In this episode, Mahesh and leading anthropologist Professor Martin Holbraad of University College London’s Ethnographic Insights Lab unravel the transformative power of anthropology. Far more than just studying cultures, anthropology – through its deep ethnographic research – unveils a powerful truth: to build truly effective AI, you must first understand the very fabric of human knowledge. This is more than just studying cultures; it’s about redefining what it means to design for a world where "AI changes the meaning of reports themselves" and the line between "where the machine ends and the person starts" blurs. This first part of a two-episode series plunges into the fundamental questions of human memory and how anthropological thinking can conquer the complex challenges of AI, as seen in Motorola Solutions and UCL’s groundbreaking work on police incident reporting. Discover why understanding "what kind of world you're building for" isn't just an essential first step, it’s the only step to crafting tools that truly serve humanity.

Martin Holbraad is Professor of Social Anthropology at University College London (UCL). He has conducted anthropological research in Cuba since the late 1990s, on the intersection of politics and ritual practices, producing works including Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination  (Chicago, 2012) and Shapes in Revolution: The Political Morphology of Cuban Life (Cambridge, 2025). He has made significant contributions to anthropological theory, including in his co-authored volume The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge, 2016). He is Director of the Ethnographic Insights Lab (EI-Lab), which he founded at UCL in 2020 as a consultancy dedicated to helping organizations better understand their customers and users, as well as themselves. EI-Lab’s tagline is “the problem is you don’t know what the problem is”. 

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