Google’s first Chief Decision Scientist · Founder of Decision Intelligence

What they are known for

Cassie Kozyrkov held a job title that did not exist before she held it: Google’s first Chief Decision Scientist. Her argument, in short, is that most organisations do not have a machine learning problem, they have a decision-making problem, and bolting a model onto a badly-framed decision produces expensive nonsense. She named the resulting discipline Decision Intelligence.

Notable public work

At Google she led the AI-first transformation internally, and by her own account trained more than 20,000 Googlers and touched over 500 projects (LinkedIn). She has since advised senior leadership at organisations including NASA, Spotify and GSK, and serves on the Innovation Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Her writing on statistical thinking for non-statisticians is unusually good at explaining why a method exists rather than how to run it.

What is being said publicly

The consistent public read is that she is the antidote to tool-first thinking. Where most of this field starts from what the technology can do, she starts from what decision you are actually trying to make and whether you would change your behaviour based on the answer — a question that kills a surprising number of proposed AI projects before any money is spent. The client and training figures above come from her own biography and are not independently audited; the Google role and the Federal Reserve council seat are matters of record.

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