Fame Host (https://fame.so) Exceeding Expectations https://podcasts.fame.so/exceeding-expectations https://feeds.fame.so/exceeding-expectations Every leader deploying AI at scale is figuring it out in real time. Exceeding Expectations is where they compare notes. Each episode features a senior leader from the front lines of AI implementation: their operational battles, their hard decisions, their failures and successes, and what they've built from them. Across industries. Across functions. Always from the people who had to make the call and live with the outcome. Real experience. Shared openly. No hype.. Exceeding Expectations. By Encore. Resources: Encore AI Website: https://www.gainencore.ai Laurel Rockall LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurel-rockall-a73813128/ Copyrights © 2026 All Rights Reserved by Insait IO en Fri, 10 Jul 2026 15:56:09 +0000 Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:32:53 +0000 https://content.fameapp.so/uploads/3jqv3wl1/691c7c30-900f-11f1-ac68-978cb15c6ea3/691c7e80-900f-11f1-ba4a-f91e5e278021.jpg Exceeding Expectations https://podcasts.fame.so/exceeding-expectations Every leader deploying AI at scale is figuring it out in real time. Exceeding Expectations is where they compare notes. Each episode features a senior leader from the front lines of AI implementation: their operational battles, their hard decisions, their failures and successes, and what they've built from them. Across industries. Across functions. Always from the people who had to make the call and live with the outcome. Real experience. Shared openly. No hype.. Exceeding Expectations. By Encore. Resources: Encore AI Website: https://www.gainencore.ai Laurel Rockall LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurel-rockall-a73813128/ Encore AI Every leader deploying AI at scale is figuring it out in real time. Exceeding Expectations is where they compare notes. Each episode features a senior leader from the front lines of AI implementation: their operational battles, their hard decisions, their failures and successes, and what they've built from them. Across industries. Across functions. Always from the people who had to make the call and live with the outcome. Real experience. Shared openly. No hype.. Exceeding Expectations. By Encore. Resources: Encore AI Website: https://www.gainencore.ai Laurel Rockall LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurel-rockall-a73813128/ No No episodic Encore AI Every leader deploying AI at scale is figuring it out in real time. Exceeding Expectations is where they compare notes. Each episode features a senior leader from the front lines of AI implementation: their operational battles, their hard decisions, their failures and successes, and what they've built from them. Across industries. Across functions. Always from the people who had to make the call and live with the outcome. Real experience. Shared openly. No hype.. Exceeding Expectations. By Encore. Resources: Encore AI Website: https://www.gainencore.ai Laurel Rockall LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurel-rockall-a73813128/ Every leader deploying AI at scale is figuring it out in real time. Exceeding Expectations is where they compare notes. Each episode features a senior leader from the front lines of AI implementation: their operational battles, their hard decisions, their failures and successes, and what they've built from them. Across industries. Across functions. Always from the people who had to make the call and live with the outcome. Real experience. Shared openly. No hype.. Exceeding Expectations. By Encore. Resources: Encore AI Website: https://www.gainencore.ai Laurel Rockall LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurel-rockall-a73813128/ Laurel Rockall team-ini@fame.so No No No Why EI (emotional intelligence) Is the Real AI Advantage with Adam Slonim https://podcasts.fame.so/e/r8kl05xn-why-ei-emotional-intelligence-is-the-real-ai-advantage-with-adam-slonim Why EI (emotional intelligence) Is the Real AI Advantage with Adam Slonim 0 No No 71wjpky0 In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall is joined by Adam Slonim, a leadership strategist, broadcaster, and AI adviser, to dive into why the most critical factor in AI adoption is how leaders think about control, culture, and the human dimension of work transformation. In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall is joined by Adam Slonim, a leadership strategist, broadcaster, and AI adviser, to dive into why the most critical factor in AI adoption is how leaders think about control, culture, and the human dimension of work transformation.

What You’ll Learn:

  • The critical difference between AI's emotional mimicry and genuine human empathy

  • Why the conversation about AI's impact on work has been fundamentally wrong

  • How metacognition changes everything about leadership's role in directing adaptive, high-performing teams

  • The alignment model that separates high-performing teams using AI from those paralyzed by it

  • Two non-negotiable decisions every leader must make before deploying AI

  • Why the teams achieving the highest productivity and creativity with AI are the ones with the best conversations

Adam Slonim is a leadership strategist, broadcaster, and AI adviser who works at the intersection of artificial intelligence, human capability, and organizational performance. As founder of Blended Learning Group, Adjunct Fellow at Victoria University, host of Behind the Headlines, and a consultant to the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, government, and industry, he brings a rare combination of fluency in the machine learning frontier alongside decades on the human side of organizations. His work helps leaders move past automation anxiety by bridging emotional intelligence with artificial intelligence, aligning teams around clear expectations, and building cultures where AI is discussed openly and adopted purposefully so that people and technology perform at their best together.

