Still Human: Real Talk in the Age of AI

Nadia Koski
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AI is rewriting how we work, how we build,  who benefits, and who gets left behind in the process. We've been told AI is the great equalizer. The data says otherwise. Still Human: Real Talk in the Age of AI is the podcast that goes inside the rooms where the future is being built and asks the questions nobody's asking on stage and puts the raw conversations on record. Host Nadia Koski is a marketing and brand strategist as well as podcast network producer, with over a decade in media, content innovation, and advertising technology. Every other week she sits down with the builders, leaders and thinkers navigating this moment: CEOs and startup founders, data scientists and creative directors, NGO leaders, engineers and entrepreneurs doing remarkable things across every time zone. The conversations are candid, unscripted and go behind-the-scenes on what we're really doing with AI. Nadia gets under every guest's skin, the mental blocks, the habits, the stories they had to unlearn to get where they are today. The question underneath all of it: what does it actually take to stay human while the world rewrites itself around you?

  1. 6d ago

    I Hated Data, Now I Run a Wildly Successful Business on It with Lena Schlegel

    Lena Schlegel founded seadster, a Google Ads agency for e-commerce brands, when she was 23. Five and a half years later, the agency manages more than €12 million a year in ad spend for brands like Störtebekker and Picard. She has worked in Google Ads for nine years, long enough to remember typing in every keyword and setting every bid by hand. Lena and Nadia met on the Austrian ski slopes, and this conversation has been a year in the making. Yay! It's finally here! Lena starts with a confession: she hated data. At school, she was the creative one, steered toward music and art. Numbers felt like formulas with nothing behind them; however, studying business administration changed that. Suddenly the numbers were building something real. Google Ads became her place because it rewards a creative idea only after the data proves it works. Then they get into the "RIP Google Ads agencies" posts flooding LinkedIn. Lena isn't buying it. The real problem in most accounts she audits is still tracking. Some truth bombs were dropped. Lena also shares early numbers from something few agencies have tried yet: a ChatGPT ads pilot with five clients, three weeks in. Tune in for her feedback. From there, the conversation turns to agentic shopping and what happens when an agent shops for you. And finally, Nadia and Lena get into what it’s like being a woman in a loud, male-dominated industry. Lena shares her experience and hiring tips. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why Google Ads agencies aren't dying, and what the job looks like once the AI does the bidding - The tracking mistake that turns a 20% purchase rate into a fake 10x ROAS, and the one report to check in your own account - Why you should never trust revenue reported inside a single ad platform - Early ChatGPT ads results - How AI Max campaigns put brands inside Google's AI Overviews - Why agentic shopping turns into a price war, and how small brands protect themselves - As a founder, how to show up as your authentic self without burning out Connect with Lena Schlegel on LinkedIn  Learn more about seadster  Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed. Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc Cover art: Adam Richarson Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi

    I Hated Data, Now I Run a Wildly Successful Business on It with Lena Schlegel

  2. Oct 21

    4 Key Trends from DMEXCO & Live From the Floor with Bastian Schlochtermeyer

    40,000 people. 17 stages. One motto on every wall: Scaling Intelligence. Host Nadia Koski came home from DMEXCO 2026 in Cologne with a different read — everybody at that fair was scaling infrastructure, and almost nobody was scaling trust. In this recap, she walks through the four things people were actually debating on the floor, from Markus Caspari’s line that 99% of today’s AI commerce isn’t truly agentic, to the most AI-saturated year this fair has had, crowning “The Return of Experience” as its winning trend.  Then she unpacks both stages she was on. On the Innovation Stage, "Sovereign by Design, where The Marketeer Group and Kantar released The Trust Premium, new EU5 research showing women have nearly closed the usage gap on AI but sit ten points behind on confidence, and that “tested to work fairly” outsells “built in Europe.”  And at the Microsoft Advertising booth, the panel discussion "More Voices. Smarter AI", moved the question from whether women use AI to whether they are in decision-making roles and how to fix it when they're not. Then straight onto the floor. Bastian Schlochtermeyer, Co-Founder and Managing Director of SWNXT, signs his LinkedIn posts “Human Written” and runs an agency building AI and CGI content engines. Basti and Nadia get into where he draws that line, why he believes outstanding creativity stays human while mediocre work gets automated, what German clients are really asking when they ask where the servers are, and the one thing he will never hand over to an AI. LINKS & RECS Download the research study, "The Trust Premium," exploring consumer trust in AI across EU5 by Kantar and The Marketeer Group Check out "NEXT! with - The Pulse" interviews on the MMA DACH's Linkedin page Connect with Bastian Schlochtermeyer on LinkedIn Learn more about SWNXT Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed. Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc Cover art: Adam Richarson Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi

    4 Key Trends from DMEXCO & Live From the Floor with Bastian Schlochtermeyer

  3. Oct 8

    Go Pick Up Your Damn Kids So We Can Play With Claude: Musings with Malin Frithiofsson

    Malin Frithiofsson is Founder and CEO of Daya Ventures, the world's first FemTech venture studio, out of Gothenburg with a second hub in Kenya. She writes for Sifted, invests as an angel, and runs an investing community called One of the Girls Has Money Now. Malin and Nadia open up the conversation on the piece that started it. An article had argued that women were missing the AI train; Malin's response, written out of frustration and a little spite, flipped the premise. Nobody is missing anything. The question nobody asked was whether women were ever given a chance to catch it. Her evidence is time. She points to the Nordic data on unpaid labour, and to her own house, where her husband has the technical background, and she is further ahead on AI for one reason: she isn't the one doing the pickups, the dentist appointments, the play dates. Her line for the people selling women discounted AI courses is unprintable and perfect. They get into why Daya does not wait for a pitch deck but rather starts with a problem in women's health — endometriosis, birth injuries, autoimmune disease — and puts researchers, clinicians, and patient advocacy groups in the same room for two or three months before anyone writes code. They also get honest about AI productivity, when it's actually useful and where it can help startups in the budget-strapped go-to-market period. The conversation shifts to the dark side of AI deepfakes and how Malin deals with men who have way too much time on their hands. She closes on what AI will never be able to absorb. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why the AI adoption gap is a time-poverty problem before it's an ambition or skills problem - What Sweden's parental leave data reveals about how we justify the same outcome every time - Why investors are statistically correct to price women as higher risk — and why that is the indictment - How Daya builds companies before it finds founders, and why it keeps only 15% - Why first-generation femtech stalled, and what B2B and B2G change about it - What AI collapsed from two weeks to twenty minutes inside a venture studio - How syndicating with 250 other women turns a €10K minimum angel ticket into something you can actually try Connect with Malin Frithiofsson LinkedIn: Malin Frithiofsson · Daya Ventures · One of the Girls Has Money Now Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed. Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc Cover art: Adam Richarson Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi

    Go Pick Up Your Damn Kids So We Can Play With Claude: Musings with Malin Frithiofsson

  4. Sep 22

    Your Brain Is in Threat Mode. It's Costing You Your Best Thinking with Claire Koryczan

