Meghan Joyce comes from a long line of people living life to the fullest. She takes a lot of influence from her grandmother, who was an entrepreneur, making and selling dresses in the early 1900's, influencing her to take a hold of every moment in life and capitalize on the time you have. She's led groups at Uber and Oscar, prior to starting her current venture. But outside of tech, she is the mother of 3 children. Her favorite hobby is to spend time with the people she loves, meeting them where they are. But when she has spare time to herself, she enjoys being in nature, hiking or walking on a beach, and staying active.

Meghan was sitting on a bed in Amsterdam, and experienced a problem with parental technology (IE a breast pump) that was keeping her from running things at Uber. While sitting on hold with the company, trying to get another one available, she started to wish she had a solution that would help her with this, while she attended her meetings at Uber.

This is the creation story of Duckbill.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://getduckbill.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/meghanvjoyce/

Today we have a special guest and author on the Code Story podcast, Steve Brown. Steve is a former DeepMind futurist, and recently published a book called The AI Ultimatum: Preparing for a World of Intelligent Machines and Radical Transformation. In the book, he provides a step by step framework to guide leaders in identifying use cases for AI, turning it into business value, and obtaining buy in from employees.

In our conversation, Steve is going to elaborate on why AI is a teammate (not a threat), the top AI rollout mistakes, leadership and management tactics that need to go, and much more.

Questions:

• What led you to write this book? Ultimately, what were you trying to accomplish?
• We often hear that AI is coming for our jobs, but you argue it’s actually our newest teammate. Can you elaborate on this more?
• Let's double back on something you said, around the flavors of agents. What are those 3 different flavors of agents?
• Over time, leaders can fall into operating out of their experience - IE assumptions about a particular endeavor. With the advent of AI, what assumptions need to be retired, and what needs to replace them?
• In the same vane as the last question, you mention that old-school management fails in the age of AI. What do you mean by this, why does it fail and what needs to be changed?
• In the book, you talk about the AI wins you can use today, effectively pointing at immediate impact teams can feel from using AI. Can you talk to 2-3 of the most important ones?
• Can you explain why reinvention beats reduction? If this is the case, how can leaders and employees move into this way of thinking?
• Today, people are trying to rollout AI and getting it wrong - from the startup to the enterprise. What are the top AI rollout mistakes for companies to avoid?

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• The AI Ultimatum: Preparing for a World of Intelligent Machines and Radical Transformation
• https://beacons.ai/aifuturist
• https://www.stevebrown.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/futuresteve/
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/aitransformation/
• https://www.youtube.com/@futureofai

Catalina Turlea is originally from Romania, growing up in the countryside there. Post getting her bachelors, she moved to Austria for her masters, and landed in Germany for 13 years. She is married with a 3 year old daughter and many, many pets. She loves to spend time with her family, in nature and the mountains. She used to do a lot of sports, but being a startup founder doesn't really allow for as much running or hiking. She also is into calligraphy, which she calls her hidden superpower.

Catalina has been building products for 14 years, and recently was running a small tech consultancy for startups. What she observed was that a lot of products contained an AI feature, but the "feature" was based on a prompt, didn't work well, and wasn't a good fit for the users. Eventually, she and her co-founder realized they saw the same problem, and built a platform to support products teams in building valuable AI features.

This is the creation story of Lovelaice.

Sponsors

• Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
• TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
• Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
• Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)

Links

• https://lovelaice.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/catalinaturlea/