Episode Resources:



]]> Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:37:00 +0000 Encore AI Encore AI 214 In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall is joined by Adam Slonim, a leadership strategist, broadcaster, and AI adviser, to dive into why the most critical factor in AI adoption is how leaders think about control, culture, and the human dimension of work transformation. In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall is joined by Adam Slonim, a leadership strategist, broadcaster, and AI adviser, to dive into why the most critical factor in AI adoption is how leaders think about control, culture, and the human dimension of work transformation. No No Why EI (emotional intelligence) Is the Real AI Advantage with Adam Slonim https://podcasts.fame.so/e/xny7k4pn-why-ei-emotional-intelligence-is-the-real-ai-advantage-with-adam-slonim Why EI (emotional intelligence) Is the Real AI Advantage with Adam Slonim 0 No No l14rz9j1 In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall is joined by Adam Slonim, a leadership strategist, broadcaster, and AI adviser, to dive into why the most critical factor in AI adoption is how leaders think about control, culture, and the human dimension of work transformation. In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall is joined by Adam Slonim, a leadership strategist, broadcaster, and AI adviser, to dive into why the most critical factor in AI adoption is how leaders think about control, culture, and the human dimension of work transformation.

What You’ll Learn:

  • The critical difference between AI's emotional mimicry and genuine human empathy

  • Why the conversation about AI's impact on work has been fundamentally wrong

  • How metacognition changes everything about leadership's role in directing adaptive, high-performing teams

  • The alignment model that separates high-performing teams using AI from those paralyzed by it

  • Two non-negotiable decisions every leader must make before deploying AI

  • Why the teams achieving the highest productivity and creativity with AI are the ones with the best conversations

Adam Slonim is a leadership strategist, broadcaster, and AI adviser who works at the intersection of artificial intelligence, human capability, and organizational performance. As founder of Blended Learning Group, Adjunct Fellow at Victoria University, host of Behind the Headlines, and a consultant to the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, government, and industry, he brings a rare combination of fluency in the machine learning frontier alongside decades on the human side of organizations. His work helps leaders move past automation anxiety by bridging emotional intelligence with artificial intelligence, aligning teams around clear expectations, and building cultures where AI is discussed openly and adopted purposefully so that people and technology perform at their best together.

Episode Resources:



]]> Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:21:00 +0000 Encore AI Encore AI 2737 In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall is joined by Adam Slonim, a leadership strategist, broadcaster, and AI adviser, to dive into why the most critical factor in AI adoption is how leaders think about control, culture, and the human dimension of work transformation. In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall is joined by Adam Slonim, a leadership strategist, broadcaster, and AI adviser, to dive into why the most critical factor in AI adoption is how leaders think about control, culture, and the human dimension of work transformation. No No The Myths Holding Enterprise AI Back with Professor Dan Roth Chief AI Scientist at Oracle https://podcasts.fame.so/e/x8y7k918-the-myths-holding-enterprise-ai-back-with-professor-dan-roth-chief-ai-scientist-at-oracle The Myths Holding Enterprise AI Back with Professor Dan Roth Chief AI Scientist at Oracle 0 No No l04rzml0 In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall is joined by Dan Roth, Chief AI Scientist at Oracle, who explains why language models are powerful but not the reasoning engines most people believe them to be, why the relationship between AI and data runs in both directions, and why most organizations are underinvesting in the data side of that equation. In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall is joined by Dan Roth, Chief AI Scientist at Oracle, who explains why language models are powerful but not the reasoning engines most people believe them to be, why the relationship between AI and data runs in both directions, and why most organizations are underinvesting in the data side of that equation.

What You’ll Learn:

  • Why language models are generation machines and what that means for enterprise deployment

  • The bidirectional relationship between AI and data that most organizations are only investing in one direction

  • Why information retrieval is far from solved and how models fail at multi-step queries

  • What a semantic data layer is and why it’s the highest-leverage AI investment almost no one is making

  • The concept of visibility of failures and why invisible AI errors are the biggest enterprise risk

  • How AI use is already eroding critical thinking and why leaders must invest in both technology and human judgment

Dan Roth is Chief AI Scientist at Oracle, bringing decades of experience building enterprise AI systems that actually ship to production. He is one of the rare voices in AI who moves fluently between research and production. Dan previously led the science behind Amazon’s first generative AI products and has published more than 450 papers across natural language understanding, machine learning, and reasoning. His PhD dissertation at Harvard, titled “Learning in Order to Reason,” anticipated ideas the entire field is now converging on three decades later.

