Will AI Take Your Job? Dag Kittlaus Separates Hype from Reality

AI is moving faster than most organizations can keep up with, but according to Siri co-creator Dag Kittlaus , the biggest challenge isn't the technology itself. It's adoption. In this episode, Dag shares his insights on how artificial intelligence will reshape your career, your business, and the future of work. Drawing on his experience building Siri and investing in the next generation of AI startups, Dag explains why widespread AI-driven job loss is unlikely in the near term and how business leaders can successfully integrate AI into their organizations. He explores the important differences between AI capability and AI diffusion, arguing that this distinction will shape the next decade of innovation, productivity, and economic growth. The conversation covers AI productivity gains, enterprise AI adoption, AI-first startups, Apple's AI future, personalized virtual assistants, healthcare innovation, data centers, AI infrastructure, and the emerging opportunities that business and technology leaders can't afford to ignore. Whether you're a CIO, business leader, entrepreneur, or technology professional, this episode offers practical insights into how artificial intelligence is transforming industries and why understanding AI today may be one of the most important investments you can make in your future. Like and follow for weekly episodes. In this episode: 00:00 Intro 00:53 Co-creator of Siri 01:15 AI's promise vs. AI's peril 02:28 Capability vs. diffusion: The real AI challenge 03:15 Why AI still can't replace entire jobs 04:31 Will AI cause massive white-collar job loss? 07:14 Why laying off employees for AI is a mistake 08:14 How businesses should actually adopt AI 10:30 How Dag personally uses AI today 12:41 AI investment trends and opportunities 13:27 What's next for AI infrastructure and data centers? 15:27 Hidden AI opportunities most investors miss 16:41 Winners and losers in the AI economy 17:56 How leaders should prepare their organizations 21:32 AI-first startups vs. large enterprises 23:11 Should established companies fear AI-native competitors? 24:00 Ignore AI and you're in trouble 25:21 The 10-year AI adoption timeline 26:22 Is AI ready or does it need more breakthroughs? 28:00 The original vision for Siri 29:30 AI agents, APIs, and autonomous assistants 31:32 Why apple lost ground in AI 34:53 Dag's vision for the future of Siri 35:29 The 'Conductor Thesis' for personal AI 38:30 Why personalization Is AI's missing link 39:07 Consumer backlash against AI 40:20 Why AI job loss fears are overblown 41:15 AI, productivity growth, and the four-day workweek 43:51 How to change public perception of AI 47:05 Convincing employees to embrace AI 47:50 Why incentives matter more than mandates 50:05 Practical advice for business leaders 53:03 The biggest AI trend nobody understands 53:38 How AI will transform healthcare 56:11 AI regulation and innovation challenges 58:23 Why Dag is optimistic about AI's future 59:15 Final thoughts #ai #futureofwork #leadership #siri #apple #futureofai #technologypodcast #digitaltransformation #innovation #entrepreneurship #futureofjobs #stevejobs #dagkittlaus Connect with Dag: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dagkittlaus/ X: https://x.com/dagk Our links: Visit our website: https://www.infotech.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=podcast Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InfoTechRG

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  It's in everybody's interest, no matter what your future, what your career looks like. Start understanding this and how it applies to whatever your interest or career path is. If you ignore it, uh, yeah, I think you're screwed.

• 0:17Geoff Nielson?

  This is a show about the future of tech and the future of work. I'm Jeff Nielsen and today my guest is Dag Kittlaus. He's the co-creator of Siri and to quote Steve Jobs, "cracked AI in a consumer-friendly way." He quit Apple the day Steve Jobs died, but has been living and breathing AI ever since. I'm interested in what we can learn from his time at Apple, but I'm more interested in what's coming next. How can modern AI tools actually help? And are they going to lead to catastrophic job loss? And how can we as leaders make sure that we're ready? Let's find out.

• 0:53Geoff Nielson?

  Dag, thanks so much for joining today. You know, I wanted to jump right into it. I mean, you built Siri, you did AI before AI, you know, you worked with Steve Jobs. I'm curious, you know, from your perspective, when you look at the AI landscape right now, what it can do, where it's going next, where do you see the promise?

• 1:15Speaker 00

  The promise is everywhere and as is the peril, so to speak. I'm not a believer in the fact that these incredible capabilities are going to wipe out white-collar jobs in the next 18 to 24 months. I do see that there's already beginning to be a semblance of breakthroughs in terms of applying these incredible capabilities to research. And you can see there's some obvious productivity gains.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  I see, I see, you know, like others, a very broad-based application of the technology, you know, for the betterment and productivity and ultimately GDP growth and a lot of the narrative that you've already heard. But I think one of the main areas that people underestimate is the difference between capability and diffusion, which is to say, there's a lot going on in the labs, that's incredible, but sitting in, you know, Chicago, it's going to take a while for

• 2:34Speaker 00

  that to actually get out into all of the industry and make the market impact we all expect.

• 2:41Geoff Nielson?

  I'm curious, when you, when you talk about the diffusion and I guess the, the kind of the slower pace of adoption than people, you know, wished for or hoped for, how, how much of that do you see as being just sort of a, a human-centric issue in terms of the people actually adopting this stuff versus is this, you know, a design issue on the parts of some of the builders? And, you know, the, the reason I ask that is I think about Siri and I think about sort of that, you know, you know, the consumer-centric nature of it. Where, where does it sit or is it both?

