The Brave Technologist

Dr. Mohsen Ghasempour, Chief AI Officer at Kingfisher, unpacks why the most dangerous thing a company can do with customer data is use all of it. He explains how a global, multi-brand retailer can draw the line between personalization that feels helpful and personalization that feels like surveillance. He also discusses why AI success is ultimately an execution problem rather than a technology problem.

Key Takeaways:

• What the "comfort test" is and how Kingfisher uses it to decide whether a personalization decision has gone too far

• How global retailers are resolving the tension between centralized AI infrastructure and brand-level autonomy

• Why legal and compliance teams are now embedded in AI development from the start

• What it will look like when AI stops being a distraction and starts being invisible infrastructure

Guest Bio:

Dr. Mohsen Ghasempour is a distinguished expert in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) with a solid academic foundation, holding a PhD in Computer Science. Currently, Mohsen serves as the Chief AI Officer at Kingfisher, where his leadership contributes to the advancement of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies within the organisation. With over 15 years of experience as an accomplished data scientist and visionary leader, Mohsen has consistently harnessed the power of data to drive strategic decision-making. Prior to his role at Kingfisher, he held pivotal positions in leading technology and retail organisations, including The Hut Group (THG) and Shop Direct. In these roles, he spearheaded cross-functional teams to implement cutting-edge Machine Learning and AI solutions, resulting in measurable and transformative outcomes.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Join us as we embark on a mission to demystify artificial intelligence, challenge the status quo, and empower everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a curious mind, or an industry professional, this podcast invites you to join the conversation and explore the future of AI together.

The Brave Technologist Podcast is hosted by Luke Mulks, VP Business Operations at Brave Software—makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and Search engine, and now powering AI everywhere with the Brave Search API.

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

Kam Karaji, Director of Cyber Security & Risk Management at the NFL, shares what 13 years in counter-terrorism and criminal intelligence taught him about protecting high-stakes environments, and discusses how that thinking now shapes security across five countries and 70,000-person stadiums. He explains why a venue full of fans is really just a very large computer, and why the data a fan hands over the moment they buy a ticket is more time-sensitive than most people realize.

Key Takeaways:

• How the NFL manages fan data across different legal jurisdictions, and why that data becomes time-sensitive the moment the league leaves a country

• Why the biggest security investment leaders should be making right now isn't in technology

• How a single piece of player misinformation can trigger a chain reaction from betting markets to a club's bottom line

• Why a stadium full of fans is really a cybersecurity problem (and what happens when that computer gets hacked)

Guest Bio:

Kam Karaji leads cyber security and risk management for the NFL's international programme, protecting games, venues, and people across Europe, the Americas, and beyond. Before moving into the corporate world, he spent over thirteen years in law enforcement as a police officer and Bronze Commander, working in criminal intelligence, counter-terrorism and international firearms training with the UK's National Crime Agency (service that earned him gallantry recognition for the protection of the British Royal Family).

Today his focus is the human side of security in an increasingly automated world. As AI reshapes how organizations assess risk, train teams, and defend themselves, Kam is interested in where the technology genuinely helps and where it quietly creates new blind spots. His guiding belief is simple: confidence without control becomes chaos, and without people, none of it works.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Join us as we embark on a mission to demystify artificial intelligence, challenge the status quo, and empower everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a curious mind, or an industry professional, this podcast invites you to join the conversation and explore the future of AI together.

The Brave Technologist Podcast is hosted by Luke Mulks, VP Business Operations at Brave Software—makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and Search engine, and now powering AI everywhere with the Brave Search API.

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

Andy McMahon, Principal AI Engineer at Barclays, shares how a 200-year-old bank is deploying autonomous agents inside one of the most heavily regulated environments in the world. He argues that observability and kill switches matter more than raw capability, and that the real test isn't whether the AI works in a demo, but whether it can fail safely in production.

