ML120: Azeem Azhar on The Exponential Impact of Technology and the Future of Work
Discover the potential impact of AI on the labour market and how to position yourself for the changes to come, business lessons from a successful entrepreneur and investor and how technology changes our understanding of the world and how we act in it.
Azeem Azhar is a strategist, product entrepreneur and analyst, currently working as the Senior Advisor for AI to the CTO of Accenture. He is also the creator of the Exponential View newsletter and podcast, which offer cutting edge insights into technology, business and society.
If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, then you’ll have noticed that technology is a topic I’ve covered extensively – and that’s because I believe understanding tech is an essential part of understanding our modern world and operating effectively in it. Azeem is uniquely positioned to offer insight into the space, given his multidisciplinary background
He founded and sold PeerIndex, a company which applied machine learning to large-scale social media graphs to make predictions about web users. As an investor he invests in tech startups, particularly in the AI sector and he has the ear of some of the world’s leading entrepreneurs and technologists
In this episode we discuss
- Azeem’s lessons as a successful entrepreneur and how that affects his investment decisions
- The potential impact of AI on the labour market and how to position yourself for the changes to come
- How technology changes our understanding of the world and how we act in it
This episode was a real pleasure to record and it was great to get inside the head of someone who has thought as deeply about the interactions between technology, business and society as Azeem has.
Show Notes
- Introducing Azeem [00:37]
- What was school like for Azeem? [02:28]
- How was Azeem inspired by his secondary school and university teachers? [06:20]
- What made Azeem want to pursue journalism and then tech right after leaving university? [08:42]
- How did Azeem’s desire to start his own company come about? What was his inspiration behind PeerIndex? [12:34]
- What are some of the qualities Azeem looks for in the companies that he’s investing in? [18:36]
- How does Azeem navigate the startup and investing problems that come up everyday? [21:16]
- What skills and areas of knowledge should the youth be mastering to thrive in the 21st century? [23:24]
- How essential is it to master technology in order to understand our modern world and how we can operate effectively in it? [28:25]
- What are the implications of AI in terms of the labor market? What does Azeem think of the current state of AI? [34:01]
- How does technology change the is and the ought of society? [40:42]
- Closing remarks (45:08)
Resources
🖥 Why You Should Actually Care about the Future of Work with Azeem Azhar