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Draft:Lutz Finger

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  • Comment: LLM authorship. Endless WP:AIBOLD, endless redlinks, half a dozen nonexistent categories. Rewrite with human hands. Cut out all the fluff. Stick to what reliable, independent sources support. CopyleftEverything (talk) 02:29, 11 June 2026 (UTC)
Lutz Finger
Portrait of Lutz Finger
Born1971 (age 54–55)
CitizenshipGerman, American
Alma materTechnical University of Berlin (MS, Quantum Physics)
INSEAD (MBA)
OccupationsAI executive; academic; author
Employer(s)Zoovu (Head of AI); Cornell SC Johnson College of Business (Data Scientist in Residence); Cherry Ventures (Venture Partner)
Known forAI product leadership; social-media analytics; AI in higher education ("cloned-professor" pedagogy); the book Ask, Measure, Learn
Websitelutzfinger.com

Lutz Finger (born 1971) is a German-American artificial intelligence executive, academic and author. He has held senior data-science and product roles at LinkedIn, Snap Inc. and Google, served from 2022 to 2024 as President, Product and Development at the Nasdaq-listed healthcare-AI company Marpai, Inc. (NASDAQ: MRAI), and has founded two technology companies that were acquired: Fisheye Analytics (sold to Kantar/WPP in 2013) and R2Decide (sold to XGen AI in 2026).[1][2][3][4] He is Head of AI at Zoovu, Data Scientist in Residence at Cornell University's SC Johnson College of Business, and a Venture Partner at Cherry Ventures.[1]

Finger is the co-author, with Soumitra Dutta, of Ask, Measure, Learn: Using Social Media Analytics to Understand and Influence Customer Behavior (O'Reilly Media, 2014), a Forbes contributor on artificial intelligence with more than fifty bylined articles, and the creator of the eCornell certificate "Designing and Building AI Solutions".[1][5][6] He co-hosted the AI podcast Lutz & Jasper, powered by Cherry Ventures with Jasper Masemann of Cherry Ventures, runs the YouTube channel Building AI Solutions, and hosts the recurring eCornell AI keynote, the 2025 instalment of which was "After the Gold Rush: Navigating the AI Boom and Bust".[7][8][6] At Cornell he built an AI clone of himself as a teaching assistant, which was one of the first such systems deployed by a university faculty member and continuously updates course content.[9] Before working in AI, Finger trained as a physicist; his early publications include semiconductor-physics work on molecular-beam epitaxy-grown GaAs/GaSb quantum dot structures in Applied Physics Letters (1998).[10]

Early life and education

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Finger was born in 1971 and is a German-American citizen. He studied physics at the Technical University of Berlin, receiving a Master of Science in quantum physics, and later earned an MBA from INSEAD.[1]

Research in physics

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Finger's earliest peer-reviewed work, conducted before his career in industry, was in semiconductor physics — specifically the optical spectroscopy of self-assembled quantum dots grown by molecular-beam epitaxy. His most-cited physics paper, "Optical spectroscopy of self-assembled type-II GaSb/GaAs quantum dot structures grown by molecular beam epitaxy" (R. A. Hogg, K. Suzuki, K. Tachibana, L. Finger, K. Hirakawa and Y. Arakawa), was published in Applied Physics Letters in 1998 and has been cited more than fifty times.[10][11]

A second 1998 paper, "Modification of energy relaxation of InGaAs quantum dots by postgrowth thermal annealing" (L. Finger, M. Nishioka, M. Grundmann, R. Hogg, F. Heinrichsdorff, O. Stier et al.), appeared in the proceedings of the International Conference on Indium Phosphide and Related Materials.[12][11] Both papers used photoluminescence and molecular-beam epitaxy to probe the band-alignment and carrier-relaxation behaviour of self-assembled III–V semiconductor nanostructures.

