What Does It Mean if AI Agents Turn Marxist?

 Lately, it feels like you can’t go more than a few minutes without hearing someone talk about AI agents, and there’s a very good reason for that. Agents are doing more work, more quickly and in more places, and we’ve developed ways to help them retain knowledge from things they’ve done, and then build upon those experiences.But what if the experience agents gain on a job changes the work product in ways we didn’t predict? How do you make sure that agent does what you want it to do? This episode, we explore the alignment problem in the age of AI agents.We Meet: Andy Hall is a professor in the Political Economy Group at Stanford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.Credits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Astro Teller, Alphabet’s Captain of Moonshots, joins us for a conversation about the importance of failure, workplace culture in a moonshot factory, and not throwing away your shot.We Meet: Astro Teller is the Captain of Moonshots at X, Alphabet's Moonshot FactoryCredits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.This episode originally ran in April 2025.

How to handle cybersecurity challenges posed by AI agents is about the hottest security topic going at the moment. If you’re wondering why that is, it’s because agents are built to take action - to do things on our behalf - and that challenges a core assumption that’s baked into companies security: that humans make the decisions. Tailscale is a Canadian Unicorn and one of the country’s fastest growing tech companies, thanks in large part to its popularity with AI companies, and increasingly with AI bots too.CEO Avery Pennarun joins us in the latest installment of our oral history project.We Meet: Avery Pennarun, CEO and Co-Founder of TailscaleCredits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

How much do we know about the way organizations are adopting agentic AI, and what it means for the human employees working alongside?  Our friends at The MIT Sloan Management Review did a deep dive on these questions and several more late last year, and they found some pretty surprising things.This week, we’re going to talk about what those things might mean for companies as we continue to unpack this latest phase of agentic rollouts.We Meet: Sam Ransbotham is a professor of analytics at Boston College, the editor for the MIT Sloan Management Review AI Initiative, and the host of Me, Myself and AI. Credits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Critical minerals are in just about every device you can think of, and there’s a global race underway to find and finance the production of these materials because they’re in short supply. This week, we hear how Earth AI uses predictive algorithms to find new deposits and how TechMet’s capital and partnerships carry those opportunities through to production and market impact.We Meet: Roman Teslyuk is the CEO/CTO of EARTH AI              Brian Menell is the CEO of TechMet Credits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

As regulatory expectations rise, and financial crime grows more complex, risk management is shifting from static checks to continuous intelligence. From the stage at this year’s Web Summit Qatar, we looked at how AI and advanced data analytics are transforming compliance workflows.We Meet: Joel Lange is the executive vice president and general manager of Dow Jones Risk and ResearchCredits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

What would you say if someone offered you a taste of a salmon filet that doesn’t contain fish?The protein content, carbs, and even the omega 3s are basically the same, but what it doesn’t contain are things like microplastics and mercury. Join us for a factory tour of a startup called New School Foods for a peek at the next-generation of plant-based protein.We Meet:  New School Foods CEO Chris BrysonCredits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

It’s not just AI software that’s rapidly shifting. One could argue that the very map of high performance computing is being redrawn, from OpenAI investing more than $10-billion in wafer-scale chips to breakthroughs in quantum research that are making that architecture much more useful. This episode was taped in front of a live audience in Davos, Switzerland, on stage at The Drawing Room: AI and Exploration Salon held alongside the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum. We Meet: Cerebras Systems CEO and Co-Founder Andrew FeldmanIonQ CEO and Chairman Niccolo de MasiCredits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco. A special thank you to our event sponsors: The House of Collaboration Davos 2026, Futurum Group and J3D.AI. 

Figuring out what it takes to make agentic AI work in a high-stakes, real-world environment is front and center these days, because for the most part, we’re still figuring that out.At this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, we get a first-hand look at the shift that’s taking place from agent demos to what a successful deployment looks like.We Meet: Shibani Ahuja is the SVP of Enterprise IT Strategy at SalesforceCredits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

How do you feel about the use of artificial intelligence in the hiring process? Whether it sounds like a good way to remove human bias, a bad idea that could bake in machine bias, or something in between, you won't want to miss our deep dive  with author and journalist Hilke Schellmann at the P&T Knitwear Bookstore in Manhattan.This episode was taped in collaboration with All Tech is Human in New York City. Credits:We Meet: Hilke Schellmann is an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter and assistant professor of journalism at New York University. Credits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.