Cassie Kozyrkov

Why organisations work with Cassie Kozyrkov

• She built the Decision Intelligence function inside Google from scratch, ran it for five years, and named the field itself. When a CEO asks what Decision Intelligence is and why their AI investment should sit inside it, she is the primary source rather than an interpreter of someone else’s framework.
• She personally trained more than 20,000 Googlers across every function in data-driven decision-making and AI, so she knows how to make the material land with non-technical executives as well as engineers.
• Her current leader-track work is about what changes when AI acts rather than advises. She puts several tests to executives: whether the AI roadmap is proactive, whether attention is being treated as an investment, and whether a pilot has a named senior owner and a business metric it should move.
• She teaches this at scale outside the boardroom. Making Friends with Machine Learning began as an internal Google course and is now public, and she created the MasterClass certificate course Data-Driven Decision-Making in the Age of AI, built on her own frameworks and featuring DJ Patil, the first US Chief Data Scientist.
• She served a full term on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Innovation Advisory Council, working on how AI affects financial markets, and has worked with senior leaders at Lenovo, NASA, and Gucci.

Biography highlights

• Google’s first Chief Decision Scientist (2018 to 2023), leading the firm’s decision intelligence practice inside Research and Machine Intelligence.
• Founder and CEO of Kozyr, an AI advisory and education business serving senior leaders and their teams.
• Personally trained more than 20,000 Googlers in data-driven decision-making and AI, and guided over 500 decision intelligence projects inside Google.
• Creator of the MasterClass certificate course Data-Driven Decision-Making in the Age of AI, built on her own frameworks and featuring DJ Patil, the first US Chief Data Scientist. Also created Making Friends with Machine Learning, originally an internal Google course and now free on YouTube.
• Has spoken in more than 40 countries and on all seven continents, including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, Web Summit, and SXSW.
• Member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Innovation Advisory Council (2023 to 2024); Duke University Few-Glasson Distinguished Alumna.

Biography

The dashboards are built, the models are in production, and senior leaders still cannot name a single decision that is demonstrably better for any of it. That gap is the subject Cassie Kozyrkov has worked on for a decade, first inside Google and now with leadership teams across industries.

At Google, she became the company’s first Chief Decision Scientist in 2018 and held the role until 2023. She built a new function that sat between Research and Machine Intelligence on one side and the operating business on the other, and used it to run AI and data through a discipline she calls Decision Intelligence. By the time she left, she had personally trained more than 20,000 Googlers and influenced over 500 projects against that framework.

The reason her work travels beyond Google is that she made the material legible. Her course Making Friends with Machine Learning, built inside Google and later released in full on YouTube, explains in plain English how machine learning fits into business decisions. Her writing in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal has done the same for non-technical executives, and her Decision Intelligence Substack has become a working reference for practitioners.

Today she runs Kozyr, advising leadership teams on AI strategy and decision design. Her current executive work centres on what changes when AI stops advising and starts acting. One of the tests she puts to leaders is blunt: name the senior owner who wants the outcome and the metric it should move. The harder question is where the hours AI frees up get reinvested. Her MasterClass certificate course Data-Driven Decision-Making in the Age of AI, which features DJ Patil, the first US Chief Data Scientist, takes the same method to a general professional audience.

Key speaking topics

• Decision Intelligence
• Agentic AI and the leader’s changing role
• AI strategy and adoption
• Data-driven decision-making
• Machine learning for business leaders
• AI literacy for executives and general audiences
• Bias and judgement in AI systems

Ideal for

• CEOs, boards, and executive teams setting AI strategy and capital allocation against it
• Chief Data, Analytics, and AI Officers building a decision-intelligence operating model
• Transformation and strategy leaders responsible for turning AI pilots into business results
• All-staff and mixed-ability audiences at conferences or internal AI days, where technical and non-technical people need the same starting point

Audience outcomes

• A working definition of Decision Intelligence and where it sits relative to data science, analytics, and AI investment.
• A sharper diagnostic for why AI projects stall: wrong decision scoped, wrong owner, or wrong question asked of the model.
• Shared language across technical and non-technical leaders for debating AI initiatives without defaulting to buzzwords.
• A test to apply to every AI pilot in the business: who the senior owner is, and which metric it should move.
• A decision about where the organisation reinvests the hours AI gives back, before the saving is quietly absorbed as extra output.