• 3:15Speaker 00

  It's definitely both. So, you know, the buzzwords these days are, if you, if you spend a lot of time in it, which I do, is they're looking to create 100% workflows. So, people are using AI in almost every industry for a limited set of things, but it's not yet replacing what, you know, a full, you know, role is in a company because it only does a part of, of that job. So. You know, a lot of the big players, Anthropic, OpenAI are sort of copying Palantir's playbook,

• 3:55Speaker 00

  which is forward deployed engineers, which are, you know, knee deep into various industries and learning the problems from the inside out that AI can help with. And then designing and building those on and off ramps to create that sort of single workflow, you know, one at a time. So that sort of thing is what's going to make this AI, you know, revolution, or whatever you'd like to call it, truly, you know, a part of the fabric of most businesses.

• 4:31Geoff Nielson?

  You, you, you mentioned earlier that you don't see a huge displacement of white collar jobs. Is that, I, I want to unpack that a little bit because when we talk about AI revolution or the impact that I do hear you talking about, is that that AI won't replace jobs or it will replace them, but with even more new jobs that are focused on AI?

• 4:56Speaker 00

  I don't have a big short term worry about, you know, unemployment

• 5:04Speaker 00

  rising faster than we're able to ingest the new capabilities. We've gone through this with many, many waves of new tech, all the way back from agriculture used to be 80% of every, you know, worker in the United States in 1800. Now it's less than 1%. So it's really the rate at which these technologies diffuse, so to speak, and become a part of the fabric that matters in terms of what does it do to unemployment? Of course, it's going to create a whole new wave of jobs simultaneously.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  The question will be, you know, do the efficiencies and the resultant, you know, decrease or, you know, in, in employment offset, you know, the gains?

• 5:59Geoff Nielson?

  Right, and, and your sense is that they will because of all the, all the doors that they'll open?

• 6:06Speaker 00

  I mean, there isn't much evidence yet that there's a bunch of AI unemployment that's happening. Yes, there's layoffs, but honestly, you know, a lot of these companies use AI as an excuse to lay off people they want to lay off anyway.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  If you look, you know,

• 6:26Speaker 00

  look, find me a good example of a company who laid off a significant percentage and proportion of their workforce and can show, you know, a dramatic increase in the bottom line and productivity, that's hard to find right now. And in fact, you know, Anthropic did their own study where 42% of people that laid people off because they thought they had AI efficiencies has have begun to hire those people back. So this is going to take a while. I think it's going to be just as impactful as, you know,

• 7:06Speaker 00

  the hype will will have it, you know, have you believe. It's just going to take a lot longer than people think.

• 7:14Geoff Nielson?

  There's, there's an implication there that rushing to lay people off and then try and figure out what they were doing and replace them with AI or, you know, free up capital to invest in AI, that there's, you know, business leaders should should heed a bit of caution there. I'm curious if, you know, from your perspective, if there's a better way to be thinking about how to actually adopt this technology or how to modernize your organization for AI.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  So is the question, what should, what should companies be doing in order to sort of maximally, you know, use this technology to their advantage or?

• 7:57Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, the question is if we, if we're not convinced that laying people off so we can bring in AI is the right solution and, you know, half of us who do that are going to end up just bringing back those same employees anyway. What's, what's the better road?

• 8:14Speaker 00

  The better road is to get, have a systematic

• 8:20Speaker 00

  process by which you start using the technology, understand how it can help your particular business. And of course, various industries will have, you know, very different ways that they'll do that. But get your hands dirty. Start using it, recognize where it can help, where productivity gains are really had. And, you know, encourage people to use it and to come up with their own ideas about how, you know, to use it to make their, themselves even more productive. So, like anything else,

• 8:58Speaker 00

  it's all hype until you're on the ground, you know, in front of your desk, trying to get something done. And hence, that is why a lot of the companies that are going after the enterprise aspect of, of, you know, getting AI productivity are literally just sending people in to really understand the business. And to create custom, you know, AI modules, you know, like Anthropic's doing for legal and accounting and all these things. That will be prevalent, that will be a huge cut as an industry to help those businesses figure that out.

• 9:36Geoff Nielson?

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• 10:18Geoff Nielson?

  I'm curious, from that perspective, where do you see the most value? How do, how do they help you the most in terms of the work that you're doing?

• 10:30Speaker 00

  So I'm not on a specific project at the moment. I just got through a gauntlet of doing three startups in a row over the last, you know, 10, 12 years. So right now I'm spending a lot of time just understanding, you know, as anyone knows this here, this stuff is changing on a daily or weekly basis. So, you know, my, my time is spent because I've had sleepless nights because my, my whole career is seeing five years out a little more clearly than the rest and building things to, you know, meet, meet the future. And it's been murky for me. So I spend a lot of time,

• 11:14Speaker 00

  you know, researching, building and getting my own perspectives on where this is all going. I use it to do, to invest. I invest in startups and, you know, some of my own things, but

• 11:29Speaker 00

  there's a lot of noise out there. And I really have spent a lot of time, Vic, to come up with my own thesis around all of these things, including what we spoke about earlier related to the fact that don't believe the hype that this technology, this train is going to come through. And suddenly there's going to be, you know, 20% of white collar jobs are going to be, you know, gone. So yeah, I'm using it in all sorts of ways. I'm having my kids build something. I have seven kids through like a Brady Bunch kind of a, an arrangement. And, you know, all of them are either using OpenClaw

• 12:14Speaker 00

  or, you know, Claude Co-Work or, you know, what Google announced,

• 12:21Speaker 00

  you know, not too long ago, related to what they're doing and agentic stuff. I think, I think it's in everybody's interest, no matter what your future, what your career looks like, is to start understanding this and how it applies to whatever your interest or career path is.

