Unscripted with Jeff Pedowitz

Camberley Bates has spent 30-plus years as one of enterprise technology's most respected independent analysts, paid to cut through vendor hype and tell executives what's real. On this episode of Unscripted, she and Jeff unpack what IBM's earnings dip really signals (AI infrastructure spending delayed mainframe upgrades, not weakness), why 70 to 80 percent of enterprise data still lives on-prem, and why cloud-first has given way to ...

Russ Wilcox, CEO of ArtifexAI, went from a broken sewer decision in his Cape Cod hometown to advising the Pentagon and State Department on the US-China AI race. In this episode of Unscripted, he tells Jeff how mining boring public records, zoning codes, meeting minutes, and permit archives, unlocks the 85 percent of human knowledge trapped in unstructured data. He explains why he believes the US is currently losing the AI race: Chi...

Every impressive AI demo sits on an enormous, expensive, and very unglamorous foundation of data. Keith Pijanowski is one of the people who built it. After a decade-plus at Microsoft (where he helped evangelize Azure before its public release) and data pipeline work at BNY Mellon, he now works on the storage infrastructure that AI training and inference actually dep...

Everyone is promising humanoid robots in every home and factory. Klas Nilsson has spent 40 years on the part that turns out to be hard. The Cognibotics founder, who built one of the first digital robot motion control systems at ABB in the 1980s, explains why less than 1% of the world's work is done by robots, and why the answer isn't a smarter chatbot. He walks through why the robotic hand remains unsolved (no existing design, tend...

Lena Smart has spent 30 years securing the systems we genuinely cannot afford to have fail — the power grid, financial markets, and as longtime CISO at MongoDB, one of the most widely used databases on the planet. She's defended more high-stakes infrastructure than most people will ever see. And she's here to tell you that AI agents scare her more than any of ...

Dr. Sarah Chardonnens is a professor at the University of Freiburg with a PhD in the science of learning, and in this conversation with Jeff Pedowitz she takes on the question everyone has an opinion about but few have studied directly: does AI make us smarter, or just make us feel smarter while a real skill quietly erodes underneath. Drawing on research showing LLM error rates ranging from 16 percent on basic questions to as high ...

Juergen Weichenberger has been building AI since the 1990s, well before it became a mainstream conversation, in domains where the cost of being wrong isn't a typo, it's a shutdown: factories, energy grids, and critical national infrastructure.

Having led AI at Schneider Electric and now serving as a data and AI partner at EY, he tells Jeff Pedowitz why the industrial sector remains the least AI-penetrated part of the economy despi...

Manas Talukdar has spent 19 years building the infrastructure underneath AI systems: the data backbone of the process industry, the platform behind one of the largest enterprise AI companies, and the training data systems behind modern language models.

In this conversation with Jeff Pedowitz, he argues that the model, the part everyone argues about, is actually the easy part. The hard part is the data engineering, context manageme...

Ed Addison took his first AI course at MIT in 1985 and has spent the four decades since building through every wave of the field, from brittle rule-based expert systems in the 80s, to neural nets in the 90s, to the deep learning breakthrough of 2006, to the generative AI and transformer architectures that produced today's large language models.

He's founded five AI companies with three exits, most of it in the notoriously difficul...

Eric Forst spent the first half of his career building the foundational technology of the surveillance economy: pixel tracking at one of the largest third-party cookie networks, then AI-driven sentiment analysis used by the Obama campaign in 2012, the same techniques Cambridge Analytica would later turn on Brexit and Trump.

In this episode he tells Jeff Pedowitz what actually made him walk away, and lays out what he's building ins...

Nevra Ledwon has spent 25 years in mathematical optimization, the branch of AI that decides which trucks carry which goods, how factories schedule production lines, how airlines crew flights, and how warehouses route their pickers, work that predates the chatbot era by decades and often delivers harder, more measurable business value.

In this conversation, she tells Jeff about the moment that changed her mind: she assumed generativ...

Rajiv Dattani helped run METR, the organization that evaluated whether OpenAI's and Anthropic's frontier models were too dangerous to release, before leaving to build something stranger: insurance for AI, underwritten through Lloyd's of London.

In this conversation, he tells Jeff how METR measured model risk in human hours, meaning how long it would take a person to complete the most complex task an AI model can now do, and why th...

Elatia Abate ran global talent for the world's largest brewer and served as head of HR at Dow Jones before Forbes named her a leading futurist, and she has spent the last decade studying what AI actually does to work, careers, and the humans inside the org chart rather than just the tech stack.

In this conversation, she tells Jeff she has shifted from tech optimist to something closer to a modern skeptic, because she believes the m...

Dr. Jennifer Rochlis spent two decades at NASA building Robonaut, a humanoid robot designed to work beside astronauts in the vacuum of space, then brought that human-machine trust expertise into autonomous defense systems. This week on Unscripted, she and Jeff break down why trust is not a feeling but an engineered, emergent property, and why NASA built in manual override for only eleven scenarios out of millions during spaceflight...

Augusto Gonzalez is an economist and researcher from Argentina who uses large language models to simulate entire human populations, running classic economic experiments on synthetic cultural agents. His work can match real anthropology (he replicated field results on the Hadza tribe of Tanzania) but it also revealed that these models flatten humanity's moral and cul...

Zachary Elewitz runs the enterprise AI lab at McKesson, a Fortune 10 healthcare company, where his team exists to de-risk the boldest AI ideas by building prototypes that prove value before the business commits resources. In this episode he offers the rare view from the buyer's seat: why the "we'll all be AI product managers" narrative is overblown, why he discounts what CEOs say publicly, and how an unflashy supply chain optimizat...

Reid Blackman, former philosophy professor turned AI ethics advisor to Amazon, the FBI, and the Canadian government, joins Jeff Pedowitz to argue that the standard approach to AI governance is fundamentally broken. Top-down, policy-driven programs take a year or more to pass, arrive obsolete as the technology races from narrow AI to generative to agentic, and rarely change behavior. His alternative, from his new book The Ethical Ni...

Zaheer Ali has built instruments for NASA, run shots at a laser fusion lab, and helped found a national center for nuclear security. Now he's an AI entrepreneur building the first true Space MBA. In this opener, he and Jeff get into where AI is real and where it's hype, why most businesses treat it like fairy dust, what actually makes AI work inside materials discovery and dealmaking, and how a practicing Stoic thinks about governi...