Happy Easter to those who celebrate.

Below are some of the articles and podcasts which caught my attention this week. As always, welcome your feedback and ideas.

Articles

• IT Spending Pulse:​ AI Agents and GenAI Reshape Priorities | BCG | As artificial intelligence evolves, IT budgets are keeping pace, with companies ratcheting up investments that drive growth—and squeezing mature categories to free the funding.

• Forget Faster, AI is Thinking: What o3, Gemini 2.5 & Your Mindset Really Mean | AI Mindset | The AI landscape is shifting. Models are moving beyond simple execution towards more complex reasoning and agency. Research is showing AI can function like a teammate in surprising ways.

• A practical guide to building agents | Open AI | A guide for product and engineering teams on how to build their first agents, distilling insights from numerous customer deployments into practical and actionable best

  practices.

• Data 3.0 in the Lakehouse Era | Bessemer Venture Partners | We’re moving beyond the modern data stack as a new architectural revolution sweeps the infrastructure landscape, ushering in unprecedented interoperability for enterprises in an AI age.

• How to Create Leverage | The Way of Work | Career Leverage is like having a catapult to launch you forward, while everyone else is marching steadily forward (or for some, pulled backward).

Podcasts/Videos

• Is Human Data Enough? | Google DeepMind | VP of Reinforcement Learning, David Silver, describes his vision for the future of AI, exploring the concept of the "era of experience" versus the current "era of human data".

• Building with AI | World of DaaS | Learn from Martin Casado, General Partner at (a16z), on Economics of open source AI, Chinese AI innovation with DeepSeek, Model collapse and data moats, and Regulatory challenges in AI.

• AGI is Still 30 Years Away | Dwarkesh Patel | Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu have 2045+ timelines, think the whole "alignment" framing is wrong, don't think an intelligence explosion is plausible, but are convinced we'll see explosive economic growth (with the economy literally doubling every 1 or 2 years).

• Inside the Future of Transmission | T&D World | Learn about the pressing challenges and opportunities in the U.S. electric transmission sector.

• Wild Courage | Talks at Google | How to smash through your fear of discomfort, failure, and the judgement of others, and to embrace your boldest self.

A Book We are Reading in April

The Courage to Be Disliked | Ichiro Kishimi , Fumitake Koga | The Courage to Be Disliked unfolds as a dialogue between a philosopher and a young man, who, over the course of five enriching conversations, realizes that each of us is in control of our life’s direction, independent of past burdens and expectations of others. This book came highly recommended by many people in my network.

A Quote We Are Pondering This Week

“"Focus on the things you are for, not the things you are against.

Many people spend large chunks of their day thinking about what they hate. They are always telling you about something they dislike: this food, that subject, this political party, that coworker.

You are more than your frustrations. Build your identity around what you love."

- James Clear

Upcoming Interesting Data & AI Conferences

• LlamaCon 2025 | 4-29-25 | Virtual

• IUCX ( Formerly CS Week) 2025 | 5-6 to 5-8 | Phoenix

• Snowflake Summit 2025 | 6/2 – 6/5 | San Francisco

• Databricks Data & AI Summit 2025 | 6/9 – 6/12 | San Francisco & Virtual

• Northeast Utilities Credit and Collections | 9/10 - 9/12 | Atlantic City

• Boston AI Week 2025 | 9/29 - 10/3 | Boston

• UA Week 2025 | 10/28-10/30 | Austin

• AWS re:invent 2025 | 12/1-12/5 | Vegas

#LetsGrowTogether