I conducted a session on Thu, 24 Sep 2026 at International IT-BPM Summit (IIS) 2026 - Function Rooms #1 & #2, 3rd Floor Pearl Wing, Okada Manila, Parañaque City, Philippines. Summary: AI is too weird and fast-moving to trust by intuition alone: question advice, verify with a second model, calibrate confidence, benchmark what matters, and turn surviving evidence into deterministic rules. Here’s the link to the session Links: Transcript Audio (60 min)
I conducted a session on Sat, 19 Sep 2026 at Shree Niketan Schools — Teachers’ AI Q&A - Shree Niketan Schools, Chennai / Zoom. Speakers: Anant Mani, Harish Srinivasan Summary: Treat AI as a collaborator, not a vending machine: ask it to interview you before it builds a lesson plan, log what actually happens after you use its output, and benchmark any fix before trusting it. Here’s the link to the session ...
Priya Dialani interviewed me for a podcast. Here’s the rough summary: What do you and Straive do? Straive builds AI and runs AI. I poke at LLMs to learn what they cannot do. My friend calls me an “LLM Psychopath”. Why do AI pilots get stuck before production? AI speeds up coding, but less of testing. Making sure it works can take months. Why organize enterprise knowledge? Better organized info is good for humans and agents. Duh! Can AI organize it? Yes! I’ve had it create one-line summaries of 10K+ docs on Straive Google Drive for easier searching. How can India’s GCCs benefit from AI? Put AI lovers next to business teams and give them AI agent access. They’ll solve asked and unasked problems. How does AI fail? Unanticipated things happen in production. So, have agents monitor failures and revise the process. How is AI software different? Normal software fails reproducibly. AI fails in new ways we haven’t fully understood. Where should a company start with AI? Skip AI strategy. Give people agent access, have them try it, and share what they learned. What if people don’t know what to try? Ask AI. “How could you improve my work?” Even rubbish ideas waste only 5 minutes. How much should we experiment? A lot! Generation is cheap. Ask for 10 options, not one. Who cares even if all 10 fail? But what happened outside of the interview was just as interesting. ...
I conducted a session on Fri, 11 Sep 2026 at SUTD DAI Signature Master Class · Expert Industry Series - Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore. Summary: Build AI products around evidence, not ideas: prototype quickly, test with agents and real users, and iterate until the product proves its value. Here’s the link to the session ...
I delivered a 15-minute keynote at Jio Institute’s Convergence 2026 at NTU on Thursday. The topic was “Data Storytelling” - a bit jarring in the middle of an AI event. Shailesh picked it and I just rolled with it. A spent several days worrying, “How the heck do I say about data storytelling, when most of my recent workshops and talks are about the death of my data storytelling approaches?” After a discussion with ChatGPT and Claude, I settled my usual strategy these days: ...
I conducted a session on Sat, 22 Aug 2026 at IIM Alumni Singapore — AI Unboxed (4/4) - Singapore / Teams. Summary: Coding is becoming specification and review: describe the outcome, let agents build it, and focus on whether the result works. Here’s the link to the session Links: Room Map Video (129 min) Transcript Audio (129 min)
I conducted a session on Wed, 12 Aug 2026 at ED5518: Data Visualization for Engineers - Department of Engineering Design, IIT Madras, Chennai. Summary: AI can generate charts and analysis. The enduring skill is knowing what deserves to be visualized, challenged, and communicated. Here’s the link to the session Links: Transcript Audio (72 min)
I conducted a session on Mon, 10 Aug 2026 at Tools in Data Science AMA - Remote. Summary: Tools change faster than curricula. The course is really about learning how to learn, automate work, and judge results rather than memorizing tools. Here’s the link to the session Links: Video (62 min) Transcript Audio (62 min)
I conducted a session on Fri, 07 Aug 2026 at Data Hack Summit 2026 - Bangalore. Summary: Managing AI resembles managing experts: specify work clearly, verify outputs systematically, and borrow proven practices from professions that already manage complex judgment. Here’s the link to the session Links: Video (58 min) Transcript Audio (59 min)
I conducted a session on Sat, 25 Jul 2026 at IIM Alumni Singapore — AI Unboxed (3/4). Summary: Agentic tools can perform much of a data scientist’s research and analysis cheaply. The leverage comes from framing the question and checking the result. Here’s the link to the session Links: Video (138 min) Transcript Audio (138 min)
Here’s roughly what I said in my When Data is for Agents workshop for Fifth Elephant on 7 Jul 2026. Or you can read the detailed AI-generated version if you prefer - it has all the prompts, links, results, etc. I think agents prefer data in a different form than humans. But I don’t know. So, everyone, open ChatGPT (or Claude or whatever), research and ask it! Now, let’s collate them and see the result. Aha! Looks like: ...
