Between Worlds

Ali Parsa is a fascinating leader and entrepreneur. Founder of Babylon Health, a company that is working with algorithms and AI to reinvent the healthcare industry, Ali has been both an influential and provocative figure at the intersection of medicine, business and technology. A few years ago, he was an early guest on the Between Worlds podcast. Since then, Babylon has expanded globally to Africa and China - as well as achieving significant advances with their own AI systems. I caught up with Ali again to learn more about his early experiences fleeing Iran as a child, where AI-first healthcare is going next, and what it takes to design successful, algorithmic organizations.

Daniel, a British expert in 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 spoken everywhere from TED to the Singularity University. We caught up in 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 manufacturer 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.

Manoj Narang is one of the world’s leading thinkers, and provocateurs, when it comes to the future of investing. A proponent of high frequency trading, he previously founded Tradeworx before setting up electronic trading and asset manager Mana Partners, with a $1 billion under management. What makes Mana interesting, especially for my research on algorithmic leadership, is Manoj’s vision for tomorrow’s investment manager, is super smart humans augmented by smart AI. When I caught up with him in NYC, he gave me a master class in the secret structures of the investment markets, and how they will be shaped and influenced by machine learning and algorithms.

Chris White is Global CIO of international law firm Clyde & Co, one of the world’s leading legal firms particularly known for their work in the insurance sector. The legal world, deeply conservative and based in tradition, has been under growing pressure to change with rapid changes in technology, AI, machine learning and the increasing algorithmic nature of client’s business activities. Chris, who manages a team of 140 technology across 40 offices globally, is helping drive his firm’s push into automation and case management technology. What will this mean for the future of the law firm? Listen in to find out.

Recently named Founder of the Year by Benzinga, Ramya Joseph is a former banker that combined her knowledge of investment management and machine learning, to create Pefin, the world’s first AI financial advisor. Pefin, which won the People's Choice Award at SXSW in the interactive innovation category, is a neural network which starts with the user’s current finances and projects how they will change over time with market conditions, inflation, taxes, government rules, and the user’s plans. I caught up with Ramya at her company's HQ in New York, where we spoke about the future of algorithmic financial advice, and also what kinds of people AI-first organizations need to hire in order to succeed.

If you have ever been fascinated by the lives of brilliant people like Einstein, Tesla, Curie or Musk - you might have wondered how exactly they were able to do what they do. And, more to the point, what drove them to such impressive achievements? That is a question that Melissa Schilling, a professor at NYU Stern, and author of the bestselling book ‘Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World’, seeks to answer. I had a coffee with Melissa on a recent trip to New York, and we spoke about what makes these serial innovators tick, and in particular, the personality traits that lead to breakthroughs. What we might think of as impossible - for these people - is simply a place to begin.

I got to spend some time with Tim on a recent trip to Tokyo, when he and his colleagues at KPMG Advisory hosted me for a week of talks and research meetings. Tim is a partner in the Japan practice, where he leads the digital innovation team, and has experienced first hand some of the fascinating characteristics of Japanese business enterprises, and their recent embrace of automation and AI as a way of transforming the way they do things. As we rode in the back of a gleaming black taxi, in heavy Tokyo traffic en-route to a meeting, we spoke about digital transformation in Japan, the shift to probabilistic decision making, and the challenges of changing traditional cultures.

Yossi Ghinsberg is a true adventurer. Although best known for his story of survival when he was lost in an uncharted part of the Bolivian Amazon jungle for three weeks in 1981, he has since led a life of inspiration, motivation and raising awareness for humanitarian causes. His bestselling book, ‘Jungle’, was recently released as a major motion picture starring Daniel Radcliffe. Over a cup of coffee we chatted about life, the universe, and the magic that happens when you find yourself off the beaten track.

If by 2050, 70% of the world’s population will be living in cities - how do we reimagine our infrastructure, resources and services to cope? Bala Mahavaden is one of the thought leaders involved in planning the next generation of super cities in India, the Middle East and Europe. We spoke about the role of data in tomorrow’s cities, digital identity and citizen information, and how predictive analytics might help civic leaders mitigate day-to-day problems and response to crisis.

It would be easy to imagine in this age of Teslas, Powerwalls, and Nest thermostats, that we are somehow on the brink of escaping traditional energy sources forever. Yet, oil, gas and coal persist - and continues to shape economies, nations and industrial policy. Dr. Kent Moors, a global expert on energy and a professor in the Graduate Center for Social and Public Policy at Duquesne University, where he directs the Energy Policy Research Group, has some ideas on why that may be. He has also had a fascinating life. You will hear how I try, unsuccessfully on a number of occasions, to get him to talk about his former life as a covert operative working for the State Department.

Industry 4.0, or the digitization of the world’s manufacturing and logistics ecosystems, represents an incredible opportunity to profoundly reinvent very traditional organizations and processes. In this podcast Frederik Janssen, who is the director responsible for strategy an innovation for IT infrastructure at industrial giant Siemens, outlines how agility has become a way of life in his team, and how important digital transformation is to their future. As manufacturing moves from mass production to mass personalized, IT leaders need to also reimagine what they do, and how they do it.