Me, Myself, and AI

Shelia Anderson parlayed a love of learning into studying the emerging field of engineering when she began her undergraduate education. After gaining experience leading IT teams in the technology, airline, and insurance industries, she joined Aflac in the summer of 2022.

Shelia joins Sam and Shervin to share how using artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate the processing of somewhat routine insurance claims frees up staff members to spend more time serving customers and processing more complex, higher-value claims. She also discusses the types of skills she looks for in data science and engineering talent beyond technical capabilities, and why she believes the insurance industry offers a great opportunity for people interested in a career working with AI and machine learning. 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.

*NEW! For specific takeaways from this episode and guidance on how you can implement them in your own work, download our episode toolkit here.

Guest bio:

Shelia Anderson joined Aflac in July 2022 as senior vice president and CIO. She is responsible for overseeing the company’s digital services division and driving technology strategy in support of the insurer’s U.S. business. Anderson has a rich history as an executive leading the IT functions at Fortune 500 global organizations, including Liberty Mutual, USAA, HP, and Electronic Data Systems.

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

Stephanie Moyerman’s background in cosmology and astrophysics — where she worked with large data sets, looking for a signal among what was mostly noise — prepared her well for a career in data science and ethics. Today, she is the data science director of well-being at Instagram, where she works to enhance trust, safety, and integrity for users of the social media platform.

Stephanie joins Sam and Shervin on this episode to discuss how applying artificial intelligence to social media enables Instagram to detect fraud and abuse at scale to help protect users, as well as the importance of human input in AI feedback loops and the need for more experienced practitioners in the field. 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.

*NEW! For specific takeaways from this episode and guidance on how you can implement them in your own work, download our episode toolkit here.

Guest bio:

Stephanie Moyerman is the data science director of well-being at Instagram, where she works to minimize negative experiences and maximize positive experiences on the platform. Previously, she was the senior director of risk and trust science at eBay and a senior science manager in Amazon’s Customer Trust and Partner Support unit, where she worked to protect the e-commerce platforms from bad actors.

Moyerman has a doctorate in physics (experimental cosmology) and a master’s in computational science, math, and engineering from the University of California, San Diego. She also has dual bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and physics from Harvey Mudd College.

Moyerman enjoys many hobbies, including running, hiking, surfing, snowboarding, judo, jujitsu, glassblowing, flying airplanes, and racing cars.

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.

Wildlife conservation efforts may not be the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks about opportunities to use artificial intelligence and machine learning. But Dave Thau, data and technology lead scientist at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), can share myriad examples of how these technologies are helping our planet.

On this episode, Dave joins Sam and Shervin to discuss WWF’s many uses of AI and machine learning. Among them are applications that predict deforestation, analyze images from motion-sensitive cameras to identify species, optimize wildlife patrols to catch poachers, and reduce the illegal wildlife trade online. These conservation efforts are not only supported by nonprofit partners with shared goals but by tech-company partners that are sharing advanced AI technologies. Read the episode transcript here.

NEW! For specific takeaways from this episode and guidance on how you can implement them in your own work, download our episode toolkit 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:

Dave Thau is the World Wildlife Fund’s data and technology global lead scientist, focusing on applying artificial intelligence in conservation and using technology for long-term impact monitoring.

Previously, he worked at Google, where he helped launch Google Earth Engine and managed developer relations. He also helped to develop the Global Forest Watch nature monitoring platform with the World Resources Institute, and the Map of Life species data platform.

Thau’s work in data management, sustainability, AI, and remote sensing has been published in several journals. He is also a member of the Knowledge and Data Task Force for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

Thau has a doctorate in computer science from the University of California, Davis.

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.

Rathi Murthy has always been passionate about technology roles that allow her to drive business transformation and improve customer experience. In her current role as CTO and president of Product & Technology for Expedia Group, she’s able to do both. One of her key goals is to enhance and unify the end-user experience across Expedia’s many brands, among them Hotels.com, Vrbo, and Travelocity. Another transformation goal: helping to modernize the entire travel industry by making Expedia’s AI technology available to B2B partners throughout the travel ecosystem, such as hotels, airlines, car rental companies, and cruise lines.

