, same output, 100 times. Extracting Tribal Knowledge — The processes that live only in John's or Vanessa's head. How Kognitos pulls that undocumented know-how directly from employees as they work — and auto-documents it as executable English. Revenue Leakage & 100+ Signals — Why 1–1.5% revenue leakage happens at nearly every company, and how fraud detection, duplicate payments, and data cleanup ride on top of the context graph. "Lack of ROI Is Actually Lack of Trust" — The most important idea in the episode. In POC mode everything works — but nobody ships to production, because if an auditor asks where a number came from and the answer is "the LLM," you're out. Kognitos's answer: full data lineage. Governance in a Regulated Industry — Why a documented, human-approved process is inherently more ethical — and where Binny says you should use Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini instead. Key Quote: "Lack of ROI is actually lack of trust. In POC mode everything works. Nobody trusts it to put in production." Connect with Binny: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/binnygill/ Kognitos: https://www.kognitos.com/ Follow and subscribe to AsembleAI: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | iHeart Radio | YouTube | Substack #Ai4Conference #FinanceAI #ContextGraph #NeurosymbolicAI #Kognitos #AsembleAI

    EP 64: Lack of ROI Is Actually Lack of Trust — Fixing Enterprise AI for Finance | Binny Gill, Kognitos

  7. Sep 2

    EP 63: From Intel to Mars: The 26-Year Story Behind OpenCV

    OpenCV powers the computer vision behind your phone's camera, autonomous vehicles, hospital screening systems, and even NASA's Mars helicopter — and most people using it have no idea. Sam sits down with Satya Mallick, CEO of the nonprofit OpenCV.org, to trace its 26-year history and where it's headed next. Topics covered: OpenCV's origins at Intel in 2000 under Dr. Gary Bradsky, and why it was open-sourced to democratize computer vision researchWhy OpenCV sees roughly a million downloads a day and remains foundational infrastructureOpenCV5's new DNN inference engine — 40% faster than ONNX Runtime on models like YOLO26Real-world deployments: the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge-winning car and NASA's Mars helicopterWhy classical (non-neural) computer vision still matters for speed- and power-constrained tasksHow OpenCV is integrating with multimodal LLMs and vision-language modelsThe case for open source AI and why closed-source labs risk falling behindA detour on the courage of Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li in advancing deep learning and ImageNetPrivacy vs. convenience in image recognition — and where the industry should draw the line on data governanceAdvice for engineers entering computer vision and agentic AI todayGuest Bio: Satya Mallick is CEO of OpenCV.org, the nonprofit that maintains the OpenCV library - downloaded roughly a million times daily and used across image and video analysis applications worldwide. He also runs BigVision LLC, a computer vision and AI consulting company he's led for over 12 years. Connect: Find Satya on LinkedIn to learn more about his work at OpenCV.org and BigVision.

    EP 63: From Intel to Mars: The 26-Year Story Behind OpenCV

  8. Aug 31

    EP 62: 95% of AI Pilots Fail. Here's Why | Mohamed Battisha, VP of Engineering at WEX

    What actually separates a data platform built for AI agents from the data warehouse most enterprises already have?  Recorded live at Ai4 conference in Vegas, AsembleAI co-host Sam sits down with Mohammed Battisha - who leads the data engineering team at WEX and previously built Saudi Arabia's national AI platform as CTO of SDAIA (Saudi Data and AI Authority), with earlier leadership roles at LinkedIn, Salesforce, and Microsoft - to find out answer to the question.  Topics covered: The shift from "collect, transform, report" data platforms to context-aware, agent-ready platformsWhy the semantic layer is the core of any AI-native architectureGoverned execution: giving AI agents boundaries and full auditabilityLessons from building a sovereign nation's AI platform at SDAIAWhy MIT's research shows 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail — and what disconnects business and technologyWEX's crawl-walk-run framework for AI adoptionClaim AI: how WEX automated a multi-day claims process down to minutesHow WEX measures AI maturity and data maturity across seven dimensionsAdvice for data and AI engineers: why business awareness matters more than technical depth aloneConnect with Mohammed : LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohamedbattisha/ WEX: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wexinc/

    EP 62: 95% of AI Pilots Fail. Here's Why | Mohamed Battisha, VP of Engineering at WEX
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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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