Talbot West

03/31/2026

Amy Osmond Cook, Ph.D. and the Fullcast team are asking the smart questions.

Talbot West CEO joined Dr. Cook on the GTM Podcast to discuss AI snake oil, hype, misinformation, and how to actually get value from AI.

I’ve linked the episode below. It’s only ~15 min and Amy makes a very entertaining host. Some tidbits below.

* Beware magical thinking and avoid vendors that indulge in it. (Example: “AI will automate your [insert process].”
* Ask “What specific technology do we mean when we reference AI in this context?”
* Ask “What are the specific capabilities and limitations of this specific technology, and how do they apply to my use case?”
* Ask “What are the risks of applying this technology to this use case, and what is your plan to mitigate them?”
* Ask “Can you clearly model ROI for this technology applied to this use case, while surfacing and defending all the assumptions in your model?”
* Ask “What are the precursors, dependencies, and adjacencies that your proposed solution would rely on in order for my company to realize the ROI in your model, and do you have a plan that ensures they’re aligned?”
* If a vendor doesn’t have clear answers, they’re probably selling snake oil.

Thank you, Dr. Cook, for having Jacob on the show!

03/17/2026

03/17/2026

Digital transformation is like an onion. The outside involves individuals picking up ChatGPT and getting faster at everyday tasks. But the deeper you go, the harder the work gets. Data integration. Systems architecture. Cross-departmental alignment. That’s where real value lives, and where most organizations stall.
Talbot West CEO sits down with to unpack why individual AI productivity is only the skin, and what it actually takes to reach the core. Cydni is a 4X CEO, former Disney Imagineer, EY Entrepreneur of the Year, and founder of . She’s led transformation at every scale, from venture-backed startups to multi-billion-dollar operations. Her reframe hits hard. Stop asking “how does AI make my job faster?” Start asking “what is now possible that has never been possible before?”
TalbotWest WomenInTech AIAdoption Leadership Innovation

02/05/2026

Talbot West CEO Jacob Andra will moderate a panel for the M&A Tech Connect event hosted by ACG Silicon Valley. The panel is February 18, 2026 and addresses the AI bubble, more accurately the LLM bubble, and what’s next.

02/03/2026

On the latest episode of The Applied AI Podcast, joins Talbot West CEO Jacob Andra to discuss the complex nature of enterprise digital transformation projects, and the reason that many AI projects fail to see meaningful ROI.

01/26/2026

Talbot West CEO Jacob Andra will speak at the Naval Postgraduate School on AI and its national security implications.

Rodrigo Nieto-Gomez will lead a fireside discussion with Andra on February 18, 2026 as part of NPS’s APEX program.

The intersection of AI and national security is a broad space; Andra and Nieto-Gomez will touch on a few salient factors and answer audience questions afterwards.

NPS is the nation’s premier defense-focused graduate university, offering master’s and doctoral degrees in more than 70 fields to U.S. Armed Forces officers, Department of Defense civilians, and international partners.

Talbot West is proud to contribute to our nation’s innovation base in the fields of applied AI and ML, especially as it intersects with national security concerns.

appliedAI

01/09/2026

01/08/2026. Jacob Andra, Talbot West CEO, delivered a presentation on artificial intelligence for Corporate Growth Utah’s Executive Series event. Speaking to M&A professionals and executives, Andra challenged conventional thinking about AI implementation and provided a framework for understanding AI’s true value proposition in enterprise environments.

Andra emphasized the difference between surface-level AI adoption and deep organizational transformation. Using a layered “onion” metaphor, he explained how most companies remain stuck at the outermost layer, where individual productivity tools like ChatGPT subscriptions live, while the real competitive advantage lies in re-engineering core information systems and workflows. This deeper integration, what he calls “total organizational intelligence,” requires substantial architectural work but delivers compounding returns that superficial implementations cannot match.

12/26/2025

“It’s important to bring in someone smarter than you.”

If it’s easy to deploy an AI tool, everyone will do so. Doing so will no longer be an advantage.

The easy-button solutions will be table stakes. Real competitive advantage will come from deep systems integration and value engineering.

Talbot West CEO Jacob Andra and attorney Adam Wardel see eye to eye on this (that’s why we’ve recently appointed Adam to our board of advisors).

In this video, they discuss the real work of AI and ML adoption that goes deep into a company’s systems and processes in a customized way. Also, the need for an overarching plan instead of the “random acts of AI” that many firms commit, and why getting the right partner is so important.

This conversation is in the context of law firms but can be generalized to any industry. The principles are the same.

12/21/2025

Adam Wardel and Jacob Andra ( )discuss legaltech and their shared vision for “invisible AI.”

We need to stop thinking of artificial intelligence as glorified software, and start thinking of it as an intelligence layer that orchestrates work across a law firm or other company.

Jacob and Adam discuss the need for an overarching plan instead of the “random acts of AI” that many firms commit, and why getting the right partner is so important.

Listen or watch the full episode; link in comments.

12/18/2025

Episode 12 of the applied AI podcast explorers the new Lumawarp machine learning model, and how it beat other models in a respected set of benchmarks. Lumawarp delivers 7% higher accuracy than leading ML models while running 300+ times faster. On the AWS TabArena HELOC default prediction benchmark, it topped the accuracy leaderboard while training on a gaming laptop in about an hour. Competing methods required hundreds of hours on large compute clusters to achieve worse results.

This is the breakthrough that breaks the accuracy/speed tradeoff that has constrained machine learning for decades.

In this episode, Talbot West CEO Jacob Andra ( ) sits down with Dr. Alexandra Pasi, CEO of Lucidity Sciences, to explore how Lumawarp achieves these results and what it means for enterprises building AI systems where precision is non-negotiable and milliseconds matter.

https://youtu.be/xJTHZZESOtM
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-best-machine-learning-model-lumawarp-rocks/id1834499760?i=1000741778422
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6bgzzZnYsNJPDIzTrl0eKj