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. 385: From API Management to Agent Control: Why Governing AI Actions Is the Only Path to Enterprise Value, with Oren Michels, Co-Founder and CEO of Barndoor AI

    1D AGO

    385: From API Management to Agent Control: Why Governing AI Actions Is the Only Path to Enterprise Value, with Oren Michels, Co-Founder and CEO of Barndoor AI

    Send us Fan Mail Oren Michels is an entrepreneur, investor, board member, and advisor to technology startups in the US and Europe. He is the co-founder and CEO of Barndoor AI, the control plane for agentic AI, and the founder who previously helped define the API management category with Mashery, acquired by Intel in 2013. He is also a Tony-nominated Broadway and Off-Broadway producer whose credits include Romeo+Juliet and Good Night, and Good Luck starring George Clooney. In this episode, Oren draws on two decades of building foundational infrastructure for the enterprise to make the case that governing AI agents is not a security problem. It is an entirely new category of problem, and most companies do not yet have the vocabulary to describe it, let alone the tools to solve it.  If your agents can already write to your CRM, interpret your instructions, and act without life experience or fear of consequences, who is actually in control? In this conversation, we discuss: Why securing AI agents is entirely different from managing APIs, and why traditional security and identity access tools were never designed to handle what agents can do.The reason most so-called agentic AI is still glorified robotic process automation, and what it will actually take to unlock enterprise value.How Barndoor AI's "least privilege" framework for agents works, and why the permission logic goes far beyond the identity of the human using the tool.Why an agent with delete access to your CRM is one probabilistic misfire away from a catastrophic outcome, and why ultimate responsibility always comes back to the humans operating the tools.The BYO AI parallel to BYOD: why well-meaning employees using personal AI tools with company data may force the enterprise governance moment no one is ready for.Why the same instinct that took Oren from API infrastructure to Broadway and back to enterprise AI may be exactly the mindset the agentic era demands from its builders.Resources Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Oren on LinkedInAI fun fact articleOn How AI may eliminate jobs: what the data reveals

    44 min
  2. 384: When AI Creates Art, What Stays Human? with Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital

    APR 13

    384: When AI Creates Art, What Stays Human? with Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital

    Send us Fan Mail Jake Saper is a General Partner at Emergence Capital, one of the most iconic venture firms in enterprise software, with a portfolio that includes Zoom, Gusto, Veeva, and Together AI. Emergence has backed some of the most category-defining B2B companies of the last two decades, and Jake has spent nearly 12 years at the center of that deal flow. What sets Jake apart is a life lived on both sides of the creativity question: he backs the companies building AI but also performs across genres from blues to metal as a working musician. In this episode, Jake brings that rare combination of investor rigor and artist instinct to one of the hardest questions AI is forcing us to face, and whether you leave reassured or unsettled may depend entirely on how much of your identity is wrapped up in the work you create. In this conversation, we discuss: How AI will democratize the creation of art but commoditize its execution, ultimately causing the value of live, dynamic human performances to skyrocket.The stunning acceleration of startup growth, with top-quartile B2B software companies now scaling from zero to $1 million in ARR in just four months.How the flood of AI-generated content is turning attention into the real bottleneck, and why curation and point of view become the new competitive advantage.Why Jake believes the market will self-regulate the anthropomorphization of AI agents in the workplace, and where that logic has a hard limit.What Geoffrey Hinton said about building AI "like a mother," why it was both comforting and deeply unsatisfying, and what it reveals about AGI risk.Why Jake argues disclosure matters during this transition period, but what he actually wants people to ask about art as AI becomes a normal creative tool.Explore this conversation: 00:00 Why AI Makes It Easier to Build a Demo and Harder to Build a Moat 05:25 From Cell Towers to Venture Capital: Jake Saper's Path to Emergence 08:53 How AI Is Compressing Startup Growth: From 18 Months to 4 Months to $1M ARR 18:05 What Art Actually Is: Compressed Human Experience and the Act of Making Meaning Shareable 23:30 How AI Can Unlock Latent Creativity in People Who Don't Think of Themselves as Creators 26:55 Why Disclosure Matters When Trust and Authenticity Are at Stake 30:19 Navigating a Post-Truth Era: When Everything Looks Synthetic, What Do We Believe? 32:14 Why the Value of Live Performance Is About to Skyrocket 35:58 As Soulless Entities Multiply, Soul-to-Soul Human Connection Becomes More Valuable 40:38 What Geoffrey Hinton Said About Building AI "Like a Mother" and Why It Was Unsatisfying 43:04 Why the Most Enduring Art Has Always Been About Transfer, Not Authorship Resources: Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Jake on LinkedInAI fun fact articleOn How AI Is Revolutionizing Creativity in Art, Music, and Education