Expedia Group’s travel platform processes more than 600 billion AI predictions each year and relies on AI and machine learning technology to provide a range of services, including fraud prevention, customer service through virtual agents, flight price comparisons, and quick and seamless travel booking. Rathi joins Sam and Shervin to explain how Expedia Group is using artificial intelligence to continually improve the customer experience for travelers and travel providers alike. Read the episode transcript here.

New! For specific takeaways from this episode and guidance on how you can implement them in your own work, download our episode toolkit 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:

Rathi Murthy is CTO and president of Expedia Product & Technology. In this role, she focuses on accelerating Expedia Group’s Open World platform, developing accessible and equitable products, and delivering quality experiences for travelers, partners, and developers.

Previously, as CTO, she oversaw Verizon Media’s global technology strategy, including its platform technology and infrastructure and innovations in 5G. As CTO at Gap Inc., she developed an end-to-end technology strategy for its portfolio of brands. She has also held senior technology leadership roles at American Express, eBay, Yahoo, Sun Microsystems, and WebMD.

Murthy currently sits on the board of directors for PagerDuty. She has a master’s degree in computer engineering from Santa Clara University.

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.

Anders Butzbach Christensen began his career in product management before landing his dream job working for the Lego Group in Denmark. Today, as head of data engineering, he’s leading Lego’s digital transformation with a specific focus on designing and building data products, including self-service applications that technology and business teams can all use to better serve their customers.

In this episode, Anders joins Sam and Shervin to describe how the Lego Group is approaching digital transformation, and how the toymaker is empowering its product teams by becoming a product-, architecture-, and engineering-led company. 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:

As head of data engineering at the Lego Group, Anders Butzbach Christensen is responsible for building up a strong competency area and great data products that will enable the company to become more data-driven. The product teams he leads are currently building a self-service core data platform to ensure that employees can discover and use data across the organization.

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.

Michelle McCrackin, senior manager of analytics learning and development at Delta Air Lines, never imagined that she’d be an analytics leader when she first joined the airline as an HR business partner. But, faced with the challenge of hiring outside analytics talent, she proposed a solution that would change her career path along with the paths of other Delta employees: an internal analytics training program. Delta Analytics Academy (DAA) enables front-line employees to gain in-demand tech skills and the opportunity to advance within the organization. In December 2022, DAA graduated its first cohort of 12 students, selected from a pool of 750 applicants that included gate agents, baggage handlers, flight attendants, and other operational experts interested in learning how data and analytics can be applied to process-improvement challenges. 

In this episode, Michelle joins Sam and Shervin to discuss how the program, started in partnership with Georgia State University, fits into the airline’s talent development and retention strategy. 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:

Michelle McCrackin is a strategy and analytics leader with over 13 years of experience in the corporate space. She worked in the consumer packaged goods and automotive industries before moving into the field of aviation, where she is currently senior manager of analytics, learning, and development at Delta Air Lines. McCrackin’s passion for raising the analytics capability across the operations and commercial functions at Delta is exhibited in creation and development of Delta Analytics Academy (DAA), a program with the objective of producing an internal talent pipeline and closing the talent gap within the analytics skill set. DAA was developed in partnership with Georgia State University based on the hypothesis that taking an industry expert and providing them with a wraparound analytics education in a condensed format would produce top-performing analytics professionals.

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 a partner with OpenAI — the company that recently wowed the tech world and the general public with its DALL-E image generator and ChatGPT chatbot — Microsoft helped to make those generative AI tools possible. But Microsoft has long invested in developing its own artificial intelligence technologies, for internal and external customers alike. And even when AI is not the centerpiece of a specific software program, it’s often driving how that tool — such as the company’s Bing search engine — works.

As corporate vice president of Microsoft’s AI platform, Eric Boyd oversees product and technology teams that build artificial intelligence and machine solutions for the company’s Azure platform and its AI services portfolio. Eric joins Sam and Shervin on this episode to talk about how Microsoft builds AI tools and embeds the technology in its various products, AI’s potential for helping to expand people’s creativity, and the democratization of AI. 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:

Eric Boyd leads the AI platform team within Microsoft’s Cloud + AI division. This global organization includes Azure Machine Learning, Microsoft Cognitive Services, Azure Cognitive Search, and internal platforms that provide data, experimentation, and graphics processing units cluster management to groups across Microsoft.

