--- title: Learning in a Podcast Interview date: 2026-09-13T09:07:30+08:00 categories: - how-i-do-things - talks description: I joined Priya Dialani for a podcast about AI, then used ChatGPT to study her format and suggest better questions, episode formats, and a buyer checklist for future interviews. tags: [ai-agents, enterprise-ai, ai-workflows, prompt-engineering] --- [Priya Dialani](https://www.linkedin.com/in/priya-dialani-a8245586/) interviewed me for a [podcast](https://www.analyticsinsight.net/podcast/how-ai-data-sovereignty-and-the-pilot-purgatory-problem-a-conversation-with-anand-s). Here's the rough summary: 1. **What do you and Straive do?** Straive builds AI and runs AI. I poke at LLMs to learn what they cannot do. My friend calls me an "LLM Psychopath". 2. **Why do AI pilots get stuck before production?** AI speeds up coding, but less of testing. Making sure it works can take months. 3. **Why organize enterprise knowledge?** Better organized info is good for humans _and_ agents. Duh! 4. **Can AI organize it?** Yes! I've had it create one-line summaries of 10K+ docs on Straive Google Drive for easier searching. 5. **How can India's GCCs benefit from AI?** Put AI lovers next to business teams and give them AI agent access. They'll solve asked _and_ unasked problems. 6. **How does AI fail?** Unanticipated things happen in production. So, have agents monitor failures and revise the process. 7. **How is AI software different?** Normal software fails reproducibly. AI fails in new ways we haven't fully understood. 8. **Where should a company start with AI?** Skip AI strategy. Give people agent access, have them try it, and share what they learned. 9. **What if people don't know what to try?** Ask AI. "How could you improve my work?" Even rubbish ideas waste only 5 minutes. 10. **How much should we experiment?** A lot! Generation is cheap. Ask for 10 options, not one. Who cares even if all 10 fail? But what happened _outside_ of the interview was just as interesting. For example, Priya shared a podcast pro-tip: **don't leave when the interview ends** (guests apparently do that a lot) - stay on for post-production notes. She also used "nevertheless", which I noticed. I was ragged in my first year at IITM for using that in a sentence. "Do people actually say _nevertheless_?" [Anand](https://www.linkedin.com/in/anandakasa/) asked me, before asking me a trick question to find the probability of 3 random points on a sphere lying on the same plane. I mentioned this. (I analyzed my transcripts later. The person who uses "nevertheless" _by far_ the most is an [IITM faculty](https://www.linkedin.com/in/palramu/), followed by an [MIT faculty](https://www.linkedin.com/in/arvindsatya1/) and another [IITian](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaidevd/).) When I asked her, "How do you use AI to prepare", she said she gives it the topic and asks for questions. Reasonable - but we tried something more ambitious, live. ![](https://files.s-anand.net/images/2026-09-13-learning-in-a-podcast-interview.avif) Her next podcast was with Decimal Point Analytics on "Agentic AI embedded into core business workflows." So I [asked ChatGPT](https://chatgpt.com/share/6a4ba24d-cbfc-83ec-8243-e337af48e0c1): > Priya runs a podcast called Analytics Insight. I want you to research that and identify the style, the theme, etc., of the podcast. Then, I'm sharing a brief below for the company. I want you to suggest insightful questions... The main difference is that I _also_ asked it to: 1. Research Priya's style and content first. 2. Suggest formats, not just topics. 3. Suggest tips for improvement. Some of the formats it suggested were _quite_ interesting. For example: - **Workflow teardown**: _Give_ the guest a use case and ask them to narrate AI decisions, step by step. - **Failure court**: Ask them to argue for or against a series of claims, providing a _number_. It also suggested that she interrupt when guests get too abstract, ask them to provide a case study, and end with a "buyer checklist". Pretty neat! It was nice to go into a podcast as a guest and come out changing their workflow!