    47 min
  3. 383: From Zero-to-One to a Billion in ARR: Why monday.com Is Rebuilding Its Product Thinking from Scratch, with Daniel Lereya, CPTO at monday.com

    APR 6

    383: From Zero-to-One to a Billion in ARR: Why monday.com Is Rebuilding Its Product Thinking from Scratch, with Daniel Lereya, CPTO at monday.com

    Send us Fan Mail Daniel Lereya is Chief Product and Technology Officer at monday.com, the AI work platform trusted by 60% of the Fortune 500 and valued at approximately $8 billion. He joined the company when it had 30 people and $4.5M ARR, and has since grown his team from 5 to nearly 900 people as monday.com crossed $1 billion in ARR. In this episode, Daniel draws on nearly a decade of scaling one of the world's most adopted work platforms to share what it actually takes to rebuild product thinking from scratch when AI changes everything you thought you knew. In this conversation, we discuss: Why the instincts that made monday.com successful are the exact ones Daniel says had to be dismantled to build AI-first products.What the critical difference is between building a demo that impresses and an agent that actually works in production, and where most teams get it wrong.Why Daniel believes wrapping AI inside rigid workflows produces better results than giving agents full discretion, and what monday.com learned the hard way.What happened when 2,000 of 3,000 monday.com employees started building their own apps in just two weeks, and what it revealed about the future of who gets to build software.Why Daniel argues that when an AI agent makes a mistake, the real question leaders should be asking has nothing to do with the technology.Why the biggest barrier to AI adoption is not the technology itself, and what Daniel says companies must stop waiting for before they start.Explore: 00:00 Why AI Adoption Is Harder Than It Looks 00:53 Introduction + AI Commerce Standards: Google, OpenAI & Visa 04:30 Daniel Lereya's 9-Year Journey Scaling monday.com to $1B ARR 09:00 How AI Forces a Complete Reset in Product Thinking 12:25 The "AI Month" Initiative: Pausing R&D to Rebuild from Scratch 14:57 Building AI Products When the Output Is Non-Deterministic 20:47 What 250,000 Customers Taught Us About AI in the Real World 25:38 Responsible AI: Guardrails, Governance, and Data Control 31:28 Who Is Responsible When an AI Agent Makes a Mistake? 37:04 The Future of Work: Humans, Agents, and What Comes Next Resources: Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Daniel on LinkedInAI fun fact articleOn How we can take back control from Big Techhttps://peoplereign.io/podcast/

    43 min
  4. 382: Are We Building AI Without Half the Population? With Lisa Davis, Author of The Only Woman in the Room

    MAR 30

    382: Are We Building AI Without Half the Population? With Lisa Davis, Author of The Only Woman in the Room