    Claire Koryczan is the founder of Imagine Beyond and has spent twenty-five years working with FTSE 100s, Fortune 500s and scale-ups. She trained as a coach after a decade in the creative industries, and she builds her leadership work on neuroscience, including her own Neuroscience Leadership Model. Claire and Nadia open with the thing most change management plans miss. The brain is a prediction machine; it wants certainty because certainty conserves energy. Sustained uncertainty keeps people in a threat response, mobilized for fight, flight or freeze, which makes it physically harder to access the prefrontal cortex, where critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity live. So the exact capacities every organization is asking people to bring to AI are the ones uncertainty switches off. Claire's point to managers is blunt: what you are reading as apathy or resistance is biology, and change is biological before it's rational. They get into what Claire would say differently if she gave her women-in-leadership keynote again today. The irony she keeps returning to is that these systems were deliberately designed to respond with empathy, warmth, and emotional intelligence — the same qualities women have spent careers being told to tone down in exchange for being more assertive. Claire also gives the first move for anyone frozen by overwhelm. She and Nadia talk about what gets lost when connection goes fully digital, why these platforms quietly reinforce individualism while recognition from a manager remains the top motivator at work, as well as the thesis of the book Claire is writing: the entrepreneurial mindset is innate to all of us, and curiosity is the bridge that carries you from fear into possibility. In this episode, you'll learn: Why change is biological before it's rational, and what managers misread as resistanceHow sustained uncertainty shuts down the exact thinking AI adoption requiresThe irony of AI being built with the emotional skills women were told to suppressThe 44% non-promotable work stat, and why that work retains your best talentA two-step move for overwhelm: the paper brain dump, then one specific promptWhat we lose when technology owns the emotional relationship with the individualConnect with Claire Koryczan on LinkedIn · Imagine Beyond Download Claire's whitepaper: "Women In Leadership: From Adaptation To Advantage, Women Are Transforming Tomorrow’s Leadership" Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed. Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc Cover art: Adam Richarson Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi

    Your Brain Is in Threat Mode. It's Costing You Your Best Thinking with Claire Koryczan

  5. Sep 15

    Everything Is Hackable. Here's What You Need To Do About It with Sunaina Aytan

    Sunaina Aytan is the AI Security Lead at BAE Systems and a UN Women UK delegate. She started her career as an ethical hacker, paid to break into companies' systems so they could find out what was broken before someone else did. She describes the job simply: cybersecurity people are the police of the internet. Sunaina and Nadia start with the room she walked into on day one of her graduate role, which was all men. Her first thought was, "Why did nobody tell me?" Her second was that nobody was obliged to. She talks about choosing education over defensiveness and why that patience eventually paid off when the same colleagues started calling out the bias themselves. She is direct about the quieter version of the problem: the industry recruits women in on the promise of "soft skills," then boxes them out of the engineering and development rooms where the products actually get built and questioned. Then the conversation gets practical. Everything is hackable. She and Nadia get into Meta's recent release that lets anyone generate AI images from a public Instagram profile without consent, why regulation will always run behind the frontier labs, and the uncomfortable question of whose moral compass we are trusting — the labs or the governments. Her two non-negotiables for anyone using AI: toggle off model training on your data, and never use a chatbot as your therapist. There is no legal privilege protecting what you type into it, and it is telling you what you want to hear. She closes with the tools most people have never heard of — Stop NCII for image-based abuse, MFA as the bare minimum, and the case for keeping cash in the house. Connect with Sunaina on LinkedIn. Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed. Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc Cover art: Adam Richarson Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi

    Everything Is Hackable. Here's What You Need To Do About It with Sunaina Aytan

  6. Aug 21

    Why You're Burned Out From AI You Haven't Even Used Yet with Joe Van Brussel

    Joe Van Brussel, writer and philosopher, has been inside the largest publishers and media companies like the New York Times, the Washington Post, HuffPost, and Verizon. He writes a brilliant Substack that asks the question most companies skip: why are we using AI, and what happens to us if we don't think it through?  Joe and Nadia get into where AI sits in the creative, content, and legacy media sectors. They unpack the realities of AI pre-burnout, the exhaustion that hits before anyone's even lost a job, and AI demoralization, the deeper loss of belief in developing skills AI might replace tomorrow. Both, Joe argues, come from companies handing people powerful tools with zero context. He also makes the case against outsourcing research to AI: skipping the messy, first-hand digging quietly strips the originality out of your thinking, and self-expression, not just output, is the human skill most at risk of atrophy. They dig into legacy media, where some agencies are now getting client contracts that explicitly say no AI, at all - a sign of a growing market willing to pay for guaranteed human work. And on AGI, Joe offers a reality check: panic about an overnight "inflection point" ignores real constraints, compute, power, data centers, human demand. That will keep this rollout slower and messier than the headlines suggest. It's a conversation about staying intentional in a moment that rewards speed over thought, and what Joe hopes to pass to his own daughter: not AI-proof skills, but the curiosity that makes learning worth it in the first place. Connect with Joe on LinkedIn Follow Joe’s Substack. LISTEN RECS: Diary of a CEO episode with Daniel Kokotajilo "OpenAI Whistleblower Finally Speaks. AI has a 70% Chance of Going..." Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed. Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc Cover art: Adam Richarson Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi

    Why You're Burned Out From AI You Haven't Even Used Yet with Joe Van Brussel

  7. Aug 4

    The Trust Problem with AI in Healthcare (and Why Your Expertise Isn't Getting Cheaper) with Katie Langdon

    Katie Langdon, Founder and Creative Director of Skin and Blister, a UK healthcare communications agency she co-founded with her sister Fiona, marking ten years in business this year, joins Nadia Koski to talk trust, expertise, and what generative AI is doing to healthcare communications. Katie and Nadia dig into where trust actually breaks down when AI enters the picture: not when a human creative uses it, but upstream — in platforms built fast, without medical input or clinical guardrails. They also get into the fight over what expertise is worth when clients assume AI should mean lower rates. Katie's take: AI doesn't erase twenty years of experience, it just makes people forget to pay for it. The conversation ranges into creative originality in an AI-saturated landscape, building a fully remote team years before it was trendy, and why the human element in health may be more irreplaceable than in almost any other industry. Katie closes with her three-year vision for Skin and Blister — one aimed at making healthcare conversations less taboo and more human, everywhere. Connect with Katie on LinkedIn Follow Skin & Blister on LinkedIn Learn more about Skin and Blister Healthcare Communications Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed. Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc Cover art: Adam Richarson Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi

    The Trust Problem with AI in Healthcare (and Why Your Expertise Isn't Getting Cheaper) with Katie Langdon

  8. Jul 21

    The AI Secret Nobody in Your Office Will Admit with Judit Szekeres

    Sixty percent of the CEOs, MDs, and founders in the room didn't have a functioning AI strategy. Six months later, Judit Szekeres says the needle has barely moved. So what's actually holding businesses back and what do they need to do right now? It isn't a lack of interest. It's overwhelm. Judit Szekeres is the Founder of Swell AI, an AI consultant and trainer who spent twenty years inside the agency world before stepping out to help businesses build real, human-first AI capability. Budapest-born and London-based, she brings a change manager's lens to a conversation that's usually all hype. In this episode, Judit gets into why AI has no finish line and why letting go of perfection is step one, the layers most companies skip — business strategy, then data, then AI — and why "garbage in, garbage out" trips so many up. She makes the case for adopting AI together rather than alone, shares the cultural fault lines she sees between the US, Europe, and Asia, and opens up about the gender problem in both AI and agencies, and the Women in Agencies partnership she launched to help close it. Her advice for the overwhelmed? Roll up your sleeves, start using it, get your guardrails in order, and remember… you can't break it. Learn more about Judit's work: swell-ai.co.uk Connect with Judit on LinkedIn: Judit Szekeres Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed. Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc Cover art: Adam Richarson Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi

    The AI Secret Nobody in Your Office Will Admit with Judit Szekeres
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AI is rewriting how we work, how we build,  who benefits, and who gets left behind in the process. We've been told AI is the great equalizer. The data says otherwise. Still Human: Real Talk in the Age of AI is the podcast that goes inside the rooms where the future is being built and asks the questions nobody's asking on stage and puts the raw conversations on record. Host Nadia Koski is a marketing and brand strategist as well as podcast network producer, with over a decade in media, content innovation, and advertising technology. Every other week she sits down with the builders, leaders and thinkers navigating this moment: CEOs and startup founders, data scientists and creative directors, NGO leaders, engineers and entrepreneurs doing remarkable things across every time zone. The conversations are candid, unscripted and go behind-the-scenes on what we're really doing with AI. Nadia gets under every guest's skin, the mental blocks, the habits, the stories they had to unlearn to get where they are today. The question underneath all of it: what does it actually take to stay human while the world rewrites itself around you?

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