The AI Report Podcast

In this episode, recorded at Dreamforce 2026, Brett Jenks, CEO of Rare, joins Liam to talk about what it takes to change human behavior at scale, and how Rare is using AI to do it. Brett's path to conservation ran through political reporting in New Jersey, film production in Boston and a volunteer teaching post in rural Costa Rica. He has spent more than two decades leading Rare, a conservation nonprofit that now works in 60 countries.

Brett explains how Rare built Agent Tierra, an AI agent on WhatsApp that gives smallholder farmers in Colombia guidance on soil, weather and regenerative farming practices. Before launching the agent, Rare spent time building trust with 200 early adopter farmers, taking composting among local farmers from 6% to 94% within a year. Agent Tierra now reaches 16,000 farmers in Colombia, with Brazil and Honduras next.

They also get into why farmers change when they see other farmers change, how Rare's pilot plots cut input costs by 30% and raised yields by 30%, why culture shapes every rollout, what keeps a global nonprofit CEO up at night, and why humans need to start thinking on hundred-year timelines.

Key Topics Covered

Episode Timestamps

Where to find Brett:

Partner Links

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, recorded at Dreamforce 2026, Nia Samady, VP of Global Partner Success at Salesforce, joins Kyle to discuss what it takes for AI agent projects to succeed with customers. Nia has spent 22 years at Salesforce, starting as a college graduate on a developer support team, and now leads a technical team that works alongside consulting partners like Accenture and Deloitte across the full customer lifecycle.

Nia explains how AIforce and Claudeforce are bringing Salesforce into the interfaces customers already use, and how Salesforce's network of 84 forward deployed engineering partner firms is tackling data readiness and customer readiness from the earliest stages of a deal.

They also get into where AI is delivering real ROI today, from service use cases seeing 70%+ case deflection to regulated industries like health and financial services, the rise of AI native partners, and how hiring is changing as companies look for new grads who blend technical skills with business acumen.

Key Topics Covered

Episode Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction and Nia's 22 years at Salesforce

00:26 - What Nia didn't see coming in the agentic era

01:21 - From the Dreamforce keynote to partner success

02:52 - Claudeforce and the Anthropic partnership

04:15 - Early signals from customers using Salesforce in Claude

05:05 - How forward deployed engineers support Agentforce delivery

07:36 - What forward deployed engineers look at first

09:08 - Why partners value early engagement

09:53 - Where AI is delivering ROI today

11:32 - The rise of AI native partners

12:32 - Marc Benioff, the beginner's mind and a chance elevator ride

14:58 - How hiring has changed for new grads and builders

16:59 - How technical grads can build business skills

18:35 - How Salesforce keeps employees ahead of AI

20:09 - Mentorship, sponsorship and career growth

21:20 - What will be obvious to partners by Dreamforce 2027

Where to find Nia:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nia-samady-48b99a46/

Salesforce - https://www.salesforce.com/

Partner Links

Join The AI Report Pro: https://community.theaireport.ai/checkout/the-ai-report-pro

Join our free live Claude session, every Tuesday: https://community.theaireport.ai/forms/497be10c

Subscribe to our free newsletter: https://newsletter.theaireport.ai/subscribe

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, recorded at Dreamforce 2026, Denis Machuel, CEO of The Adecco Group, joins Kyle to discuss how AI agents are changing recruitment, workforce strategy, and the day-to-day work of recruiters. Denis explains how Adecco is moving from isolated AI pilots to scaled deployment across its business, with a focus on keeping people at the center of the transformation.

They discuss Ada, Adecco's recruitment agent in the UK, why roughly half of its candidate conversations initially happened outside working hours, and how agents can take over repetitive outreach and first-level screening so recruiters can spend more time on higher-value human conversations.

Denis also breaks down Adecco's work with Salesforce, the rollout of Agentforce Coworker to 27,000 sales professionals and recruiters, the importance of responsible AI and secure data, and why the next challenge is orchestrating multiple agents while bringing humans into the process at the moments where they add the most value.

