Sarah DaVanzo works at the intersection of innovation, marketing, branding, trends and culture. In her current role within the L’Oréal Group (USA), she has developed agile innovation methods to help brands sync with trends, anticipate change, improve relevance and design for the future.

In this podcast Luminaries editor Kay Corry Aubrey talked with Sarah about her work, the importance of curiosity and the methods she uses to detect trends that have led to a 73% futures prediction accuracy rate. Sarah suggests that we need to demystify AI. “I like to say AI is artificial ignorance – it’s not that smart. It’s basically taking in huge amounts of data links or data oceans and looking for patterns and trying to learn from those patterns. But humans have to train it still, so it’s years, hours, and so much human interaction to train AI into what to look for and what to see.”