AI Master Group

Shawn is the Global VP of Solutions at FirstHive, which is a customer data platform. Prior to that, he held senior leadership roles at Capgemini, Silicon Valley Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Clorox, Northwestern Mutual and SC Johnson. He is also an advisory board member of the Customer Data Platform (CDP) Institute.

In this conversation, Shawn describes various roadblocks to transformation in large organizations – especially AI-based initiatives in marketing. He then shares an agentic vision for a future-state where a marketing operations user might simply say: "I want to grow my credit card business by 20% in the US. What should I do?" and the platform would develop a plan for that.

Jodi is the VP of Data Science at Cox Automotive, a company that has a diverse portfolio of 17 brands that encompass digital products like Kelley Blue Book and Autotrader, as well as various kinds of physical services – all of which are supported by about 70 in-house data scientists and ML engineers.

In this conversation, Jodi describes her AI initiatives as investments, managed in a way that's similar to a diversified investment portfolio, where the core projects deliver a baseline of ROI, and are supplemented by strategic bets, plus a very small fraction of high-risk / high-reward projects ("moonshots") that get a Yes/No decision within 4-6 weeks. The show also includes a discussion about what makes a Gen AI project strategic vs "must have," as well as insights about the practical and human challenges associated with the kinds of AI-based initiatives that primarily target efficiency gains, rather than top-line growth.

Ramsu holds a PhD in Machine Learning, and is the Head of R&D at solus.ai, which powers Segment of One personalization. Roles prior to that included Senior Scientist at GE Global Research, and Principal at Sabre Airline Solutions, where he developed some of the original algorithms.

Ramsu shares highlights of his journey in AI, with particular focus on personalization in marketing, with insights about how to think about that problem conceptually, including what parts are somewhat easy and which are difficult or tedious. There are also key insights about customer journeys and about the cold start problem. Other topics covered include customer genomes, as well as a discussion about navigating between decisions taken at a zoomed-in perspective at the individual customer record level, while also managing to a zoomed-out perspective that's driven by KPIs, comps and annual targets. The show concludes with a discussion about the 1-2 year product development roadmap for solus.

This inaugural episode features a very special guest: My father! . . . better known to the rest of the world as G. Edward Griffin, historian, futurist and author of The Creature from Jekyll Island, which sold more than a million copies.

Mr. Griffin would be the first one to point out that he's not an expert on AI, but this episode nonetheless found an area of intersection between his life work and artificial intelligence.

The show features a thought-provoking discussion about the guardrails that are being erected to ensure that Generative AI does not say "the wrong things." A conversation ensues about the dangers of creating software that systematically imposes a filtered version of the truth on others, as compared to a world where individuals are able to gain free access to opposing views (including unpopular ones), and to decide for themselves what the truth is.

The AI Master Group podcast with Jim Griffin is a place to meet the people who are creating the future of AI in their work today, featuring authors of recent papers, or people working with machine learning and AI in real-world applications. If you want a front row seat to the technology and craft of AI, you're in the right place.