• 12:41Geoff Nielson?

  That's helpful and helps me understand, I guess, a little bit better some of the applications. The research part is interesting, and I'm sure you've gotten pretty deep in terms of trying to suss out what is the future, what's not the future, especially with the lens of investment. And you mentioned that 20% of white collar jobs is like that's something you're calling BS on as like this is not going to be something we see in the next handful of years. In terms of what we do see, are there any kind of trends that you've been following that you see as like, these are places you may want to invest, or that you think will be kind of the next hot area?

• 13:27Speaker 00

  You know, the debate is around the sequencing. I mean, there's just no question about the avalanche of resources going in this like no other industry before it. But what I'm starting to see is, you know, are semis, can the semis keep cranking out revenue when the data centers are getting delayed for both construction reasons, power supply shortages, memory constraints, and frankly, people just don't want them in their neighborhood, right? So what's happening

• 14:07Speaker 00

  is that a large number of purportedly completed data centers in '26 are going to be built in '27, or '28, or '29. They're all going to be delayed. Meanwhile, you have all the fab producers out there cranking out chips that may or may not have a home because of the delay of the rest of the supply chain. So those are the type of dynamics that are happening that a lot of people are trying to figure out. There's just so much resources and money going into this that... It's hard to say, you know, and of course, it's all priced to perfection right now.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Everybody assumes that these timelines, these execution paths are, you know, good to go. And of course, there's going to be certain things that aren't there, but it all depends on each other. So the opportunity is being able to see and predict where those delays are going to be, how it's going to impact things downstream, you know, and that's just sort of the public trade.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  In the private investing world, I would say there's going to be a thousand unicorns with companies that are building, well, let me give you an example. I'm in Chicago.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  You know, it's not on the coast. It's there. A lot of the industry in Chicago is what they call, you know, Rust Belt companies, right? They've heard about AI. They're talking about it in their board meetings. They've got nothing but customers and resources, but very little knowledge on what to do with it. And so now there's some incubators starting up with some friends and I that literally look at what are some very sort of boring tedious issues in major industries that, you know, we can come in and help build companies with people that have insider knowledge of, you know, industry-specific stuff like insurance, you know, becoming a third-party administrator for,

• 16:17Speaker 00

  you know, a health plan and being able to customize health plan for medium-sized businesses in a way that they would never get from Aetna or Blue Cross. So there's some really innovative stuff that's happening where the general attention just isn't focused on. And I think those are really good opportunities to build companies around.

• 16:41Geoff Nielson?

  When you look at the, I guess, the landscapes of organizations out there, whether it's tech, whether it's non-tech, I'm curious who you see as some of the winners and the losers shaking out from the next handful of years and this sort of diffusion pattern? What are the character, I mean, first of all, are there any specific sectors or any specific, I guess, organizational demographics, whether it's the bigger guys, the smaller guys, any particular areas where you think are going to be more conducive to getting ahead versus falling behind? And, you know, what, I guess, what are the characteristics that organizational leaders can think about to try and make sure they end up in the winner camp?

• 17:26Speaker 00

  Well, are you talking about sort of the battle of the frontier models? Are you talking about just, you know, everyday enterprise?

• 17:34Geoff Nielson?

  I'm talking about everyday enterprise. I'm talking about, you know, whether we think, you know, big companies are going to get farther ahead, whether we think startups are going to come and start disrupting them. Are there particular sectors that are going to completely be changing their business models in a way that, you know, disrupts some of the incumbents?

• 17:56Speaker 00

  I think the basic tenet is valid for all of them, which is begin, you know, have a very specific and aggressive plan for getting your hands sturdy with the tech, having your employee base get to understand it, and they'll discover through their day-to-day work, especially if there's, you know, a few experts that can run around and help people sort of get up to speed on what's possible and teach them. I think it's more about getting that attitude and getting that process rolling than whether

• 18:35Speaker 00

  or not they're big or small, because, you know, this is a layer on top of everything. It's not an industry or sector-specific advance. So winners and losers, you know, you can see that, for example, consulting companies are clearly replaceable in many ways with their existing model, right? So.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  Because you can just go in and get expert advice and have them make, you know, decks for you in 10 minutes, which used to cost, you know, $500 an hour for, you know, whoever to come in and help you do that kind of thing.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  But they're getting smart and now they're doing deals with, so the Accentures of the world, you know, they're partnering up with the frontier companies and saying, hey, we're gonna take it upon ourselves to take your platform and get it deeply embedded in various industries with the scale that we have. And that's gonna help you win. So now they're doing joint ventures, which, you know, were several of which were announced not too long ago. I don't know if you heard any about, you know, about any of those, but that's starting to happen. But I would say in general, you know, having a systematic approach to,

• 20:01Speaker 00

  you know, getting your employees, you know, feet wet and hands dirty on the tech and having some kind of systemized way to, you know, figure out how it can best help, you know, your enterprise. And there's clearly going to be, you know, like I said, it's gonna take longer than everyone thinks. But the benefits will be there. It's just, it's not going to be as disruptive. I don't see civil unrest coming down the road.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  But, you know, I think a deliberate, clever and, you know, disciplined way to get that ball rolling is the way to go, regardless of, you know, the enterprise.