Episode Resources:



]]> Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:22:00 +0000 Encore AI Encore AI 2330 In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall is joined by Dan Roth, Chief AI Scientist at Oracle, who explains why language models are powerful but not the reasoning engines most people believe them to be, why the relationship between AI and data runs in both directions, and why most organizations are underinvesting in the data side of that equation. In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall is joined by Dan Roth, Chief AI Scientist at Oracle, who explains why language models are powerful but not the reasoning engines most people believe them to be, why the relationship between AI and data runs in both directions, and why most organizations are underinvesting in the data side of that equation. No No AI in Banking: How Valley Bank Scales the Human Touch https://podcasts.fame.so/e/5nz7jrr8-ai-in-banking-how-valley-bank-scales-the-human-touch AI in Banking: How Valley Bank Scales the Human Touch 0 No No 80znv440 In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall sits down with Izge Cengiz Ercan, Senior Vice President and Director of Strategic Innovation at Valley Bank. They discuss how the bank deploys smart AI solutions across commercial lending, prospect outreach, and internal workflows without losing its human core. In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall sits down with Izge Cengiz Ercan, Senior Vice President and Director of Strategic Innovation at Valley Bank. They discuss how the bank deploys smart AI solutions across commercial lending, prospect outreach, and internal workflows without losing its human core.

Izge Cengiz Ercan is Senior Vice President and Director of Strategic Innovation at Valley Bank, a 95-year-old relationship-focused financial institution. With over 20 years of experience in highly regulated industries, she combines deep technical fluency with a conviction that technology should enhance human connection.



What You’ll Learn:

  • How to shift your organizational mindset from seeing AI as a workforce threat to treating it as a connectivity solution.

  • Why data trustworthiness is the absolute, non-negotiable prerequisite before implementing any AI strategy.

  • How to engage compliance, legal, and risk partners early as co-builders rather than final checkboxes.

  • Why the hardest part of digital transformation isn't the technological rollout, but preparing and empowering your team.

  • How to scale customer-centricity and use “invisible” AI to deepen real-world human connection.


Quotes:
  • “What makes a relationship term real is the context that's around it. So you might know that your customer needs a loan for expansion, but the real relationship piece of it is knowing that they're nervous about this and they need assurances that taking the right steps and with your support will set them for success.”

  • “The reason I believe AI can make us more human is that if we let AI do the non-value-adding transactional pieces of banking.”

  • “I think the starting point for everyone is data trustworthiness. So if you can't trust the data you have, you can't trust the decisions AI can suggest or the direction it can point to.”

  • “In banking, you have to innovate within the limits. We are a regulated industry, and there is no getting around that. So what really worked for us is engaging our partners, like our compliance partners, our legal partners very early on and really paving the road to bringing AI into the bank together.”

  • “If we approach AI as a connectivity solution rather than a workforce threat, we can modernize how work gets done and free our bankers to do more of the human work the clients actually value.”



]]> Tue, 14 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000 Insait IO Insait IO 1142 In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall sits down with Izge Cengiz Ercan, Senior Vice President and Director of Strategic Innovation at Valley Bank. They discuss how the bank deploys smart AI solutions across commercial lending, prospect outreach, and internal workflows without losing its human core. In this episode of Exceeding Expectations, host Laurel Rockall sits down with Izge Cengiz Ercan, Senior Vice President and Director of Strategic Innovation at Valley Bank. They discuss how the bank deploys smart AI solutions across commercial lending, prospect outreach, and internal workflows without losing its human core. No No Exceeding Expectations Trailer https://podcasts.fame.so/e/4n9mvj2n-exceeding-expectations-trailer Exceeding Expectations Trailer 0 No No v07r5wv1 Exceeding Expectations, hosted by Laurel Rockall, sits down with the business leaders who are deploying AI to unpack what they’ve learned, what broke along the way, what scales successfully, and what they would do differently next time. If you’re the one in the room making these calls, this show was built for you. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. What does it actually take to deploy AI agents at scale? Not in a proof of concept. In production, with real stakes and real consequences.


Exceeding Expectations, hosted by Laurel Rockall, brings together the business leaders who are navigating this right now. Each episode, one guest sits down to share what they’ve learned, what broke, what scaled, and what they would do differently next time.


If you're in the room where these decisions get made, this show was built for you. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and join us for the first episode.


Insait Website - https://insait.io/
Insait LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/insait-io/
Laurel Rockall LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurel-rockall-a73813128/

]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000 Insait IO Insait IO 38 Exceeding Expectations, hosted by Laurel Rockall, sits down with the business leaders who are deploying AI to unpack what they’ve learned, what broke along the way, what scales successfully, and what they would do differently next time. If you’re the one in the room making these calls, this show was built for you. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Exceeding Expectations, hosted by Laurel Rockall, sits down with the business leaders who are deploying AI to unpack what they’ve learned, what broke along the way, what scales successfully, and what they would do differently next time. If you’re the one in the room making these calls, this show was built for you. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. No No