Happy Sunday. Hope you got some rest this weekend. It was spring break for many schools in Boston. Below are some of the articles and podcasts which caught my attention this week. As always, welcome your feedback and ideas.

Articles

• The front-runner’s guide to scaling AI | Accenture | How to strategically scale AI and win.

• How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025 | HBR | What the data shows about how people are using gen AI now.

• Five practical lessons to scale your data products | McKinsey | As companies increasingly rely on data to innovate and grow, ineffective (or nonexistent) data product practices have become a top strategic issue.

• Rethinking the course to manufacturing’s future | Accenture | Taking steps now in workforce transformation, automation, AI optimization, and digitalization is key to tomorrow's most competitive factories.

• Talent Whisperer | Colossus Review | How a maniacal focus on people led to incredible returns.

• Marketing’s New Middleman: AI Agents | Bain | From discovery to decision, large language models are starting to gatekeep the marketing funnel, so brand stewards must learn to speak their language.

Podcasts/Videos

• Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas: From Academic to $9B AI Pioneer | HBS Entrepreneurship Summit 2025 | In this exclusive interview, Srinivas shares his journey from electrical engineering student in India to founder of the revolutionary AI-powered search company recently valued at $9 billion.

• OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar on the race to build artificial general intelligence | Goldman Sachs | The path to artificial general intelligence and the importance of capital in the AI race.

• Tariffs, Free Trade, Export Controls, H20 & Rare Earth Ban | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner | Arguments about free trade, and updates on tariff negotiations, export controls, the new AI cold war, NVIDIA H20 chip ban, rare earth ban, DeepSeek, Tesla, & more.

• How to Ask AI the Right Questions to Grow | On Purpose with Jay Shetty | Learn from Deepak Chopra on the unexpected intersection of spirituality and artificial intelligence.

• Reinventing Recruiting using Agentic AI | Founded and Funded | Learn from an AI-first company transforming how organizations discover, hire, and manage talent.

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

“The willingness to figure things out as you go is often the only difference between those who achieve difficult things and those who never begin.”

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