• 20:41Geoff Nielson?

  This might be too much of an oversimplification, but I'm curious, you know, one of the ways that I talk or think about organizations using AI is sort of, you know, top down versus bottom up. Is it some, you know, the board coming up with this big grandiose, this will be the organization of the future and how AI will get us there versus, do you empower, you know, rank and file grassroots employees to, you know, to your point, have the tools and be, I guess, smart and motivated enough to re-architect things that they're doing in a way that rewires the business. It sounds like your perspective is more the latter, right? Like, let's decentralize this. Let's have people actually do it.

• 21:26Geoff Nielson?

  Is that, is that a fair categorization or is there more to it than that?

• 21:32Speaker 00

  So I would say that large enterprises and startups will have, will diverge in a big way in terms of how that's accomplished. So the larger companies will have to go through the process I was just talking about, which is, hey, let's figure out what the best way is, you know, to use this new revolutionary capability for our business and get it organized about that. The newest startups are going to be completely re-architecting what companies look like with a real AI forward, you know, not someone that's already down the road and that's 10 years old. You know, this, you see a lot of the software stops, stocks

• 22:13Speaker 00

  getting beaten up because they're really trying to overlay something into an existing process. But, you know, there's going to be one, two, three person companies that start everything with, at the baseline of AI first, where they're not changing existing workflows, they're building the original workflows using AI, which will be, you know, multiples more productive than trying to overlay AI on something existing. So I think it depends. I think the larger companies will have, you know, some kind of transformation projects to, you

• 22:55Speaker 00

  know, get, gain efficiencies through getting their, their, their hands dirty. And then the newest startups are going to come out and change everything by being AI first across a lot of things that never were.

• 23:10Geoff Nielson?

  I, that, that makes a lot of sense to me. And it's interesting that there's now this kind of new generation of companies that are suddenly a lot leaner, a lot more efficient. And, you know, I guess to use the trope, can do a lot more with less because they've been engineered and architected to be AI first. You know, if you're a leader in a large company, is that, when you're, when you're thinking about this new wave of competition, like, is that an existential threat? Like, are, should these companies be worried about finding themselves to be like the blockbuster and like a blockbuster versus Netflix story? Or, you know, do you think there's room for everybody or some other structural advantage that the large companies have that are going to help them,

• 23:55Geoff Nielson?

  you know, get through this wave of competition?

• 24:00Speaker 00

  I would say in the most, for the most part, um, yeah, if you don't make a concerted effort to jump on this, this wave, uh, I, I'd say your prospects are dim. It will be a part of things. There's no question about the, the productivity gains that you'll get, especially after you've taken the time to understand where and how to implement those. If you ignore it, uh, yeah, I, I think you're screwed.

• 24:32Geoff Nielson?

  Makes sense. Uh, so, so you know, if, if you're in a larger organization, you really don't have a choice other than, you know, get these tools out there, whether it's a big transformation project, or whether it's just kind of getting the licenses or the, getting the tools in the hands of employees to start figuring out how to, how to build the architect, the firm of the future.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  Yes. And of course, you know, it depends a bit on the industry. If you're in hospitality and you're running a group of restaurants, you know, that's about people, right? You're not going to have robots in there serving food anytime soon, or if ever. People are there to, to be with people. I don't think that changes for those industries that have the same characteristic of clearly there's some backend stuff that they can do. They can automate, you know, marketing and some of the campaigns that they do. So there's, there's efficiencies even where people first sort of is the business, but those are, you

• 25:34Speaker 00

  know, those are in the minority, I think. I think there's clearly, um, I would call it a 10-year timeframe over which all of this diffuses and becomes a regular part of all business. And frankly, that's going to be a huge net positive. Um, productivity growth, GDP growth. Um, how long is it before we get to a four-day work week? I mean, who knows? Um, universal basic income and all that. Um, it's hard for me to see anytime soon. I think this stuff takes a lot longer. Um, but you know, uh, it's coming and you

• 26:15Speaker 00

  know, what's, what's the smart way to do it is sort of what I've covered already.

• 26:22Geoff Nielson?

  I want to come back to the notion of diffusion versus, I guess, technological capabilities. And it sounds like a lot of, in your mind, the issue right now is just the, you know, the diffusion piece, that the, you know, the future is here, but it's not evenly distributed. I was, I was thinking about a conversation. So I was talking to Adam Shire on the show in the fall. And at least at the time, he was, he was a very tough critic of L L Ms and, and was complaining that they're a lot less intuitive than even Siri was in its early days. And, you know, could, could create a lot of interesting text or, you know, media,

• 27:06Geoff Nielson?

  but couldn't actually get things done in the same way that Siri could do, you know, basically 15 years ago. The reason I'm bringing up that anecdote is I'm curious to what degree, you know, from what you've seen, the technology is here already. It really is truly a diffusion problem versus are there, you know, to what we were talking about earlier, some real issues with the technology itself? And we need to see it continue to develop before, you know, we can expect it to be deployed at scale effectively?

