GAEA Talks

This week on GAEA Talks Live from HumanX, Graeme Scott sits down with David Shim - co-founder and CEO of Read AI, former CEO of Foursquare, founder of Placed, and one of the most original product thinkers in the AI ecosystem today.David's career is a study in spotting opportunities before anyone else. The son of Korean immigrants, he became one of the youngest registered stockbrokers in the United States at seventeen, after being emancipated from his parents so he could legally sign trading contracts. He went on to build and sell a coupon website out of his university fraternity, then founded Placed, the pioneering location analytics company that Snap Inc. acquired in 2017. He became CEO of Foursquare in 2021 and pivoted the business from check-ins into a full enterprise analytics platform. In 2021 he co-founded Read AI, the multimodal meeting intelligence platform that now serves close to five million users worldwide and signs up forty to fifty thousand new users every single day.In this episode, recorded live at HumanX 2026 in San Francisco, David lays out what he calls the narration layer of AI - the idea that meetings, decisions and digital interactions are not just about the words people say, but about how they react, where they engage, and where they tune out. He walks Graeme through Read AI's new Digital Twin product, codenamed Ada, which behaves not as a chatbot but as an email address, a Slack handle and a Teams alias that can answer for you, schedule for you and move work forward while you are unplugged. He shares his view that the AI magic has worn off in developed markets, that emerging markets are now driving the most practical adoption, and that the next breakthrough in consumer AI will look more like TikTok meets Tinder than another ChatGPT. This is one of the most useful conversations on the future of AI agents that GAEA Talks has recorded.What you'll take away from this conversation:• The narration layer thesis - why what people do in a meeting matters more than what they say• The Digital Twin and Ada - why your next AI assistant is an email address, not a chatbot• The sidebar pattern - how a good AI agent checks in with you before sending sensitive content• Why developed and emerging markets are now on completely different AI adoption curves• The TikTok-meets-Tinder analogy for the next breakthrough in consumer AI UX• Why coding and legal got AI first - and which professions are next• The healthcare, social work and Southeast Asian insurance use cases that have surprised the Read AI team• The early onset dementia user story that quietly changed how David thinks about product• Why you should never wait for perfection - "twelve other companies will have launched while you wait"The jigsaw puzzle approach to AI - you only need thirty to forty percent of the picture to know what it is• Why agents will eventually invent their own language to talk to each other• The Foursquare pivot lesson - turning check-in data into an analytics business• The Placed origin story - how location intelligence became a category and exited to Snap• David's advice on failure - the fear of failure is the biggest waste you can have• Why the youngest stockbroker in the nation grew up to build AI for the rest of usAbout David Shim:David Shim is the co-founder and CEO of Read AI, the multimodal meeting intelligence platform used by close to five million people across Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and mobile field environments. Before Read AI, David was Chief Executive Officer of Foursquare, where he led the transformation of the company from a check-in app into an enterprise analytics and developer platform.
Accelerate your company’s AI transformation, head to https://larridin.com/gaea and book a demo now. Thanks to Larridin for sponsoring today’s video!

This week on GAEA Talks Live from HumanX, Graeme Scott sits down with Bianca Anghelina - founder and CEO of Aily Labs, 2025 CNBC Changemaker, and the former Head of Global Digital Finance at Novartis turned builder of the first enterprise decision-intelligence mobile app.Bianca's career sits at the intersection of business, finance and technology. She studied business and finance and added technology management at university, worked in consultancy and inside one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, and in 2018 implemented AI to disrupt her own multi-billion dollar PNL planning role at Novartis. That experience became the seed of Aily Labs, which she founded in 2020 to build a decision advisor for every employee in the enterprise. Aily Labs has been profitable since its first year, grew customer growth by five hundred percent last year, counts Sanofi, Johnson and Johnson and Teva among its clients, and now serves more than thirty eight thousand users worldwide.In this episode, recorded live at HumanX 2026 in San Francisco, Bianca explains why the era of siloed data has given way to an even bigger problem - siloed AI - and why connecting the dots across functions is now the most valuable thing an enterprise AI platform can do. She argues that AI has to move from collaboration to fusion, from processes to routines, and from vertical expertise to horizontal leadership.What you'll take away from this conversation:- Why decision intelligence is fundamentally different from workflow automation - it reinvents how companies operate- The difference between "optimising workflows with AI" and "running the company with AI"- Why siloed data has become siloed AI - and why breaking those silos is the real prize- The "fusion, not collaboration" model - and how AI agents collapse the last barriers inside the enterprise- The horizontal leadership shift - why AI turns every employee into a mini-CEO with access to the whole business- Why Steve Jobs' obsession with beauty applies to enterprise software and accelerates adoption at scale- The "routines, not processes" insight - and why daily AI use is more sustainable than quarterly projects- How one Aily customer scaled from three hundred to fifteen thousand users in a year by treating adoption as a KPI- Why shadow AI inside enterprises is a symptom - not a security problem - and how to channel it- Why the most optimised enterprise of the next decade will personalise AI for every user while optimising the global P&L- Why imperfect data should not stop enterprise AI projects - and what to do instead- The real risk for incumbents that fail to fuse AI into daily operationsAbout Bianca Anghelina:Bianca Anghelina is the founder and CEO of Aily Labs, the decision-intelligence platform that acts as an AI decision advisor for every employee in the enterprise. She was named a 2025 CNBC Changemaker and one of the top 50 CEOs to watch in 2024 by Pavilion. Before founding Aily Labs in 2020, Bianca was Head of Global Digital Finance at Novartis, where she ran one of the largest P&Ls in the pharmaceutical industry. She previously worked at BMW and Sandoz, and holds a background in business, finance and technology management.GAEA Talks is the enterprise AI podcast for leaders navigating the age of artificial intelligence. Subscribe for weekly conversations with the people shaping the future of business, technology and society.Bianca Anghelina on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bianca-diana-anghelina-310b453Aily Labs: https://www.ailylabs.comHumanX: https://www.humanx.coGAEA Talks: https://gaealtalks.ai#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GAEATalks #GAEATalksLive #HumanX #HumanX2026 #EnterpriseAI #DecisionIntelligence #AilyLabs #CNBCChangemaker #AIAdoption #EnterpriseSoftware #WomenInAI #WomenInTech #AIAgents #AIPodcast #GAEAAI

