Artificial Insights: Conversations About AI

Clinics get stuck in lending for a frustratingly simple reason: the process is hard to navigate. The information exists, lenders are willing, and qualified borrowers do get funded. But the path is not accessible, especially when you're running a clinic and don't have time to decode criteria buried across pages, videos, and jargon.

Sharmeen Aqeel is the founder and CEO of Lyyvora, and she treated this as a human-centered design probl...

AI licensing can sound like a moral argument until you look at the product constraints. If the best material is behind paywalls and contracts, “just scrape it” stops working.

In this bonus clip, Daniel pressures the obvious skeptical question: if big AI companies can afford lawsuits, why bother building fair, legal access at all? Julie Trelstad’s answer is practical. She expects the next wave of AI advancements to include many more ...

AI has been trained on the world’s writing. Now, we have to figure out how creators prove ownership, set permissions, and get paid when their work is used.

Julie Trelstad has spent 30 years inside publishing’s biggest technology shifts, from desktop publishing to eBooks to print-on-demand to self-publishing. In this episode, she explains why AI is forcing publishing into a new kind of rights era, one where piracy and fast imitation ...

When AI threatens your job, the real risk is clinging to the parts of work that are already predictable.

In this bonus short, Daniel Manary and Dave Boyce (Winning by Design, author of Freemium) talk about the fear many people feel right now: AI is coming for my job. Dave argues that AI doesn't replace you as a human unless you keep trying to do work AI should handle. The path forward is to automate what is routine, and double down ...

"Run experiments" is easy advice. Measuring them inside a real customer journey is the hard part.

Dave Boyce has lived through multiple SaaS eras, from $1.2M ACV enterprise deals to $1,200 self-serve motions. Now, as Product lead and Executive Chair at Winning by Design, he works with growth-stage companies to rebuild their revenue systems for an AI-shaped market.

In this conversation, Daniel and Dave get concrete about what “AI-forw...

An AI-written encyclopedia can sound coherent and still be wrong and that gap matters more than it first appears.

In this bonus short, Daniel Manary and William Beutler of Beutler Ink and The Notability Company look at the first real challenger to Wikipedia's long-standing dominance. They discuss Grokipedia, Elon Musk's AI-generated encyclopedia: why its entries can feel clearer and more complete than Wikipedia, and how that polish ...

Wikipedia has become one of the quiet foundations of modern AI.

In this episode, Daniel explores why large language models rely so heavily on Wikipedia, both as training data and as a real-time citation source. Its concise structure, dense linking, and topic-first writing make it ideal for machines, even as fewer humans read it directly.

Daniel is joined by Bill Beutler, founder of Beutler Ink, who works inside Wikipedia’s rules to h...

This season, we’re not talking about models, benchmarks, or demos. We’re talking about how AI is reshaping how humans work, coordinate, and judge as tools get better at remembering, acting, and contextualizing. With context increasingly automated, wisdom and judgment matter more, not less.

We’ll hear from builders, operators, researchers, and leaders wrestling with how experience, trust, value, and incentives shift as AI becomes par...

Artificial Insights is a podcast about how AI is changing economics and work, and what happens once the technology moves beyond demos and into real organizations.

The podcast features conversations with founders, operators, and thinkers who are close to the work. People building AI products. People deploying them inside teams. And people who have already learned where AI helps and where it quietly creates problems.

Daniel started Art...

This special Christmas and New Year bonus episode is a pause. We're looking back at 2025 and thinking about what surfaced across a year of conversations with builders, executives, philosophers, and operators working close to AI.

Across industries and roles, the same shift kept appearing. Work isn't disappearing per se... but it is changing. Flipping.

Humans are moving upstream. Away from direct execution and toward enabling, guiding,...

Across healthcare, nonprofits, construction, and creative tools, the same shift kept appearing. AI is moving work from impossible to practical.

This special wrap up episode closes out Season 4 by revisiting a handful of moments that captured that shift most clearly. Rather than focusing on replacement or marginal efficiency gains, AI is removing constraints around memory, time, coordination, and execution.

When those constraints fall...

Regulation and innovation rarely move at the same speed. In this bonus clip, Daniel Manary and David Proulx talk about who should shape the future of AI. David argues that the people building modern systems understand both the risks and the capabilities far better than policymakers who lack technical grounding.

He contrasts Europe’s tendency to regulate early with the United States’ focus on innovation, liability, and builder respon...

One of the things David Proulx is most proud of is building an AI agent that has handled more than 100,000 mental health conversations without a single hallucination.

David is the Chief AI Officer at HoloMD, where an AI agent becomes a third party in the Therapeutic Alliance. The patient wants to feel better. The psychiatrist guides their care. HoloMD adds a daily point of contact that checks in, gathers context, tracks medication a...

Most AI conversations describe personalization as if it were new. In this bonus clip, Alex Maier explains why the real shift is not personalization itself, but how agentic systems read context and respond to a person's actual state the moment they ask a question.

Alex describes how onWater uses prompts, sentiment, language patterns, and user actions to understand experience level and intent. He compares it to the way great salespeop...

Most companies stop at “ask the bot a question”. onWater wants to go further, building an app that can answer “Should I go today?” and then quietly handle everything that comes after yes.

In this episode of Artificial Insights, Daniel talks with Alex Maier, now President of onWater. His team has been working on a simple idea with complicated stakes: help people decide where to fish or paddle, understand the real conditions on the wa...

AI is currently in a transitional moment: a new tool being used to make old kinds of content. But, what if AI can do more than just help us create the same old things faster and better?

In this bonus clip, Daniel Manary and Ahmad Iqbal step back from product and design to explore how AI is a new creative medium that could change how people make, share, and experience ideas.

Drawing on the work of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media ...

What if "designing well" no longer requires years of training, and the real work becomes choosing the story to tell?

In this episode of Artificial Insights, host Daniel Manary interviews Ahmad Iqbal, product lead and Head of MENAP at Canva, about what it really means to design for accessibility in the age of AI. Ahmad helped launch Canva’s first generative AI features and shares how the company's guiding principle, making creativity...

Most people talk about "data privacy" like it’s a legal checkbox. For Josh Müller, it’s part of faithful stewardship.

In this bonus episode, Josh and Daniel pick up on a single idea from their main conversation: data management as Kingdom stewardship. Josh shares how his once “off-the-cloud-at-all-costs” mindset softened as AI made it possible to do genuinely good things with data.

The hard part now isn’t the tech. It’s building the ...

What if a six-month production bottleneck became a 16-minute job?

Josh Müller, director at tech nonprofit Waha, tells Daniel how forced alignment and smart automation turned a tedious audio-editing gauntlet into a repeatable pipeline that ships Bible study content across dozens of languages. The result is more time for actual disciple-making and less time in Audacity.

They dig into privacy-first analytics in risky contexts, when to ...