Episode #22: Manana Hakobyan's Foundations

Foundations with Larisa Hovannisian · Aug 22, 2026 · 41m

My guest today is Manana Hakobyan. Manana is Chief of Staff for GenAI at Scale AI in San Francisco — which means she works inside one of the companies the frontier AI labs depend on to make their models good. Before Scale, she was a product manager on IBM's Data and AI team. She holds a master's in data science from Harvard and degrees in economics and data science from Berkeley. She has a line I keep coming back to: "humans will always be in the loop.”