Key Topics Covered

Episode Timestamps

00:00 - Denis' background in computer science and AI

01:50 - The scale of Adecco and the future of work

03:33 - How Ada, Adecco's recruitment agent, works

05:22 - Scaling AI agents across languages and geographies

06:19 - Adecco's partnership with Salesforce and Agentforce

09:05 - Moving from individual AI use to enterprise deployment

10:54 - How a recruiter's workflow is changing with AI agents

13:34 - From reactive recruitment to proactive career support

15:18 - How Adecco measures the success of a hire

16:53 - AI adoption in Europe versus the US

19:15 - Regulation, responsibility and human-centric AI

20:12 - What drives Denis as CEO of The Adecco Group

22:02 - Why agent orchestration is the next big challenge

Where to find Denis:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/denismachuel/

The Adecco Group - https://www.adeccogroup.com/

Partner Links

Upgrade your AI toolkit: https://www.theaireport.ai/ai-executive-pass

Subscribe to our free newsletter: https://newsletter.theaireport.ai/subscribe

Join the community: https://community.theaireport.ai/checkout/the-ai-report-welcome-gift?coupon_code=WRTH

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Ian Kahn, PwC partner and global leader for its Customer and Commercial Excellence platform, joins Liam to discuss what AI adoption actually looks like inside large organizations. Ian has spent 27 years at PwC and leads a global team of almost 10,000 practitioners focused on helping clients build stronger customer relationships and drive growth.

Ian explains why the biggest challenge with AI is not access to the technology, but getting people and business models to change with it. He shares why PwC sees a small group of companies capturing most of the value from AI, how leaders can reduce resistance to change, and why the number of agents deployed matters less than how the business itself evolves.

They also get into how Ian uses his own portfolio of AI agents, the shift toward voice-based interaction, and how agents can take over routine administrative work so teams can spend more time on higher-value customer relationships.

Key Topics Covered

Episode Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction and Ian's 27 years at PwC

02:15 - Why AI is the biggest change Ian has seen in his career

02:56 - Ian's role leading almost 10,000 practitioners at PwC

04:44 - Why continuous learning matters in a 175-year-old firm

06:08 - Why 20% of companies are capturing 75% of AI's value

07:57 - The role of culture and leadership in AI adoption

10:08 - Why Ian spends most of his time with clients and teams

11:06 - How PwC is embedding AI into its business model

12:55 - Using agents to free up higher-value capacity

14:17 - How Ian uses his own portfolio of AI agents

16:29 - Why leaders need to explain the "why" behind AI

18:28 - Career advice, mentorship and leading high-performing teams

Where to find Ian:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianwkahn/

Partner Links

Upgrade your AI toolkit: https://www.theaireport.ai/ai-executive-pass

Subscribe to our free newsletter: https://newsletter.theaireport.ai/subscribe

Join the community: https://community.theaireport.ai/checkout/the-ai-report-welcome-gift?coupon_code=WRTH

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Flynn joins Liam to break down how companies are moving from AI experimentation to measurable business value. Mike has spent more than 20 years in consulting, including nearly a decade at EY, nine years at PwC, and now leads the technology sector for EY's consulting business.

They discuss why businesses need to redesign workflows around AI instead of simply adding AI to existing processes, how EY's "Design for Zero" approach works, and why AI agents are changing the economics of software.

Mike also explains the real costs behind AI agents, what enterprises want from AI vendors, how AI is reshaping consulting, and why EY is investing in forward-deployed engineering.

Key Topics Covered

Episode Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction and Mike's path from the Air Force to EY and PwC

01:58 - What Mike's role at EY looks like today

03:57 - Why point solutions create "trapped work"

04:29 - From AI experiments to end-to-end transformation

07:47 - Where AI-first redesign is working today

10:00 - Why AI is breaking the per-seat software model

13:01 - The real costs behind running an AI agent

16:00 - Measuring AI spend versus business value

18:28 - How much work will AI actually take over?