Career

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Fisheye Analytics (2008–2013)

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In 2008 Finger co-founded Fisheye Analytics with Soumitra Dutta (then at INSEAD, later Dean of the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford) and Ashwin Reddy.[2][13][14] Fisheye applied natural language processing and graph analysis to social-media streams for governments, non-governmental organizations (including the OECD and the International Olympic Committee), defence agencies and Fortune 500 brands.[13][15] In December 2013 Kantar Media, part of WPP plc, acquired the company.[2][15]

LinkedIn (2013–2016)

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From 2013 to 2016 Finger was Director of Data Science and Data Engineering at LinkedIn.[1][16] Among the projects associated with his tenure is the "Future Me" model, a career-trajectory predictor built on the LinkedIn graph that was profiled by Mashable.[17]

Snap Inc. (2016–2017) and Google (2018–2022)

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Finger served as Director of Data Science at Snap Inc. from 2016 to 2017, then as Group Product Manager at Google from 2018 to 2022.[1][16][18]

Marpai, Inc. (2022–2024) — President, Product and Development

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On 17 February 2022, Marpai, Inc. — a Nasdaq-listed (NASDAQ: MRAI; later OTCQX: MRAI) third-party administrator of self-funded employer health plans — announced that Finger had joined as President, Product and Development.[4][18] Marpai operates in the roughly US$22 billion U.S. third-party-administrator market for self-funded employer health benefits and applies deep learning models to claims, electronic health record and behavioural signals in order to predict near-term high-cost events — Type 2 diabetes onset, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease episodes, knee replacements and other preventable admissions — and to route members into earlier clinical interventions.[19][20]

At Marpai, Finger led the build-out of a provider-network "ecosystem" wrapped around this prediction layer — a platform connecting employers, members, providers and pharmacy-benefits managers so that the AI risk scores translate into concrete care-pathway decisions.[20] He set out the thesis in a series of Forbes columns: "Three Trends of Transformation: How AI + Value-Based Care (VBC) Will Drive Transformation of Self-Insured Healthcare" (May 2023);[21] "Healthcare and Data: How to Measure Quality" (June 2023);[22] and "Changing Healthcare: A Platform Approach Using Data & AI" (July 2023).[23]

R2Decide (2024–2026) and Zoovu

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In July 2024 Finger founded R2Decide, a Mountain View-based startup applying conversational intent classification, vector retrieval and re-ranking to e-commerce search and discovery. R2Decide was acquired in 2026 by XGen AI.[24][3][25] He is currently Head of AI at Zoovu, an enterprise product-discovery platform.[1]

Academia and venture

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Finger holds the title Data Scientist in Residence at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, where he teaches master's-level courses on AI strategy and data-product design.[26] He is also a Venture Partner at Cherry Ventures, a European seed-stage venture-capital firm.[27]

"Cloned-professor" pedagogy and the Cornell certificate

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Finger created the eCornell certificate program "Designing and Building AI Solutions" (Cornell course code BANA 6070) and built an AI clone of himself as a teaching assistant, which was one of the first such systems deployed by a university instructor.[9][28] The clone, trained on his course videos, transcripts, slides and prior Q&A, joins each student's flow with the instructor's voice, knowledge and pedagogy on demand, and continuously updates course content as the field evolves.[9][29]

Cornell's Center for Teaching Innovation profiled the approach in its Emerging Leaders in Data Products series.[30] The Cornell Chronicle quoted Finger as saying, "My AI clone supercharges me! He serves as a real-life demonstration of AI product design."[9]

Teaching with espresso data — Decent Espresso and student-built AI models

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A signature feature of Finger's Cornell teaching is that the data sets students use to build supervised classifiers come from his own coffee bar: he instruments every shot pulled on his Decent Espresso machine — capturing grind size, water temperature, pressure profile, flow rate, extraction time and a personal quality rating — and releases the resulting CSVs as the course's running case study.[31][28][32] Writing on LinkedIn, Finger summarised the idea: "Coffee and AI? Absolutely! Coffee is a complex art, and data and AI are here to help. I measure every espresso shot using my Decent Espresso Machines."[31]

The same data threads through two units of the certificate:

