Tuesday / CS Seminar

November 17 / 12:00 PM

Hybrid / Mudd 3514

Speaker

Nathan Nichols,Tableau/Salesforce

Talk Title

AI Challenges: Trustworthy Collaboration, World Discovery, and Long-Horizon Memory

Abstract

Nate Nichols has spent two decades building and shipping AI products, from machine-generated content research during his CS PhD, to Chief Scientist at an NLG startup, to VP of Product at Salesforce. Lately he's been asking a different question: what happens as these systems get more capable than the people building them expect? In this informal talk, he'll share how his thinking on AI safety has changed, what the field's open problems look like from a practitioner's seat, and why people entering AI right now are unusually well placed to shape how it goes. Bring questions.

Biography

As VP of Product Management at Tableau/Salesforce, Nate owns the Agentic Analytics strategy and works with product development teams across Tableau to define and communicate that vision. Nate was previously Chief Scientist at Narrative Science (acquired by Tableau in 2021) and has over 40 patents related to text generation and rhetorical modeling. He earned his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Northwestern University in 2010, with a thesis titled "Machine-generated Content." Since 2025, Nate has become passionate about AI safety, leading public workshops in Chicago and hosting Kitchen Table, a weekly podcast and YouTube show dedicated to engaging parents and the public on AI safety topics.

Research Interest/Area: AI safety