Last week at VizChitra, I ran a “Dialogue” session. A new format for me. I usually speak 80% in my workshops. In this dialog, I spoke 20%. The group discussed. PART A I showed 6 charts and said, “Pick the best.” Then I shared the audience & purpose and asked: “For THIS audience and purpose, will you publish, fix, or kill it?” INSIGHT: almost no one said, “Ship”. That’s good – these were all drafts. ...
I conducted a session on Thu, 09 Jul 2026 at AI in Education — Sivaswamy Iyer School - Mylapore, Chennai. Summary: Teachers should use AI as a participant in lesson planning, explanation, assessment, and reflection—not treat it as a separate subject or shortcut. Here’s the link to the session Links: Transcript
I conducted a session on Thu, 02 Jul 2026 at PGP-BA Multivariate Data Analysis — Term 4 - IIM Bangalore. Summary: AI makes sophisticated analytical methods cheap and accessible. The scarce skill becomes choosing the right analysis, questioning assumptions, and judging whether results matter. Here’s the link to the session Links: Transcript Audio (185 min)
For thirty years, we cleaned data for humans. Now, agents are reading it. What do we do differently? On Tue 𝟳 Jul 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲, 𝟮-𝟲pm IST, I’m running a Fifth Elephant workshop: “When Data is for Agents, Not Humans”. I have a few theories we’ll be testing on your data. Like: Tools beat tables. Agents prefers functions over tables they can read. Logs beat docs. Logs show actual usage - not how we’re supposed to use it. Messy beats clean. Agents can do clean & join data. You just need descriptions. ...
The theme of yesterday’s workshop for the IIM Alumni at Singapore was Tools and Workflows was: Agents are getting smarter, so they know what to do. Tools agents can use are growing and are more powerful. This combinatorial explosion creates explosive possibilites. This workshop covered the following six workflows: Leverage transcripts. Use Google AI Studio to transcribe non-sensitive recordings with a reusable “don’t miss anything” prompt. AI Studio’s record button is a ready-to-use transcriber. Simplify dense text as a comic, an infographic, a story. Image generation is now a tool call an agent runs for you. Then compress it as AVIF on Squoosh before you email it to a thousand people. Verify - cheaply. Paste one suffix: “Break this into key claims, mark certainty, flag the five highest-risk ones, and tell me how to verify or falsify each.” Convert to a skill to automate. Cross-checking with multiple models took error from 14% to 0.7%. Skills are assets. A skill tells the agent “here’s how I do stuff.” Build them slowly, edit them weekly, and they compound for years. No skills support in your tool? Keep them as copy-pasteable prompts. Brainstorm by forcing range. Ban the five obvious ideas; borrow from unrelated domains; smash two random concepts together with the Ideator. Hallucination is a feature when you’re being creative. Schedule tasks. Weekly regulatory scans, daily meeting prep, market briefings - and even an “unreasonable gesture” nudge. As AI hides the tech, human relationships gain value. Here’s the talk video and full story + transcript. ...
At 2 pm IST today (Fri 12 Jun 2026), I conducted a workshop at Paradox, IITM - at DOMS 101. My core message is: “AI can solve exams and help you learn. Delegate what AI can do. Learn what AI can’t do instead.” My talks page for “Let AI take your exams” includes: The full story + transcript + audio How Codex solved a real exam, live My collection of AI-learning techniques - which was not covered in the workshop, but is a useful reference Here are the takeaways from the workshop: ...
I conducted a session on Thu, 11 Jun 2026 at Department of Engineering Design - IIT Madras, Chennai. Summary: AI keeps moving the boundary between disciplines and automation. Education should organize around problems and judgment rather than fixed departmental skill boxes. Here’s the link to the session Links: Transcript
On Sat 13 Jun 2026 at 3 pm, I conducted an online workshop on Data Stories with AI. Registration link: https://forms.gle/dNkUxtJ2PVqNMNcE9 In this workshop, the audience used ChatGPT and Claude, mostly, to: Find data Analyze it Extract insights Visualize as stories It’s a data visualization using AI workshop for journalists - but you don’t need to know data, visualization, journalism, or even technology. But this is a practical workshop. You’ll be doing stuff and sharing your results. ...
I conducted a session on Sat, 23 May 2026 at IIM Alumni Singapore — AI Unboxed (1/4). Summary: AI performance depends less on clever prompts than on context. Give models the right goals, examples, constraints, history, and tools so they can act effectively. Here’s the link to the session Links: Video (126 min) Transcript Audio (119 min)