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

Dan Turchin
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🏆 Ranked #3, Best Tech Podcasts — Million Podcasts (2026) | Top 1% global podcast. 450+ episodes. 10M+ downloads. 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. 3d ago

    409: Ryan Gavin, CMO at Slack: AI Is Single-Player. Slack Is Betting on Multiplayer

    Send us Fan Mail Ryan Gavin is Chief Marketing Officer at Slack, the global collaboration platform used by more than 200,000 organizations across 150 countries. Since joining Slack, Ryan has helped drive a 250% increase in revenue while championing the launch of Slack's AI-first capabilities and agentic integrations. A seasoned technology executive, Ryan previously served as Chief Growth Officer at Convoy and held senior leadership roles at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, where he managed multi-billion-dollar business units. In this episode, Ryan draws on watching hundreds of enterprise AI rollouts up close to make the case that dropping agents into an organization without a strategy doesn't just fail to help, it actively backfires. In this conversation, we discuss: Why single-player AI tools fail to deliver enterprise productivity gains, and how deploying autonomous agents into collaborative, multiplayer environments unlocks hidden software value.How a conversational interface connects unstructured team dialogue with structured CRM data, allowing employees to query enterprise systems without opening underlying software tabs.What the concept of "headless software" reveals about democratizing access to sales and operational insights across non-technical departments.Why transparent, step-by-step reasoning and strict permission inheritance are essential for building trust when introducing AI tools into enterprise workflows.How leading organizations elevate Slack from a conventional IT collaboration expense into a core strategic driver for company-wide AI adoption.What executive advice for emerging professionals highlights the enduring value of curiosity, creativity, and adaptability in a rapidly changing job market. Explore the conversation 00:00 Show Intro, a Team Human Success Story, and Meet Ryan Gavin 03:44 Ryan Gavin's Path to Becoming CMO of Slack 04:57 Slack's New Job in the Age of AI Agents 07:53 Designing SlackBot to Strengthen Human Collaboration 12:31 Headless Salesforce and Slack as the New Front Door 16:50 Slack as 2% of Your AI Budget and the Problem With 'Work About Work' 21:37 Trust, Transparency, and the AI Black Box in SlackBot 25:28 From Slash Commands to Every Employee as a Builder 31:40 Winning Share of Wallet in a Zero-Sum AI Budget 35:54 Advice for Workers Who Feel Left Behind by AI 39:35 Where to Find Ryan Gavin and Slack Resources Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Ryan on LinkedInOther episodes mentioned on the show:On How Silvio Savarese, EVP and Chief Scientist at Salesforce, navigated the real challenges of taking AI from the ivory tower to corporate labs (Episode 297)On How Kai Nunez, Vice President of Research & Insights at Salesforce, shares the secret to making tech teams own responsibility for AI ethics (Season 2, Episode 47)- See why Freshworks was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for ITSM. Learn more → freshworks.com/dant

    409: Ryan Gavin, CMO at Slack: AI Is Single-Player. Slack Is Betting on Multiplayer

  2. Oct 8 ·  Bonus

    SE 31: Kartik Sakthivel, CIO at John Hancock | Live from Ai4 2026

    Send us Fan Mail Kartik Sakthivel is the Chief Information Officer at John Hancock, the life insurer that turned 164 years old in April 2026 and is part of Manulife. Before joining, he spent eight and a half years at LIMRA and LOMA, the oldest and largest trade association in financial services, which gave him a view across carriers few technology leaders ever get.  Recorded live from the floor of Ai4 2026, this lightning round explores what it takes to bring AI into a company founded during the Civil War, and why he tells his teams that what they build today becomes the legacy for the next 164 years. Kartik and host Dan Turchin dig into why he believes every technology leader should think of themselves as a business leader first, how a regulated industry decides what to fast track and what to slow down, and what he says to people who are watching a machine learn to do the thing that made them valuable. What You'll Learn Why uptime and mean time to repair are table stakes for a modern technology organization, and what Kartik measures insteadHow a highly regulated business draws the line between internal AI that gets fast tracked and anything customer facing that does notWhy there are more AI pilots in insurance than planes at a major airport at peak hour, and how to find use cases that are neither too small to matter nor too large to finishThe question he asks every time the business brings him an AI idea, and why the answer is sometimes something far simplerWhat he tells colleagues watching automation absorb part of their role, and where the time that comes back should be reinvested 🎙️ Part of our Ai4 2026 compilation series.  Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19816277   Resources Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Kartik on LinkedIn

    SE 31: Kartik Sakthivel, CIO at John Hancock | Live from Ai4 2026

  3. Oct 5

    408: Cesar Carvalho, CEO of Wellhub: The Risk Isn't AI. It's How Fast You Grow.