  • Unit 1 — Business Value With AI uses the Espresso_Shots.csv dataset to teach students to "perform analytics on this dataset to define a business objective and propose a supervised classifier" predicting optimal espresso-shot quality.[28]
  • Unit 3 — Leveraging Data for AI uses an enriched version, CoffeeDataset_Enriched, to train a personal-coffee-preference binary classifier. The dataset is, by design, "intentionally contains data and model biases for students to identify and address" — the You_like column reflects Finger's own tastes, and students are asked to add their own preferences and then debug the resulting skew.[32]

The course also features John Buckman, founder of Decent Espresso, as a guest instructor, tying the dataset back to the hardware that produced it and to Finger's separately-built community-Q&A bot "Derek" for the Decent Espresso forum.[31][33]

Books and writing

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  • Ask, Measure, Learn: Using Social Media Analytics to Understand and Influence Customer Behavior with Soumitra Dutta (O'Reilly Media, 2014, ISBN 978-1-4493-3675-2). A non-technical guide to deriving business value from social media analytics.[34]
  • Forbes contributor on artificial intelligence — over fifty bylined articles since 2014, covering generative AI, deepfakes, bots, artificial intelligence in healthcare, value-based health care and AI-driven retail.[5]
  • "The Missing Moat in AI — Your Eval Data" (Forbes, 2026), often cited as a representative articulation of his "eval data, not the model" thesis.[35]
  • "Get Vaccinated — How Trust Into the Institutions Determines Vaccination Rates in the EU" (Forbes, 6 May 2021), co-developed with Cornell students. One of the early data-driven analyses linking trust in public institutions to COVID-19 vaccination uptake across European Union member states.[36]
  • "Artificial Intelligence Made in the USA — Can Europe Learn From the Past?" (Intereconomics, vol. 3, p. 154, 2025) — peer-reviewed essay on European AI policy.[11]

Media

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Finger works in long-form audio and video formats alongside his written output.

Podcast — Lutz & Jasper, powered by Cherry Ventures

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Finger co-hosted the AI podcast Lutz & Jasper, powered by Cherry Ventures (also published under the title Products. Data. AI. / The Edge) with Jasper Masemann, an investment partner at Cherry Ventures.[7][18][37] The show, officially described as "breaking down the latest developments in AI with two experts," covers AI agents, chatbots, MLOps, the AI venture-capital market and the gap between AI demos and production deployments, drawing on the contrasting Berlin and Silicon Valley vantage points of the two hosts.[7] Representative episodes include "AI Agents: The Future of Work?", "The Value Translation Gap: AI's Deployment Problem", "AI Gold Rush: Is the Market Overheating?" and "Cherry's Investment Thesis on AI". The podcast is distributed by Cherry Ventures as part of its founder-support programme.[18]

YouTube — Building AI Solutions

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Finger maintains the YouTube channel Building AI Solutions (handle @buildingaisolutions), which hosts short explainers, demo walkthroughs and the public-facing assets from his eCornell certificate, including the "Lutz and His Clone" segment on his AI teaching assistant.[8][29] The same handle is used for his companion Instagram account.[38]

Cornell AI keynote — After the Gold Rush

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Finger is the host of the recurring eCornell AI keynote, presented in partnership with the SC Johnson College of Business and framed around his central thesis that "value is generated when AI is used to enhance workflows, not replace them".[6][39]

Guests on the show have included Aneesh Chopra, the first U.S. Chief Technology Officer; Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (the "Future of AI" session on agents, copilots and infrastructure);[40] Lucilla Sioli, Director of the European Commission's AI Office ("AI in the EU");[41] Kurt Wagner, a Bloomberg journalist and author of Battle for the Bird ("After the Gold Rush: Navigating the AI Boom and Bust", 21 October 2025);[6] and founder Cyriac Roeding, co-founder of Shopkick (the 2026 keynote on AI in service and healthcare), among other industry leaders, founders and policymakers.[42]

The eCornell AI keynote has been featured by eCornell and Cornell's Center for Teaching Innovation as a representative example of Finger's teaching practice.[30][39]

