SHIFT

Each day more than 11,000 people in the US turn 65 years old. It adds up to more than 4,000,000 people a year, and the labor force that serves them is struggling to keep up with that demand - a problem that’s unlikely to go away anytime soon. 
We explore this shift and how might technology be used to help people age in place in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet: 
Chia-Lin Simmons is the CEO of Logic Mark

Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Lately, it feels like you can’t go more than a few minutes without hearing someone talk about AI agents, and there’s a very good reason for that. Agents are doing more work, more quickly and in more places, and we’ve developed ways to help them retain knowledge from things they’ve done, and then build upon those experiences.
But what if the experience agents gain on a job changes the work product in ways we didn’t predict? How do you make sure that agent does what you want it to do? This episode, we explore the alignment problem in the age of AI agents.

We Meet: 
Andy Hall is a professor in the Political Economy Group at Stanford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Astro Teller, Alphabet’s Captain of Moonshots, joins us for a conversation about the importance of failure, workplace culture in a moonshot factory, and not throwing away your shot.

We Meet: 
Astro Teller is the Captain of Moonshots at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory

Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

This episode originally ran in April 2025.

How to handle cybersecurity challenges posed by AI agents is about the hottest security topic going at the moment. If you’re wondering why that is, it’s because agents are built to take action - to do things on our behalf - and that challenges a core assumption that’s baked into companies security: that humans make the decisions. 
Tailscale is a Canadian Unicorn and one of the country’s fastest growing tech companies, thanks in large part to its popularity with AI companies, and increasingly with AI bots too.
CEO Avery Pennarun joins us in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet: 
Avery Pennarun, CEO and Co-Founder of Tailscale

Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

How much do we know about the way organizations are adopting agentic AI, and what it means for the human employees working alongside?  Our friends at The MIT Sloan Management Review did a deep dive on these questions and several more late last year, and they found some pretty surprising things.
This week, we’re going to talk about what those things might mean for companies as we continue to unpack this latest phase of agentic rollouts.

We Meet: 
Sam Ransbotham is a professor of analytics at Boston College, the editor for the MIT Sloan Management Review AI Initiative, and the host of Me, Myself and AI. 

Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.