By Shashi Bellamkonda ·
Personal Essay | September 12, 2026Guests Show Up. An Audience Is Designed.By Shashi BellamkondaThe Qualtrics XM Analyst event this week was not held in a hotel ballroom. It was held inside the Utah Jazz training center. That is not a cute venue choice. It is the point.Ryan Smith sat down with Qualtrics CEO Jason Maynard for a fireside chat, then walked us through the building. The chat was use…
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By Shashi Bellamkonda
Personal EssayThe C-2 had been in the air about an hour when the crew signaled with their hands. Here we go, here we go. I was facing backward, which is not how you expect to land…
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By Shashi Bellamkonda
My son texted me from the platform at Huntington. Everyone just got off the train. Not delayed, not canceled, just off, the whole car of people standing up in that particular hurr…
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By Shashi Bellamkonda
I was reading the AI Observatory's new report last week, a study built from 24,521 real chatbot conversations pulled from seven existing datasets and led by researchers at Sta…
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By Shashi Bellamkonda
I watched this movie on the United flight from Las Vegas this week.It was a masterpiece. A window into a forbidden world. Very human, and a story that leaves you hanging, wonderin…
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By Shashi Bellamkonda
Somewhere in the first half second of meeting someone new, your brain runs a background check faster than any conference badge scanner. It looks at the face, the outfit, the accen…
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By Shashi Bellamkonda
A friend of mine called on a Sunday night, not to talk about anything in particular, but to talk about a text message. Someone had replied to him with one word. "Sure." …
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