• 27:38Speaker 00

  So I'd break that into two parts. The original Siri vision, for lack of a better word, I mean, we had to sort of anchor this notion of a personal assistant to something people knew when we started it way back in the day. Because they didn't, people didn't understand what we were talking about. So we called it a do engine instead of a search engine. And the technology to make that vision come to life is now here. I don't see any, any restraint, like understanding language, be able to delegate to a multitude of, you know, APIs, you know, the

• 28:22Speaker 00

  The the the architecture of MCP and and UCP and some of these other connective tissue, things that agents will use to conduct commerce. All of these bridges are are being built right now. The APIs exist and almost all of these companies that you could. I mean, we call it back then. And our second company called Viv was actually even more about this. I don't know if you remember that or not, but that was acquired by Samsung and is now their version of Siri called Samsung. Called Bixby at Samsung.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  But yeah, we could spin up with one query. It might do five API calls.

• 29:11Speaker 00

  You know, use a variety of services to figure out the weather, book. Book the table that has a good view of Alcatraz for dinner. And, you know, have an Uber at your door. You know, 20 minutes before your reservation, knowing what traffic patterns look like. Those types of use cases are definitely coming and have no further technical constraints.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  If you want to jump forward a little bit now. There's talk about, you know, LLMs advancing scientific research. But you still need people on the ground that are mixing the chemicals. And I mean, before you have this.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  It's going to take a while before you've got, you know, millions of Optimus robots out there that are doing the scientific grunt work. You need researchers out there in the fields to do this kind of thing in in many fields.

• 30:11Speaker 00

  So. You know, do we have what it takes to to make Siri

• 30:18Speaker 00

  the full vision of Siri to be able to do all kinds of things for you, predict what you want, understand your preferences, you know, get serious productivity behind just a voice interface? Absolutely. I would kill to have had that tech when we were starting this because we spent a lot of time just getting it to try to understand us.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  The rest of the picture is imminently doable.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  And I've I've written a letter to Tim Cook about what Siri should do in this regard because Apple's in a unique position here to, you know, ascend back to the, you know, to the you know, to the trophy stand when it comes to agentic AI. So yeah, there's a lot going on.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  I have gained a lot of respect for where L L M's have headed and in terms of assistance and all that.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  With the possible exception of of memory and preferences, which they still haven't really figured out. There are some architectural things that need to be done there. But yeah, it's it's ready to go.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  People just need to do it.

• 31:32Geoff Nielson?

  Right. Well, and it's, you know, it's interesting, interesting to me and and maybe more depressing or a more of an emotional aspect for you, given your work on Siri that, you know, to your implied point, like, Apple has not been leading the charge in this stuff. The, you know, Siri's trajectory kind of lost ground. I hope it's not controversial to say relative to some of these other players. And so I'm curious, when you think about, I mean, first of all, when you think about that, was that just an inevitability based on, you know, Apple not having labs there? Was that just an issue with, you know, losing Steve Jobs, losing folks like you from the company and and sort of

• 32:15Geoff Nielson?

  losing the, I guess, the human side of it and the will to do that? And then the the road forward, I guess, from here. I'm I'm curious, you know, how much you're comfortable sharing about what you see Apple needing to do if they're going to regain that, you know, supremacy.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, so regarding the path that Apple took after we left, so

• 32:42Speaker 00

  you know, we worked with Steve every week. This was a personal project of his. He was very interested in the space 10 years before he bought Siri.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  So we were on a great trajectory. We had, we had a similar vision. That was a part of the reason we, you know, basically decided to take the deal and join Apple. We wanted to sort of make our baby go big with, with someone like Steve and Apple.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  We were on the right track, but Steve died the day after the Apple, after the Siri launch. I actually quit the same day he died because I didn't want to work without him on it because, you know, you can see

• 33:25Speaker 00

  how other, how things are going to change. You can get a sense for it. And there's a lot of other sort of noise that was coming in around what we should do with Siri and whatnot. So I I left, Adam left soon after we started the second company. And, you know, off to the races and what we felt was important, which was opening up a Siri-like environment for third parties to be able to build apps on. So I think an app store for AI where you know, anyone could build capabilities for Siri and just like the app store, which to this day, I think Apple has an opportunity to use the incredible ecosystem that they have to create

• 34:09Speaker 00

  an app store where people can create their own capabilities and choose what their personal assistant can do. You know, versus just waiting for the next roadmap to drop.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, going forward.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  What specifically are you thinking about on that roadmap that you're thinking about?

• 34:35Geoff Nielson?

  Well, I mean, I'm, I'm curious. And again, I don't know how personal we're getting here. You mentioned you wrote a letter to Tim Cook, like what, what are kind of the, the broad strokes in as much detail as, as you're comfortable sharing about what, what needs to happen to right the ship?

