Data Science With Sam

Sam sits down with Shawn Kercher — Co-Founder & CEO of HummingAgent.ai — to cut through the noise around AI agents. Shawn built his company on a simple but powerful observation: most AI products are just ChatGPT wrappers. HummingAgent is his answer — a full-custom software shop that builds private, in-environment AI workflows for companies that run on real data, messy CRMs, and processes that only exist in someone's head.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE
▪ Why generic AI tools fail in real business environments — and what full-custom actually means
▪ The wrapper test: if Anthropic adds this next quarter, does your product still exist?
▪ HummingAgent's Private GPT — lives in your environment, zero data sent for external training
▪ Humcrew.com — voice AI, texting, proposals, and full company command centre in one product
▪ Real client story: 44 years of PDF data, research time cut from hours to minutes
▪ Why discovery-first, paid-scope engagements beat "move fast and ship demos"
▪ The baby steps rule for agent permissions: one task, one sandbox — expand only after validation

GUEST BIO
Shawn Kercher is Co-Founder and CEO of HummingAgent.ai, based in Lone Tree, Colorado. With over a decade of engineering leadership experience, Shawn has built HummingAgent as a full-custom software shop — not a generic AI tool vendor. HummingAgent builds private, in-environment AI workflows and agents for small and mid-sized businesses, including the Private GPT product and Humcrew.com command centre. Shawn writes publicly about the risk of AI startups becoming ChatGPT wrappers — and what it actually takes to build AI systems with real domain expertise and data integration.

GUEST LINKS
Shawn Kercher on LinkedIn
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Shashank Akinapalli is a Senior Data Engineer at TCS where he leads cloud data lakehouse initiatives and real-time streaming architectures for supply chain intelligence. With 14 years of experience across IBM DataStage, Databricks, Snowflake, dbt, AWS, and Spark-based ecosystems, he has previously worked with USAA in banking and Blue Cross Blue Shield in healthcare.
IN THIS EPISODE:
▪ The biggest architectural shift when migrating from IBM DataStage to a modern cloud lakehouse — and why the technical migration is the easier half, while reconstructing encoded business knowledge is the real challenge
▪ How to choose between Snowflake and Databricks: Databricks for heavy transformation and Python workloads, Snowflake for structured SQL and BI, and where dbt fits as the layer that eliminates repetitive SQL code
▪ The real UNFI example: how batch processing caused inventory misrepresentation (800 units sold, system still showing 1,000 available), and how real-time Databricks pipelines eliminated that problem and unlocked fraud detection on top
▪ Data governance across three regulated domains: the four pillars — data quality, redundancy, least-privilege access, and lineage — and the three questions every framework must answer first
▪ Why CI/CD transformed data engineering: from manual, multi-team deployments with risky rollbacks to automated quality checks, Git version control, and the specific silent failure that finally convinces a team to invest
▪ How the data engineer role shifts over the next three years: from pipeline development to data product engineering, from reactive operations to AI-predicted failure prevention, and from human dashboards to AI agents making autonomous predictions
▪ Practical advice for data engineers who want to stay relevant: Python, PySpark, cloud architecture, and understanding the full data lifecycle from ingestion to consumption

FIND SHASHANK:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shashank-a-2aa629119/
Twitter / Instagram: @shashi001git
Happy to answer questions on enterprise data warehouse, data engineering, and cloud architecture modernisation — reach out directly via LinkedIn or email.
DATASCIENCEWITHSAM:
If you work in data engineering and are navigating a legacy modernisation right now — this is the episode to send your 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 for captivating discussions — if you have a topic you'd like to discuss on a 30–45 minute podcast, feel free to reach out.

Karima Sharif-Ali — known affectionately in the industry as the Fresh Princess of Media — is the SVP of Strategic Accounts at Doceree, a platform transforming point-of-care communications for healthcare brands. Over her career, Karima has shaped the marketing journeys of more than 100 pharmaceutical and medical device brands across agencies including WPP, Publicis, and IPG MediaBrands. She is a thought leader featured in AdWeek and MM+M, co-founder of the Women of Color Affinity Group (now the Mosaic Collective Leadership), and a global board member of the Healthcare Businesswomen's Association. She holds an MBA from Rosemont College and a BA in Communications from Temple University.

