The Age Of Intelligence

About The Age Of Intelligence

AI changes everything it touches. For better and for worse. And AI is increasingly touching everything. The Age of Intelligence, recorded from INSEAD, brings together the voices of this new era. AI is rebalancing the world. Power is shifting — among nations, corporations, and individuals — as trillions in value are created and redistributed. AI is increasingly central to economic and business strategy, geopolitical influence, and the shaping of culture, ideology, and values. Listen to those leading the change—from academics exploring the boundaries, to entrepreneurs building the future, business leaders reshaping markets, policy-makers tackling the implications, and analysts marvelling at it. Who will gain most in this unfolding era? What can executives, policymakers, parents, and citizens do to protect and shape their future? How will values and beliefs evolve as education and media are revolutionized? What does this mean for national security, business survival, personal agency – indeed what will it mean to be human? Guiding you through this conversation are Theos and Tim. Theos Evgeniou is a leading AI academic at INSEAD, entrepreneur, and advisor. Tim Gordon, co-founder at Best Practice AI, is an entrepreneur, adviser and recovering political organiser. They have worked with some of the world’s most sophisticated companies, organisations and governments as they grapple with these questions. Each episode features a thought-provoking conversation with a remarkable guest – followed by a rapid-fire, high-energy debrief. We’ll reflect on what it might mean – for you, for your business, and for our world. Grounded in the realities but exploring the opportunities. Whether you’re building, investing in, or simply trying to make sense of AI and what it may mean for you, this podcast is your backstage pass to the diverse people and ideas driving the most transformative force of our time. Subscribe now or push the “like” button

Publisher

Tim Gordon, Theos Evgeniou

Category

business · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

10 Jun 2025

Latest episode

1 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

14 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   1 Jul 2026

   Constantijn van Orange-Nassau: Europe’s AI Opportunity

   Prince Constantijn van Oranje-Nassau is one of Europe’s clearest voices on tech sovereignty, startup scaling and industrial AI. His argument is blunt: Europe is not doomed in AI. But it is moving too slowly, thinking too nationally, and not investing enough capital required to compete. Europe should not focus on LLMs. The LLM race is crowded, expensive and dominated by the US and China. The better opportunity lies in industrial AI, world models, semiconductors, edge compute, quantum, robotics, energy, manufacturing data and deep tech. AI sovereignty is really about vulnerability. Europe has ceded too much control over cloud, compute, manufacturing, batteries, raw materials and digital infrastructure. If access to models, chips or critical components can be weaponised, Europe needs alternatives and leverage. Europe is optimised for society; China for speed; America for innovation. Europe’s rule of law, freedoms and social systems are strengths, but they do not automatically create velocity. Without urgency, Europe risks becoming “the museum of the world”. Meanwhile, Europe's automotive industry is "a very fat canary". Fragmentation is Europe’s tax on ambition. Founders face different rules, capital pools, clients and talent systems across 27 jurisdictions. EU Inc (the plan for a single trans- EU corporate listing), capital markets union and larger scale-up funds matter because European companies need to think global from day one. Startups cannot do the heavy lifting alone. Founders need corporate customers, procurement, infrastructure, energy, compute, capital and permission to move fast. Large European companies need to treat startups as core to innovation, not as side experiments. The optimistic case is still real. The continent has talent, capital, universities, industrial strength, rule of law and deep technical clusters. If it can mobilise those assets with urgency, it can still build a distinctive model of AI strength. But time is running out - "we need to be much more aggressive." Constantijn's message is clear: Europe has to choose to compete — and it must then accept the sacrifices necessary to do so with urgency, capital and industrial muscle. If not, it risks irrelevancy. "What are we willing to give up.... to get back in control?" Note: this was recorded as part of a live remote webinar at INSEAD and not in the studio so there are occasional audio imperfections. See omnystudio.com/listener (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information.

2. 

   6 Jun 2026

   Ray Eitel-Porter: Governing the Machine

   Ray Eitel-Porter led Accenture’s global responsible AI practice and co-authored Governing the Machine. This episode asks what happens when AI moves from giving answers to taking actions — and why AI Governance may yet become the cornerstone of management in the Age of Intelligence. Chatbots make mistakes; agents do things. Today’s AI can hallucinate, but Agentic AI spends money, updates systems, contacts third parties and triggers workflows. When it fails, it will fail at speed with potentially huge consequences. A company-destroying AI accident is plausible. Ray does not dismiss the risk of a mid-sized business being badly damaged by an AI agent running loose — deleting records, spending cash, exposing data or creating operational chaos before anyone notices. “Human in the loop” is not a magic shield. Humans only help if they understand the system, stay alert and have authority to intervene. The more accurate AI becomes, the easier it is to over-trust it. If AI is right 99% of the time who stays awake for the 1%? The smarter the AI, the more dangerous complacency becomes. Ray highlights the example of “cognitive speed bumps” — deliberate pauses that force people to question the machine rather than simply approve its output. Big firms are waking up; smaller firms may be exposed. Regulation, reputational risk and financial losses are pushing large corporates towards better AI governance. Mid-sized companies may adopt powerful tools faster than they build controls. AI regulation will probably be sector by sector. Healthcare, finance, recruitment and public services need different rules because AI risk depends on context. One global rulebook is unlikely. The best governance uses existing business systems. Do not bolt on a new AI bureaucracy. Review procurement, compliance, risk, legal and operational controls with an AI lens. Accountability should sit with the business owner. Not just IT, legal or the vendor. The executive who wants the AI system and signs off the business case should own both the upside and the risk. Boards need to ask three questions. Who is accountable? Do we know where AI is being used? Have people been trained well enough to use it safely and productively? Training is where many rollouts fail. Generic Copilot training is not enough. The value comes when teams redesign real work around AI, not when they learn a few prompts. Governance may become a source of value. In a world where machines produce more of the work, customers will pay for assurance: that outputs have been checked, systems are controlled and someone trustworthy stands behind them. The more we worry about the technology of AI, the more we come back to people. Ray’s message is cautiously optimistic: AI governance is possible. But the weak link may yet be the humans. See omnystudio.com/listener (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information.

