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Eye On A.I.
30 episodes
American Companies Have 36 Months to Go AI-Native or Get Left Behind | Drew Cukor, TWG AI
Aug 13, 2026 · 59 min
The same tools that slowed the U.S. military down in Afghanistan (PowerPoint, Excel, email, and Word) are now slowing American businesses down in the AI race. Drew Cukor spent 30 years as a Marine intelligence officer, helped build Project Maven into a battlefield command and control system, served as Chief Data Officer at JP Morgan, and is now leading AI transformation at TWG AI. In this episode, he joins Craig Smith to make a case that most enterprise AI strategies are fundamentally broken, no…
In 5 Years, 90% of What You Use AI For Will Run on Your Smartphone | Paolo Ardoino, Tether
Aug 10, 2026 · 59 min
Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into AI data centers right now, and Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether - the company behind the world's most widely used stablecoin with 573 million users - thinks that investment is going to age very badly. In this episode, he joins Craig Smith to explain QVAC, Tether's open-source platform for running AI on smartphones, laptops, and edge devices, and to make a case that within five years, 90% of what ordinary people use AI for will run entirely on consumer…
Why People Are Paying 10x More for AI | Sid Sheth, d-Matrix
Aug 6, 2026 · 51 min
The AI chip market looks monolithic from the outside - NVIDIA dominates, and everyone else is fighting for scraps. But d-Matrix's CEO Sid Sheth argues that the market is quietly splitting into two distinct tiers, and the one that's exploding right now is the one NVIDIA's architecture isn't built for. In this episode, Sid joins Craig Smith to explain the "premium token economy": a new class of AI inference where interactivity is the product, users pay ten times more per million tokens for instant…
AI Agents Fixing Your IT Before You Even Know Something Broke | Erhan Giral & Ryan Manning, BMC Helix
Aug 3, 2026 · 59 min
Most enterprise IT teams spend the majority of their time fighting the same fires repeatedly. BMC Helix is building the AI system that handles those fires automatically, detecting anomalies, tracing root cause through millions of asset relationships, generating remediation plans, and learning from every incident it resolves. Craig Smith sits down with Erhan Giral, VP of AI Strategy and Innovation at BMC Helix, and Ryan Manning, Chief Product Officer at BMC Helix, to explain how agentic AI is tra…
Real AI Transformation Costs HALF of Everyone's Salary for 2 Years | Chris Blackburn, Liatrio
Jul 30, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min
Most companies think they're transforming with AI. They're not, and the gap between what they believe and what's actually happening on the ground is costing them far more than they realize. In this episode, Craig Smith sits down with Chris Blackburn, founder and CEO of Liatrio, a consultancy that has spent a decade embedding directly inside large enterprises to help them actually change how they work, not just what tools they use. The conversation opens with a striking data point: the average en…
"According to NASA's Definition of Life, I'm Not Alive" - Why Nobody Can Define Life | Dr. Kate Adamala
Jul 29, 2026 · 46 min
Nobody has ever built a cell from scratch - assembled entirely from purified molecules on a shelf - that can feed itself, grow, and split into daughter cells through its own genetic activity. Until now. Dr. Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist and a professor of genetics at the University of Minnesota, whose lab just published a landmark paper on what she calls "spud cells," joins Craig Smith to explain what her team built, why it matters, and what it will take to go from proof of concept to a pl…
Video Is About to Stop Being One-Way (and That Changes Everything) | Victor Riparbelli, Synthesia
Jul 28, 2026 · 39 min
Every company is creating content that nobody reads, nobody watches, and nobody remembers, and the CEO of the AI platform that 90% of Fortune 100 companies use to fix that just explained what comes next. In this episode, Craig Smith sits down with Victor Riparbelli, co-founder and CEO of Synthesia, to discuss the $4 billion company that is now redefining what video communication means for the enterprise. The conversation opens with the founding insight that still drives the company: AI is going…
6 in 10 Enterprises Can't Find the Root Cause When Their AI Workloads Fail | Paul Appleby, Virtana
Ep 366 · Jul 15, 2026 · 45 min
Companies are spending billions building AI factories, but most of them can't tell you why their AI workloads are failing, whether their GPUs are actually being used, or what their infrastructure is going to cost them when agents start running at scale. Paul Appleby, CEO of Virtana, joins Craig Smith to discuss the findings of their AI Factory Reality Check study, a research report that reveals a striking and underappreciated gap between the pace of AI infrastructure investment and the governanc…
