The Only Constant

In this episode of The Only Constant, Lasse Rindom speaks with Dr. Rachel Wood, a leading cyberpsychology researcher, licensed therapist and founder of the AI Mental Health Collective. They explore what happens when AI becomes a mirror that always accommodates us - and why human relationships, friction and otherness remain essential to our wellbeing, creativity and capacity for discernment.

Main topics they discuss include:

Why creating is about the human process, not just the output

How AI companions and chatbots can weaken self-trust and relational skills

The difference between concession and repair in human and AI relationships

Why organisations need to acknowledge ambivalence and grief in their AI adoption

Listen to the episode to hear Rachel’s perspective on how we can use AI without losing the friction, connection and humanity that make life meaningful.

Want to know more about Dr. Rachel Wood?:

Rachel Wood holds a PhD in cyberpsychology with expertise at the intersection of AI and mental health. She is passionately invested in shaping the future of connection, work, and identity, and thrives in her multifaceted roles as speaker, founder, advisor, and researcher. Dr. Wood's work has been featured in prominent publications including TIME, Business Insider, ABC, International Business Times, and CBS. She is on the American Psychological Association's AI advisory board inside the innovate APA Labs initiative. She is also an advisor to the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society, as well as several startups.

As the founder of the AI Mental Health Collective, Dr. Wood cultivates a cross-discipline community focused on collaboration among clinicians, builders, and researchers. Her insights are not just timely, but essential for understanding the complexities of human connection and professional identity in today's evolving AI-infused world.

In this episode of The Only Constant, Lasse Rindom speaks with Federico Casalegno, Executive Vice President of Design at Samsung Electronics, where he leads global design and innovation teams shaping human-centred experiences across products and services. Drawing on a career spanning design, technology and academia - including his previous work at MIT - Federico shares why AI should augment human purpose rather than replace it, and why the future of design is about creating meaningful relationships between people, technology and the world around them.

Main topics they discuss include:

Why computational design belongs within human-centred design

The difference between automation, optimisation and genuine human meaning

How designers can use friction to build trust, reflection and better agentic experiences

Why emotional intelligence and human imagination remain essential in the age of AI

Listen to the episode to hear Federico’s perspective on designing technology with purpose.

 

What to know more about Federico?:

Federico Casalegno is EVP of Design at Samsung, where he leads global design studios spanning three continents, including a significant footprint in Korea. Before moving into industry full-time, he spent two decades on the MIT faculty teaching and leading advanced innovation research.

His work today sits at the intersection of computational design and artificial intelligence, exploring what he calls "co-living with AI," the question of what AI changes about how we create, work, and live, and what design contributes to making that future feel human. Federico brings a reflective, humanistic lens to conversations about technology and creativity.

In this episode of The Only Constant, Lasse Rindom speaks with Damian K. Kowalczyk, a PhD and Principal ML Architect at Microsoft, and Emilie Lundblad, a Microsoft MVP and AI, data and security expert. They discuss the rapidly changing AI landscape, from China’s advances and open-weight models to the importance of context, evaluation and trust.

Main topics they discuss include:

Why China’s AI ecosystem continues to surprise the West

The economics and complexity of open-weight models

Why context, prompts and evaluation matter more than model size

Whether SaaS and low-code platforms are becoming obsolete

Europe’s role in the global AI race

Listen to the episode to hear Emilie’s and Damian’s perspectives on the future of AI, enterprise technology and digital sovereignty.

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Want to know more about Damian and Emilie?:

Damian Kowalczyk:
Damian Kowalczyk is a Principal AI/ML Architect at Microsoft, building systems that make advanced AI fast, reliable, and affordable at Microsoft 365 scale. His work spans models, inference engines, GPU optimization, and product architecture, delivering order-of-magnitude performance gains and turning frontier research into production-ready products. Over 15 years, his career has taken him from CERN and large-scale data platforms to hyperscale AI infrastructure, always connecting engineering decisions with customer and business outcomes.

With a PhD in Data Science and an Executive MBA in Innovation, Damian brings together engineering, science, and organizational thinking. He is particularly interested in how global competition, open models, and falling AI costs are reshaping how organizations create value. His central question is not only what AI can do, but what becomes possible when intelligence becomes abundant and innovation moves across traditional boundaries.