Key Takeaways

• How a major bank is giving AI agents real autonomy while keeping them bounded inside strict permission structures

• Why "could I build this" is the wrong question for engineers to ask

• Some of the current bottlenecks that slow down agentic payments

• Why most companies are racing to deploy agents without tracking what those agents actually do once they're live

Guest Bio:

Andy McMahon is Principal AI Engineer at Barclays, a guest lecturer at Oxford University, and author of the book "Machine Learning Engineering with Python." He trained as a theoretical physicist, but has spent his career making production AI systems that are safe, governed, and genuinely valuable in some of the most regulated and risk-controlled environments in the world. He has strong opinions about what AI engineering is, where it's going, and what separates the hype from the work that actually matters.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Join us as we embark on a mission to demystify artificial intelligence, challenge the status quo, and empower everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a curious mind, or an industry professional, this podcast invites you to join the conversation and explore the future of AI together.

The Brave Technologist Podcast is hosted by Luke Mulks, VP Business Operations at Brave Software—makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and Search engine, and now powering AI everywhere with the Brave Search API.

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

Fred Gifford, Strategy Lead and Sr. Product Manager at Sony AI, shares how his team is building knowledge graphs from academic literature to predict new biomedical relationships and accelerate drug discovery. He explains why Sony AI publishes so much of its research openly, what he got wrong about AI therapy when writing his novel and why he believes accountability for AI's ethical failures still lags dangerously behind the pace of the technology itself.

Key Takeaways:

• Why specialized AI tools are losing ground to all-in-one chatbots and what that means for the personal data we hand over

• What it actually takes to build an ethical dataset from scratch and why most image data used to train AI didn't

• His experience of writing about AI therapy years before chatbots became a mental health solution for millions

• Why Sony AI is choosing to open-source its work

This episode was recorded LIVE at The AI Summit London

Guest Bio:

Fred Gifford is an AI strategy lead based in London. He has spent the past 5.5 years at Sony AI applying frontier AI research to solve challenges in gastronomy, AI Ethics, and biomedical.

He is also an author under the pen-name Fred Lunzer. His debut novel, Sike, was published by Macmillan / Celadon last year, and focuses on a young couple navigating life with an AI therapist.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Join us as we embark on a mission to demystify artificial intelligence, challenge the status quo, and empower everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a curious mind, or an industry professional, this podcast invites you to join the conversation and explore the future of AI together.

The Brave Technologist Podcast is hosted by Luke Mulks, VP Business Operations at Brave Software—makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and Search engine, and now powering AI everywhere with the Brave Search API.

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

Riccardo Arnaldi, Agentic AI Product Manager at Pandora, shares what it actually looks like to build and scale a brand-facing LLM shopping agent live with millions of customers. He explains why too much autonomy is a liability, how a deterministic routing layer keeps the AI from going off-script, and why traditional QA teams had to rebuild their processes from scratch. He also breaks down a real customer interaction that exposed the gap between automation and appropriate human sensitivity, changing how the team handles frustrated users.

Key Takeaways

• Which metrics Pandora uses to measure success of Gemma, their customer-facing AI agent

• What breaks when traditional QA processes meet agentic products, and how testing an agent differs from testing software

• How a brand's voice gets engineered into an AI agent, including exact words it's allowed to use and the persona it borrows

• What a frustrated customer's outburst revealed about the line between automation and human sensitivity

Guest Bio:

Riccardo Arnaldi is a product manager with 6+ years' experience building and iterating on digital products through data, experimentation, and AI. Currently, he owns end-to-end development and strategy of LLM-based shopping and customer support agents at Pandora. Previously, he drove X60M+ DKK in incremental revenue by scaling Pandora's website and CRM personalisation programme from the ground up across 7+ markets. An Italian based in Copenhagen, Riccardo is a sports lover and guitar strummer, and is always on the lookout for the next great travel destination (with hype-worthy local foods).

