AI-Curious with Jeff Wilser

Why are so many people getting faster with AI, while their companies still move at the same speed?
In this episode of AI-Curious, we bring you a live panel conversation from HumanX Amsterdam with Andrey Khusid of Miro, Nasrin Mostafazadeh of Verneek, and Imad Riachi of Honu. Together, we explore one of the biggest questions in enterprise AI: what has to change for humans and AI to work as a true team across an entire organization?
We discuss the gap between individual AI productivity and company-wide transformation. Many employees now have their own chatbots, agents, and AI workflows, but that does not automatically mean the business moves faster. The panel looks at why AI adoption often stalls at the organizational level, and why companies may need to redesign workflows, teams, accountability, and decision-making instead of simply giving everyone access to new tools.
Andrey shares how Miro uses AI internally through daily briefs, shared data surfaces, and a digital twin of the company, helping teams operate from the same source of truth. Nasrin explains why enterprise AI should begin with business strategy, not AI strategy, and how Verneek helps retailers and consumer brands use AI to improve merchandising, planning, and operational decisions. Imad brings a neuroscience and systems perspective, warning that we often mistake eloquence for intelligence and that overreliance on fluent AI systems can quietly erode human expertise.
We also explore augmented intelligence, organizational intelligence, AI governance, decision traceability, tacit knowledge, accountability, and why AI should not just make today’s work cheaper, but help companies build a more interesting tomorrow.
Guests
Andrey Khusid — Co-founder and CEO, Miro
Nasrin Mostafazadeh — Co-founder and CEO, Verneek
Imad Riachi — Founder and CEO, Honu
Follow AI-Curious on your favorite podcast platform:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
All Other Platforms
For anyone interested in Jeff’s AI Workshops for their company:
Reach out directly at jeff@jeffwilser.com

What if the biggest limitation of AI agents is not intelligence, but context?
In this episode of AI-Curious, we bring you a live panel conversation from HumanX Amsterdam with Bianca Anghelina of Aily Labs and Stefan Ostwald of Parloa. We explore why “context is king” in the age of AI agents, and why even the most powerful models can struggle inside companies if they do not understand how the business actually works.
Bianca and Stefan both work with AI agents inside large enterprises, where success depends on more than model performance. We talk about what context really means in practice: internal business knowledge, company strategy, user history, market conditions, regulations, policies, permissions, governance, and the processes that shape how work actually gets done.
We also discuss why enterprise AI deployment is much harder than simply giving employees a chatbot. The panel gets into APIs, access management, semantic layers, real-time context, cost efficiency, token budgets, and the importance of measuring AI ROI instead of only measuring AI spend. Bianca shares how Aily Labs embeds business context into decision-intelligence systems for Fortune 500 companies, while Stefan explains how Parloa helps enterprises deploy AI agents for customer communication.
Finally, we explore what leaders can do to make AI adoption stick. From giving CEOs a “super agent,” to building safe AI playgrounds, to containerizing agents so they cannot run loose across a company’s systems, this conversation offers a practical look at how large organizations can experiment with AI agents without losing control.
Guests:
Bianca Anghelina — Founder, Aily Labs
Stefan Ostwald — Co-founder, Parloa
Follow AI-Curious on your favorite podcast platform:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
All Other Platforms
For anyone interested in Jeff’s AI Workshops for their company:
Reach out directly at jeff@jeffwilser.com

