ML120: Azeem Azhar on The Exponential Impact of Technology and the Future of Work

Azeem Azhar is a strategist, product entrepreneur and analyst, currently working as the Senior Advisor for AI to the CTO of Accenture. He is also the creator of the Exponential View newsletter and podcast, which offer cutting edge insights into technology, business and society. If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, then you’ll have noticed that technology is a topic I’ve covered extensively – and that’s because I believe understanding tech is an essential part of understanding our modern world and operating effectively in it. Azeem is uniquely positioned to offer insight into the space, given his multidisciplinary background He founded and sold PeerIndex, a company which applied machine learning to large-scale social media graphs to make predictions about web users. As an investor he invests in tech startups, particularly in the AI sector and he has the ear of some of the world’s leading entrepreneurs and technologists In this episode we discuss - Azeem’s lessons as a successful entrepreneur and how that affects his investment decisions - The potential impact of AI on the labour market and how to position yourself for the changes to come - How technology changes our understanding of the world and how we act in it This episode was a real pleasure to record and it was great to get inside the head of someone who has thought as deeply about the interactions between technology, business and society as Azeem has.