3. 

   23 Mar 2026

   Olivier Touba: What would your digital twin say?

   Olivier Toubia is a Columbia Business School professor working at the frontier of AI, marketing, consumer behaviour, and digital twins. This was recorded late last year but his arguments are relevant and clear: LLMs drive towards the average which means its hard to mimic the diversity of human existence. Digital twins are promising — but not ready. Synthetic consumers for research purposes (e.g. virtual focus groups) are fast and cheap, but Toubia’s research suggests they are still too biased and inconsistent to trust too far. Learn what happened when they compared digital and human twins' responses to the same questions. Politics is the worst domain to deploy synthetic focus groups: The base model exerts a powerful pull. Twins often reflect the worldview of the model as much as the individual they are meant to represent, especially in politics, where performance is weakest. AI is too sensible - compared to humans it tends to be more moderate: in one study 45% of humans wanted to deport illegal immigrants and only 5% of digital twins agreed. Synthetic personalities reflect a clear pro-tech bias. Twins tend to be more comfortable with algorithms, less concerned about privacy, and more trusting of technology than humans actually are. AI twins thinks AI is smarter than humans.... Generative AI has entered its monetisation phase with advertising as the likely endgame Subscriptions and enterprise sales matter, but the bigger prize is becoming the interface for search, discovery, decision-making, and purchase. Business adoption remains uneven but labour anxiety is rational Many pilots are failing to deliver meaningful returns; senior leaders are often enthusiastic, while middle managers and employees are more sceptical. AI can be creative, but not at the edges. AI tools can recombine ideas - "its a fallacy to think that AI will never be able create new things". However, it still misses the diversity of lived experience that gives humans their edge. The push is towards the average. We usually worry about AI driving polarisation - Olivier's work shows that current LLM tools trend towards the opposite. Humans can provide the spikiness and AI the padding. See omnystudio.com/listener (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information.

4. 

   1 Mar 2026

   Its time to build! (European style): Cristina Caffarra

   Cristina Caffarra is an eminent economist and veteran antitrust practitioner who has become a leading voice behind Eurostack — a grassroots, industry-led push to rebuild Europe’s digital infrastructure as a sovereignty and competitiveness play. She has a strong argument to make: Europe is a “digital colony” — and it’s self-inflicted. US hyperscalers are excellent; Europe vacated the field through fragmentation, weak risk capital, and complacency. The "kill switch" is a distraction; dependency is the disease. The real risk is gradual denial: deprecated features, constrained access, and strategic leverage — not a Hollywood blockbuster blackout. Productivity is the core argument. Europe’s gap is investment per worker, especially into high-growth tech that diffuses across the whole economy. Regulation can’t create an industry. Antitrust and platform rules “nibble at the corners”, take years, and leave the giants stronger — while absorbing all the political oxygen. Europe chose theatre over building. “Taming Big Tech” became a substitute for the only question that mattered: where are Europe’s builders, customers, and scale-ups? Demand is the lever, not more grants. Without customers, no stack survives — procurement and enterprise buying decisions are the flywheel. Procurement should be the no-brainer. Every other major power has local preference norms; Europe’s non-discrimination logic is now being weaponised against European options. She notes that even the European Commission's own CIOs focuses on performance and efficiency alone. Private enterprise is the real swing voter. Public sector is ~20% of demand; the other 80% sits with CEOs and CIOs who complain about European weakness — and then buy American. European tech can compete cost — but not ease of use. European components exist; what’s missing is end-to-end “peace of mind” and the glue between parts. Mercedes is the case study. They want sensitive AI loads (e.g. autonomous driving) not wholly dependent on US infrastructure — but need suppliers and buyers to co-design workable, integrated alternatives. She argues that no one wants to “decouple” form the US — that’s a straw man. The practical goal is share: move European supply from <20% to something like 30–40% in a growing market. This is wartime logic, not business-as-usual. Europe has surged before under pressure; Caffarra argues that its time to stop waiting for Brussels and to start acting like a superpower. She leaves us with a blunt challenge: will Europe keep buying convenience — or invest, through demand, in a tech stack that keeps its innovation future in its own hands? See omnystudio.com/listener (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information.

