The Tech Blog Writer Podcast - Inspired Tech Startup Stories & Interviews With Tech Leaders, Entrepreneurs And Innovators

I invited Atalia Horenshtien to unpack a topic many leaders are wrestling with right now. Everyone is talking about AI agents, yet most teams are still living with rule based bots, brittle scripts, and a fair bit of anxiety about handing decisions to software. Atalia has lived through the full arc, from early machine learning and automated pipelines to today’s agent frameworks inside large enterprises. She is an AI and data strategist, a former data scientist and software engineer, and has just joined Hakoda, an IBM company, to help global brands move from experiments to outcomes. The timing matters. She starts on the 18th, and this conversation captures how she thinks about responsible progress at exactly the moment she steps into that new role. Here’s the thing. Words like autonomy sound glamorous until an agent faces a messy real world task. Atalia draws a clear line between scripted bots and agents with goals, memory, and the ability to learn from feedback. Her advice is refreshingly grounded. Start inter