Other media appearances

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Finger has appeared as a guest on several industry podcasts:

  • Three Key Insights with Sanjiv Yajnik — the Capital One podcast hosted by Sanjiv Yajnik, President of Capital One Auto Financial Services; episode "Lutz Finger — From SEO to GEO: How AI is Changing How Car Buyers Find You" (2026), on the shift from classical search engine optimization to generative-engine optimization in automotive retail.[43]
  • Silicon Zombies — a Bay Area live show and podcast on "Tech, AI & Venture Capital"; Finger appeared on episode SZ 139, "AI in the EU" (with Yaad, Gerard, Florence and Julie) discussing AI regulation in the European Union, and in a later segment discussing DeepSeek and the new generation of reasoning models.[44][45]
  • The Pulse of AI — episode "Deep Dive into the Current State of AI with Lutz Finger".[46]
  • Build AI by gAI Ventures — episode "From Google to Cornell: Rethinking AI Workflows" (16 April 2026).[47]

Selected work and projects

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A non-exhaustive list of products and research projects associated with Finger, drawn from his published portfolio.[25]

Project Description
R2Decide Conversational e-commerce search and discovery; founded 2024, sold 2026 to XGen AI; informed Finger's ongoing work at Zoovu.[3][25]
Preventable hospital admissions Built at Marpai (NASDAQ: MRAI) as President, Product & Development: deep-learning risk-scoring over claims and EHR feeds flagging patients heading toward avoidable admissions, wrapped in a provider ecosystem for value-based health care.[4][19][21][22][23]
Clone-Advisor Retrieval-augmented system that answers in a public figure's voice with inline citations.[48]
Derek (Decent Espresso community bot) Q&A and customer-care chatbot for the Decent Espresso hardware community.[33]
Virtual Teacher / AI Clone The "cloned-professor" model used inside the Cornell eCornell certificate.[9][29]
SAI (Sentient AI) Personal-assistant client built on Anthropic's Claude; base architecture open-sourced at github.com/lutzfinger/SAI-baseversion.[49]
Audiobook summariser Structured-pacing compression of non-fiction audiobooks.[50]
"Future Me" Career-trajectory prediction over the LinkedIn graph; covered by Mashable.[17]
Fisheye Analytics NLP / graph analysis of social-media streams for governments and Fortune 500 brands; sold to Kantar/WPP in 2013.[2][13]

He also holds, as co-inventor, several United States patents granted during his LinkedIn tenure, including US 10,019,515 (attribute-based contexts for sentiment-topic pairs), US 10,042,923 (topic extraction using clause segmentation and high-frequency words), US 10,255,354 (detecting and combining synonymous topics) and US 10,275,837 (recommending a social structure).[11]

Recurring themes

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Across his Forbes column, keynotes and teaching, Finger has returned to four interlocking themes:

  1. AI and workflows. Finger has argued in his Forbes column and in the eCornell certificate that the durable enterprise value of large language models lies in workflow integration — composing small, scoped "skills" that fit inside existing processes — rather than in the model layer itself.[49][6]
  2. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Finger has argued in his Forbes column for "Generative Engine Optimization" as the successor discipline to search engine optimization, in pieces including "Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): A Playbook for Online Retailers".[51]
  3. Data, bias and "eval data is the moat." Finger has argued in his Forbes column that the strategic moat in applied AI is the proprietary evaluation data a team holds, not the model itself, in "The Missing Moat in AI — Your Eval Data" (2026).[35]
  4. AI and leadership. Finger has argued in his Forbes column and in his co-authored BMJ Health & Care Informatics paper on care management that leaders are responsible for governing data quality, bias and disclosure in AI deployments, not for the model architecture itself.[52]

Reception and commentary

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The Cornell Chronicle described Finger as "a senior visiting lecturer at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business who generated an AI clone of himself to continuously update courses with new content," in coverage of Cornell's adoption of generative AI in teaching.[9]

Writing in Medium, former student Aaron (Youshen) Lim said of the program:

