Me, Myself, and AI

A former startup employee herself, Shilpa Prasad knows the level of commitment and effort required to begin a new venture. That’s what led her to join LG Nova, electronics manufacturer LG’s innovation incubator, as an entrepreneur in residence. In her role, Shilpa identifies promising startups — particularly those working with AI — and coaches and nurtures entrepreneurs while keeping a close eye on the products that might one day find their way into LG’s ecosystem.

On this episode, Shilpa explains how keeping a finger on the pulse of startups helps LG Electronics stay open to innovation and new business opportunities. She also discusses why artificial intelligence is at the forefront of her work with startups, and the promising future she sees for using augmented reality and AI technologies to change how skills training is delivered. Read the episode transcript here.

Guest bio:

Shilpa Prasad is an experienced leader in the startup ecosystem with a strong passion for entrepreneurship and corporate startup engagement/innovation. She brings over 15 years of global experience in corporate startup strategy and venture-building to her role as entrepreneur in residence at LG Nova, where she is helping the company identify market trends and build partnerships. 

Prasad has been instrumental in driving innovation for various open innovation projects across corporations, governments, and accelerators and in establishing new partnerships across the global startup ecosystem. An experienced founder, she has also contributed her time to mentoring and advising startups.

Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger.

Stay in touch with us by joining our LinkedIn group, AI for Leaders at mitsmr.com/AIforLeaders or by following Me, Myself, and AI on LinkedIn.

We encourage you to rate and review our show. Your comments may be used in Me, Myself, and AI materials.

Starting a career with the ambition of becoming a medical doctor and ending up a technical leader for a major automaker might seem an unlikely path, but for Anders Sjögren, who leads data and AI innovation projects for Volvo Cars, it was a perfect trajectory.

On this episode, Anders joins Sam and Shervin to explain the ways the carmaker uses data and artificial intelligence to inform manufacturing — ensuring that parts are made consistently and as efficiently as possible — as well as driver experience and safety. He also outlines some specific ways smart technology keeps drivers alert and aware of conditions around them and describes Volvo’s approach to technology-driven innovation. Read the episode transcript here.

Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger.

Stay in touch with us by joining our LinkedIn group, AI for Leaders at mitsmr.com/AIforLeaders or by following Me, Myself, and AI on LinkedIn.

Guest bio:

Anders Sjögren is senior technical leader for Volvo Cars. He focuses on strategy, research, innovation, and transformation, with the key objective of ensuring that the automaker understands and executes within the continuously emerging areas of data, analytics, and artificial intelligence. Application areas include creating AI-enabled intelligent customer functionality and using AI to reform Volvo’s operations and development activities. Sjögren has an academic background in mathematical statistics (large-scale and computational aspects) and an industrial background in data-centric methods development and software product development.

We encourage you to rate and review our show. Your comments may be used in Me, Myself, and AI materials.

At Amnesty Tech, a division of human rights organization Amnesty International, Damini Satija and Matt Mahmoudi leverage their expertise in technology and public policy to examine the use of AI in the public sector and its impact on citizens worldwide.

In Part 1 of Matt and Damini’s conversation with Sam and Shervin, they described scenarios in which AI tools can put human rights at risk and how their work is helping to expose those risks and protect people from the technology’s misuse. In this episode, they resume their conversation and dig deeper into the ways AI regulations can limit the negative use of AI at scale. Matt and Damini also caution us about what a dystopian future might hold and point to specific ways leaders in the corporate world can help limit the harms of AI. Read this episode's transcript here.

Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger.

Stay in touch with us by joining our LinkedIn group, AI for Leaders at mitsmr.com/AIforLeaders or by following Me, Myself, and AI on LinkedIn.

Guest bios:

Matt Mahmoudi is a lecturer, researcher, and organizer. He’s been leading Amnesty International’s research and advocacy efforts on banning facial recognition technologies and exposing their uses against racialized communities, from New York City to the occupied Palestinian territories. He was the inaugural recipient of the Jo Cox Ph.D. scholarship at the University of Cambridge, where he studied digital urban infrastructures as new frontiers for racial capitalism and remains an affiliated lecturer in sociology. His work has appeared in the journals The Sociological Review and International Political Sociology and the book Digital Witness (Oxford University Press, 2020). His forthcoming book is Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Control (University of California Press, 2023).

