AI-Curious with Jeff Wilser

What does it really mean for a company to become AI-first?

In this episode of AI-Curious, we welcome futurist and keynote speaker Kevin Surace back to the show to explore how AI has changed since our last conversation two years ago. The conversation moves beyond the question of “what is AI?” and into a more urgent business reality: how companies, workers, creators, and leaders should actually use it.

We talk about why Kev...

What happens when artificial intelligence enters the most dangerous decision-making systems humans have ever built?

In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Ankit Panda and Andrew Reddie about the real risks of AI and nuclear weapons. Ankit is the Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of The New Nuclear Age. Andrew is a professor at UC Berkeley’s Gol...

Can a 23-year-old video game help train the next generation of AI agents?

In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Hilmar Pétursson, CEO of Fenris Creations, the studio behind EVE Online, about why Google DeepMind has invested in the company and why EVE may be one of the hardest tests for artificial intelligence.

EVE Online is not just a space game. It is a persistent virtual civilization with player-run economies, alliances, corp...

What happens when AI stops being just a software story and starts showing up in towns, power grids, zoning fights, data centers, and business workflows?

In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Sharon Goldman, longtime AI journalist (most recently senior reporter at Fortune) who’s now the founder of Ground Level AI, which focuses on the real-world impact of the AI boom: infrastructure, data centers, cybersecurity, enterpris...

What if the only way to stay human in the age of AI is to become something more than human?

In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with D. Scott Phoenix, partner at 50 Years and co-founder of Vicarious, about one of the most provocative arguments in AI: we cannot stop AI, we cannot control AI, so humans may need to enhance themselves to stay at the center of civilization.

Scott lays out the thesis behind his TED talk, including why h...

What if the most important part of AI is the part nobody talks about, not the chatbot, but the map underneath the world?

In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with John Lenahan, Head of Esri’s Global Commercial Services team, about geospatial AI, GIS, and why “where” may be the missing context in so much of today’s AI conversation. We explore how maps become far more powerful when they layer in infrastructur...

What does the bleeding edge of AI actually look like inside a small team, before the big labs turn it into a polished product?

In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Elijah Spencer, Chief of Staff at Miden, about the practical workflows power users are building right now with AI coding tools, research agents, and custom automation. We explore how Elijah uses tools like Claude Code, Codex, and third-party harnesses to move from ...

What happens when your next customer is not a person, but an AI agent shopping on their behalf? The way we buy things online may be about to change a lot faster than most people realize.

In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Chi Zhang, cofounder and CEO of Kite, about agentic commerce and the infrastructure that could make AI agents true economic actors instead of just helpful assistants. We explore what it means to let an age...

In a year when the frontier AI labs are spending tens of billions on training runs and scaling their teams into the thousands, one of 2026's fastest-growing agentic AI companies has exactly one employee.

His name is Arthur Vandelay. His company is Mojo Agentic AI. And his revenue, with zero outside funding and a Fortune 100 client roster, is on track to clear $30 million this year.

In this episode of AI-Curious, Arthu...

What if the future of AI is not just better text, better image, and better video models stitched together, but something closer to a unified mind?

In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Caroline Ingeborn, COO of Luma AI, about the company’s bet on “unified intelligence” and why that may be a fundamentally different path toward AGI. We explore why Luma believes training across modalities together, instead of bu...

What if the future of AI is not bigger models in bigger data centers, but smaller ones running quietly on the devices you already use every day?

In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Jeffrey Li, COO of Liquid AI, about why the next phase of AI may depend less on giant cloud models and more on small, specialized models that run directly on phones, laptops, cars, and other edge devices. We explore the case for on-device AI, why ...

It’s happening everywhere. And no one’s really talking about it. What happens when your employees are already using dozens of AI tools your company never approved?

In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Rick Caccia, co-founder and CEO of Witness AI, about the rise of “shadow AI” inside enterprises and why it has become one of the biggest practical challenges in AI adoption. We explore how employees, ofte...

What happens when an AI prediction does not just forecast the future, but helps create it?

In this episode of AI-Curious -- recorded on location at this year's TED conference -- we talk with philosopher and ethicist Carissa Véliz about AI ethics, AI privacy, predictive AI, and the hidden power of algorithmic decision-making. We explore how AI systems used in hiring, lending, insurance, and other high-stakes settings can become ...

What if the job you have today will soon require a completely different set of skills? 

In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Dan Roth, Editor in Chief of LinkedIn, about what LinkedIn’s data reveals about the future of work, the rise of AI literacy, and why deeply human skills may matter more than ever. We dig into LinkedIn’s “Skills on the Rise” research, what employers are actually looking for n...

What does it actually look like to use AI tools in the real world, beyond the usual chatbot prompts and hype?

In this episode of AI-Curious, Jeff Wilser shares five AI tools and workflows that are shaping how he works right now, from Claude Code and personalized news briefings to NotebookLM, multi-model prompting, and using AI to write more closely in your own voice. The goal is not to offer a comprehensive list of every AI product ...

What happens when AI stops being a productivity tool and starts reshaping the structure of work itself?

In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Kelly Monahan, a future of work and AI advisor, about what AI may actually do to the workplace over the next few years, and why the reality is likely to be messier than both the hype and the fear suggest. We dig into the tension between using AI for augmentation versus automation, why so...

What happens when a business school decides AI isn’t a bolt-on elective, but the operating system for how students learn marketing, finance, entrepreneurship, and leadership?

In this episode of AI-Curious, we’re back with David Marchick, Dean of the Kogod School of Business, to see what changed after his earlier promise to become the country’s first AI-first business school. We dig into what “AI-first” ...

What happens when AI makes the news feel like it was made just for us, and the “objective” version quietly disappears?

Here we have something of a “very special episode” of AI-Curious. I was recently in Davos during World Economic Forum week, and was honored to speak on a panel on the Future of Media. This is that panel. 

We dig into the trust crisis in journalism, the attention economy, and how AI may ac...

Something I don’t usually say: This is one of my favorite conversations I’ve ever had in the AI space. Truly. 

The setup: What happens when an AI agent stops being a tool and starts acting like a coworker?

In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Dan Botero, who built an AI agent named Octavius Fabrius using OpenClaw. Octavius didn’t just chat or summarize. He applied to hundreds of jobs, built his own portf...