Boyd joined the company in 2009 to create the Silicon Valley Search Ads team. In 2011, he moved to Bellevue, Washington, to lead the Bing Ads Development team before taking on his current role in 2015.

Before joining Microsoft, Boyd was the vice president of engineering at Mochi Media, an ads startup that was acquired by Shanda Games. Previously, he was vice president of platform engineering at Yahoo for 10 years.

Boyd has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from MIT.

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.

When Ziad Obermeyer was a resident in an emergency medicine program, he found himself lying awake at night worrying about the complex elements of patient diagnoses that physicians could miss. He subsequently found his way to data science and research and has since coauthored numerous papers on algorithmic bias and the use of AI and machine learning in predictive analytics in health care.

 Ziad joins Sam and Shervin to talk about his career trajectory and highlight some of the potentially breakthrough research he has conducted that’s aimed at preventing death from cardiac events, preventing Alzheimer’s disease, and treating other acute and chronic conditions. Read the episode transcript here.

For more about Ziad: http://ziadobermeyer.com/research

Nightingale Open Science: https://www.nightingalescience.org/

Dandelion Health: https://dandelionhealth.ai/

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:

Dr. Ziad Obermeyer works at the intersection of machine learning and health. He is an associate professor and the Blue Cross of California Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley; a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator; and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His papers have appeared in a wide range of journals, including Science, Nature Medicine, and The New England Journal of Medicine; his work on algorithmic bias is frequently cited in the public debate about artificial intelligence. He is a cofounder of Nightingale Open Science, a nonprofit that makes massive new medical imaging data sets available for research, and Dandelion, a platform for AI innovation in health. Obermeyer continues to practice emergency medicine in underserved communities.

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.

While Me, Myself, and AI is on winter break, we hope you enjoy this bonus episode excerpted from an MIT Sloan Management Review-BCG webinar based on our 2022 research report, "Achieving Individual — and Organizational — Value With AI."

Cohost Sam Ransbotham is joined by BCG Henderson Institute's global director François Candelon for a discussion of our global survey findings.

Download a PDF copy of the slide deck from this webinar here.

Follow along with our speakers:

1:31-1:53 — Page 4

1:54-2:29 — Page 5

2:30-4:27 — Page 6 (and, listen to our episode featuring Land O'Lakes' CTO Teddy Bekele)

4:28-7:15 — Page 7

7:16-8:45 — Page 8

8:46-11:52 — Page 9 (and, listen to our episode featuring The Estée Lauder Companies' Sowmya Gottipati)

11:53-13:19 — Page 10

13:19-14:33— Page 11

14:34-16:04 — Page 12

16:05-17:20 — Page 13

17:21-18:44— Page 14

18:45-20:50— Page 15

20:51-21:35 — Page 16

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.

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

While Me, Myself, and AI is on winter break, we hope you enjoy this bonus episode excerpted from an MIT Sloan Management Review-BCG webinar based on our 2020 research report, "Expanding AI's Impact With Organizational Learning."

Download a PDF copy of the slide deck from this webinar here.

Follow along with our speakers:

1:15-1:35 — Page 3

1:38-1:52 — Page 4

1:53-3:13 — Page 7

3:14-3:38 — Page 8

3:39-4:13 — Page 9

4:14-4:50 — Page 10

4:51-6:10 — Page 11

6:11-6:27 — Page 12

6:28-11:31 — Page 13

11:32-12:17 — Page 14

12:18-13:10— Page 15

13:11-13:22 — Page 16

13:25-13:59 — Page 17

14:00-14:54 — Page 18

14:55-15:05 — Page 19

15:06-16:05 — Page 20

16:06-16:38 —Page 21

16:39-16:59 — Page 22

17:00-18:08 — Page 23

18:09-18:28 — Page 24

18:29-21:12 — Page 25

21:13-23:52 — Page 26

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.

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