This week on GAEA Talks Live from HumanX, Graeme Scott sits down with Steve Ancheta - serial founder, sixteen-year veteran of enterprise sales, and the founder and CEO of Zig, the first AI platform built for the sales rep rather than for sales management.Steve started in sales at eighteen, took the job to support his new son, and has spent his entire adult life inside the revenue function of technology companies. He has hired hundreds of sales reps, run multiple sales organisations, and watched the same eighty-twenty pattern play out inside every business he has been part of. That firsthand experience is the reason Zig exists - a product designed to give top sellers their own team of virtual employees, cut ramp time, prevent burnout and finally bring the same productivity revolution to sales that AI has brought to engineering.In this episode, recorded live at HumanX 2026 in San Francisco, Steve argues that the real moat in the AI era is domain expertise, that salespeople do not want organisation - they want controlled chaos, and that any tool built on assumed frameworks is building for the wrong user.What you'll take away from this conversation:
The "jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down" mental model that separates real founders from pretenders
The strategic optimist vs pessimist framework - and why every great founder defaults to option D
Why eighty percent of revenue comes from twenty percent of sellers - and why no tool has ever actually been built for them
Why sales reps hate organisation and love controlled chaos - and why most CRMs are built for the wrong user
The Rick Rubin lesson - "I'm confident in my taste and my ability to know what I like" - applied to product building
The "does it feel like magic and is it stupidly simple" test that governs every Zig release
Why "how did that feel" is a better feedback question than "what do you think"
The love it / don't hate it / not a fan / hate it internal feedback loop that keeps product velocity high
Why indifference - not hate - is the worst signal in product analytics
How to prevent the six-to-nine-month sales ramp disaster by making performance predictable from week one
Why AI will make the human side of sales more valuable, not less
What Steve Jobs and Chris Voss have in common, and why that combination is the future of AI product design
About Steve Ancheta:Steve Ancheta is the founder and CEO of Zig, an AI platform that equips sales reps with a team of virtual employees so they can sell at top-performer level from day one. Before Zig, Steve spent more than fifteen years leading sales and revenue organisations in enterprise technology, where he hired and managed hundreds of sales professionals. He is a lifelong student of product design, entrepreneurship and the art of building technology around how humans actually behave - with influences drawn from Steve Jobs, Rick Rubin and Chris Voss.GAEA Talks is the enterprise AI podcast for leaders navigating the age of artificial intelligence. Subscribe for weekly conversations with the people shaping the future of business, technology and society.Accelerate your company’s AI transformation, head to https://larridin.com/gaea and book a demo now. Thanks to Larridin for sponsoring today’s video!Steve Ancheta on LinkedIn:   / steveancheta  Zig: https://www.getzig.comHumanX: https://www.humanx.coGAEA AI: https://gaealgm.ai

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GAEATalks #GAEATalksLive #HumanX #HumanX2026 #EnterpriseAI #SalesTech #AIForSales #Zig #RevenueEnablement #SalesEnablement #Founders #AIPodcast #TechPodcast #GAEAAI

