AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace, Business, Ethics, HR, and IT for AI Enthusiasts, Leaders and Academics

Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies and former Global Head of QuantumBlack Labs at McKinsey, explains why enterprise AI lags despite model progress. He discusses messy legacy data, the importance of human feedback, redesigning workflows rather than layering AI, and why business ownership and clear output standards are crucial for real deployments.

Matt Firestone, General Manager at Microsoft for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agents, explains how trillions of telemetry signals reveal employees are ahead on agentic AI. He discusses the transformation paradox, why rewards and systems lag, how agentic AI expands human agency, and practical leader moves like building in the open and measuring manager equity.

Send us Fan MailEmmanuel Daniel is an author, advisor, and global thought leader on geopolitics, the future of finance, and their intersection with business and society. As the founder of the research and consulting house TAB Global and a recognized top 10 global influencer in the Fintech Power50, Emmanuel has spent decades looking under the hood of the global economy to understand how nations and institutions truly interact. In this episode, Emmanuel draws on 25 years of building relationships with central bankers, policymakers, and fintech leaders across 157 countries to make the case that the disruption most financial institutions are bracing for is not the one that is actually coming, and that the leaders asking the wrong questions today will have no runway left when the real inflection point hits.In this conversation, we discuss:Why financial markets distracted everyone from the real AI disruption, and what happens to large organizations when agentic AI finally reaches the Internet of Things.Why the end user no longer interacts with your bank's app directly, and what that means for every institution investing in UX.Why Emmanuel argues that debt is the economy, and why the conversation about U.S. debt-to-GDP is asking the wrong question entirely.Why state-promoted digital currencies are structurally designed to fail, and what China's eCNY after 8 years in pilot reveals about the limits of government-driven innovation.Why stablecoins have enabled a parallel global economy that traditional banking missed, and what that signals for the institutions still holding the rails.Why originality of thought is the one human capability AI cannot replace, and why Emmanuel says AI is of no use to you if you cannot form the right questions yourself.Resources:Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Emmanuel on LinkedInAI fun fact articleOn How AI Voice Assistants Will Make Meetings More ProductiveOther episodes mentioned:344: Can Decentralized AI Fix Banking? Crypto, Brain OS, and the Future of Finance with Paolo Ardoino, Tether CEO358: Inside Mastercard’s AI Adoption Journey: CTO George Maddaloni on Building Trust, Detecting Fraud, and the Future of Payments

Tom Scott, CEO of Wrike and former finance and operations leader in telecom and robotics, shares frontline views on pace and noise as the real frictions to AI-driven change. He discusses why transformation stalls, how careers must climb the value stack, hiring for intensity and ownership, and why agentic AI will be table stakes well before 2031.

Bruce Feiler, bestselling author who contextualizes tech-driven work shifts. Josh Drean, Work3 co-founder pushing decentralized, passion-led work. Brian Elliott, advisor who champions trust, experimentation, and ending productivity theater. Bernard Marr, futurist optimistic about AI augmenting human skills. They discuss meaning over efficiency, trust-based leadership, decentralizing employment, and freeing humans for higher-level, creative work.

Oren Michels, entrepreneur and CEO of Barndoor AI who built Mashery and produces Broadway shows, talks about governing agentic AI. He explains why agent control differs from API security. He describes least-privilege, tool-limiting, and auditing approaches. He warns about BYO-AI risks and how gradual, monitored rollouts can unlock real enterprise value.

Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital and working musician, reflects on AI, startups, and creativity. He explores how AI democratizes art yet commoditizes execution. He discusses compressed startup growth, attention as the new bottleneck, the rising value of curation and live performance, and why disclosure and market forces will shape AI’s role in creative work.

Daniel Lereya, Chief Product and Technology Officer at monday.com who scaled R&D from a handful to nearly 900 engineers, explains why the company had to rethink product thinking for AI. He discusses replacing old instincts, structuring agents inside rigid workflows, modular guardrails and explicit I/O, surprising citizen-builder use cases, and why adoption hinges on habits more than tech.

Lisa Davis, a technology executive and former CIO with 30+ years across DoD, Intel, and healthcare, champions women and diverse talent in STEM. She discusses why female representation in STEM has fallen, how that gap risks biased AI, why corporate systems were never built for women, and practical steps to build gender-neutral cultures and govern AI responsibly.

James Cham, Partner at Bloomberg Beta and long‑time AI infrastructure investor with a CS and MIT MBA background, challenges common assumptions about responsibility and humans in decision loops. He argues for assigning moral and legal accountability to beneficiaries of models. Short takes cover model consistency versus human unpredictability, why removing humans from certain loops can be better, and three big AI investment opportunities.