The AI Diaries

Ljupka Schwantes spends her days doing e-discovery — the legal process of collecting and auditing electronic evidence — for Armstrong Teasdale LLP. In this episode, she brings that lens to AI: what happens when an AI agent's decision becomes the subject of a lawsuit, and why almost no company is ready for that moment.

Jeremy Hyde runs customer service at Sun Country Airlines and has a hard rule: exit clauses on every AI vendor contract. No exceptions. One vendor said no — he walked.

In this episode, Host Kate Nelson and Jeremy discuss what happens when you turn on AI and get zero ROI, why multi-year AI deals are a trap, and the legal Wild West vendors aren't warning you about.

Jeremy Hyde runs customer service at Sun Country Airlines and has a hard rule: exit clauses on every AI vendor contract. No exceptions. One vendor said no — he walked.

In this episode: what happens when you turn on AI and get zero ROI, why multi-year AI deals are a trap, and the legal Wild West vendors aren't warning you about.

Host Kate Nelson sits down with Jessica Rose Garcia, the Head of Customer Experience at OneSkin who shares her take on why great AI still hallucinates and how to build a bot you can actually trust.

Kate sits down with Jerry Ellis, Head of Contact Center at Ardent Health, for a candid look at AI adoption inside healthcare — an industry that's regulated, cautious, and moving on its own timeline whether leaders like it or not.

Jerry is refreshingly honest about where his team is ahead and where it's behind, and he makes a strong case that the thing blocking most AI projects isn't money or executive buy-in. It's prioritization.

Haseeb Fonte has been inside the XR machine. Former Chief of Staff to Meta's COO, product leader on the AI smart glasses and Meta Quest teams, and a veteran of Samsung and Monitor Deloitte — he's seen XR from the inside out. Now, as COO of Game Changing Style and a track lead at MIT Reality Hack, he's thinking about where it goes from here.

In this debut episode of XR Diaries, Haseeb and host Kate Nelson pull back the curtain on the state of XR — without the pitch deck spin.

Key takeaways:

1. Gaming and social world-building are the only areas with proven XR traction. Everything else — healthcare, retail, enterprise — has pockets of success but hasn't broken through yet. The honest answer is: it's a developer supply problem, not a consumer demand problem.
2. Meta's trust problem with developers is a real liability. When they killed Spark AR and pulled back from Horizon Worlds VR, they didn't just lose platforms — they lost the developers who built their careers on those platforms. Rebuilding that trust will take time that Meta may not have the patience for.
3. Samsung and Apple entering the headset space is the real unlock. When iOS and Android developers can build for XR headsets using tools they already know, the content library explodes — and content is what drives adoption.
4. For enterprise leaders curious about XR, skip the conference. Go to a hackathon. MIT Reality Hack and Stanford XR give you four days of hands-on exposure, direct access to developers building real prototypes for your industry, and the kind of fast learning no conference panel can replicate.
5. VR adoption will follow the same arc as every other communication technology. Screens. Mobile. Social media. Every time, people said "no one will spend hours doing that." Every time, they were wrong. The Roblox generation is already growing up — and they're going to expect XR in the workplace.

Guest: Haseeb Fonte — COO, Game Changing Style | Track Lead, MIT Reality Hack | Former Chief of Staff to Meta COO Host: Kate Nelson — Tech Consultant and XR Leader

• MIT Reality Hack: https://www.mitrealityhack.com
• Game Changing Style - Fashion & Gaming Awards @ NY Comic Con (October 2026): https://www.fashioningamingawards.com/

Kate sat down with Shawn Farris to discuss his approach to cutting through the AI hype and the practical realities of integrating artificial intelligence into contact center operations.

Explore Shawn's standardized approach to evaluating vendors, including an "express" 15-question RFP that helps leadership filter out noise and identify true partners.

Host Kate Nelson sits with Savannah Dowe, the VP of Customer Care at Place to talk about what AI actually looks like when it's working inside an organization: the monthly workshops, the Center of Excellence, the champions model, the psychological safety conversation — and where it goes wrong when you skip the foundation.
Spoiler: a lot of what people think are AI problems are actually just broken workflows.
🎙️ Guest: Savannah Dowe — VP of Customer Care, Place
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🔗 LINKS
Connect with Savannah on LinkedIn:   / savannahcruz  
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