Data Science With Sam

If you ever had a document you wished you could just ask questions to - without it leaving your computer, wouldn't be pretty good from data privacy perspective? In this episode, Sam sits down with Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer - Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, co-founder of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and founder and CEO of Synsira, creator of KIND — for one of the most historically grounded AI conversations we've had on this show. He holds two Guinness World Records: his program Chinook became the first computer to beat a human world champion in any game (Checkers, 1994), and in 2007 his team mathematically solved the game of Checkers - proving perfect play always ends in a draw across 500 billion billion positions. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the AAAI. In February 2026 he launched KIND, a desktop AI application built by his company Synsira Software Solutions, with one founding thesis: your data should work for you and only you. IN THIS EPISODE: ▪ The 40-year arc of AI through the eyes of someone who lived every wave - expert systems, search scaling with computing, deep learning removing human knowledge bottlenecks, and being stunned on November 30, 2022 when ChatGPT launched ▪ Why nondeterminism is built into LLMs and why the 'hallucination' band-aids being applied don't fix the fundamental flaw - the answer today may be different from the answer tomorrow ▪ Why Jonathan renamed AI as 'augmented intelligence' - and what that reframe means for how leaders should govern and oversee these tools ▪ KIND unpacked: a private, local, hallucination-free desktop AI that answers questions about your own files - with no internet access, no data leaving your device, and a clear answer of 'I don't know' when the answer isn't in your data ▪ Real-world use cases from Jonathan himself: personal medical records, family history, book research, and intellectual property - things he uses ChatGPT and Claude for daily, but would never put near KIND's use cases ▪ The data resale story: searching for a niche collectible online, then receiving a cold email from an unknown company selling exactly that product within 24 hours ▪ Digital sovereignty: why Canada, Europe, and much of the non-US world is dangerously dependent on a small number of large US companies - and why user agreements, when you read them, reveal more than most people expect. FIND DR. SCHAEFFER & KIND: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jonathan-schaeffer-phd-frsc-aaai-fellow-3318015 KIND download: kind.synsira.com Amii: amii.ca DATASCIENCEWITHSAM: If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your network. DataScienceWithSam is always looking for new guests for captivating discussions. If you have a topic you'd like to discuss on a 30–45 minute podcast, feel free to reach out. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, RSS, and YouTube.

Most companies have spent years buying tools, running pilots, and building dashboards - and they still can't answer the questions leadership needs answered. The problem isn't the technology. It's that no one fixed the foundation first. Ilan Man is the Founder and CEO of Paradox Machines, a data and AI consultancy incubated through the Infinity Venture Studio in New York. A Data & AI leader with deep hands-on experience across the full stack strategy, engineering, and analytics - Ilan has built and scaled data functions at high-growth companies, including an exited consultancy, across multiple industries. Paradox Machines exists because he kept seeing the same problems repeat: too much technology, not enough partnership, and teams left holding platforms that weren't delivering value. Paradox Machines is the company he wishes existed - built around a core conviction that analytics should be simple, affordable, and empowering, and that AI is an enabler, not a silver bullet. IN THIS EPISODE: ▪ Why Ilan left data leadership to build Paradox Machines: he kept meeting 'AI consultants' who weren't practitioners and saw a gap for people who actually build data foundations rather than just talking about them ▪ The vibe-coding trap: anyone can build a data platform over a weekend, but it fails in production as soon as latency requirements change, pipelines throw errors, or the business evolves ▪ Why 'just MCP your data into Claude' is dangerous advice - Ilan has met zero people who piped their SaaS tools into an LLM and got a working data strategy out the other side ▪ The follow-through problem: why dashboards exist but don't drive decisions - and the top-down (executive conviction) + bottom-up (giving business owners data access) framework for fixing it ▪ The epsilon greedy mental model applied to data: some structured goal-direction, some randomness - because the big company bets come from exploration, not just A/B test optimisations ▪ The founder's paradox: how Paradox Machines maintains strategy + implementation without splitting into a deck-delivery shop vs an execution shop ▪ AI sovereignty and data sovereignty: why Ilan believes data - because it's so custom, contextual, and constantly changing - is one of the last things frontier labs will be able to commodities FIND ILAN MAN: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilanman/ Paradox Machines: https://www.paradoxmachines.com/ Email: [email protected] DATASCIENCEWITHSAM: If this episode resonated, share it with whoever in your organization is still trying to ship an AI project on top of broken foundations. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, RSS, and YouTube. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your network. DataScienceWithSam is always looking for new guests for captivating discussions — if you have a topic you'd like to talk about on a 30–45 minute podcast, feel free to reach out.