    Send us Fan Mail Cesar Carvalho is the co-founder and CEO of Wellhub, the corporate well-being platform connecting millions of employees to top-tier fitness, mindfulness, therapy, nutrition, and sleep partners across 18 countries.  Since founding the company as Gympass in 2012, Cesar has raised nearly $900 million in venture funding, reached a $2.4 billion valuation, and grown Wellhub to serve over 50,000 corporate clients worldwide.  In this episode, Cesar sits down with Dan to discuss why treating employee wellness and business performance as opposing forces is a false dichotomy. Tune in to hear his perspective on why AI should be leveraged to fund employee reskilling rather than justify job cuts, how Wellhub's AI wellness coach scales hyper-personalized care to millions of subscribers, why less than 10% of global healthcare spending goes toward prevention, and how pivoting during the 2020 pandemic transformed a near-death crisis into a multi-product wellness ecosystem. In this conversation, we discuss: Why framing corporate wellness as an adversary to business performance is a false dichotomy, and how employee health directly drives bottom-line execution.How granting employees 30 minutes of paid work time daily to experiment with AI tools fosters a culture of innovation and continuous reskilling.What the structural imbalance between preventive "well care" and reactive "sick care" reveals about the urgent need to redesign enterprise benefits.How an AI-powered wellness coach expands personalized fitness and mindfulness guidance from hundreds of thousands to millions of corporate subscribers.Why strict data minimization policies and phased beta testing provide a trusted framework for deploying AI in sensitive health environments.What pivoting a global business model during the 2020 pandemic teaches founders about mission alignment, resilience, and turning near-death moments into catalysts for growth. Explore the conversation: 00:00 Show Intro and Newsletter Shoutouts 02:07 AI Fun Fact: Chatbots and Mental Health Risks 04:01 Introducing Cesar Carvalho, CEO of Wellhub 05:03 From Harvard Dropout to Corporate Wellness: The Founding of Gympass 06:56 The "Team Human" Ethos: Making Well-Being Ubiquitous at Scale 09:14 Performance vs. Health: Why Employee Well-Being Directly Drives Execution 12:37 Calling Out AI Layoffs: Are Employees Expendable? 14:12 Reskilling Over Layoffs: Why Wellhub Invests in Existing Talent 16:34 Personalization at Scale: Expanding the AI Wellness Coach Across Millions 20:19 Responsible AI at Wellhub: Data Minimization and Governance Standards 22:36 Sick Care vs. Well Care: Quantifying a 20-35% Drop in Healthcare Costs 26:36 Eliminating Friction: Redesigning Employee Benefits Outside Open Enrollment 32:02 Human-First Design and Why AI Will Disrupt Legacy Companies 33:23 The Pandemic Pivot: Turning a Near-Death Event into Wellhub's Evolution 37:27 Advice to His Younger Self and the Best Time to Start a Company 39:45 Closing Thoughts and Sign-Off Resources: Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Cesar on LinkedInAI Fun FactOn how one good decision made Thomas Otter (venture capitalist at Acadian Ventures) an accidental HR tech pioneer- See why Freshworks was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for ITSM. Learn more → freshworks.com/dant

    408: Cesar Carvalho, CEO of Wellhub: The Risk Isn't AI. It's How Fast You Grow.

  4. Oct 1 ·  Bonus

    SE 30: Todd Barr, CEO at Axonis | Live from Ai4 2026

    Send us Fan Mail Todd Barr is the CEO of Axonis and has spent his career in high growth software infrastructure, living through the shift from Unix to Linux, the rise of DevOps, and the blockchain era before landing in AI. Axonis was built by technical founders with 25 years each in large scale infrastructure across government, defense and intelligence, where sharing the underlying data was never an option.  Recorded live from the floor of Ai4 2026, this lightning round explores why you do not have to centralize your data to start doing AI, and what it takes to make a decision you can defend later. Todd and host Dan Turchin dig into what an auditable decision actually records, how governance can live at the data node instead of the application layer, the distance between collecting sensor data and acting on it, and why Todd believes decisions themselves are about to become a category of data. What You'll Learn Why centralizing your data is not a prerequisite for AI, and how a federated architecture holds up when nodes go offline and come backWhat an auditable decision captures: the data used, the model and its version, the reasoning, and the person who attested to itHow attribute based access control decides what each operator or agent is allowed to see, enforced at the data itselfThe sensor to decision gap, and how a flood management team went from raw readings they could not interpret to acting on them in real timeWhy collecting data and acting on it are two different problems, and what opens up once that distance closesWhat becomes possible once decisions are stored as data, from the cost of each decision to who in the organization decides better🎙️ Part of our Ai4 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19816277   Resources Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Todd on LinkedIn