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Join us as we embark on a mission to demystify artificial intelligence, challenge the status quo, and empower everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a curious mind, or an industry professional, this podcast invites you to join the conversation and explore the future of AI together.

The Brave Technologist Podcast is hosted by Luke Mulks, VP Business Operations at Brave Software—makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and Search engine, and now powering AI everywhere with the Brave Search API.

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

Zach Shefska, Founder & CEO of CarEdge, shares how he and his father (a 43-year auto industry veteran) turned a broken, opaque car buying process into a transparency-first business powered by AI agents that now negotiate deals on behalf of consumers. He also explains how data collected from over 100,000 agent driven negotiations is reshaping what buyers can know before they even walk into a dealership.

Key Takeaways:

• Why the car buying process is structurally designed to work against both consumers and the salespeople serving them and what's starting to change

• How AI agents are negotiating real car deals, including the first-ever agent-to-agent transaction between a buyer's AI and a dealership's AI

• Why the biggest frontier AI models keep getting car buying wrong and what a purpose-built data harness requires

Guest Bio:

Zach Shefska is an entrepreneur, creator, and consumer advocate best known as the co-founder and CEO of CarEdge. He partners with his father, Ray Shefska (a 40+ year auto industry veteran), to level the playing field for car buyers by providing transparent negotiation strategies, data tools, and AI-driven car-buying agents.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Join us as we embark on a mission to demystify artificial intelligence, challenge the status quo, and empower everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a curious mind, or an industry professional, this podcast invites you to join the conversation and explore the future of AI together.

The Brave Technologist Podcast is hosted by Luke Mulks, VP Business Operations at Brave Software—makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and Search engine, and now powering AI everywhere with the Brave Search API.

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

Harry Halpin, CEO of Nym Technologies, shares why the surveillance Web is more dangerous than most people realize, and why most privacy tools aren't enough. He explains how traditional VPNs still leave you exposed, why metadata is more revealing than the content of your messages, and how Nym's decentralized mixnet offers unique protection.

Key Takeaways:

• Why encrypting your data isn't enough and what metadata reveals that most people don't consider

• What a mixnet is and why it's built differently than Tor

• Why age verification mandates could be the real turning point for Internet freedom

• How Nym is bringing device-level privacy protection to everyday users

• Ways we can make agents and LLMs more private and safe to use

• The new integration between Nym and Brave

Guest Bio:

Harry Halpin is CEO and co-founder of Nym Technologies. He completed his Ph.D. in AI at the University of Edinburgh under Andy Clark, and then led standards around cryptography and social networking at the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT under Tim Berners-Lee (although he left due to the standardization of DRM). Harry is now focused full-time on preserving privacy and freedom of speech with NymVPN.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Join us as we embark on a mission to demystify artificial intelligence, challenge the status quo, and empower everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a curious mind, or an industry professional, this podcast invites you to join the conversation and explore the future of AI together.

The Brave Technologist Podcast is hosted by Luke Mulks, VP Business Operations at Brave Software—makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and Search engine, and now powering AI everywhere with the Brave Search API.

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

Balazs Nemethi, CEO of the Agent Community, explains why AI agents need identities and why the window to decide who controls that infrastructure is closing fast. He breaks down how a community-governed effort is working to secure .agent as a top-level domain, and why domains are a smart foundation for agent identity.

Key Takeaways:

• Why agents need identities, including personalized names and domains

• What challenges will emerge around trust, safety, and accountability as agents scale, and why domains are a powerful trust layer

• What community governance could change by preventing single-company control over agent identity

• How the ICANN application process works, and the one bylaw that gives community a real shot at winning a TLD

• Why verifying agents (not just humans) may be the smarter approach to trust on the agentic web

Guest Bio:

Balázs Nemethi is a Hungarian technologist and entrepreneur working at the intersection of internet infrastructure, identity, and AI. He is the founder of the Agent Community at agentcommunity.org, a community-backed effort to establish .agent as a new top-level domain and identity layer for AI agents. He is also the author of AID, a DNS-first standard for agent identity and discovery. Previously, he helped scale the Decentralized Identity Foundation to more than 300 organizations; founded Taqanu, a financial-inclusion company serving refugees in Germany; and built Web3 compliance infrastructure at Veri Labs, where he is the inventor on a U.S. patent for programmable assets.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Join us as we embark on a mission to demystify artificial intelligence, challenge the status quo, and empower everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a curious mind, or an industry professional, this podcast invites you to join the conversation and explore the future of AI together.

