2024 in review: what data from 36 "AI, Software, & Wetware" interviews tells us
Topics and demographics on gender, ethnicity, and locations worldwide for the guests we're featuring in our AISW interviews (8 countries so far, 9+ in the works).
When I said I want to feature guests from all over the world to hear & share their views on AI and how it’s affecting their lives, I meant it. 😊 And that means I’m analyzing data on where committed and future guests for “AI, Software, & Wetware” are based (along with other demographics). Here’s what I’ve learned from my 36 featured interview guests in 2024, and how the global search for guests is coming so far for 2025, as of Dec. 16, 2024.
🗣️ Quick note for those who prefer listening to reading: Substack now supports read-aloud natively in the Substack app. If you give it a try on this post, let me know what you think!
TL;DR In 2024, 36 interview guests from 8 countries mostly talked about how people “use, think, and know" data (not about AI / ML technologies).
Data on Guests
Guest Locations
Location data is based on the country, and city if specified, in the guest’s LinkedIn profile. My 72 current and future guests hail from 17 countries.
8 Published: 🇨🇦 Canada, 🇨🇷 Costa Rica, 🇩🇰 Denmark, 🇩🇪 Germany, 🇮🇳 India, 🇮🇹Italy, 🇸🇪 Sweden, 🇺🇸 USA.
9+ Pending: 🇦🇺 Australia, 🇦🇹 Austria, 🇧🇷 Brazil, 🇨🇳 China, 🇫🇮 Finland, 🇫🇷 France, 🇲🇾 Malaysia, 🇵🇹 Portugal, 🇬🇧 UK.
Within Canada, guests come from 2 provinces so far: Ontario (Ottawa area) and British Columbia (Vancouver area).
Within India, guests come from 3 metro areas so far: Bangalore (Bengaluru), Chennai, and Pune.
Within the US, guests come from 16 states so far: California, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.
Guest Ethnicity (Americas)
I don’t ask my guests for demographic information. So I’ve used what I already knew with some certainty to do a quick estimate on ethnicity for guests from the Americas (USA, Canada, Central America, and South America).
For 26 published Americas interviews only, the distribution is 7.7% Asian, 7.7% Black, 19.2% Hispanic, 61.5% White, and 3.8% unknown/other.
For 52 published and planned Americas interviews, the distribution is 11.5% Asian, 9.6% Black, 15.4% Hispanic, 55.8% White, and 7.7% unknown/other.
Guest Genders
For the 36 interviews published to date, guests are 23 women (63.9%), 13 men (36.1%), and 0 people known to self-identify as non-binary.
For completed and planned interviews. the 72 guests are 46 women (63.9%), 25 men (34.7%), and 1 person known to self-identify as non-binary (1.4%). Mousing over the bubbles in the map below will show the gender distribution in each location.
Map of Guest Locations
Below is an interactive, zoomable view of the locations and genders of interview guests. (It was created with Datawrapper). This dataset includes 72 guests for published interviews, completed interviews that are in production, and planned interviews.
Guests’ Words
What did 36 AISW guests talk about most, in response to my standard questions?
To get some quick insights, I removed my questions and comments from the texts of the interviews. Then I fed all 36 interviews into this wordcloud tool (details here). I added my own ‘stop words’ (such as my name and some common adjectives) and tuned some of the wordcloud layout parameters for size and spacing.
As the wordcloud image below shows, the top words across all interviews are “data, think, use, people”. This highlights that we don’t dig into AI technologies in these interviews. Instead, we talk mostly about the impacts of AI tools on people who use them, and impacts on people of AI tools which use their data. That aligns with the vision for this interview series; no technical AI expertise is required for guests.
When the interviews are analyzed separately by gender, comments from women and men show similar top words with somewhat different frequencies.
Women: The top two words are “data” and “people”, with “think”, “right”, “know”, and “use/used/using” next most common.
Men: The top two words are “use” and “think”, with “data”, “know”, and “time” next most common.