20:52 - Why companies need more granular AI cost controls

25:53 - Building automated control loops for AI

31:21 - Experimenting with enterprise AI tools at scale

36:02 - Why enterprise AI adoption moves slower than personal AI

39:37 - CIOs shift from adoption to process redesign

41:29 - What enterprises want from AI vendors

45:24 - Consulting versus AI deployment at EY

46:36 - Why AI may create more consulting work, not less

49:00 - EY's forward-deployed engineering strategy

52:16 - The two qualities Mike looks for when hiring

55:33 - Why Mike does what he does

Where to find Mike:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelbernardflynn/

EY - https://www.ey.com/

Partner Links

Upgrade your AI toolkit: https://www.theaireport.ai/ai-executive-pass

Subscribe to our free newsletter: https://newsletter.theaireport.ai/subscribe

Join the community: https://community.theaireport.ai/checkout/the-ai-report-welcome-gift?coupon_code=WRTH

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Cillian Kieran, CEO and founder of Ethyca, joins Liam to talk about why data privacy and AI governance need to be treated as engineering problems, not just legal and compliance challenges.

Cillian explains how a consulting project for Heineken ahead of the GDPR pushed him to rethink privacy from an engineer's perspective and eventually build Ethyca. He breaks down how the company's product suite works, why Fides has become a widely adopted open-source privacy standard, and what changes when AI agents are given read and write access to tools like Stripe, QuickBooks or a CRM.

They also get into what foundation model providers may be missing on governance, why AI needs a harness that directs its capabilities without slowing it down, the responsibility engineers have when building AI systems, and why he thinks much of what we call AI is still statistical math wrapped in a marketing label.

Later, Cillian and Liam discuss where AI startups may consolidate, Yann LeCun's work on world models, the human impact of increasingly agent-driven work, and how growing up around art shaped Cillian's view of software as a creative pursuit.

Key Topics Covered

Episode Timestamps

Where to find Cillian:

Partner Links

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brad Axen, Block's Head of AI Capabilities and the original author of Goose, joins Liam to talk about what actually makes AI useful at work. They cover how Block went from building an early open-source AI agent to MoneyBot, ManagerBot, BuilderBot and Buzz, and why Brad thinks the hardest problems now are memory, access and interface, not just model intelligence.

Brad also explains why AI memory should belong to the business rather than a single bot, what ants can teach us about shared memory systems, why "meat proxy" is becoming a new office problem, and how Buzz is testing a multiplayer model where humans and AI agents work in the same space.

Key Topics Covered

Episode Timestamps

00:00 Intro

00:07 What Block actually is

02:40 From CERN to Block

05:19 Building Goose and taking it open source

06:29 Agents vs. harnesses vs. interfaces

10:28 MoneyBot, ManagerBot and BuilderBot

15:56 Memory, access and learning over time

22:53 What ants can teach us about AI memory

26:48 Two versions of where AI could go

28:26 Buzz and the idea of multiplayer AI

29:56 "Meat proxy": the new office problem

35:09 The Buzz case study and a 50% productivity jump

37:06 The new bottleneck now that AI can write the code

49:11 Rebuilding institutional knowledge after team restructuring

52:00 How AI is changing hiring and interviews

57:35 The loneliness of working with AI all day

59:13 Why Brad does what he does

Connect with Brad on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradleyaxen/

Partner Links

Upgrade your AI toolkit: https://www.theaireport.ai/ai-executive-pass

Subscribe to our free newsletter: https://newsletter.theaireport.ai/subscribe

Join the community: https://community.theaireport.ai/checkout/the-ai-report-welcome-gift?coupon_code=WRTH

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Loni Stark, VP of Strategy and Product at Adobe, joins Liam to talk about what happens when a 25 year tech career runs alongside a full creative practice in painting, sculpture and writing, and what that split brain teaches her about building for the AI era. Loni explains why she thinks brands may already be invisible, or worse, misrepresented, inside AI answers, why every company needs to start treating AI as a new kind of audience, and how she is running her own home AI lab, complete with a self built server and a personal agent that has now run continuously for over 150 days, to understand what actually gives an AI agent an identity.