• 34:53Speaker 00

  So there's an aspect of what we have been working on for 15 years that a lot of the people or most, if not all, I haven't seen it yet.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  They're working on building intelligence and, you know, getting better benchmarks and solving harder problems. There aren't many people who have thought through, what would it take to apply that intelligence to make,

• 35:24Speaker 00

  you know, the virtual assistant vision that we had back in the day, a reality? So there's taking the tech and morphing it into something that really gets to know you. So, you know, the gist of that paper was what I call the conductor thesis, which is that Siri should be spending most or all of its time getting to know you, knowing everything about you, your preferences, your habits, how you use various things, what time you get up in the morning, your health status. And then using that information to delegate tasks and getting information and timely

• 36:08Speaker 00

  alerts about various things that matter specifically to you. I don't see anybody in the market whose sole focus is to build the conductor that directs the symphony of what will ultimately be a world of specialized agents out there. And I think Siri is in a really good position to do that. They have a ton of context about us already, as does Google. If you think about, you know, Gmail, search history, you can go on and on, and Apple has a similar, you know, baseline that gives it an advantage to jumpstart how quickly it can do things that are relevant to, you know, any of us.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  So yeah, I think, I think the future of the, the personal assistant aspect of this, call it the consumer play, is

• 37:04Speaker 00

  Build that interface that the individual can't do without. Spend a lot of time, get, you know, and it's a, it's a two way street. It's not just inferring things by looking at your emails and understanding their relationships that you have, being able to write and respond in, in your voice.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  You know, knowing your preferences when you book the flight that you like aisle seats rather than window seats and you like to travel in the morning. And generally speaking, you travel out of O'Hare instead of Midway in Chicago. You know, there's a whole preference graph that's going to come out of this for someone who does it properly.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  And I don't see anybody doing that properly. So I think that is a missing link in what consumer AI morphs towards. And, you know, not as relevant in the business and enterprise case, although you could argue that there's enterprise versions of this around it, getting to know your work very specifically. So the whole

• 38:12Speaker 00

  part of the ecosystem that seems to be missing is that very personal aspect of it. And, you know, I've always thought nobody's done personalization, you know, even close to what the opportunity is. And I think that holds very well in this world we're in.

• 38:30Geoff Nielson?

  I think it's really interesting and, you know, one of the aspects of consumer AI, of consumer technology now that's on my radar, that I feel like wasn't as present, you know, 15 plus years ago, is it feels like we're starting to see a real consumer backlash against AI, that there's this kind of negative reception of, and by the way, in no small part because there's all these narratives about, oh, AI is going to take your job or AI is going to have some sort of negative societal consequence.

• 39:07Geoff Nielson?

  And we're starting to hear more stories about people saying, but people opting out or saying, no, I don't want that. AI equals bad.

• 39:17Geoff Nielson?

  Assuming we want to overcome that and that there actually is value in these things that we're creating, how do we overcome that? And how would a more consumer-focused company like Apple or anyone serving consumers, I guess, really overcome that and be able to build that trust or build that demand?

• 39:39Speaker 00

  Let me ask, did you hear about the commencement speech that Eric Schmidt gave at University of Arizona?

• 39:45Geoff Nielson?

  Let's talk about that for a miniature.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  I was there. I was in the audience because my daughter was graduating. And it was wildly inappropriate, but and the message was really good. But yes, there was this incredible negative bias around AI and tech in general. And I think that narrative has been way overblown, but it doesn't help when the leaders of these companies are, you know, Dario with every other breath is talking about white collar job loss and maybe all jobs will be gone in 10 years and it'll just be a bunch of

• 40:24Speaker 00

  robots out there. All of that stuff is just really, I mean, it's overblown. It's clearly not going to happen. And if anything, you know, AI is a huge net positive in the world. Now, notwithstanding all of the potential dangers around cybersecurity and, you know, the bad actors using it to create new viruses or whatever, those are real risks. And I think that they're being appropriately prioritized in terms of wanting to make sure that that doesn't happen. But I think people

• 41:05Speaker 00

  just need to project the future of what's possible and more likely to be possible, which is great advances in, you know.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  Disease research, drug discovery, the economics of productivity and that that people can understand and feel. Getting a lot more done in their job.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  You know, I do think that there will be societal shifts in our patterns like a four day work week. I think that is a real possibility, which gives people more free time.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  The GDP growth is real. I mean, I think we're already starting to see GDP growth accelerate. Other than, you know, some of the inflationary pressures that we're feeling now. If you were to take that all out of the equation right now, you would see higher GDP growth than you've seen a long time if ever. You know, the productivity is starting to really happen, but it only accelerates over time. So that's nothing but good news for, you know, the everyday person's life's ability to afford things. To have time to spend, more time to spend with their families and on hobbies.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  And, you know, the whole issue around, hey, what if we end up not needing to work? What's our identity? I find that

• 42:42Speaker 00

  a non-issue.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  You know, if I had a bunch of time on my hands, I would be, you know, working for, I would be planting trees and, you know, I would be doing things that made me feel really good about contributing to, you know, the long-term decline of the environment or, you know, take your pick, pick your favorite hobby, you'll have more time to do it. Pick your favorite friends, you'll have more time to hang out. That's the message I think is more realistic.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  So all the doomer stuff, I think they need to just tamp down a little bit and,

• 43:28Speaker 00

  you know, I'm not saying that there aren't risks there, but they don't have to make that, you know, the primary narrative of every talk that they give. So I think that that stuff spreads. You know, the news media comes out and starts convincing people that AI is bad and all these jobs are going to be gone. That's just not the reality.

