TheModernCDO

Richard Muirhead
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The Modern CDO is the podcast for data and AI leaders who run enterprise organizations — not for people who want to become them. Hosted by Richard Muirhead — Fractional CDO, AI strategist, and former IBM Distinguished Engineer with 30+ years of enterprise experience and 130+ patents — each episode delivers a single sharp thesis, three sector-specific evidence cases, a practical decision framework, and one falsifiable prediction No guest roundtables. No vendor content. No hedging. Episodes run 5-10 minutes.

  1. Aug 7

    S3 E1: Garbage in, Confidently Out

    For fifty years, the rule was simple: garbage in, garbage out. Bad data produced output that obviously looked bad, so someone caught it and fixed it. AI broke that bargain. Feed a copilot flawed data and it returns a fluent, confident, well-structured answer that happens to be wrong, and nothing on the screen looks broken. In this episode, Richard Muirhead makes the case that data quality is the one problem AI both makes more dangerous and is genuinely built to solve. He covers why the failure mode went invisible, how AI-assisted profiling, entity matching, observability, and cataloging actually find bad data, where the return on investment shows up, and the three traps that separate a fix that holds from a demo that doesn't. In this episode: - Why "garbage in, confidently out" is the new failure mode - The numbers behind AI-readiness (Precisely 2025, Gartner) - Four things AI-assisted data quality does that hand-written rules never could - How to build the ROI case your finance team will actually fund - Three traps: tooling without ownership, overconfidence, and treating it as a one-time project Read the full whitepaper: https://themoderncdo.gumroad.com/l/s3e1-Garbage-In-Confidently-Out Work with Richard: https://perigee.pro The Modern CDO is written and hosted by Richard Muirhead, fractional Chief Data Officer and founder of Perigee.

  2. Aug 6

    S2 E29: No Post Deployment Monitoring

    Most AI governance ends at the moment the real risk begins. The day a model goes live is the day it starts to drift. A model learns a snapshot of the world, and the moment it ships that snapshot starts to age. Accuracy and fairness degrade silently, with no alarm, because the governance was all spent at the gate and none on the operation. Watch the model for as long as it runs. Long-form whitepaper is at https://themoderncdo.gumroad.com/l/s2e29-no-post-deployment-monitoring

  3. Aug 5

    S2 E28: The Generative AI Traps

    Generative AI is most dangerous at the exact moment it is most convincing. It fails fluently. It produces a confident, polished, authoritative falsehood with no signal that it is wrong, leaks whatever an employee feeds it, and varies its output from one run to the next. Govern the real failure modes, not the ones traditional software taught you to expect. Long-form whitepaper is at https://themoderncdo.gumroad.com/l/s2e28-the-generative-ai-traps

  4. Aug 4

    S2 E27: Bias as an Afterthought

    A model can be 95 percent accurate and systematically unfair to the people who matter most. The aggregate number hides it. Treated as a late-stage checklist item, bias gets discovered too late to fix, rationalized away under deployment pressure, or missed entirely. A single accuracy number is not a fairness measure. Measure by subgroup, from the start, where you can still act on what you find. Long-form whitepaper is at https://themoderncdo.gumroad.com/l/s2e27-bias-as-an-afterthought

  5. Aug 3

    S2 E26: The Accountability Vacuum

    The moment a real decision can be blamed on a model, you have built a machine for laundering accountability. A model makes a consequential decision and no human owns it. The data scientist points to the business, the business points to the model, the sponsor treats the output as objective. Everyone is adjacent and nobody is accountable, which means nobody is watching when the decisions drift wrong. Long-form whitepaper is at https://themoderncdo.gumroad.com/l/s2e26-the-accountability-vacuum

  6. Jul 31

    S2 E25: Model Risk Without Lineage

    When a model starts making bad decisions and you cannot trace what it learned from, you do not have a problem. You have an outage with no off switch. A model runs beautifully for a year, then starts producing bad outcomes nobody can diagnose, because its lineage was never captured. An untraceable model is an unfixable model. Make lineage a deployment gate, the way tests gate code, and capture it at build time. Long-form whitepaper is at https://themoderncdo.gumroad.com/l/s2e25-model-risk-without-lineage

  7. Jul 30

    S2 E24: AI Governance as a Separate Tower

    Standing up a separate AI governance function is how you rebuild data governance from scratch and get it wrong twice. Most AI risk is data risk with higher stakes: bias from training data, privacy from data use, unexplainability from missing lineage. Wall off a separate tower and you rebuild lineage, quality, and ownership badly, then watch the two versions diverge and open a seam where the worst risks hide. Long-form whitepaper is at https://themoderncdo.gumroad.com/l/s2e24-ai-governance-in-a-separate-tower

  8. Jul 29

    S2 E23: Policy Without an Inventory

    Most companies wrote their AI policy before they had any idea how much AI they were running. Writing the policy is the easy part. The AI it governs is mostly invisible: shadow models, AI features inside SaaS tools, employees pasting company data into public generative tools. You cannot govern what you cannot see. Discovery comes first, and it never stops. Long-form whitepaper is at https://themoderncdo.gumroad.com/l/s2e23-policy-without-an-inventory

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About

The Modern CDO is the podcast for data and AI leaders who run enterprise organizations — not for people who want to become them. Hosted by Richard Muirhead — Fractional CDO, AI strategist, and former IBM Distinguished Engineer with 30+ years of enterprise experience and 130+ patents — each episode delivers a single sharp thesis, three sector-specific evidence cases, a practical decision framework, and one falsifiable prediction No guest roundtables. No vendor content. No hedging. Episodes run 5-10 minutes.

Information

  • Creator
    Richard Muirhead
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    38
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Richard Muirhead
  • Show Website
    TheModernCDO