Along the way, Loni and Liam get into her Harvard Extension School research into "orphan values," the personal values people can't express in any of their current life roles, and what happens to that alignment as AI reshapes the roles themselves. She also breaks down how she balances Adobe's biggest enterprise bets, including Experience Manager, Commerce, Brand Concierge and LLM Optimizer, against the need to experiment without limits in her own time.

Key Topics Covered

Episode Timestamps

Loni's Socials:

Loni’s Art Gallery: https://atelierstark.com/work/

Partner Links

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Braden Warwick, Financial Planning Product Architect at PWL Capital, breaks down why so much of the financial advice sold at big banks is a sales pitch dressed up as a plan, and what a real financial plan actually requires. Braden traded a PhD in aerospace engineering for a career rebuilding how Canadians plan their money, and he brings that same engineering mindset to financial planning: define your objectives, map your constraints, then solve for the outcome that actually improves your life.

Braden also walks Liam through the AI infrastructure PWL has built in house, from a proprietary data lake to an AI powered meeting note tool and planning summaries, and explains why they chose to build their own tools instead of buying off the shelf software. They get into Monte Carlo simulations, why financial planning is really about the distribution of outcomes rather than one predicted path, and what a financial planning engagement might look like in 2031.

Key Topics Covered

Episode Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction

00:40 - From aerospace engineering to financial planning

03:54 - Why PWL approaches financial advice differently

07:31 - The six areas of a real financial plan

11:48 - Financial planning as an engineering problem

17:56 - The psychology behind financial planning

23:14 - Objectives, constraints, and uncertainty

28:10 - How Monte Carlo simulations work

33:21 - What financial planning software still misses

39:11 - Building financial planning tools at PWL

44:16 - Inside PWL's financial planning system

51:38 - How AI is changing the advisor workflow

57:20 - Why PWL built its own AI tools and data infrastructure

1:03:41 - What changed after the OneDigital acquisition

1:06:34 - The future of financial planning

1:11:47 - Why Braden does what he does

Braden's Socials:

Resources Mentioned:

Braden’s article, The Optimal Financial Plan - https://pwlcapital.com/the-optimal-financial-plan/

Partner Links

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Andrew McNamara, VP of Applied ML at Shopify, returns to unpack how much has changed in agentic commerce since his last episode. Andrew and Liam dig into why agents are becoming "the new front door to commerce," why orders coming to Shopify stores from AI are up 13x, and what's actually happening inside Shopify's personalized shopping agent in the Shop app.

They also get into the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and why AI commerce is growing 9x faster than social commerce did at the same stage, how Sidekick's architecture and app extensions work, and SimGym, Shopify's system for training AI shoppers to A/B test store changes before they ever reach a real customer.

Key Topics Covered

Episode Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction and welcome

00:29 - What's changed in AI and shopping since their last conversation

01:47 - Agents becoming "the new front door to commerce"

04:16 - Inside Shop app's personalized shopping agent

07:32 - Why data stays personalized to each shopper instead of training a larger model

11:53 - What the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is, and orders from AI up 13x

14:58 - Merchant tooling for tracking AI-driven traffic and conversions

15:55 - The story of Tobi's Hermes agent sending him gifts in the mail

20:48 - Andrew's own habit of shopping by taking pictures and searching by image

26:59 - Sidekick's app extensions and partner integrations

33:02 - Inside Sidekick's architecture: the Sonnet model and knowledge base

35:18 - Campaign Autopilot's auto research loop

38:58 - SimGym: training AI shoppers to test store changes

42:23 - What's next for Shopify's agentic commerce features

44:17 - Where to find Andrew

Andrew's Socials:

Twitter (X) - https://x.com/DrewCH

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmcnamara1/

Partner Links

Upgrade your AI toolkit: https://www.theaireport.ai/ai-executive-pass

Subscribe to our free newsletter: https://newsletter.theaireport.ai/subscribe

Join the community: https://community.theaireport.ai/checkout/the-ai-report-welcome-gift?coupon_code=WRTH

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices