High Signal: Data Science | Career | AI

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 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.

Episode 18: High-Stakes AI Systems and the Cost of Getting It Wrong

June 19th, 2025  |  58 mins 45 secs

ai, data science, llms, machine learning

Sudarshan Seshadri—VP of AI, Data Science, and Foundations Engineering at Alto Pharmacy—joins us to explore what it takes to build high-stakes AI systems that people can actually trust. He shares lessons from deploying machine learning and LLMs in healthcare, where speed, safety, and uncertainty must be carefully balanced. We talk about designing AI to support pharmacist judgment, the shift from bottlenecks to decision backbones, and why great data leaders are really architects of how irreversible decisions get made.

Episode 17: The Incentive Problem in Shipping AI Products — and How to Change It

May 29th, 2025  |  53 mins 52 secs

ai, data science, machine learning

Roberto Medri, VP of Data Science at Instagram, explains why most experiments fail, how misaligned incentives warp product development, and what it takes to drive real impact with data science. He shares what teams get wrong about launches, why ego gets in the way of learning, and how Instagram turned Reels from a struggling product into a global success. A candid look at product, data, and decision-making inside one of the world’s most influential platforms.

Episode 13: The End of Programming As We Know It

March 27th, 2025  |  1 hr 23 mins

ai, data science, genai, llms, machine learning

Tim O’Reilly—founder of O’Reilly Media and one of the most influential voices in tech—argues we’re not witnessing the end of programming, but the beginning of something far bigger. He draws on past computing revolutions to explore how AI is reshaping what it means to build software, why real breakthroughs come from the edge—not incumbents—and what it takes to learn, teach, and build responsibly in the age of AI.

Episode 10: AI Won't Save You But Data Intelligence Will

February 12th, 2025  |  59 mins 42 secs

ai, data science, machine learning

Ari Kaplan—Global Head of Evangelism at Databricks and a pioneer in sports analytics—explains why businesses fixated on AI often overlook the real advantage: making better decisions with their own data. He shares lessons from his work building analytics teams for Major League Baseball, advising McLaren’s F1 strategy, and helping companies apply AI where it actually works—without falling into hype-driven traps.

Episode 9: Why 90% of Data Science Fails—And How to Fix It -- With Eric Colson

January 30th, 2025  |  1 hr 9 mins

ai, data science, machine learning

Eric Colson—former Chief Algorithms Officer at Stitch Fix and VP of Data Science and Machine Learning at Netflix—explains why most companies fail to fully leverage their data science teams. Drawing on his experience leading data functions at top tech companies, he shares how organizations can move beyond treating data science as a support function and instead empower data scientists to drive strategic impact through experimentation, iteration, and algorithmic decision-making.