Why the Chatbot Shopping Boom Fizzled

Nasrin Mostafazadeh, co-founder and CEO of Verneek, traces her path from a teenage robotics champion to founding an AI company with a boy at that same robotics competition, who later became her husband. She explains why 2026's wave of generic LLM shopping integrations largely failed, and how Verneek's domain-specific AI cut Nordstrom's product-tagging time by 20x while beating human accuracy by 20%.We meet: Co-founder & CEO of Verneek Nasrin MostafazadehCredits: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.

Neo4j CTO Philip Rathle on why the AI systems reaching production aren't monolithic LLMs,  and why "attackers think in graphs" even when defenders don't.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.

From deciding where to build a new business, airport or fire station, to understanding the potential impact of decisions regarding conservation or governance, people make billions of maps everyday using GIS. We explore the history and evolution of this tech with one of its pioneers, in the latest installment of our oral history project.This episode originally aired in November 2024. We Meet:Esri Founder & President Jack DangermondCredits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco. 

We know that kids spending time on social media are more likely to experience depression and anxiety. Less clear, and far more contentious, is the role we expect of schools, governments, and tech companies, and some parents are organizing.We Meet: Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA) Founder Julie ScelfoThis episode of our oral history project originally aired in March 2025. Since then, MAMA has grown to nearly 50 chapters nationwide, and a California court found Meta and YouTube liable for designing addictive products that harm kids - a case Scelfo has called a major win for the movement.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.

Planet co-founder Robbie Schingler argues AI's next leap requires teaching it about the physical world, not just text. Join us as he traces the company's path from university dorm-room satellites to a daily record of the planet, in the latest installment of our oral history project. We Meet:  Planet Labs co-founder Robbie Schingler 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.

Water shows up at every stage of the AI supply chain: to manufacture chips, to generate the power that runs them, and then more water to cool the chips in data centers. It's believed that AI's water needs by 2030 could roughly match the drinking needs of the entire United States, and less than 5% of this water is currently recycled. Ecolab CEO Christophe Beck joins us with a look at how he thinks the industry can grow without draining communities dry.We Meet:  Ecolab CEO Christophe BeckCredits: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.

From Las Vegas, where AI and security conferences are putting agentic risk front and center, we explore the identity crisis inside enterprise AI, and what it means to have machines managing machines. We Meet:  SailPoint President Matt Mills 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.

What if you could build solutions that unlock entirely new realities for millions of people? Aiming for something so big and so audacious that it seems almost impossible to imagine is often referred to as a moonshot. And what might it mean if a big part of what’s standing in the way of your moonshot… is your mindset? We Meet:  Salima Bhimani, author of Invent Now: The Next Leap in MoonshotsCredits: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’s an astronaut’s time worth? Answering that question is not a perfect science, but at more than $100,000 an hour (not counting salary - that's just to keep one alive) on the International Space Station, it’s safe to say it’s more than you want to pay for bagging up trash. This week, we take a field trip in New York City to see some space robots that could help with this problem. We Meet:  Icarus Robotics CEO Ethan Barajas Icarus Robotics CTO Jamie Palmer  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.

For as far as we’ve come with AI and robotics, there’s still a huge gap when it comes to combining the two. AI excels in the digital space, and in the physical world, robots are often pre-programmed. That’s where physical AI comes in. It’s critical for things that can’t tolerate the kinds of mistakes that are common in today’s statistics based AI, like self driving cars or managing the power grid. In the latest installment of our oral history project, we meet a central figure in these efforts, MIT's Daniela Rus.We Meet:  Daniela Rus is the Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.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.