Mastering AI with the experts
Mastering AI with the experts
Podcast Description
Welcome to "Mastering AI with the Experts," a comprehensive series where we delve into the vast and evolving world of artificial intelligence. This playlist brings together thought leaders, innovators, and top experts from various fields to explore the impact of AI across industries. From cutting-edge technologies to practical applications, we cover the past, present, and future of AI, providing you with insights and knowledge to stay ahead in this rapidly changing landscape.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast focuses on the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, with episodes covering AI maturity assessment, customer service enhancements through AI, and the impact of AI on sales processes, emphasizing practical applications and expert experiences.

AI Frontier Playbook exists because the real conversations about enterprise AI deserve to be heard. The guests here are the practitioners, researchers, and executives actually making decisions inside organizations, not summarizing trends from the sidelines. Every episode is a front-row seat to how AI is reshaping work, leadership, and business strategy in real time.
Whether you are leading an AI initiative, advising your organization, or just trying to cut through the noise, this is your space to think clearly, lead confidently, and stay ahead.
What if the biggest obstacle to AI in your business isn’t the technology, but the organizational structures built for humans to be the bottleneck?
In this episode of the AI Frontier Playbook, I sit down with Steve Gustavson, CVP of Design and Research at Microsoft, leading the Business Apps and Agents division with a 350-person team spanning design, research, and content. We explore how organizational transformation, AI agents, and user experience converge to reshape how companies build and run their business processes.
Steve brings 20+ years of experience from Adobe, ServiceNow, and now Microsoft, where he leads the design thinking behind Copilot Studio, Agent 365, and the broader agentic ecosystem. What makes this conversation different is how concrete it gets. We go deep on why rigid org charts become liabilities when AI teammates start handling workflows at scale, what it actually takes to evaluate agents beyond technical accuracy, and why generative UX is forcing a complete rethink of how business applications get built.
If you want to understand where the future of work is heading across agent ecosystems, this is the conversation.
What You’ll Learn
- Why organizational structures designed for human decision-making become liabilities in an AI-enabled workplace.
- How generative agents are shifting Dynamics 365 and business applications from rigid tools to flexible, adaptive systems.
- What it means to evaluate AI systems beyond technical accuracy to include human qualities like empathy and voice authenticity.
- How the future of work requires flatter organizations with fluid project-based team assignments rather than static org charts.
- Why user researchers and design leaders are becoming the primary voices defining what makes AI assistance trustworthy and effective.
- What the ethical and transparency challenges are when deploying AI agents in organizations alongside human teams.
- How to balance using cutting-edge AI tools daily while maintaining security and ethical boundaries around sensitive data.
- Why the next generation of agents will be customizable by end users, PMs, and other non-engineers using plain-language markdown specifications.
Whether you are an enterprise leader grappling with legacy systems or a designer thinking about human-centered AI, this episode challenges conventional thinking about how technology and people will work together.
Sponsored by Talan
Learn more about Talan’s AI Commerce Agent for B2B Buyers: https://bit.ly/4kZRDTj
Resources & Links
- Steve Gustavson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevegustavson/
- Microsoft Agent 365: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-agent-365
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