5. 

   13 Feb 2026

   Sangeet Choudary: Who Learns Wins

   Sangeet Choudary is the best-selling co-author of Platform Revolution and the author of the new book Reshuffle (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DTKW6NQV). He has advised CEOs at more than 40 Fortune 500 companies and is currently a Senior Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. The SaaS crash isn’t cyclical — it’s structural. AI is eroding seat-based pricing, collapsing product boundaries, and destroying the old logic of defensible SaaS moats. AI doesn’t just change tasks — it rewrites value. Focusing on “automation vs augmentation” misses the point; AI reshapes whole systems of work, competition, and advantage. Translation is the real superpower of AI. By collapsing the cost of translating across silos, AI enables coordination without standards, APIs, or shared workflows. Moats built on customer understanding are dissolving. When users can no-code, extend, or bypass tools — and adjacent platforms can invade workflows — retention logic breaks. The decisive divide is above vs below the algorithm. Those who design and own learning systems capture capital-like returns; those whose knowledge is absorbed become commoditised labour. Platforms don’t just intermediate — they absorb learning. Campaign managers, drivers, and operators trained the systems that ultimately priced them out. Firms must be re-designed, not AI-enabled. Automating existing workflows locks in obsolete constraints; the real prize is questioning why the workflow exists at all. The future firm is modular — but selectively integrated. AI makes context exportable, pushing work outside the firm, while pulling learning-critical activities tightly inside. In physical AI, learning beats scale. The advantage isn’t owning assets — it’s owning the feedback loops that reveal how complex systems actually behave (the Tesla lesson). Nations compete on where learning compounds. The US bets on intelligence concentration, China on model commoditisation plus execution, India on open standards — while Europe risks playing defence in a power game. He leaves us with a lingering question: are you above or below the algorithm? See omnystudio.com/listener (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information.

6. 

   12 Dec 2025

   Helen Toner and Emelia Probasco: National Security in the Age of Intelligence

   Helen Toner, whose decade of work on AI Safety came in to prominence when she was the OpenAI Board member who led the revolt against Sam Altman, and Emelia Probasco, who covers the national securty angles of AI both now work at the Centre for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). They join the podcast to discuss the security issues around AI with the conversation ranging from their take on the China / US race, the role of allies, alternative paths for the technology and the "AI Adulting Problem". We discuss the challenges around AI as a dual use technology. As a general purpose technology it is impossible to control what happens next. This can cut both ways - drones optimised for warfare can deliver humanitarian aid with great precision. The key is to keep talking - and we discuss the current state of diplomacy around AI, why the US needs allies and how the worriers need to better articulate their concerns if we want to solve them. We also touched on the alternative - how AI is being deployed in the military, why the existing rules of war matter, the challenges of deploying AI in legacy organisations (and with legacy weapons systems). Helen and Emelia bring real insight from working on some of the hardest problems from where national security meets the transformational power of AI. See omnystudio.com/listener (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information.

7. 

   28 Sept 2025

   Karen Hao: Rebel against the Empire

   Award-winning journalist Karen Hao discusses how AI giants function as empires, exploring alternative paths for AI development and its societal impact in this interview.

8. 

   15 Sept 2025

   Saif Al Salman: what happens when a nation goes all-in on AI?

   Microsoft's National Technology Officer in the UAE, Saif Al Salman, discusses the nation's ambitious AI strategy and its projected economic and global influence.

9. 

   22 Aug 2025

   Demba Ba: The AI Neurosurgeon

   Harvard Professor Demba Ba, the "AI Neurosurgeon," explains how understanding AI's inner workings unlocks human control and reveals insights into both artificial and human thought processes in this interview.

10. 

    25 Jul 2025

    Francois Candelon - Lessons from the “Permanent Revolution”

    Francois Candelon, Private Equity AI executive, shares insights on embracing AI's "permanent revolution" for business competitiveness and workforce adaptation in this interview.

11. 

    11 Jul 2025

    Smarter Humans: The Pattie Maes Mission

    MIT academic Pattie Maes shares her lifelong mission to augment human intelligence with technology, discussing AI's potential and perils in this interview.

12. 

    27 Jun 2025

    Jeff McMillan: How Morgan Stanley deploys AI at scale

    Chief AI Officer Jeff McMillan shares Morgan Stanley's AI scaling strategies and global insights, offering practical advice for corporate leaders.

13. 

    16 Jun 2025

    Tom Hurd: From Tracking Terrorists to Tracking AI Talent

    Tom Hurd, former UK Homeland Security Advisor, discusses how tracking AI talent predicts technological futures and global power shifts in this interview with Theos and Tim.

14. 

    10 Jun 2025

    The Age Of Intelligence - Season 1

    Hosts Theos Evgeniou and Tim Gordon interview industry leaders about AI's transformative impact on global power, business, and society, offering insights for navigating this new era.

Who has been a guest on The Age Of Intelligence

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Karen Hao
• Saif Al Salman
• Demba Ba
• Francois Candelon
• Pattie Maes

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.