About
Bob Burgin: Serial Entrepreneur and AI Pioneer
Building a Career Rooted in Connection and Collaboration
Bob Burgin calls himself a connective thread—someone who maps insights from diverse fields to find new perspectives on complex problems. This approach has defined his thirty-five-year entrepreneurial career focused on translating scientific research into transformative products.
Back in the early days of the internet, Bob founded and led a company that built web-based customer service agents. Working closely with groundbreaking Stanford researchers Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, he explored the media equation and human-computer interaction before eventually selling that company to the world's largest customer service outsourcing firm.
For the past fifteen years, Bob has served as chairman and CEO of a company working to advance human learning through brain science. His mission has been to collaborate with leading neuroscientists to uncover how our brains encode, store, and retrieve new learning in order to build hyper-efficient learning systems. He has worked closely with pioneers in the science of learning, including Dr. Robert Bjork, Dr. Daniel Schacter, and Dr. Henry Roediger III.
“As Bob reflects, his team was essentially trying to reverse-engineer one of evolution's greatest achievements: how a twenty-watt brain creates lasting knowledge.”
A Human Approach to Understanding Machine Learning
Exploring Ourselves to Understand AI
Bob's journey into understanding intelligence began with his own experience of dyslexia. As a child who struggled to read, he learned through pattern recognition and context, an experience that later informed his deep appreciation for how brains create meaning from chaos and drives both his work and his unique perspective on human and artificial intelligence.
Throughout his career, Bob has supported important environmental and scientific causes, including longtime support of the Jane Goodall Institute. He worked closely with Jane Goodall on a documentary about her life, traveling the world to capture her story in collaboration with filmmaker Jeff Orlowski, who went on to direct The Social Dilemma.
The Future of Artificial Intelligence
Bob's career and incredible collaborative journeys inspired him to write Emergence: How Our Twenty-Watt Brains Unlocked Intelligence Beyond Biology, his latest book in which he shares all he's learned with fellow leaders and entrepreneurs eager to understand the future of AI.
Today, Bob lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he continues to both explore the intersection of neuroscience, learning science, and artificial intelligence, as well as inspire the next generation of business leaders to harness the power of AI as a sought-after speaker and executive coach.