The Brave Technologist Podcast is hosted by Luke Mulks, VP Business Operations at Brave Software—makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and Search engine, and now powering AI everywhere with the Brave Search API.

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

João Moura, CEO of crewAI, shares why single AI agents fall short and what changes when you give them a crew. He explains how multi-agent systems are already running inside Fortune 500 companies; why accountability and human oversight still matter as agents grow more autonomous; and what it looks like when an AI agent negotiates on your behalf (and wins).

Key Takeaways:

• How multi-agent systems are already being used inside Fortune 500 companies

• How agents are starting to watch, review, and debug each other, and what that means for quality control

• What the shift from better models to better coordination looks like in practice

• Why data ownership and open-source are becoming the real competitive edge in the AI race

• What "LLM as a judge" means and how it's becoming a quality control pattern

• Why accountability and human oversight still matter even as agents become more autonomous

Guest Bio:

João Moura is the CEO of crewAI. He has over 20 years of software engineering experience, and previously served as Director of AI Engineering at Clearbit, where he transformed AI into a core profit driver, growing a thriving user base and spearheading advancements in large-scale vector databases. João also founded Urdog, an IoT startup, where he developed a smart collar for dogs and managed all aspects of the business. With extensive experience in engineering leadership roles at Toptal and Packlane, he specializes in building high-performing teams and implementing scalable AI and machine-learning solutions. João holds an MBA in Information Technology from FIAP, and completed executive leadership training at NYU Stern.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Join us as we embark on a mission to demystify artificial intelligence, challenge the status quo, and empower everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a curious mind, or an industry professional, this podcast invites you to join the conversation and explore the future of AI together.

The Brave Technologist Podcast is hosted by Luke Mulks, VP Business Operations at Brave Software—makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and Search engine, and now powering AI everywhere with the Brave Search API.

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

Sam Lyman, Head of Research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute and former Senior Advisor and Chief Speechwriter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, shares what it looks like inside the U.S. Treasury when Bitcoin, stablecoins, and AI are being treated as strategic national assets. He explains why the current administration's approach marks a fundamental break from the Gensler era; how freedom tech is becoming a geopolitical tool to challenge authoritarian capital and information controls; and why the time to shape crypto and AI policy through legislation is now.

Key Takeaways:

• How AI, Bitcoin, and stablecoins form a "trifecta of freedom tech," and why policymakers are starting to see them as such

• Why China banned both Bitcoin and stablecoins, and what that tells us about the real threat these technologies pose to authoritarian regimes

• What AI agents prefer to use as money, and what a first-principles study of frontier models revealed about savings vs. payments

• Why executive orders aren't enough, what legislation like the Clarity Act can protect, and how this legislation couldn't be easily undone with an administration change

• How AI could actually make the economy more human

Guest Bio:

Sam Lyman is the head of research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute. He served previously as senior advisor and chief speechwriter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Prior to working at the U.S. Treasury, Sam served as public policy director at Riot Platforms, a leading digital assets and AI infrastructure company. He holds a master's in public policy from Princeton University.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Join us as we embark on a mission to demystify artificial intelligence, challenge the status quo, and empower everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a curious mind, or an industry professional, this podcast invites you to join the conversation and explore the future of AI together.

The Brave Technologist Podcast is hosted by Luke Mulks, VP Business Operations at Brave Software—makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and Search engine, and now powering AI everywhere with the Brave Search API.

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte