Why so many companies make big hiring mistakes

Scott Hartley: In this world where we focus so much on what we're building, how we're building it, I think we need to take a step back and reconsider why we're building, and really humanize our technology, really bring together diverse teams of methodologies and people and mindsets so that we can take our technology and actually apply it to the most fundamental human problems. Today the conversation is largely about artificial intelligence, and one of the concepts that I like to discuss in the book The Fuzzie and the Techie is this concept of intelligence augmentation--so: thinking about using AI but using it in a way that's augmenting the ability of humans. So Paul English, who was the creator of Kayak.com, he is a techie through and through, but he also calls himself an AI realist; he's somebody who believes in the promise of artificial intelligence, but also realizes that this is not something that tomorrow or next year or maybe perhaps in the next decade is going to completely take away from the characteristics and the qualities of what a human can provide. And so he's now creating a company called Lola that's based in Boston, and Lola is sort of Kayak 2.0, where rather than trying to take the travel industry and put it online he's actually taking travel and putting it back into the hands of travel agents, real people that are working on the phones dealing with people that are calling in to book travel. And what he's doing is he's supplementing those travel agents with technology, with artificial intelligence, really "flipping the letters" and trying to use intelligence augmentation as an AI realist to sort of better the service that a travel agent can provide.