High Signal: Data Science | Career | AI

Episode 34: Duolingo and the Future of Personalized Education with AI

February 10th, 2026  |  45 mins 39 secs

Bozena Pajak, VP of Learning at Duolingo, joins High Signal to discuss the evolution of AI at Duolingo: from personalized difficulty models to the current generative frontier where AI characters provide low-stakes and high impact conversational practice. We discuss the role of AI in overcoming one of the biggest hurdles in language acquisition, speaking anxiety. We also talk about how Bozena's team leverages agentic workflows to scale content and why the next wave of personalization involves shifting from difficulty levels to "thematic lenses" tailored to specific user interests.

Episode 33: Why Your AI Product Will Be Obsolete in Six Months (And What To Do About It)

January 27th, 2026  |  1 hr 21 secs

Benn Stancil joins High Signal to ask some uncomfortable questions about the current AI moment. Is now actually a terrible time to start a company, if the tools you build on today are obsolete in six months, at what point does the head start stop mattering? Is all that context engineering you're doing a waste of time, destined to go the way of Boolean search syntax in the 90s?

Episode 32: The Post-Coding Era: What Happens When AI Writes the System?

January 12th, 2026  |  41 mins 44 secs

Nicholas Moy, former Head of Research at Windsurf & now at Google DeepMind, joins High Signal to discuss the shift from "co-driving" to a truly "agentic" era of development. We discuss Windsurf's journey from early prototypes that struggled with compounding errors to the successful launch of their agentic coding product. Nick explains that building a startup in the current climate requires a strategy of "disrupting yourself" to avoid the innovator’s dilemma; companies must be ready to pivot as soon as a new frontier model makes previously impossible features viable. He argues that traditional technical moats are increasingly fragile, and true defensibility now comes from real-world usage data, brand reputation, and a deep intuition for what users need at the frontier of these capabilities.

Episode 31: Why Data Governance In Your Org is Broken (And How to Fix It)

December 29th, 2025  |  47 mins

ai, data science, genai, ml

Cara Dailey, VP and Head of Data Strategy at Early Warning (the parent company of Zelle), joins High Signal to discuss the evolution of high-stakes data leadership and governance. From her early work in online advertising at DoubleClick to shaping data strategy at Nike and holding Chief Data Officer roles at Bank of the West and T. Rowe Price, Cara has seen every iteration of the data leader’s role. Now, she’s navigating her 'product era'—shaping the data strategy for Early Warning's Decisions Intelligence business, where she leverages rich financial data and data science to drive fraud monitoring and modeling.

Episode 30: The AI Paradox: Why Your Data Team’s Workload is About to Explode

December 10th, 2025  |  50 mins 18 secs

Chris Child, VP of Product, Data Engineering at Snowflake, joins High Signal to deliver a new playbook for data leaders based on his recent MIT report, revealing why AI is paradoxically creating more work for data teams, not less. He explains how the function is undergoing a forced evolution from back-office “plumbing” to the strategic core of the enterprise, determining whether AI initiatives succeed or fail. The conversation maps the new skills and organizational structures required to navigate this shift.

Episode 29: Why AI Adoption Fails: A Behavioral Framework for AI Implementation

November 27th, 2025  |  49 mins 25 secs

ai, data science, genai, ml, nudge

Liz Costa of the Behavioral Insights Team returns to High Signal to deliver a critical behavioral science playbook for the AI era focused on human and business impact. We discuss why the potential of AI can only be fulfilled by understanding a single bottleneck: human behavior. The conversation reveals why leaders must intervene now to prevent temporary adoption patterns from calcifying into permanent organizational norms, the QWERTY Effect, and how to move organizations past simply automating drudgery to achieving deep integration.

Episode 28: From Context Engineering to AI Agent Harnesses: The New Software Discipline

November 13th, 2025  |  50 mins 34 secs

ai, data science, genai, ml

Lance Martin of LangChain joins High Signal to outline a new playbook for engineering in the AI era, where the ground is constantly shifting under the feet of builders. He explains how the exponential improvement of foundation models is forcing a complete rethink of how software is built, revealing why top products from Claude Code to Manus are in a constant state of re-architecture simply to keep up.

Episode 27: Why Your Data Team Doesn't Have a Seat at the Table (And How to Earn It)

October 29th, 2025  |  41 mins 35 secs

Paras Doshi (Head of Data, Opendoor; former data leader at Amazon) joins High Signal to unpack the playbook for building an indispensable data function. He shares his experience tackling the classic scaling challenge of fragmented data at Opendoor, where rapid growth led to inconsistent metrics across the business, and turning the data function into a centralized strategic asset.

Episode 26: Gen AI's True Cost: Why Today's Wins Are Tomorrow's Debts

October 16th, 2025  |  43 mins 14 secs

ai, data science, genai, ml

Vishnu Ram Venkataraman (Generative AI Executive & Entrepreneur; former AI Leader at Credit Karma and Intuit) joins High Signal to unpack the true cost of generative AI. Having scaled AI solutions impacting over 140 million users, Vishnu reveals why the ease of shipping Gen AI prototypes often masks significant operational and engineering debts, challenging the conventional wisdom of rapid deployment.

