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AI-First Podcast

How ANL turned its research library into an AI powerhouse | Box AI-First Podcast EP 21

06 May 2026 32:01 Box

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About this episode

What happens when one of America's most cutting-edge research labs puts AI to work protecting the very discoveries it's designed to accelerate?

In this episode of the AI First Podcast, Jon Herstein, Chief Customer Officer at Box, sits down with Jesse Henning, Library and Information Manager at Argonne National Laboratory, one of the U.S. Department of Energy's premier research institutions. Jesse digs into how Argonne is using AI to accelerate scientific discovery, from streamlining document review and publication workflows to helping researchers surface insights across thousands of technical reports.

Learn how they're balancing the immense potential of AI with rigorous governance, protecting sensitive research from being scooped, and navigating national security and export control requirements. Jesse also discusses the evolving role of research librarians as AI stewards, the importance of keeping humans in the loop, and how a deeply ingrained safety culture at Argonne is shaping responsible AI adoption across the lab.

Key moments:
(00:00) Introduction 
(01:30) The real tension between accelerating discovery with AI and controlling what's exposed 
(02:57) What Argonne National Laboratory actually does 
(04:15) How Argonne makes research publicly available through the DOE 
(05:05) The role of a research library in a national lab 
(05:12) Using Box Hub RAG to analyze 300 technical reports instantly 
(06:35) Handling hallucinations and why "right enough" isn't good enough in science 
(07:51) How AI is freeing librarians to focus on harder, unsearchable questions 
(10:51) The travel policy chatbot: a real-world, non-hype AI win 
(14:46) AI-assisted document review for national security and export control 
(16:47) Amplifying signal-to-noise so expert reviewers focus on actual risk 
(17:31) How Argonne uses AI for content governance without losing human context 
(20:53) What separates AI experiments from true production deployments 
(23:14) Top-down vs. bottom-up AI experimentation and why both are happening 
(26:04) The "key turning in the lock" moment that makes AI believers out of skeptics 
(26:46) Which AI pilots deserve to survive and why curation is the deciding factor 
(29:46) Why librarians were always the original AI stewards

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