• 43:51Geoff Nielson?

  It's, it's, I, I agree with you. I'm, I'm just processing it because it's not the reality and yet it's become the reality because people believe it and have an emotional attachment to it. And because there's so many, um, I don't know, I guess, uh, conspirators who are, that, that might be too strong a word, but there's, there's so many people who are complicit in this narrative, to your point, you know, starting at some of the heads of these AI companies and then through this whole, you know, diffusion network of, of the media. So how do we, how do we dispel this myth? Is it like, is it as simple as just like convincing like the Darius

• 44:35Geoff Nielson?

  of the world to like shut up? Or is it like painting a more prosperous picture? Or how do, how do we get this? How do we get this?

• 44:45Geoff Nielson?

  Sorry?

• 44:46Speaker 00

  Sorry, sorry to interrupt. Um, find the examples where it actually is doing some incredible things and they are out there by the, you know, the dozens or hundreds already. Um, create, you know, if you, if you're, if you're advertising in the Super Bowl for, you know, don't be, don't, don't make it be about the, you know, the fact that one of your competitors is now using ads.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  Show that future that's already happening. Use real life, uh, stories about people who created using, uh, artificial intelligence, uh, a medication that saved their dog's life. I don't know if you heard that story. Um, you know, there are things that are, you know, real mainstream upsides that should get a lot more sort of media coverage and.

• 45:45Speaker 00

  There should be a concerted effort to turn that around because I saw firsthand, you know, Eric Schmidt couldn't get his words out. You couldn't even hear him. They were booing the whole time. And the message was actually positive in the sense that, you know, he said, you know, we're, we're, we're walking into this world, but you have the opportunity of making sure we do it in the right way and it's applied to the right things. And it's, you know, we guarantee that the benefits, not the perils, are what ends up happening, you know, in, in all of our futures. So, you know, yeah, I, it, it's a marketing issue and, you know, there's no reason at all they can't turn around. I think as more people use it,

• 46:30Speaker 00

  and see the benefits of it, and we, we come up with really good

• 46:36Speaker 00

  showcases for those wins, get it out there.

• 46:42Geoff Nielson?

  So if we, if we shift the playing field slightly, and now instead of talking about consumers and the consumer backlash, we're talking about business use cases and how to make sure employees are using it versus an employee backlash. And dealing with employees who are saying, well, why would I use AI? As soon as I use it, you're just going to fire me and, you know, have it do my job without me. Is it, is it the same playbook for getting employees on board or is it a different playbook? If you're, if you're a business leader, how would you try to convince your employees that this is actually good for them, not just good for the business?

• 47:19Speaker 00

  So behaviors are driven by incentives. So I've already heard companies who literally track how much people are using AI, like in terms of hours per day or hours per week. And, you know, giving them a pat on the back or the AI employee of the month.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  But you know, I would say just, yes, here's some tools. Let's see how much more you can get we get done this week than you got done last week. And we're going to pay you a bonus or overtime or whatever, you know, pick your compensation. But, you know, behavior is driven by incentives. So, you know, be get motivated to use these tools and figure it out in your own context. How to, you know, make this better for our company, make our company more productive. And you will see the upside of that personally.

• 48:23Geoff Nielson?

  I think I caught something there that I want to just confirm and talk a little bit more about. You talk about the incentives, but it sounds like when you talk about incentives, we're talking about more carrot than stick, I guess, that this isn't just, hey, use AI or we'll fire you. It's some compelling positive reason to use AI or some reward for using it versus just more fear. Is that fair?

• 48:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think it's the only effective way. I mean, beating somebody over the head and having them having them clock the number of hours or number of tokens they use on AI. God knows what they're doing, you know, on Claude or whatever to rack up those hours. You know, I would tie it to a specific productivity goal or, you know, certain tasks that they need to do. And hey, if you did 30% more of them this week, you get that upside. But the stick to me doesn't, isn't a relevant way or an effective way to diffuse this into their everyday work stream.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  Because, you know, you're literally just saying, hey, use AI whether you like it or not, or else. And how they use it, you know, is the difference between whether it's actually benefiting the company or not. So, you know, if you, if you don't want to use it, that's fine. But hey, start judging, start creating productivity goals across various functions. And we'll see who's, who's winning that race with or without.

• 50:05Geoff Nielson?

  So with that in mind, you mentioned earlier that you've been doing some work with incubators and helping broader organizations kind of up their game when it comes to using AI, starting to rewire a little bit for AI. What's sort of your top advice for business leaders? So for business or technology leaders who are looking at bringing more AI into their organization, or I guess just sort of upping their game, rewiring their company for the economy of the future, what advice would you give them? What do they need to get right here? What do they need to do?

• 50:46Speaker 00

  I mean, it goes back to what we spoke about earlier a bit, which is there isn't a simple cross-industry AI as a pill to solve your ailment, your business ailments. It's understanding it. It's getting your hands dirty. It's getting, like they said, a forward and deployed engineer that in there, understanding your business, who knows very well what the tech can do. And then having the companies describe problems or the individuals describe problems and have them build.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  I mean, you've seen the rate that software programming is increasing now. It's insane. So even small wins that have huge impact just don't take the time and energy or money that they used to. So there's no downside in going in and taking a darn good look at all of your processes and workflows and saying, what lends itself to automating and what doesn't? And use it for the ones that it does. And you will see, once you've spent enough time on it, meaningful productivity growth.