    SE 30: Todd Barr, CEO at Axonis | Live from Ai4 2026

  5. Sep 28

    407: Daniel Chait, CEO at Greenhouse: Inside the Doom Loop Where AI Screens AI-Written Resumes

    Send us Fan Mail Daniel Chait is the co-founder and CEO of Greenhouse, the industry-leading hiring software platform designed to help enterprise organizations build fair, structured, and effective recruiting processes. He has been a technology entrepreneur in New York for more than 20 years. He started Greenhouse about 15 years ago on a simple conviction: companies that follow structured hiring practices get better results, and job seekers deserve a process that is fair and transparent. Today he is leading the company through a reinvention for the AI era, including the acquisition of Ezra AI Labs to bring transparent, conversational AI tools to job seekers and hiring teams alike.  In this episode, Daniel draws on two decades of building companies where every hire lands directly on the bottom line to ask what candidates and employers both need answered: can AI make hiring more human when it is already making it feel less so? In this conversation, we discuss: Why candidates and employers using AI at the same time is creating a doom loop that shuts real humans out.Why AI-led interviews worry so many job seekers, and what it takes for a conversation with an AI to feel fair.Why using AI to automatically reject most applicants is tempting, and why Greenhouse said no to itWhy AI-polished resumes are making every candidate look the same, and how hiring can move beyond the resume.How AI can replicate human bias at light speed, and why Daniel says no vendor should ask you to take their word for it.What Daniel tells anxious workers, from new grads to senior leaders, about disruption, opportunity, and reinventing a career with AI. Explore the Conversation 0:00 Welcome Back and This Week's AI Fun Fact 4:48 Meet Daniel Chait, Co-Founder and CEO of Greenhouse 7:55 From a Soulless Consulting Job to Founding a Company 10:43 Reinventing the Applicant Tracking System 15:23 How AI Has Already Reshaped Hiring and Job Seeking 21:11 What the Candid AI Interview Report Reveals About Trust 24:25 Why Auto-Rejecting Candidates With AI Backfires 26:08 Sorting Through the Flood of AI-Generated Applications 30:46 Confronting Bias in AI-Powered Hiring Tools 36:46 Reframing AI Anxiety Into Opportunity 40:11 Time Capsule: Advice to His Younger Self 42:14 Where to Find Greenhouse and Closing Thoughts Resources Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Daniel on LinkedInAI fun fact articleOn How Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, is exploring whether decentralized AI can fix banking, crypto, and the future of finance

    407: Daniel Chait, CEO at Greenhouse: Inside the Doom Loop Where AI Screens AI-Written Resumes

  6. Sep 24 ·  Bonus

    SE 29: Andrew Rabinovich, former Upwork CTO | Live from Ai4 2026

    Send us Fan Mail Andrew Rabinovich is the former CTO of Upwork and has spent 25 years in machine learning and computer vision, long before AI was fashionable. After a PhD in computer vision at UCSD, he worked at Google. He then spent five years at Magic Leap building mixed reality devices before founding Headroom, a video conferencing company that Upwork acquired.  Recorded live from the floor of Ai4 2026 in August, this lightning round explores what happens when you actually measure how much of a real job an AI agent can finish. Andrew and host Dan Turchin dig into Upwork's shift from a matching marketplace to a work delivery platform, the meta agent that breaks a job into atomic units of work, how the platform proves a freelancer is human, and more.  What You'll Learn How Upwork is evolving from a matchmaking marketplace into a work operating system, and how its meta agent decomposes a single job into atomic units of workWhat Upwork's AI productivity index revealed when agents were tested against real jobs already completed by human freelancersWhy every agent on the platform is paired with a human expert, and how that pairing changes both the speed and the quality of the resultHow proof of humanness works in practice, from identity verification to AI video interviews, and what happens when the system gets it wrongWhy agents may soon become the demand side of the marketplace, calling human experts in real time to verify what they cannot 🎙️ Part of our Ai4 2026 compilation series.  Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19816277  Resources Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Andrew on LinkedIn

    SE 29: Andrew Rabinovich, former Upwork CTO | Live from Ai4 2026

  7. Sep 21

    406: Mahe Bayireddi, CEO of Phenom: AI May Be Replacing Your Job Right Now, But Not the One You'll Have Next

