Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Jon Fortt, CNBC journalist, cohost of Closing Bell Overtime, and creator and host of the Fortt Knox podcast. As you just heard Nilay say, I’m stepping in to guest host a few episodes of Decoder this summer while he’s out on parental leave, and I’m very excited about what we’ve been working on.
For my first episode of Decoder, a show about how people make decisions, I wanted to talk to an expert. So I sat down with Cassie Kozyrkov, the founder and CEO of AI consultancy Kozyr. She’s also the former chief decision scientist at Google.
For a long time, Cassie has studied the ins and outs of decision-making: not just decision frameworks but also the underlying social dynamics, psychology, and even, in some cases, the role that the human brain plays in how and why we make certain choices. This is an interdisciplinary field that Cassie calls decision intelligence, which mixes everything from statistics and data science to machine learning. Her expertise landed her a top advisor role at Google, where she spent nearly a decade helping the company make smarter use of data.
In recent years, her work has collided with artificial intelligence. As you’ll hear Cassie explain it, generative AI systems like ChatGPT are making it easier and cheaper than ever to get advice and analysis. But unless you have a clear vision of what it is you’re looking for, and what values underlie the decisions you make, all you’ll get back from AI is a lot of messy data.
So Cassie and I really dug into the science behind decision-making, how it intersects with what we’re seeing in the modern AI industry, and how her current work in AI consulting helps companies better understand how to use these tools to make smarter decisions that can’t just be outsourced to agents or chatbots.
I also wanted to learn a little bit about Cassie’s own decision-making frameworks and how she made some key decisions of her own, such as what to pursue in graduate school and why she decided to leave academia for Google and then strike out on her own just as the generative AI boom was really starting to kick off. This is a fun one, and I think you’re really going to like it.
Okay: decision scientist Cassie Kozyrkov. Here we go.
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Cassie Kozyrkov, welcome to Decoder. I’m going to welcome myself to Decoder too, because this isn’t my podcast. I’m just having a good time punching the buttons, but it’s going to be a lot of fun.
Yeah, it’s so great to be here with you, Jon. And I guess we two friends managed to sneak on and take over this podcast, so I’m really excited for the mischief we’ll cause here.
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