IN THIS EPISODE:
▪ Karima's one word for AI's biggest impact on healthcare media: SPEED — media plans down from two months to two weeks, data available daily instead of monthly, and media planners freed to focus on strategy rather than back-office operations
▪ The difference between AI pilots and real AI adoption: asking 'how does this make what I'm doing better?' rather than experimenting theoretically — and the meeting notes example: two hours reduced to 15 minutes, giving planners 90 minutes back for strategy
▪ Why creative strategy must remain human-led: the concept, the vision, the cultural intelligence. AI reformats and scales what humans create — it cannot originate the strategy itself
▪ The deep fake crisis in healthcare: why AI-generated misinformation targeted at vulnerable audiences (patients, elderly populations) is Karima's biggest concern, and why authenticity and trust are non-negotiable in healthcare media
▪ The copyright and IP question: should AI companies establish partnerships before inheriting creative work — especially in healthcare patient journey content?
▪ The three things that keep Karima up at night: deep fakes, data privacy, and the erosion of trust and authenticity
▪ The five-year vision: AI embedded in daily operations, more regulation, more nimble media companies — and Karima's call for more women and Black executives at the table where AI decisions are made, not just using the tools

FIND KARIMA:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karima-sharif-ali-mba-9520727/
HBA Global Board: hbanet.org

DATASCIENCEWITHSAM:
If this episode resonated — share it with someone in media or healthcare who is navigating the AI conversation right now. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, Podbean, and YouTube. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to 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.

Jim Spignardo is the Director of Cloud Strategy and AI Enablement at ProArch, a global IT services and consulting firm. With 25 years in IT spanning network engineering, cloud, cybersecurity, and strategic consulting, Jim advises executive teams on modernisation, operational resilience, and AI-enabled transformation that delivers measurable business value. He is the architect behind ProArch's Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption playbook, which has been deployed with clients across financial services, credit unions, and enterprise organisations. Jim is also the author of The AI Turning Point, available on Amazon, and publishes the Control All Innovate newsletter on LinkedIn, where he writes approximately three articles per week on AI strategy and adoption.
IN THIS EPISODE:
▪ Why the through-line of Jim's 25-year career isn't the technology — it's the discipline of making technology actually work for the organisation and justifying that investment to leadership
▪ The real reasons 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail: weak use cases selected before the problem is clearly defined, and jumping to exciting initiatives without asking whether AI is actually the right solution
▪ Shadow AI — the hidden ROI nobody measures: employees quietly using AI tools on their own often deliver real productivity gains that never appear in official metrics, causing organisations to underestimate what AI is already doing
▪ What a successful Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout looks like in 90 days: a strong business case, a targeted pilot with the right stakeholders, measurable use cases, and no broad rollout before value is proven in a contained environment
▪ Why data governance should be an accelerator, not a blocker — good governance tells people what they CAN do, enables faster experimentation, and prioritises use cases so organisations operationalise value sooner
▪ AI amplifies broken processes and can't fix culture — if work processes were broken before AI arrived, AI will expose that faster than anything else
▪ What organisational readiness for AI actually requires: an AI governance council, internal champion programmes, and — critically — someone in the organisation with AI transformation as their primary job description, not a side project
FIND JIM SPIGNARDO:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spignardo/?skipRedirect=true
Book: The AI Turning Point — available on Amazon
ProArch: https://www.linkedin.com/company/proarch-it-solutions-pvt-ltd/
Website: https://www.proarch.com/

DATASCIENCEWITHSAM:
If your organisation is staring at an AI pilot that stalled, or a Copilot licence nobody is using, this is the conversation to share with your leadership 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 for captivating discussions — if you have a topic you'd like to discuss on a 30–45 minute podcast, feel free to reach out.

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.