However, these top few most-frequent words do not support any conclusions about broad differences by gender. The gender groups have more in common than they have real differences. And this quick look at the data is far from perfect:
The 36 interview participants were not scientifically or randomly selected.
The two gender groups are small and differently-sized (23 and 13).
Better text preprocessing would be helpful, e.g. combining word stems (such as “use”, “used”, “using”).
I may do some additional analysis on this data over the holiday break. Comment, DM, or email me if there’s anything specific you’re curious to know:
Data on Readers and Listeners
As of Dec. 13, 2024, the 6 'P's in AI Pods (AI6P) newsletter has subscribers in 30 countries to date.
Curiously, my Substack podcast data says that the AI6P podcast (primarily “AI, Software, & Wetware” interviews) has drawn listeners from 44 countries.
If the location data is correct, either:
lots of non-subscribers are listening on the Substack site or in the app, or
sharing the podcasts externally extended the reach of these interviews beyond Substack to lots of non-subscribers/non-followers,
in at least 14 additional countries.
If true, that would be a nice surprise. But I’m skeptical, and here’s why.
The Substack podcast dashboard also says that a vast majority of listeners (71% as of Dec. 9) are using the Substack website, but 17% are using Apple Podcasts. Only 1% are using Spotify or the Substack app.
I checked the Apple Podcast and Spotify dashboard data. Neither explains or supports the extra views and countries shown in the Substack podcast dashboard.
At present, I have 275 subscribers and 589 followers on Substack. So podcast listens by followers who aren’t subscribers might explain the difference. There’s no way to be sure, though. Substack doesn’t share subscriber location data with newsletter owners. (If they did, I could see the 30 countries and map them to the podcast listener countries.) And we don’t get any data on our Substack followers (non-subscribers), so I can’t check out that possibility either.
Regardless, I’m taking this listener data as a sign that the effort to create audio interviews for the podcast is appreciated. So I’ll keep doing it in 2025. 😊
Substack just announced last week that the app now supports “read-aloud” for all posts. I’m curious to see if the 2025 data will show a difference in views between text posts with read-aloud and audio posts with original human voices.
What’s Next?
Before we welcome 2025, I want to thank (again) all of my 2024 interview guests and everyone who’s supported me in getting this interview series and podcast started. You all made this series fun and worthwhile.
1. More interviews coming weekly!
As of Dec. 31, 36 interviews will be published (including 2 scheduled). Four are in various stages of production for January 2025, and more are in the works. The AISW Interviews page will be updated weekly with newly published interviews. The best way to not miss any is to subscribe to “6 ‘P’s in AI Pods (AI6P)” (it’s FREE, no ads, no spam).
All audio interviews are available in our AI6P podcast. You can listen in the Substack app or on the website, or in the major podcasts integrated with the "6 'P's in AI Pods (AI6P)" Substack. All posts include full (human-edited) transcripts. And now you can listen with “read-aloud” on text interviews.
2. More guests from more countries, states, and provinces!
Is YOUR area of the map open or sparse (especially outside north and central America)? I’d love to chat with you about potentially featuring you as a guest! (Can be anonymous or with credit, text or text+audio.) DM or email me, or see this guest FAQ to learn more.
See our AI Glossary or ask me if you’re not sure if you have relevant AI experiences. Almost everyone does, whether they realize it or not: AI is so pervasive nowadays that it’s hard to avoid in our lives! For examples, see:
3. Casting a wider net
To help reach more people around the world in diverse roles, I’ve joined Bluesky and Mastodon. I now post links to these AISW interviews on these sites and Medium, as well as in the LinkedIn newsletter. All posts include open invitations to future guests.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, please help me find more people worldwide whose everyday AI experiences and voices deserve to be heard! Shares, hearts, comments, restacks, skeets, and boosts are all awesome and appreciated, as are one-time tips or voluntary donations via paid subscription 😊
Have a safe & happy holiday and new year!