    Send us Fan Mail Mahe Bayireddi is the CEO and co-founder of Phenom, the global HR technology platform he launched in 2011 with the mission to help a billion people find the right job.  Under his leadership, Phenom has raised over $160 million, achieved unicorn status, and consistently ranked among the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing private companies. A serial entrepreneur with a deep technical foundation, Mahe previously co-founded SnipSnap and Bijol Health. He holds BE and MS degrees in computer science. In this episode, Mahe sits down with Dan Turchin to unpack why "AI is taking your job" is the wrong framing, and why the real question is where you sit, what you do, and how deeply you understand the business around you. In this conversation, we discuss: Why replacing jobs and replacing the job you'll have tomorrow are two very different things, and why irreplaceability comes down to understanding the business, not just being intelligent.Why raw machine intelligence falls short in enterprise HR, and why true workforce alignment requires AI systems built on deep business understanding.How culture, structure, and strategy form a company's "organizational DNA," and why most companies fail at execution, not strategy.How a five-dimensional rubric of talent zones, industries, roles, locations, and culture creates hyperpersonalized workflows instead of one-size-fits-all automation.Why frontline workers and specialized knowledge practitioners experience AI as an amplifier of capability rather than a displacement force.What enduring over 100 venture capital rejections teaches founders about developing "cockroach" resilience and leading through persistent industry skepticism. Explore the Conversation 00:00 Intro & AI Fun Fact 04:27 Meet Mahe Bayireddi, Phenom CEO 06:36 AI Is Your Ally, Not Enemy 09:29 What Hiring Got Wrong 10:43 Culture as Organizational DNA 12:26 Why Agent Interviews Won't Scale 16:47 Bias and AI Responsibility 19:00 Fraud Agents by Region 24:23 Frontline vs. Desk-Based AI 28:53 A Billion People, Right Jobs 31:24 Lessons From the Founder Journey 33:01 100 Rejections, One Cockroach 35:39 Where to Find Mahe and Phenom Resources: Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Mahe on LinkedInAI fun fact articleOn using AI to make hiring more fair and eliminate human bias

    406: Mahe Bayireddi, CEO of Phenom: AI May Be Replacing Your Job Right Now, But Not the One You'll Have Next

  8. Sep 17 ·  Bonus

    SE 28: They Might Be Agentic, But We Have Agency: Leaders from Upwork, Axonis, and John Hancock on Where the Human Belongs | Live from Ai4 2026

    Send us Fan Mail Walk the floor at an event like Ai4 and most of the conversation is about what machines can now do on their own. The question that kept surfacing in our conversations was quieter, and harder: where do humans belong when machines can think? In this special compilation episode of AI and the Future of Work, we bring you three conversations recorded live at Ai4 2026 in Las Vegas. This is the first episode of our four-part Ai4 series. A talent marketplace, a data infrastructure company, and a 164 year old life insurer. Three businesses that could not be more different, and three leaders who arrived at the same answer from opposite directions.  What connects them is not caution about automation. All three are automating serious amounts of work. What they share is that the requirement was built in on purpose, because the outcome depends on someone being answerable for it. Featured Guests Andrew Rabinovich, former Upwork Chief Technology Officer. Full conversation: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19855791Todd Barr, CEO at Axonis. Full conversation: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19890804Kartik Sakthivel, Chief Information Officer at John Hancock. Full conversation: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19925796 What You'll Learn What happens when you measure how much of a real job an agent can actually finish, and why that number should change what you let it do unsupervisedThe one line in hiring that should never be crossed, no matter how capable the technology becomesWhere human agency actually lives once the work itself is handed off, and why how it gets done may matter less than we assumeWhy collecting data and acting on it are two different problems, and what opens up once that distance closesThe question worth asking before any AI project starts, and why the answer is sometimes something far simpler than AIWhat to say to someone watching a machine learn to do the thing that made them valuable, and where the time that comes back should go Inspired by something you heard in this episode? Share your favorite insight about where people belong in the systems we are building, 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. Other special episodes: SE 26: Designing AI for Accountability and Harmony with Leaders from Honeycomb, FieldAI, Archetype AI, and Zoom (Live from HumanX 2026 Special Episode)SE 27: AI and the Next Generation: What We Can Learn from Them (International Youth Day Special Episode)SE 19: AI and Education: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Learning (International Day of Education Special Episode)Lessons from Four Unicorn CEOs Disrupting Massive Markets with AI (Special Episode)Ethical AI in Hiring: How to Stay Compliant While Building a Fairer Future of Work (HR Day Special Episode)AI and Safety: How Responsible Tech Leaders Build Trustworthy Systems (National Safety Month Special)Lessons from Leaders: How AI Is Redefining Work and the Human Experience (Labor Day Special Episode)

    SE 28: They Might Be Agentic, But We Have Agency: Leaders from Upwork, Axonis, and John Hancock on Where the Human Belongs | Live from Ai4 2026
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🏆 Ranked #3, Best Tech Podcasts — Million Podcasts (2026) | Top 1% global podcast. 450+ episodes. 10M+ downloads. 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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