Damini Satija is a human rights and public policy expert working on data and artificial intelligence, with a focus on algorithmic discrimination, welfare automation, government surveillance, and tech equity. She is head of the Algorithmic Accountability Lab and a deputy director at Amnesty Tech. She previously worked as an adviser to the U.K. government on data and AI ethics and represented the U.K. as a policy expert on AI and human rights at the Council of Europe. She has a master’s degree in public administration from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

We encourage you to rate and review our show. Your comments may be used in Me, Myself, and AI materials.

Amnesty International brings together more than 10 million staff members and volunteers worldwide to advocate for social justice. Damini Satija and Matt Mahmoudi work with Amnesty Tech, a division of the human rights organization that focuses on the role of government, Big Tech, and technologies like artificial intelligence in areas like surveillance, discrimination, and bias.

On this episode, Matt and Damini join Sam and Shervin to highlight scenarios in which AI tools can put human rights at risk, such as when governments and public-sector agencies use facial recognition systems to track social activists or algorithms to make automated decisions about public housing access and child welfare. Damini and Matt caution that AI technology cannot fix human problems like bias, discrimination, and inequality; that will take human intervention and changes to public policy. Read the episode transcript here.

For more on what organizations can do to combat the unintended negative consequences arising from the use of automated technologies, tune in to our next episode, Part 2 of our conversation with Matt and Damini, airing September 13, 2023.

Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger.

Stay in touch with us by joining our LinkedIn group, AI for Leaders at mitsmr.com/AIforLeaders or by following Me, Myself, and AI on LinkedIn.

Guest bios:

Matt Mahmoudi is a lecturer, researcher, and organizer. He’s been leading Amnesty International’s research and advocacy efforts on banning facial recognition technologies and exposing their uses against racialized communities, from New York City to the occupied Palestinian territories. He was the inaugural recipient of the Jo Cox Ph.D. scholarship at the University of Cambridge, where he studied digital urban infrastructures as new frontiers for racial capitalism and remains an affiliated lecturer in sociology. His work has appeared in the journals The Sociological Review and International Political Sociology and the book Digital Witness (Oxford University Press, 2020). His forthcoming book is Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Control (University of California Press, 2023).

Damini Satija is a human rights and public policy expert working on data and artificial intelligence, with a focus on algorithmic discrimination, welfare automation, government surveillance, and tech equity. She is head of the Algorithmic Accountability Lab and a deputy director at Amnesty Tech. She previously worked as an adviser to the U.K. government on data and AI ethics and represented the U.K. as a policy expert on AI and human rights at the Council of Europe. She has a master’s degree in public administration from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

We encourage you to rate and review our show. Your comments may be used in Me, Myself, and AI materials.

Jeremy King leads a team of 1,400 passionate engineers working on the continuous improvement of Pinterest’s image-driven platform. With a background that includes heading up a translation team at eBay and overseeing the technology behind Walmart’s U.S. retail stores and e-commerce business, Jeremy is now responsible for technology operations at Pinterest. To support the company’s mission to inspire people to “create a life that they love,” he and his team rely on advanced AI, machine learning, and a graph database to index and build a network of images so users can find inspiration — particularly when they aren’t completely sure what they’re looking for.

On this episode, Jeremy joins Sam and Shervin to talk about some recent advances Pinterest has made in the image-recognition space and shares his views on how generative AI will transform image-based content like Pinterest’s. Read the episode transcript here.

Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger.

Stay in touch with us by joining our LinkedIn group, AI for Leaders at mitsmr.com/AIforLeaders or by following Me, Myself, and AI on LinkedIn.

Guest bio:

Jeremy King is senior vice president of technology at Pinterest, where he leads the company’s technical vision and the engineering organization responsible for building and scaling a visual discovery engine.

