This week, Bren and Lenno are joined by their first guest, Alberto Gonzalo Otero, a purpose coach who helps leaders and teams reconnect daily work with why they do it.

Alberto talks through the power of "why," the questions he uses to get people past surface answers like money, and the team assessment he built to measure purpose and psychological safety alongside trust and clarity.

The conversation also looks at courage and the relationship with purpose, and why staying in a role that doesn't fit your purpose is usually the bigger risk.

They discuss how understanding and aligning with your purpose can lead to greater fulfilment, better decision-making, and navigating technological changes like AI.

Guest

Alberto Gonzalez Otero - https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertogotero/

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Alberto Gonzalo Otero and Purpose

00:59 What is Purpose and Why It Matters

03:04 Purpose During the COVID-19 Pandemic

05:03 AI, Technology, and the Future of Work

07:05 The Midlife Crisis and Purpose

08:07 Purpose Across Generations

09:01 The Impact of AI on Jobs and Society

10:57 Using Purpose to Make Better Decisions

13:12 The Role of Leadership and Team Dynamics

15:57 The Value of Purpose in Innovation and Technology

20:09 Balancing Technology and Human Values

24:05 Aligning Work with Personal Purpose

28:04 The Power of Asking 'Why' and Purpose

32:58 Team Dynamics and Purpose

37:08 The Courage to Follow Your Purpose

41:09 Overcoming Societal and Personal Barriers

43:57 Practical Steps to Discover Your Purpose

44:55 Closing Remarks and Final Thoughts

This week, Bren & Lenno venture into the world of security, starting with a media company whose entire channel went completely offline. Not because of a sophisticated breach, but because of a simple but stupid human action.

This episode digs into why data sovereignty and geopolitics get all the corporate attention, while the far bigger risk sits closer to home.

And ultimately they address the question that you can spend a billion dollars on security, but what's the point if it only takes one person to undo it?

This week Bren & Lenno dive into recent but potentially disturbing news of Google being on a buying spree. They didn't buy a bankrupt airline for its planes, but for it's data...years of emails, Teams messages and spreadsheets, all headed off to train AI models.

This is a sharp reminder that everything we write on a work account, or hand over to an app, has become a monetizable asset, whether we intended it to or not.

So if our data is worth buying, shouldn't we be the ones getting paid for it?

This week, Bren and Lenno discuss a shared frustration... chatbots.

From there, they ask if AI is making customer service better, or if people are quietly rejecting it in favour of a real human

They also unpack a LinkedIn story about connecting family calendars to ChatGPT instead of talking to their own kids.

Honest, a little ranty, and very human so exactly the conversation the call centre script never lets you have.

Bren and Lenno pick up a question sparked by a full-body health scan at a Swedish startup and wonder how far can AI actually take healthcare?

They discuss declining global birth rates and shrinking workforces, and what that means for healthcare, economic growth, and data privacy as health tracking gets more personal.

There's also a cheeky ChatGPT sign, and an AI-planned run that did not go as planned.

Warm, candid, and thinking out loud as always, this is the conversation still finding its shape in real time.

Welcome back to This Is Definitely Not a Data Podcast, where Brendan and Lenno, sit down to unpack what happens when AI adoption moves from personal experiment to company-wide bet.

They start with why ChatGPT's real genius wasn't the model, but the humble Google-style search box that let everyone in from day one.

From there, Lenno shares his own hands-on testing of AI models on messy address data, and the pair compare Klarna's AI-first retreat with IKEA's decision to retrain its workforce instead of replacing it.

Warm, candid, and refreshingly honest, Brendan and Lenno keep circling back to the same conclusion: however far the technology goes, this is still a people problem.

Welcome back to This Is Definitely Not a Data Podcast, where Brendan sits back down with co-host Lenno, a Chief Data Officer freshly returned to the Hot Topics CDO list, for a conversation about everything that happens before AI gets to be the exciting part.

Brendan and Lenno dig into why data governance gets written off as boring right up until someone rebrands it "AI enablement" — and why light, iterative guardrails tend to beat giant upfront frameworks that nobody ends up using.

From an Excel spreadsheet that quietly wrecks someone else's day to the Rubik's Cube problem of every data decision rippling sideways, they trace how the post-COVID shift to screens has cost us the "collision conversations" that used to build trust before things went wrong.

It all lands on the same place: data is the output, people are what bring it to life.

Bren and Lenno pick up a conversation they'd normally have only behind closed doors, "what AI actually costs and what happens when the bill comes due?"

Starting with pricing (why token costs, like mortgage rates or SaaS subscriptions, are unlikely to stay this low), is a price hike inevitable? And what happens if you have AI in critical processes when costs skyrocket?!

A question that hits hard was if agentic AI can do the work of offshore teams, what happens to the people behind those jobs, and whose responsibility is it to plan for that?

Warm, unscripted, and more than a little uneasy by the end.