Cassie Kozyrkov

Cassie Kozyrkov is a statistician, data scientist, and educator who served as Google's first and only Chief Decision Scientist from 2018 until 2022, a role she defined within the organization. In that capacity, she was responsible for advancing the practice of data-driven decision-making across Google, including leading internal training programs in statistics, machine learning, and the responsible application of AI to business decisions.

Her work at Google focused on what she calls "decision intelligence," a discipline she developed and popularized that combines applied statistics, behavioral science, and management theory to improve how humans and organizations make decisions with and about data. She trained tens of thousands of Googlers in applied statistics and decision methods during her tenure, and she designed Google's flagship AI literacy course, Making Friends with Machine Learning, which was delivered to a large internal audience and later released to the public.

Kozyrkov has been a prolific public communicator on AI, statistics, and decision science. Her writing on Medium has reached millions of readers and her LinkedIn newsletter on decision intelligence has built one of the largest practitioner audiences for applied AI thinking on the platform. She speaks frequently at major industry conferences and has appeared on the keynote stages of events organized by O'Reilly, Fortune, and major analyst firms. Her writing is known for making rigorous statistical and machine learning concepts accessible to non-specialist audiences without sacrificing accuracy.

After leaving Google, she founded Kozyr, an advisory firm focused on decision intelligence and AI strategy for organizations. She also serves as a board advisor, executive educator, and frequent speaker on what it takes to make AI useful for organizational decision-making rather than impressive in isolated demos. A consistent thread across her public work is the argument that the riskiest moment in AI adoption is the one where a probabilistic output is treated as a fact by an organization that has not been trained to read uncertainty. Her academic background spans statistics, behavioral economics, and cognitive neuroscience, with degrees from multiple institutions including the University of Chicago.

Cassie Kozyrkov represents a domain that the AI First Principles framework explicitly depends on: the science of how humans and organizations actually make decisions under uncertainty. As Google's Chief Decision Scientist, she spent years documenting the gap between how decisions are supposed to be made and how they are made in practice, a gap that AI systems widen dramatically when they produce outputs that people treat as conclusions rather than evidence.

Her work on decision intelligence directly reinforces Ambiguity Is Wisdom, the principle that AI systems must surface probabilities rather than force them into binary outputs. Kozyrkov has argued consistently that the most dangerous moment in AI deployment is when a probabilistic output is treated as a fact by an organization that has not been trained to read uncertainty. Her endorsement grounds the movement in the organizational reality that the principles must function within.