Before joining Pinterest, he was CTO and senior vice president at Walmart, where he led the team responsible for the technology behind U.S. retail stores and e-commerce for Walmart and Jet, and oversaw customer, merchant, and supply chain technologies across cloud and data platforms. King has also held executive-level technology roles at Walmart Labs, LiveOps, and eBay.

We encourage you to rate and review our show. Your comments may be used in Me, Myself, and AI materials.

When Zan Gilani came to the U.S. from Pakistan to complete his undergraduate studies, he chose to study Chinese because it was rumored to be a difficult language. At the time, the tech industry was booming, and he quickly became interested in applying his passion for foreign languages and learning more generally in a technology-rich environment.

Those interests led Zan to Duolingo, where he has been working in product management for eight years and now oversees the app company’s experiential AI team. What excites him about working at the language-learning app company is his ability to help build solutions that enable personalized education at scale: The app boasts over 16 million daily active users, and AI-driven functionality motivates them through frequent notifications, personalizes learning experiences by adjusting the difficulty of questions in practice sessions, and observes and critiques learners’ performance.

Zan joins our podcast to outline the specific ways Duolingo uses AI and machine learning to drive user engagement, and discuss how the technology can be used to support learning more generally. Read the episode transcript here.

Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger.

Stay in touch with us by joining our LinkedIn group, AI for Leaders at mitsmr.com/AIforLeaders or by following Me, Myself, and AI on LinkedIn.

Guest bio:

Zan Gilani is a principal product manager at Duolingo. For the past eight years, he has helped grow the company’s learner base from 3 million to 16 million daily active users by working on retention, acquisition, growth in Asia, gamification, and the new-user experience.

He currently leads Duolingo’s Experimental AI team, which uses generative AI to build features that teach learners more effectively. More broadly, Gilani is working on setting Duolingo up for success using generative AI, through external partnerships and internal education.

Gilani grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, and is currently based in New York City. He has bachelor’s degrees in political science and East Asian studies from Columbia University.

We encourage you to rate and review our show. Your comments may be used in Me, Myself, and AI materials.

Naba Banerjee’s identity as a “forever learner” led to her become the first female engineer in her family. That curiosity has informed her career choices as well, leading her to companies as varied as Tata, Cognizent, Walmart, and AAA. Now, as director of trust product and operations at vacation rental platform Airbnb, she is continuing let her curiosity be her guide as she applies her previous data science experience to the travel industry. On this episode, Naba joins Shervin and Sam to talk abouthow she and her team use AI and machine learning to increase the safety of the guests and hosts who use Airbnb’s platform. She also discusses collaboration between humans and machines and the importance of recognizing that neither is an infallible decision maker. Read the episode transcript here.

Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger.

Stay in touch with us by joining our LinkedIn group, AI for Leaders at mitsmr.com/AIforLeaders or by following Me, Myself, and AI on LinkedIn.

Guest bio:

Naba Banerjee is the director of trust product and operations at Airbnb, overseeing the company’s efforts to combat fraud, build trust between hosts and guests, and stop bad actors from using the platform. Her most recent work includes the development of Airbnb’s reservation screening technology, which helps to identify users making potentially high-risk reservations and prevent them from taking advantage of the platform. Banerjee has over two decades of experience building products that deliver innovative, customer-centric solutions. She joined Airbnb after spending 13 years at Walmart.com, where she played an instrumental role in the evolution of product management, including shipping packages to customers more quickly and building mobile apps to enable customers to check out faster.

We encourage you to rate and review our show. Your comments may be used in Me, Myself, and AI materials.

We want to know how you feel about Me, Myself, and AI. Please take a short, two-question survey.

As CEO of Aboitiz Data Innovation, David Hardoon oversees the operations of a technology conglomerate focused on using data science and AI to support its businesses in a range of sectors, including banking, financial services, utilities, agriculture, and construction in Singapore and the Philippines. In his role, David is leading some unexpected — but practical — uses of artificial intelligence, including using voice and image recognition to detect stress in livestock, and analyzing internet-of-things data to reduce waste and CO2 emissions in the cement R&D process.

David joins this episode to discuss the broad scope of the organizations he’s responsible for, the role of AI regulation and governance in helping to spur innovation, humans’ sometimes problematic role in shaping AI outputs, and how a high school detention led to a career in artificial intelligence. Read the episode transcript here.

Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger.

Stay in touch with us by joining our LinkedIn group, AI for Leaders at mitsmr.com/AIforLeaders or by following Me, Myself, and AI on LinkedIn.

Guest bio:

David Hardoon is the CEO of Aboitiz Data Innovation and chief data and AI officer of Union Bank of the Philippines. He is concurrently the chief data and innovation officer of the Aboitiz Group and chief data officer of UnionDigital Bank. Previously, he was the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s first appointed chief data officer and head of the Data Analytics Group, as well as a special adviser on AI. Hardoon has a doctorate in computer science (machine learning) from the University of Southampton and a bachelor’s degree from Royal Holloway, University of London, in computer science and AI.

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We want to know how you feel about Me, Myself, and AI. Please take a short, two-question survey.

When Elizabeth Anne Watkins started her doctoral program, she landed a research role studying journalists’ use of security and privacy technologies — but she found the security tools confusing and difficult to use. Today, as a research scientist in the social science of AI at Intel Labs, she advocates for other end users faced with understanding and working with new technologies.

Elizabeth employs social science to understand the concerns of technicians performing complex chip manufacturing processes so that new AI systems will be developed to better serve those human experts. During this process, she also helps the technicians recognize AI’s role as a supporting technology — even a coworker — rather than a human replacement.

She joins this episode to discuss her role as a social scientist working in tech and some of the ways Intel is applying AI technologies like computer vision and natural language processing to improve semiconductor manufacturing processes. Read the episode transcript here.

Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger.

Stay in touch with us by joining our LinkedIn group, AI for Leaders at mitsmr.com/AIforLeaders or by following Me, Myself, and AI on LinkedIn.

Guest bio:

Elizabeth Anne Watkins is a research scientist in the Social Science of Artificial Intelligence at Intel Labs and a member of Intel’s Responsible AI Advisory Council, where she applies social science methods to amplify human potential in human-AI collaboration. Her research on the design, deployment, and governance of AI tools has been published in leading academic journals and has been featured in Wired, MIT Technology Review, and Harvard Business Review. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and has a doctorate from Columbia University and a master’s degree from MI

We encourage you to rate and review our show. Your comments may be used in Me, Myself, and AI materials.

We want to know how you feel about Me, Myself, and AI. Please take a short, two-question survey.

Hina Dixit’s interest in supporting people and solving problems has its roots in her family’s call office business, where she helped people place telephone calls when she was growing up in India. Later, after earning her bachelor’s degree in computer science, she was quickly recruited into the tech space, where her problem-solving and customer service skills have served her well as both a software engineer and tech investor. From a developer role at Symantec, to project leader at Apple, to an AI investor role at Samsung Next, Hina continues to leverage her communication and connection skills in seeking out and supporting innovations in artificial intelligence, as well as robotics, Web3, and other tech sectors.

On this episode, Hina shares the criteria she considers when making investments in new entrepreneurial ventures. She also highlights the focus areas that are of most interest right now, explains why she enjoys mentoring other technologists, and shares her views on what the future of AI looks like. Read the episode transcript here.

Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger.

Stay in touch with us by joining our LinkedIn group, AI for Leaders at mitsmr.com/AIforLeaders or by following Me, Myself, and AI on LinkedIn.

Guest bio:

Naba Banerjee is the director of trust product and operations at Airbnb, overseeing the company’s efforts to combat fraud, build trust between hosts and guests, and stop bad actors from using the platform. Her most recent work includes the development of Airbnb’s reservation screening technology, which helps to identify users making potentially high-risk reservations and prevent them from taking advantage of the platform. Banerjee has over two decades of experience building products that deliver innovative, customer-centric solutions. She joined Airbnb after spending 13 years at Walmart.com, where she played an instrumental role in the evolution of product management, including shipping packages to customers more quickly and building mobile apps to enable customers to check out faster.

We encourage you to rate and review our show. Your comments may be used in Me, Myself, and AI materials.

We want to know how you feel about Me, Myself, and AI. Please take a short, two-question survey.