Data Science With Sam

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=trueBook: 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-3318015KIND download: kind.synsira.comAmii: amii.caDATASCIENCEWITHSAM: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 commoditiesFIND ILAN MAN:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilanman/Paradox Machines: https://www.paradoxmachines.com/Email: [email protected]: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.