An independent evaluation of Snowflake's Cortex Analyst found 6 in 10 AI-generated queries were wrong — but they all compiled and ran without a single error. That's not a model problem. That's a missing harness problem. Pradnesh Patil is the Co-Founder and CEO of Altimate AI — a platform bringing agentic AI to data engineering with tools trusted by Fortune 500s and downloaded more than 1 million times across 200+ countries. Before Altimate, he spent a decade in product leadership at Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, and VMware. IN THIS EPISODE: ▪ The five components of an agentic data engineering harness: context, governance, MCP tools, shared skills, and agent infrastructure — and why missing any one of them causes silent failures ▪ Why a system prompt cannot substitute for a harness: a prompt tells the model what to do, a harness tells it what is actually true ▪ Where the 27–33% phantom table references and 78% silent wrong joins come from — and why it's not the LLM's fault ▪ How Altimate Code topped ADE-Bench using Sonnet while competitors used Opus — proof that the harness matters more than the model ▪ The deterministic vs LLM boundary: why validation, cost checks, and query correctness are deterministic jobs and should never go to an LLM ▪ Context compaction innovation: why standard LLM compaction destroys long-running data engineering tasks — and how Altimate fixed it ▪ The $5,000 Cortex AI query bill — and how permission-based governance controls prevent agents from going rogue on your cloud bill ▪ The future of data engineering: days of writing SQL by hand are ending — what the data engineer's role becomes in an agentic world ▪ Pradnesh's advice: build open source, build cross-platform — avoid siloed AI features that don't move the industry forward FIND PRADNESH: Website https://altimate.ai/ Github for altimate-code: https://github.com/AltimateAI/altimate-code Connect with Pradnesh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pradneshpatil/ DATASCIENCEWITHSAM: Weekly conversations with practitioners and builders at the frontier of AI, data science, and machine learning. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, Podbean, and YouTube. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a data engineer who is still wondering why their AI agent keeps writing queries for tables that don't exist.

We are letting AI make life-changing financial decisions without requiring it to explain itself. The CFPB says 'insufficient information' is no longer an acceptable reason to deny a loan. The EU AI Act classifies credit scoring as high-risk. And more than half the US workforce - gig workers, fractional leaders, solopreneurs - is still scored by models built for a 1950s economy. Tamara Laine is the Founder and CEO of MPWR AI and an Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist turned fintech executive. Her reporting on ethical AI at Amazon and Northrop Grumman earned her an Emmy. Her work at MPWR - building explainable, policy-bound AI for the lending lifecycle - has earned her a seat in the Fintech Sandbox. IN THIS EPISODE: ▪ How Tamara's path from ballet to journalism to fintech all follows the same thread: spot a problem, find the expertise to solve it, create change ▪ Why half the US workforce is now a gig worker, creator, Gen Z worker, or thin-filed borrower - and why FICO models were never built to see them fairly ▪ What MPWR AI actually does: six policy-bound agents across the full loan lifecycle, pulling hundreds of data points to help lenders say yes more often ▪ The core architectural principle: AI does the work, deterministic models make the decisions - because LLMs can be biased and engineered to produce answers that are simply not true ▪ The two-button audit system: a decision audit and a bias audit, immediately available to any compliance team ▪ Patent-pending architecture: agents operate in defined information buckets — if the information isn't there, the system cannot answer and cannot hallucinate ▪ How MPWR measures whether it's actually expanding access: higher acquisition rates, lower defaults, reduced manual work - all benchmarked against lenders' own historical denial data ▪ Tamara's advice to gig workers and fractional leaders: solutions are emerging - advocate for yourself and ask your bank how they serve the modern workforce. FIND TAMARA LAINE: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamaralaine/ (DMs always answered) MPWR AI: https://www.mpwrai.com/ DATASCIENCEWITHSAM: If you work in fintech, lending, or AI governance, this is the episode to send to your compliance team. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, Podbean, and YouTube. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your network. DataScienceWithSam is always looking for new guests - if you have a topic you'd like to discuss on a 30–45 minute podcast, feel free to reach out.

McKinsey says 88% of organizations are using AI. Only 6% are getting real value. Sumaiya Shrabony argues the gap isn't technical - it's trust. And the people best equipped to see that barrier are almost never in the room when AI rollout strategy gets written. Sumaiya is Technical Program Manager and Data Infrastructure Lead at the University of Colorado Denver, managing 200 data pipelines across a 530-user analytics environment. She came to the US from Bangladesh at 19 and learned every institutional system from the outside - and built DataReady, a four-agent AI readiness audit tool, along the way. IN THIS EPISODE: ▪ Why institutional trust — not technology, data, or budget — predicts whether an AI tool actually gets used ▪ The McKinsey 88%/6% gap explained: deploying a tool isn't adoption, it's a gym membership you never use ▪ The DataReady confession: building a tool that measured data readiness and missing whether the people were ready ▪ The three real reasons people don't use AI tools — and why most orgs misdiagnose which one they're facing ▪ Why cognitive diversity work is often theater — and what changes when outsiders define success before the metric is set, not after ▪ The specific diagnostic skill immigrants and career-switchers develop — and why it can't be trained, only earned ▪ The Monday morning action plan: interview 10 users, ask if the metric makes sense from their seat, track the override rate ▪ The real test for AI adoption success: who stopped using it - not who complained FIND SUMAIYA: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sumaiya-shrabony Newsletter: https://substack.com/@shrabony DATASCIENCEWITHSAM: Weekly deep-dives into AI, machine learning, and data science. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, Podbean, and YouTube. If you lead an AI program and haven't asked your users whether the success metric makes sense from their seat — that's your homework from this episode.