    Send us Fan Mail Lisa Davis is a technology executive who has served as CIO and tech leader for some of the world's most complex organizations, including Intel, Blue Shield of California, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Department of Defense.  She is now focused on shaping the next generation of leaders and advocating for women and diverse talent in STEM through her board work, executive coaching, and her forthcoming book, The Only Woman in the Room: How to Win in a Workplace Still Built for Men. In this episode, Lisa draws on 30+ years leading technology at the highest levels of government and enterprise to make the case that the future of AI depends on who gets to build it, and as long as women remain locked out of those rooms, we are getting it dangerously wrong. In this conversation, we discuss: Why women's representation in STEM has fallen from 34% in the mid-1980s to 22% today, and why that decline is a crisis for the future of AI, not just the workplace.Why the real risk isn't the technology itself but the leadership teams making AI decisions without diverse voices at the table.The structural systems that were never designed for women to thrive, and why redesigning them is a business imperative, not a social favor.Why current corporate layoffs are being falsely attributed to AI, and what leaders need to start saying out loud.Why girls begin dropping out of math and science as early as middle school, how cultural norms around "bossiness" suppress leadership potential, and what parents and organizations can do to intervene earlier.What Lisa says women who finally reach the executive table must do differently, and why most don't.Resources: Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Lisa on LinkedIn or visit her website to learn more about her book.AI fun fact articleOn how to navigate life transitions with Bruce Feiler, award-winning author and popular TEDx speaker

    42 min
  5. 381: Who's Really Responsible When AI Gets It Wrong? Bloomberg Beta's James Cham on Power, Morality, and the Case for Removing Humans from the Loop

    MAR 23

    381: Who's Really Responsible When AI Gets It Wrong? Bloomberg Beta's James Cham on Power, Morality, and the Case for Removing Humans from the Loop

    Send us Fan Mail James Cham is a Partner at Bloomberg Beta, the venture capital firm recognized by CB Insights as the #2 investor in AI. He has spent years backing the companies quietly building the infrastructure of tomorrow's economy, including Orbital Insight, Primer, Domino Data Labs, and AppZen.  A Harvard CS graduate and MIT MBA, James brings a rare combination of technical depth, philosophical seriousness, and long-horizon investing perspective to every conversation.  In this episode, he challenges some of the most popular  assumptions in enterprise AI adoption (including the idea that keeping humans in the loop is always the right answer) and makes a compelling case for why the moral and economic decisions we make right now will shape the nature of work for the next hundred years. In this conversation, we discuss: Why the people who benefit from AI models, not those impacted by them, should bear full legal and moral responsibility for the harms they causeWhy comparing AI to a flawless "Platonic ideal" is a mistake, and how the mathematical consistency of models is a massive advantage over noisy, unpredictable human decision-makingThe case for pulling humans out of the loop and why romanticizing your role in the process is exactly how organizations miss the real opportunityWhy corporate America's "gold star" approach to AI adoption, tracking how many employees used AI once this week, is a dangerous distraction from what heavy users are already doingHow ancient wisdom and the biblical concept of creation in Genesis can help us navigate the moral responsibilities of building new technologiesJames’s three massive investment theses, including the untapped market for AI tools with high emotional intelligence and why developers spending over $50 a day on tokens are already living in the futureResources: Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with James on LinkedInAI fun fact articleOn How AI Impacts Humanity

    46 min
  6. 380: Customer Service's AI Shift: Zendesk CTO Adrian McDermott on Deterministic AI and Context Engineering

    MAR 16

    380: Customer Service's AI Shift: Zendesk CTO Adrian McDermott on Deterministic AI and Context Engineering

    Send us Fan Mail Adrian McDermott is Chief Technology Officer at Zendesk, where he leads the company’s product management and engineering teams and helps shape the technology behind one of the world’s most widely used customer service platforms. He joined Zendesk in 2010 and has played a key role in guiding the company’s product and platform strategy as customer experience continues to evolve in the age of AI. Drawing on years of experience building enterprise software used by service teams around the world, Adrian brings a thoughtful perspective on how AI can help organizations deliver better customer service while allowing people to focus on the work humans do best. In this conversation, we discuss: How customer service evolved from a cost center with rigid scripts and binders into a strategic function where technology helps teams deliver better experiences.Why customer service leaders shouldn't fear automation — and why everyone has a "service debt" that AI can finally help pay down.The shift from traditional contact centers to AI-enabled service platforms that help companies respond faster while improving both employee and customer experience.Lessons Adrian learned scaling Zendesk from a small product team to a global platform serving 100,000 customers and how product-led growth shaped that journey.The critical challenge of moving from non-deterministic, creative AI models to deterministic, reliable solutions necessary for enterprise trust and safetyThe future of context engineering and why the next major leap in AI won't be about superintelligence, but about building systems that capture and act on the knowledge created in every customer interaction.Resources: Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Adrian on LinkedInAI fun fact articleOn How the impact of the pandemic on leaders, culture, and the evolving nature of work

