Madison Mills covers AI for Axios — but she came to the beat from Wall Street, and that changes everything about what she’s looking for. She spent years covering markets, interviewing Jamie Dimon and Ray Dalio, and building one of the most-read financial newsletters in the country. She knows how investors think, how they hedge, and how wide the gap is between what they say publicly and what they actually believe.

That’s the lens she’s bringing to the AI story. And the picture it reveals is one most of the tech coverage is missing entirely.

We talked about the hidden financial exposure in the AI buildout — the small-town bank loans to truckers and construction companies that don’t look like AI bets on paper, but absolutely are. We got into what Wall Street sources are telling her off the record right now about fraud risk, and why she describes those conversations as “a very scary picture.” And we dug into the trillion-dollar question she keeps putting to the AI labs themselves: when are you actually going to be profitable?

We also ended up in a really honest conversation about the jobs debate — why she’s skeptical when public companies attribute layoffs to AI, what’s actually happening with entry-level hiring, and why some of the most enthusiastic AI adopters she’s encountering are the most senior people in the room.

Madison is one of the smartest reporters working this beat. I think you’ll want to listen twice.

Find Madison at Axios — she co-authors the AI Plus newsletter Monday through Thursday — and on Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.