This week on GAEA Talks Live from HumanX, Graeme Scott sits down with Jennifer Smith - co-founder and CEO of Scribe, former Head of Business Development and Partnerships at Greylock Partners, and one of the clearest thinkers in the world on enterprise AI transformation.Jennifer's journey is the perfect setup for what she is building today. After Princeton and an MBA from Harvard, she spent seven years at McKinsey in the operations practice, flying to operations centres across America. She watched first hand how the best operator on any team had their own personal best practice that bore no resemblance to what the rest of the team had been trained on. She then moved into venture capital at Greylock Partners, where she interviewed over twelve hundred CIOs and CTOs and asked them all the same question: what do you actually want Silicon Valley to build? The same answer kept coming back. Institutional knowledge. That insight became Scribe, the context layer for workflow data across the enterprise. The platform now works with nearly half of the Fortune 500 and over ninety thousand customer organisations.In this episode, recorded live at HumanX 2026 in San Francisco, Jennifer makes the case that the reason ninety percent of enterprise AI pilots fail is not the model. It is the missing context layer underneath. She walks Graeme through why dropping the most intelligent AI in the world into a business with no context is like hiring an army of Nobel laureates and refusing to onboard them. She lays out a complete reframe of how enterprise leaders should approach AI transformation: stop starting with strategy, start by mapping how your business actually works. She explains why she would not have been comfortable deploying agents at scale a year ago, why she is genuinely comfortable with it now, and what business leaders should do in the next twelve to eighteen months to make sure they are on the right side of the curve. This is one of the most useful conversations on practical enterprise AI that GAEA Talks has recorded.What you'll take away from this conversation:• The context layer thesis - why the missing piece in every failed enterprise AI pilot is not the model, but the data on how the business actually works• The Nobel laureate analogy - why dropping the world's smartest intelligence into a business with no onboarding is exactly why ROI keeps disappearing• The Stanford and MIT studies on why ninety percent plus of enterprise AI pilots fail• Why most enterprises are doing AI transformation in the wrong order• The "before map and after map" framework for measuring real AI ROI• Why engineering and customer support are the only two functions where AI is delivering at scale today• The Waymo lesson - map a process for "millions of miles" with humans before handing it to an agent• Why so many founders in San Francisco are quietly anxious they are already behind• The mandate versus strategy distinction - "do more with less using AI" is not a strategy• Why the limiting factor in AI adoption is no longer the technology, it is the human and organisational ability to absorb change• The shift from one human equals one output to systems of work that can be filled by humans or agents• The two-week Scribe pilot that maps workflows and builds AI transformation business cases• Why the future of work will be a mix of humans and agents - and why leaders must make the work legible to both• Jennifer's advice for senior leaders: define success first, then map operations, then build ROI-backed cases

This week on GAEA Talks Live from HumanX, Graeme Scott sits down with Cynthia Chen - co-founder and CEO of Kikoff, ten-year fintech veteran, and the founder of one of the most human stories in consumer AI: an AI debt negotiator that has already saved everyday Americans more than five million dollars.Cynthia arrived in New York at seventeen with two suitcases, no family and no credit history, spent her eighteenth birthday in a college computer lab applying for her first credit card, and has spent the last two decades building consumer finance products for the millions of Americans who cannot build credit fast enough or cheaply enough. Kikoff is her fourth startup. It is a regulated and licensed financial services company, with bank-level security, that helps consumers build credit, reduce debt and save money. Today Kikoff's AI credit coach, Finn, and its AI debt negotiator - which talks to real debt collectors and lenders on consumers' behalf - are live inside its app and have together helped hundreds of thousands of active users.In this episode, recorded live at HumanX 2026 in San Francisco, Cynthia explains what it really takes to deploy AI agents inside a heavily regulated consumer finance product, why trust has to be the starting point for everything, and how Kikoff built a product she wanted to build for her users back in 2021 but which only recently became technically possible.What you'll take away from this conversation:- The human story behind Kikoff - from two suitcases in New York City to five million dollars of debt saved for consumers- What it actually takes to deploy AI agents inside a regulated and licensed financial services company- How Finn, Kikoff's AI credit coach, analyses real-time bank transactions and credit reports to give personalised advice- How the AI debt negotiator works - and why it can save consumers hours of intimidating phone calls with collectors- The bank-level security, consent and privacy architecture behind a product that holds millions of sensitive records- Why regulators are often more open than founders assume - and how to engage them before they come looking- Cynthia's four playbooks - one each for AI researchers, enterprise buyers, VCs and everyday consumers- The vibe-coded app warning - the exact checks consumers should do before handing over personal data- Why the next twelve months will be defined by adaptability, not by specific technologies- The one out of three Americans stat that shaped Kikoff's mission- Why democratising access to financial expertise may be the most under-hyped use of AI- How to stay optimistic and open-minded through rapid technological changeAbout Cynthia Chen:Cynthia Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Kikoff, a regulated personal finance platform that helps everyday consumers build credit, reduce debt and save money using AI. Kikoff is her fourth fintech startup. Before founding Kikoff in 2019, Cynthia spent more than a decade in consumer finance leadership roles. She is a Columbia University graduate, a first-generation immigrant to the United States, and one of the most respected voices in US fintech on the intersection of AI, regulation and real consumer outcomes.GAEA Talks is the enterprise AI podcast for leaders navigating the age of artificial intelligence. Subscribe for weekly conversations with the people shaping the future of business, technology and society.Cynthia Chen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cynthiachenKikoff: https://kikoff.comHumanX: https://www.humanx.coGAEA AI: https://gaealgm.ai#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GAEATalks #GAEATalksLive #HumanX #HumanX2026 #Fintech #Kikoff #AIForFinance #CreditBuilding #DebtNegotiation #ConsumerAI #ResponsibleAI #AIAgents #AIRegulation #WomenInAI #WomenInTech #AIPodcast #TechPodcast #GAEAAI