    44 min
  7. Confidence, Bias, and Opportunity: Lessons from Women Leaders in Tech Building the Future of AI and Work (International Women’s Day Special Episode)

    MAR 12 ·  BONUS

    Confidence, Bias, and Opportunity: Lessons from Women Leaders in Tech Building the Future of AI and Work (International Women’s Day Special Episode)

    Send us Fan Mail To celebrate International Women’s Day, this special compilation episode of AI and the Future of Work revisits powerful moments from past conversations with women leaders shaping technology, artificial intelligence, and the future of work. Across industries and roles, these leaders share reflections on career growth, leadership, resilience, and the barriers women still face in technology and executive leadership. Their stories reveal how confidence, mentorship, and opportunity shape who gets to lead in emerging industries like AI. As artificial intelligence reshapes how organizations operate and how work evolves, representation in the people building and guiding these technologies matters more than ever. Expanding access and opportunity is essential to creating a more innovative and inclusive future of work. Featured Guests Charlene Li – Author, Keynote Speaker & Strategic Advisor. Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/3970637]Daphne Jones – CEO at The Board Curators. Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/12105172]Patty Hatter – President & COO at Opsera. Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/5939122]Mona Sabet – SVP at GCG. Listen to the full conversation here: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/16747398]Tess Posner – CEO and Founder at AI4ALL. Listen to the full conversation here: [2019: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/2207636 - 2025: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/17326118]  What You’ll Learn Why women often wait until they feel fully qualified before pursuing leadership rolesHow imposter syndrome shapes career decisions and confidence in techWhy perfectionism can limit growth for technical leadersHow hiring practices based on brand signals reinforce gender imbalanceWhy diversity in AI development leads to better technology outcomesHow leaders can expand opportunity for the next generation of women in tech💬 Inspired by something you heard in this episode? Share your favorite insight about leadership, risk-taking, or expanding opportunity for women in AI and tech, and tag us on social. And don’t forget to subscribe to AI and the Future of Work for more conversations with the leaders shaping the future of work.

    26 min
  8. 379: AI and the End of the Knowledge Economy: Gen Alpha, Reskilling, and the Rise of Creative Work, with Matt Britton, Founder and CEO of Suzy

    MAR 9

    379: AI and the End of the Knowledge Economy: Gen Alpha, Reskilling, and the Rise of Creative Work, with Matt Britton, Founder and CEO of Suzy

    Send us Fan Mail Matt Britton is Founder and CEO of Suzy and a leading voice on how AI and generational change are reshaping business. He is the author of the best-selling book Generation AI: Why Generation Alpha & The Age of AI Will Change Everything, and has advised more than half of the Fortune 500 on marketing, innovation, and consumer behavior. Drawing on decades of experience working with global brands, Matt examines why AI is shifting the economy from knowledge tasks to creative problem solving, why reskilling will define the next decade, and how leaders can build organizations that elevate human judgment in an AI-driven world. In this conversation, we discuss: Why AI is accelerating a shift from memorization and knowledge tasks toward creativity, critical thinking, and real problem solving.Why reskilling, not upskilling, will define the next decade and why that transition will be harder than most leaders admit.How Gen Alpha, the first AI-native generation, will reshape expectations around work, brands, privacy, and employer relationships.Why robotics will transform the service economy sooner than most leaders expect, and what that means for jobs.The mistake companies make when they chase AI tools instead of focusing on the most important problems to solve.How hyper-personalization and an “audience of one” are redefining trust, value creation, and meritocracy in business.Resources: Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Matt on LinkedInAI fun fact articleOn How Kai Nunez, Vice President of Research & Insights at Salesforce, is making tech teams take ownership of AI ethics

    32 min
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4.9
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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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