Episode 25: How Data-Driven Growth Redefined a Media Giant

October 2nd, 2025  |  56 mins 22 secs

ai, data science, genai, ml

Sergey Fogelson (VP of Data Science, Televisa Univision) joins High Signal to reveal how the world’s largest Spanish-language media company built a sophisticated data engine from the ground up. This transformation fueled a tenfold expansion of its digital streaming business by redefining how the company connects with 300 million viewers worldwide. At the heart of this success is a proprietary household graph that creates a single, privacy-first view of a massive and culturally diverse audience.

Episode 24: Rebuilding an Airline for the 21st Century: LATAM's Data-Driven Transformation

September 15th, 2025  |  49 mins 56 secs

ai, data science, genai, ml

Andrés Bucchi (Chief Data Officer, LATAM Airlines) joins High Signal to unpack how a century-old airline reinvented itself with data and AI—and how that transformation is unlocking value from fuel efficiency to fraud detection. LATAM has built a massive data operation, experimenting across everything from pricing to operations, while customers benefit from a more reliable and secure travel experience.
We dig into how LATAM fostered an experimentation culture, why existing data infrastructure is a critical asset, and how the biggest bottleneck in AI adoption isn't the technology itself, but human decision-making. The conversation also looks ahead to the future of generative AI as a software engineering problem, and the organizational changes needed to unlock its full potential.

Episode 23: Why Most AI Agents Fail (and What It Takes to Reach Production)

September 2nd, 2025  |  51 mins 17 secs

agents, ai, machine learning

Anu Bharadwaj (President, Atlassian) joins High Signal to unpack how humans and AI agents will work together across the enterprise, and how that shift could change the very nature of teamwork. Atlassian employees have already built thousands of agents across product, marketing, engineering, and HR teams, while customers like HarperCollins are cutting manual work by 4x as industries from publishing to finance rethink their workflows.

We dig into how Atlassian’s culture enables bottom-up experimentation, why grounding and reliability are critical for adoption, and how non-technical teams are often the ones creating the most useful agents. The conversation also looks ahead to the frontiers of multiplayer agent collaboration, proactive and ambient workflows, and the governance and compliance challenges enterprises will face as agents move from tools to teammates.

Episode 22: Why a Trillion Dollars of Market Cap Is Up for Grabs (and How AI Teams Will Win It)

August 19th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  46 mins 50 secs

ai, data science, genai, ml

Tomasz Tunguz (Theory Ventures) joins High Signal to unpack why a trillion dollars of market cap is up for grabs as AI reshapes enterprise software. He explains why workflows are now changing faster than packaged software can keep up, how “liquid software” is redefining CRM and marketing automation, and why background agents will require a new kind of “agent inbox.” We discuss the compounding errors that arise when tools are chained too finely, the hidden AI technical debt accumulating in today’s systems, and why modular stacks—mixing local and cloud models—will beat monolithic apps. The conversation also surfaces early memory architectures, what breaks when one IC manages 100 agents, and how these shifts change the real bottlenecks in scaling AI.

Episode 21: Why Great Data Still Leads to Bad Decisions (And How to Fix It)

August 5th, 2025  |  50 mins 38 secs

Amy Edmondson (Harvard Business School) and Mike Luca (Johns Hopkins) join High Signal to unpack what actually drives good decisions in data‑rich organizations. Using contrasts like the Bay of Pigs vs. the Cuban Missile Crisis and product cases such as Airbnb’s work on measuring discrimination, they show how decision quality tracks conversation quality—framing options, surfacing uncertainty, and challenging assumptions. We cover common failure modes (correlation vs. causation, anchoring, hierarchy, false precision), practical meeting designs that raise the signal, and where algorithms and LLMs help or hinder human judgment.

Episode 20: Incentives, Accountability, and the Data Leader’s Dilemma

July 21st, 2025  |  1 hr 3 mins

Daragh Sibley, Chief Algorithms Officer at Literati and former data-science leader at Stitch Fix, joins High Signal to unpack how machine-learning moves from slide-deck promise to bottom-line impact. He walks through his shift from academic research on how kids learn to read to owning inventory and personalization algorithms that decide which five books land in every child’s box. We dig into the moment a data leader stops advising and starts owning P&L-critical calls, why some problems deserve simple analytics while others need high-dimensional models, and how to design workflows where human judgment and algorithmic predictions share accountability. Along the way we talk incentive design, balancing exploration and exploitation in inventory, and measuring success in dollars—not dashboards.

Episode 19: Defaults, Decisions, and Dynamic Systems: Behavioral Science Meets AI

July 3rd, 2025  |  54 mins 8 secs

ai, data science, genai, ml, nudge

Lis Costa, Chief of Innovation and Partnerships at the Behavioural Insights Team, joins High Signal to explore how behavioral science is reshaping public policy, digital platforms, and machine learning.

She explains how defaults influence behavior at scale, why personalization and chatbots are unlocking new kinds of interventions, and what happens when AI systems meet real-world complexity. We also discuss the limits of nudging, the promise of boosting, and why building for human decision-making requires more than just good models.