Few leaders have a better real-time read on how AI is actually reshaping the workforce than Hayden Brown. As CEO of Upwork, the platform where 18 million freelancers meet the businesses that need them, she sees what the monthly jobs report can't: which skills are surging, which jobs are quietly disappearing, and why 23% of businesses that moved work to AI are already bringing humans back. Brown joins Rapid Response to share what she's actually seeing on the ground, why she refused to blame AI when she laid off a quarter of Upwork's staff, and what the data says about the gap between AI hype and AI reality.

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Stories of people standing in line for hours to get their drivers license or being wrongfully denied government food assistance are common in America. Few people think, “I can solve this problem.” But the CEO of Promise, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, sees a solution in AI. Promise is a software company designed to help move money in and out of government benefit programs (like SNAP) to better serve the people who rely on them – and better serve taxpayers, too. Host Rana el Kaliouby speaks with Phaedra about how Promise is making these systems cheaper and faster with AI. 

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In the first half of 2026 alone, investors poured $3 billion into the next frontier of AI: World Models. Google DeepMind, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, Yann LeCunn’s AMI labs, and Odyssey are all building in this space. In this episode, host Rana el Kaliouby speaks with the co-founder and CEO of Odyssey Oliver Cameron. They dive into the trillion dollar opportunity behind world models, why they are the next frontier of AI, and how they will be applied to a range of industries, from education to healthcare. 

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Critterz was one of the first feature films built primarily with AI, but OpenAI abruptly shut down Sora, the very tool its director was relying on. Nik Kleverov, Chief Creative Officer of Native Foreign, joins Rapid Response from the Cannes Lions festival to make the case for why AI isn't killing Hollywood, it's about to reinvent it. He breaks down why 2026 is year zero for mass adoption of AI in the film industry, and why human talent is more in demand than ever when great storytelling is the goal. Kleverov also confronts the darker side of the technology: deepfakes, scams, and the blurring line between real and generated, and offers a surprising possible solution.

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This week we reprise our episode with robotics developer Grace Brown, co-founder and CEO of Andromeda, an Australia- and US-based company. A recently launched study, led by nurses, will analyze how Andromeda’s humanoid robot Abi fits into the everyday routine of patients in dementia care. Abi is a social robot designed for the aging population, with a goal to address the loneliness epidemic. In this interview, Rana el Kaliouby sits down with Brown to talk about why physical AI needs emotional intelligence, how nonverbal cues make or break human-robot interactions, and the importance of designing robots people actually want in their lives.

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For nearly two decades, Amy Webb's annual Tech Trends Report was required reading for anyone trying to keep up with technology. But this year, Webb killed the report and replaced it with something more applicable for leaders in an AI era.

In this episode, CEO of Future Today Strategy Group Amy Webb joins host Rana el Kaliouby to unpack her 2026 Convergence Outlook and examines how AI-driven convergences such as compute shock, living intelligence, and emotional outsourcing will reshape business and daily life.

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Is it possible for us to ever wholeheartedly trust a machine the way we would a human? According to Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, the answer is no. And that’s what stops us from being able to emotionally connect with AI chatbots.

In this episode, host Rana el Kaliouby and Duhigg dissect what's really happening when people confide in ChatGPT and why real connection depends on reciprocity and vulnerability, two things AI can't offer.

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In the last year, Canva redefined itself from the ground up. Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Cameron Adams joins Rapid Response live from the Cannes Lions festival to explain why the so-called SaaSpocalypse never kept him up at night, how Canva shifted from a design company to an AI company without losing what made it great, and why being only 1% of the way there is actually the most exciting place to be. Adams also shares the specific steps anyone can take to get real impact from AI tools rather than just falling down the rabbit hole, and makes the case that in a world of commoditized models, your organization's unfair advantage is the only thing that matters.

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AI's promise is real. But the challenge to realizing its value isn't technology—it's people. Rana el Kaliouby joins WorkLab's Molly Wood to explore what can stall progress. The conversation explores how emotional intelligence, empathy, and communication are essential for hybrid human–AI teams to thrive. Rana makes the case that leaders must foster trust and readiness, rethink workflows, and keep humans at the center to unlock AI's full potential and ensure sustainable adoption.

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American universities are a critical pillar of US innovation. But what happens when Silicon Valley gets more intentional about that, treating a campus more like a talent pipeline, especially in the race to build AI? In his new New York Times bestseller “How to Rule the World,” journalist and recent Stanford graduate Theo Baker explores that and more. He describes the extreme lengths students and VCs go to in supercharging the school’s system for cultivating talent and investment opportunity. Host Rana el Kaliouby knows this world from the other side – as a founder who spun her company out of MIT and as an investor who now scouts talent on college campuses. Theo and Rana compare perspectives, discuss how AI has changed college, and ask whether AI is an accelerant to “win at all costs.”

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It often feels like the world is divided when it comes to AI — do you lean in, or opt out?.

But what if that tension exists within your own household? In this episode, Rana brings her kids onto the show for a candid conversation about AI adoption. Her son Adam is an AI enthusiast and her daughter Jana is an AI skeptic, a dynamic she wrote about in a recent essay, "I'm an AI Scientist, My Daughter Refuses to Use AI, and I'm Okay with It." She asks them both to explain their different perspectives on AI, how they've embraced it and how they haven't — prompting Rana to reflect on her role as a mother and an AI leader raising both of them. 

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