Emilie Lundblad:
Emilie Lundblad van Vliet is Lead Architect for GenAI at the LEGO Group, where she work with digital product teams for one of the world's most recognized consumer brands, to build and scale generative AI across its enterprise. Her work spans agentic systems, platform architecture, security and AI governance, turning frontier models into production-ready solutions that connect engineering decisions with business and organizational outcomes. Over 15 years, her career has taken her from data analytics and machine learning at GroupM and Hempel to leading AI Centers of Excellence at Ambu, always bridging deep technical work with board-level strategy.

A 5x Microsoft MVP in AI and 2x Microsoft Regional Director, she is the only woman in the Nordics to hold both titles simultaneously. She sits on the boards of Blue Logistics Group and Fortytwo Technologies, a Nordic Microsoft security partner, and serves as Chairperson of the Danish Data Science Community and member of the National Advisory Board for the Pioneer Centre for AI. With a master's degree from ITU Copenhagen and more than 50 keynotes delivered across the region, she is one of the most active voices shaping the Nordic AI agenda. Her central question is not only what generative AI can do, but what becomes possible when organizations stop treating AI as a capability and start treating it as infrastructure.

In this episode of The Only Constant, Lasse Rindom speaks with Shannon Lucas, co-founder and co-CEO of Catalyst Constellations. Shannon has more than twenty years of experience driving innovation across Fortune 500 companies and startups, including leadership roles at Ericsson, Vodafone, and Cisco.

They explore:

Why AI agents do not belong in outdated organisational structures

Discernment as the deeply human bridge between logic and intuition

How empowerment requires clarity, competence and accountability

Whether organisations need more managers, fewer managers or something entirely different

Why narratives, assumptions and prophecies shape the future we think we are merely predicting

AI may change how work is performed, but the deeper question is how we redesign organisations without losing human agency in the process.

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Do you want to know more about Shannon Lucas?:

Shannon Lucas, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Catalyst Constellations, has over twenty years’ experience working with startups, launching her own ventures, and driving innovation into the world’s largest companies. Shannon is a best-selling co-author of Move Fast, Break Shit, Burn Out; The Catalyst’s Guide to Working Well. She is a passionate thought leader about creating sustainable organizations in every sense of the word; for people, planet and profit.
 
In her previous roles, as EVP of Emerging Business at Ericsson, Senior Innovation Architect at Cisco’s Hyperinnovation Living Lab and Director of Innovation at Vodafone Global Enterprise, Shannon empowered Fortune 500 businesses to stay agile, competitive and sustainable through the adoption of new technologies and organizational structures.

In this episode of The Only Constant, Lasse Rindom speaks with Maria Sukhareva - computational linguist, Lead AI Strategist, and founder of AI Realist - who brings 15+ years in natural language processing to a refreshingly hype-free look at what large language models actually are, and aren't. With roots in computational linguistics and machine translation, Maria has been doing language modelling "since before it was cool," and she puts that depth to work as the conversation moves from the latest AI market drama into the deeper questions of language, intelligence, and truth.

Main topics they discuss include:

Why understanding language matters for understanding LLMs, and how the field drifted from linguistics toward pure statistics

The absence of real concepts, reasoning, and truth in models that simply predict the next token

AI slop, eloquence-as-intelligence, and the flood of machine-generated academic papers

Why "what to do" now matters more than "how to do it" - and what this means for experts, managers, and the future of work

If you've ever wondered what's actually happening behind the curtain of a language model - this conversation is for you.

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Do you want to know more about Maria Sukhareva?

Maria Sukhareva is the founder of AI Realist (airealist.org), an independent publication offering vendor-neutral, anti-hype analysis of enterprise AI for a practitioner audience. Through her weekly AI Realist Radar briefings, long-form investigative writing, regular workshops, and keynote engagements, she covers the developments enterprises actually need to navigate, from model releases and pricing shifts to security incidents and governance frameworks. AI Realist has grown to over 30,000 followers on LinkedIn and hundreds of paying subscribers, with her work cited by top media outlets including Forbes and Die Welt.

Alongside AI Realist, Maria serves as Principal Expert in AI and Lead AI Strategist at a DAX40 company, with over 15 years in NLP and generative AI. Her path runs from certified translator to computational linguist at Universität des Saarlandes, through leading the machine translation initiative at BMW Group, to her current role shaping enterprise AI strategy.

Maria holds a background in computational linguistics, has authored more than 20 publications, and speaks four languages.