• 52:07Speaker 00

  And I think this will be a very normal part of the way that this goes as we move forward here.

• 52:17Geoff Nielson?

  Makes sense. Dag, I'm looking at the clock. I'm looking at my question list. I think we covered most of what I wanted to cover. Is there anything we didn't cover here that you wanted to dive into or talk a little bit more about?

• 52:33Speaker 00

  You know, my big, like I said, the, the things that I've learned by diving all the way into this and tracking week to week what's happening is that the gap between what the capabilities and the models can do is way ahead of, of the ability and the rate at which, which it's, you know, diffusing into the markets and the businesses and the enterprises. That's the key takeaway.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  You know, the, the people that are effectively implementing it and going through some of the things we've already spoken about are going to win.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  An example of this is like you hear, okay, doctors, are doctors going to be replaced by AI? The answer is no, they're going to be augmented by AI and doctors who use AI will be preferred over ones who don't and will be better doctors as a result of it. I mean, I spent a year on a project to gather

• 53:46Speaker 00

  a large majority of the United States patient data and, you know, we talked about

• 53:53Speaker 00

  and, and plan to potentially create a medical superintelligence that listens into patient doctor conversations and that uses real data to, you know, diagnose a non, a non-normal, you know, set of symptoms where, you know, I have these three symptoms. The doctor's like, yeah, I know what that is, but that, but I also have these two other symptoms. They're like, I'm not sure what that is. And what's the next step? Let's order a bunch of tests. Right? Now, if there's a database with 100 million people in it that has 15 years of

• 54:35Speaker 00

  history, that has, you know, claims data for insurance, claims data for insurance companies.

• 54:45Speaker 00

  You can have this thing recommend in realtime follow-up questions during the conversation with the patient that hones in on, hey, the 317,000 cases that had the three normal symptoms and the two outlier symptoms and give you a probable probability ranked, you know, diagnosis of what it likely is. And, you know, I think that's inevitable. I think that'll raise the bar for medicine worldwide. Once that comes out and everybody uses it. Because, you know, there's a wide variety of quality of doctors. And I think healthcare is a place where you can bring

• 55:27Speaker 00

  that bar way up by using this technology. And, you know, that's just an example of, you know, an industry that is ripe for using AI to improve diagnoses, for example. And, you know, I could go on and on for another two hours about other industries and how they would do it too. But, you know, it's coming.

• 55:48Geoff Nielson?

  Healthcare is an interesting one. The value to me is so insanely obvious and how it very materially improves people's lives or, you know, keeps them alive or extends their lives. And I can only imagine the regulatory headaches and battles you must have fought trying to do that.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  Well, the good news is, if there's any good news, is that it's becoming more normal that AI is a part of FDA processes and they're seeing a lot of effective AI, you know, therapeutics and other AI, you know, based treatments. So.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  I'm hoping that that drastically reduces the burden to, you know, bring great ideas to the market in healthcare. I went through a really horrible last startup. We spent five years and in the end it worked. It was amazing. It was the number one health issue in the world. We were working on, we created a much easier way for people to measure and manage blood pressure using their iPhone, right? Just putting their finger over the camera to measure it. It would track every day. We got their blood pressure under control in just a few weeks. And then FDA ended up keep asking for more data that, you know, every

• 57:18Speaker 00

  time they ask, we have to do a clinical trial and get six sites mobilized and spend another $7 million that drove that company into the ground. So, you know, if we apply AI to both sides of the equation, it's going to make life a lot better for us all.

• 57:38Geoff Nielson?

  No, I think so too. And it's a, it's a sad story, not just a sad business story, but a sad, you know, kind of consumer health story that, you know, something that valuable couldn't get off the ground. And I don't know, I, I would like to believe that the whole thing is a, is a when, not an if, versus, you know, some intractable problem that we've created, or who knows if there's a, I don't want to, you know, besmirch the FDA too much. But if there's, you know, another country that has, you know, an incrementally more lax regulatory body where you can, you know, actually do it at scale and say, see if it works there, it can work here. But I don't know, I'm, I'm like you, I'm trying, trying to find ways to remain hopeful.

• 58:23Speaker 00

  You know, I, I think this whole story is a hopeful one. I think the things we discussed on the dark side of it, which is the negative rap AI is getting for no good reason.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  You know, the worry and the fears about job losses and, and social disruption and the whole thing. I'm just not buying most of it. I, and there's, there's evidence to back me up on that. I'm not saying ignore it. I think there's a lot of good initiatives to make sure that we navigate this period. You know?

• 59:04Speaker 00

  Appropriately, and I think if we do, you know, the future is bright and it's going to be way more net positive than net negative.

• 59:15Geoff Nielson?

  I really like that, and I really like that as a note to end on. So Dag, I wanted to, on that note, say a big thanks for joining us today. It's been really interesting, really insightful, and we appreciate you having you here.

• 59:27Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me, Jeff. And yeah, it was, there's a ton more to talk about down the road, and I'm happy to do so.

• 59:36Geoff Nielson?

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