What happens when AI stops living only on screens and starts measuring the physical world?
In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Ben Bond of Simbe about physical AI, retail robotics, and how autonomous robots are already helping stores understand what is actually happening on their shelves.
Simbe is focused on store intelligence through its shelf-scanning robot, Tally, a six-foot autonomous sensing robot used by major retailers across grocery, club, home improvement, and other high-volume retail environments. We explore how Tally moves through stores, detects missing products, checks shelf conditions, reads prices, and gives retailers a clearer picture of what is happening in the aisles.
We also discuss why the physical world is still surprisingly under-measured. Online retailers have had decades of analytics, SEO, merchandising tools, and digital optimization, but brick-and-mortar stores have often relied on human observation, spot checks, and labor-intensive manual audits. Ben explains how physical AI can create a new data layer for stores, helping retailers prioritize work, improve inventory accuracy, catch out-of-stock items, and operate more efficiently.
The conversation also gets into why Tally is a robot rather than just a ceiling camera or drone, why it does not currently talk to shoppers or stock shelves, and why the robot’s ability to move close to products from multiple angles creates richer, more precise data. We also talk about whether robots are taking retail jobs, why Simbe sees its work as additive rather than replacement-driven, and how robotics may evolve beyond humanoids into more specialized systems.
Finally, Ben shares where physical AI and robotics may be headed next, including supply chain, manufacturing, healthcare, disaster response, and a future where robots collaborate not only with humans, but with other robots.
Guest
Ben Bond — SVP of Strategy and Client Success, Simbe
Follow AI-Curious on your favorite podcast platform:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
All Other Platforms
For anyone interested in Jeff’s AI Workshops for their company:
Reach out directly at jeff@jeffwilser.com

What happens when AI agents become the audience?
In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Mark Howard, Chief Operating Officer of TIME, about how one of the world’s most iconic media brands is preparing for a web increasingly shaped by AI agents, AI crawlers, and machine-readable content.
TIME is now operating across what Mark describes as two internets: one built for human readers, with photos, design, layout, and the familiar red border, and another built for machines, stripped down into structured text that AI agents can crawl, parse, and use. We explore how TIME is using this shift to build new products, new internal workflows, and even a new kind of ad inventory designed for AI agents.
Mark walks us through the work behind TIME’s AI transformation, including how the team organized more than 100 years of journalism, nearly a million pieces of content, across scattered databases, PDFs, and legacy systems. We discuss the creation of a private LLM grounded in TIME’s archive, the launch of TIME AI, and how tools like summaries, translations, audio briefings, and article-level chat can expand access without changing the underlying facts of the reporting.
We also talk about what TIME considers sacred: trust, original reporting, editorial integrity, and the journalist-source relationship. Mark explains why TIME does not generate journalism with AI, how the editorial team shaped the product’s voice and guardrails, and why every company needs to define what AI should never touch.
Finally, we explore the agentic web, AI crawlers, GEO, publisher monetization, brand-verified facts, and what it means to sell ads to robots. Mark shares how TIME is thinking about crawler blocking, AI citations, referral traffic, markdown pages, and the future of media as AI search changes how people find information.
Guest
Mark Howard — Chief Operating Officer, TIME
Follow AI-Curious on your favorite podcast platform:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
All Other Platforms
For anyone interested in Jeff’s AI Workshops for their company:
Reach out directly at jeff@jeffwilser.com

Will AI ever become conscious, or are we mistaking intelligence for inner life?
In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with neuroscientist Anil Seth about one of the biggest questions in artificial intelligence: whether AI can truly become conscious. Anil is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he directs the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science.
We explore why Anil believes today’s AI systems are not conscious, why language and intelligence are not the same as experience, and why humans are so quick to project minds onto machines. We also discuss his argument that consciousness may be deeply tied to living biological systems, rather than something that can simply be copied into silicon.
The conversation moves through neuroscience, philosophy, AI ethics, and the future of human relationships with machines. We talk about the cultural pull of Frankenstein, HAL, the singularity, and mind uploading, as well as the risks of assuming AI deserves rights if it only appears conscious. Anil also explains why brain organoids and biological systems may raise more serious consciousness questions than today’s chatbots.
Finally, we look at why this debate matters now, especially as people form emotional bonds with AI companions and increasingly interact with systems that can seem empathetic, aware, and alive.
Guest
Anil Seth — Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, University of Sussex; Director, Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science
Follow AI-Curious on your favorite podcast platform:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
All Other Platforms
For anyone interested in Jeff’s AI Workshops for their company:
Reach out directly at jeff@jeffwilser.com