Daniel, a British expert on AI and machine learning, founded Satalia, one of the world’s first companies that brought algorithms from the academic world, into practical application at organizations. He has a Masters and Doctorate in Artificial Intelligence from UCL, lecturing in Computer Science and Business, and has spoken everywhere from TED to the Singularity University. We caught up in Soho, London to discuss the latest developments in AI, the new kinds of people that algorithmic organizations will need to hire, and his own experiments in designing a management model without traditional KPIs and hierarchies.

GlaxoSmithKline, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, is in the midst of a fascinating digital transformation. To accelerate their process, they recently created a new chief digital and technology officer role, and brought on the former CIO of Walmart to fill it. They have been active in applying AI to drug discovery and clinical trials, have sought to use inhalers with clip-on sensors to combat asthma, and have deployed their first medical device mobile app. To get some detail on what was going on behind the scenes of their transformation, I spoke with Adam Raeburn-James, SVP End User and Infrastructure Services and Business Service Centers.

Right before he joined the AI company, Cognitive Scale, Ganesh Padmanabhan was working on his own AI startup aimed at trying to make systems that were able to explain how they reach their conclusions. The real threat of AI is not killer robots or rogue star destroyers, but rather systems that lack accountability, or consideration of their economic impact on job replacement. Speaking at the Cognitive Scale HQ in Austin, Ganesh and I explored some of the big topics around augmenting human intelligence through machine learning, capturing knowledge and talent patterns, and how to personalize customer experiences at scale.

A topic that has fascinated me recently is how the semiconductor industry is changing with the advent of AI and machine learning. We have already seen the stellar rise of NVIDIA, a company previously known for making video gaming cards, once AI developers realized how useful their chips were for deep learning. To get a handle on what’s next for chips, as well as the impact on jobs in that sector, I spoke with Keith Schaub. Keith started out working on radar systems on the famed Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor jet. He is now a VP at Advantest, which is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of automatic test equipment for the semiconductor industry.

Applying the logic of professional gambling to leadership might not strike you as obvious, but Rasmus Andersen is no ordinary thinker. Currently running two football teams with the assistance of data and machine learning, he is also a provocative thinker on human performance. When he became curious about why certain towns and cities produced so many top athletes, he decided to find out himself, venturing from Africa to Korea, in search of the secrets of talent clusters. Those experiences became his bestselling book, ‘The Goldmine Effect’. More recently, in ‘Hunger in Paradise’, he explored why success can be the undoing of companies, even at the peak of their powers. We met up for a coffee in London to talk about what might really drive talent and high performance in the 21st century.