"What impressed me most was Lutz's ability to make complex AI concepts both accessible and practical."
"What resonated most was the program's emphasis on first principles. Rather than just teaching us to use ChatGPT, we learned core concepts that make these technologies work."
"The knowledge I gained from this Cornell program has equipped me to think more critically about various perspectives & speakers' agendas on AI."[53]

Cornell's Center for Teaching Innovation featured Finger in its Emerging Leaders in Data Products video series.[30] eCornell separately summarised his keynote style with the on-camera tag-line "It is not all about metrics," describing him as a faculty member whose lectures move between ski slopes, cow pastures and airport terminals to make AI tangible to non-specialists.[39]

Personal life

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Finger lives and works between the United States and Europe and publishes regularly on Forbes, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram under the handle buildingaisolutions.[1][38]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f g h "About," lutzfinger.com. "About". lutzfinger.com. Retrieved 2026-05-27.
  2. ^ a b c d "Kantar to acquire Fisheye Analytics". WPP plc. 2013-12-09.
  3. ^ a b c "XGen AI Acquires R2Decide to Accelerate AI Commerce". Yahoo! Finance. 2026.
  4. ^ a b c "Google Executive Lutz Finger joins Marpai Health as President, Product and Development" (Press release). Marpai, Inc. (Investor Relations). 2022-02-17.
  5. ^ a b Lutz Finger contributor page at Forbes.
  6. ^ a b c d e "Keynote: After the Gold Rush" at eCornell.
  7. ^ a b c "Lutz & Jasper powered by Cherry Ventures", Storytel podcast directory.
  8. ^ a b "Building AI Solutions", YouTube channel.
  9. ^ a b c d e f Israel, Molly (2024-06-26). "Cornell transforms generative AI education (with help from a cloned professor)". Cornell Chronicle.
  10. ^ a b R. A. Hogg, K. Suzuki, K. Tachibana, L. Finger, K. Hirakawa and Y. Arakawa, "Optical spectroscopy of self-assembled type-II GaSb/GaAs quantum dot structures grown by molecular beam epitaxy," Applied Physics Letters 72(22), 2856–2858 (1998).
  11. ^ a b c d Lutz Finger, Google Scholar profile.
  12. ^ L. Finger, M. Nishioka, M. Grundmann, R. Hogg, F. Heinrichsdorff, O. Stier et al., "Modification of energy relaxation of InGaAs quantum dots by postgrowth thermal annealing," Proceedings of the 1998 International Conference on Indium Phosphide and Related Materials (1998).
  13. ^ a b c "Kantar Media Acquires FishEye Analytics" (Press release). PR Newswire. December 2013.
  14. ^ "Soumitra Dutta", Wikipedia article.
  15. ^ a b "Media monitoring firm Fisheye sold to Kantar", Research Live.
  16. ^ a b Lutz Finger, LinkedIn profile. Used as a WP:BLPSELFPUB-acceptable source for tenure year ranges.
  17. ^ a b "How LinkedIn Found My 'Future' Self", Mashable.
  18. ^ a b c d "AI expert Lutz Finger joins Cherry Ventures as Venture Partner", Cherry Ventures.
  19. ^ a b "Marpai Aims to Cut Skyrocketing Health Plan Costs in Half with Launch of Suite of AI-Powered Services", PR Newswire.
  20. ^ a b "Marpai Launches Marpai Connect Platform to Predict and Help Modify Risk in Healthcare", PR Newswire.
  21. ^ a b Lutz Finger, "Three Trends of Transformation: How AI + Value-Based Care (VBC) Will Drive Transformation of Self-Insured Healthcare", Forbes, 1 May 2023.
  22. ^ a b Lutz Finger, "Healthcare and Data: How to Measure Quality", Forbes, 27 June 2023.
  23. ^ a b Lutz Finger, "Changing Healthcare: A Platform Approach Using Data & AI", Forbes, 5 July 2023.
  24. ^ r2decide Inc., Crunchbase company profile.
  25. ^ a b c "Portfolio", lutzfinger.com.
  26. ^ Lutz Finger faculty page, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.
  27. ^ Lutz Finger, Cherry Ventures team page.
  28. ^ a b c README_Espresso_Shots.md, designing-and-building-ai-solutions, Unit 1, GitHub. Describes the espresso-shot dataset used in BANA 6070 Module 1.4 for supervised-classification exercises.
  29. ^ a b c "Lutz and His Clone — Designing and Building AI Solutions", YouTube.
  30. ^ a b c "Emerging Leaders in Data Products: Lecturer Lutz Finger", Cornell Center for Teaching Innovation.
  31. ^ a b c Lutz Finger, "Coffee and AI? Absolutely!", LinkedIn post on his use of the Decent Espresso machine and AI in coursework. Also confirms John Buckman of Decent Espresso as guest instructor.
  32. ^ a b README_CoffeeDataset_Enriched.md, designing-and-building-ai-solutions, Unit 3, GitHub. Documents the bias-identification module: dataset "intentionally contains data and model biases for students to identify and address."
  33. ^ a b "Derek", Decent Espresso community Q&A bot, Facebook community thread.
  34. ^ Lutz Finger and Soumitra Dutta, Ask, Measure, Learn: Using Social Media Analytics to Understand and Influence Customer Behavior (O'Reilly Media, 2014), ISBN 978-1-4493-3675-2.
  35. ^ a b Lutz Finger, "The Missing Moat in AI — Your Eval Data", Forbes, 26 May 2026.
  36. ^ Lutz Finger, "Get Vaccinated — How Trust Into the Institutions Determines Vaccination Rates in the EU", Forbes, 6 May 2021.
  37. ^ "Lutz & Jasper powered by Cherry Ventures — The Edge", Podcast Addict directory.
  38. ^ a b Verified accounts: LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Instagram.
  39. ^ a b c "It is not all about metrics — Lutz Finger", eCornell (Facebook video).
  40. ^ "Keynote: The Future of AI", eCornell — Lutz Finger with Martin Casado (Andreessen Horowitz).
  41. ^ "Keynote: AI in the EU", eCornell — Lutz Finger with Lucilla Sioli, Director of the European Commission's AI Office.
  42. ^ eCornell Keynotes lists Cyriac Roeding (co-founder of Shopkick) as a 2026 guest on the AI-keynote series with Lutz Finger.
  43. ^ "Lutz Finger — From SEO to GEO: How AI is Changing How Car Buyers Find You", Three Key Insights with Sanjiv Yajnik (Capital One Auto Financial Services podcast).
  44. ^ "SZ 139: AI in the EU Ft. Yaad, Gerard, Florence, Julie, & Lutz", Silicon Zombies podcast.
  45. ^ "Lutz Finger discusses DeepSeek AI", Silicon Zombies YouTube short.
  46. ^ "Deep Dive into the Current State of AI with Lutz Finger", The Pulse of AI podcast.
  47. ^ "From Google to Cornell: Rethinking AI Workflows", Build AI podcast by gAI Ventures, 16 April 2026.
  48. ^ "Clone-Advisor" demo, LinkedIn.
  49. ^ a b SAI base version, GitHub repository.
  50. ^ Audiobook summariser prototype, Google Drive (audio sample).
  51. ^ Lutz Finger, "Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): A Playbook for Online Retailers", Forbes, 20 August 2025.
  52. ^ M. G. Seneviratne, R. C. Li, M. Schreier, D. Lopez-Martinez, B. S. Patel, L. Finger et al., "User-centred design for machine learning in health care: a case study from care management," BMJ Health & Care Informatics 29(1):e100656 (2022).
  53. ^ Aaron (Youshen) Lim, "What I Learned from Cornell's 'Designing and Building AI Solutions' Program", Medium.
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Category:1971 births Category:Living people Category:American technology chief executives Category:Technical University of Berlin alumni Category:INSEAD alumni Category:LinkedIn employees Category:Google employees Category:Snap Inc. employees Category:American technology writers Category:Forbes people Category:Cornell University faculty Category:German emigrants to the United States Category:American artificial intelligence researchers

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