Inside the Enterprise Browser Rebuilding Security for the AI Era | Bradon Rogers, Island
Ep 365 · Jul 13, 2026 · 56 min
AI is moving faster than enterprise security systems were designed to handle. In this episode of Eye on A.I., Craig Smith speaks with Bradon Rogers, Chief Customer Officer at Island, Island about how companies are struggling to govern the rise of AI agents, browser-based workflows, and unsanctioned AI tools inside the workplace. The conversation explores why traditional "block-and-control" security models are breaking down and how a new approach, embedding policy directly into the browser and us…
What Industrial AI Actually Looks Like | Kriti Sharma, Nexus Black
Ep 364 · Jul 10, 2026 · 23 min
Most AI is built for people sitting at desks. Kriti Sharma builds it for the people who work in refineries, aircraft hangars, and utility networks responding to wildfires at 4 a.m. and she spends weekends on-site with them to make sure what she builds actually holds up. In this episode, Kriti joins Craig Smith to discuss what industrial AI really looks like when failure genuinely isn't an option, and why the gap between an impressive AI pilot and a production-grade AI system is so much wider in…
The Biggest AI Security Problem Isn't the Model. It's This. | Devvret Rishi
Ep 363 · Jul 7, 2026 · 48 min
What is an AI agent, really? Strip away the hype, and it's a model with access - to tools, APIs, databases, email, anything that lets it take real action instead of just generating text. That access is exactly where the risk lives, and Devvret Rishi, GM of AI at Rubrik, and former co-founder & CEO of Predibase, joins Craig Smith with a string of real-world incidents that make the case concrete: AWS reporting four major outages in 90 days after deploying coding agents, a Meta-related agent that d…
Big Pharma Fails 50% of the Time in Phase Three. AI Can Fix That | Vin Singh, BullFrog AI
Ep 362 · Jul 5, 2026 · 50 min
It costs up to $2 billion and fifteen years to develop a drug, and big pharma still fails half the time at the final stage. BullFrog AI founder, Chairman, and CEO Vin Singh joins Craig Smith with a clear diagnosis of why: the industry keeps picking the wrong drug target from the beginning, and no amount of downstream optimization fixes a fundamentally wrong starting point. Built on AI technology originally developed at Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Lab, BullFrog has assembled a three-stage plat…
AI Agents Are Failing and It's Almost Never the Model's Fault | Alberto Pan, Denodo
Ep 361 · Jul 2, 2026 · 42 min
After two years of AI pilots, enterprises are finally diagnosing what went wrong, and the answer keeps coming back to data. Alberto Pan, CTO of Denodo, joins Craig Smith to walk through the findings of the company's AI Trust Gap Report: a survey of 850 enterprise data leaders that reveals the dominant failure modes of enterprise AI agents are almost never the model's fault. They're caused by stale data, missing context, and inconsistent semantics across the hundreds of data sources agents need t…
How Modern Science Got Consciousness Wrong From the Start | Philip Goff
Ep 360 · Jun 29, 2026 · 1 hr 1 min
What if consciousness isn't a byproduct of complex brains, but a fundamental feature of reality itself, present, in some rudimentary form, all the way down to electrons and quarks? Philip Goff, a philosopher at Durham University and one of panpsychism's leading contemporary advocates, joins Craig Smith to make that case, arguing that modern science's founding move - separating the mathematical world physics studies from the subjective experience we know only from the inside - solved one problem…
AI Is Reading 15 Million X-Rays a Year With No Human in the Loop | Prashant Warier, Qure.ai
Ep 359 · Jun 20, 2026 · 42 min
Eighty percent of lung cancer cases are diagnosed too late, not because the signals aren't there, but because nobody was looking at the right moment. Prashant Warier, co-founder and CEO of Qure.ai, joins Craig Smith to explain how his company is changing that using a tool most people already encounter: the routine chest X-ray. Cure's Lung Nodule Malignancy Risk Score - validated in the CREATE study - analyzes X-rays people get for unrelated reasons, identifies high-risk nodules, and flags which…
Only 12% of Companies Generate Value From AI. Here's What They're Doing | Sanjeev Vohra, Genpact
Ep 358 · Jun 18, 2026 · 59 min
Genpact surveyed 500 senior executives to understand why companies are investing in AI but not seeing the value, and what they found was both clarifying and uncomfortable. Sanjeev Vohra, Genpact's Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, joins Craig Smith to share the results: only 12% of companies qualify as genuine AI leaders, meaning they're deploying AI in production environments, generating measurable business outcomes, and have the governance systems in place to actually assess that value.…
India Is Becoming an Architect of the Global AI Order | Ivana Bartoletti of Wipro
Ep 357 · Jun 16, 2026 · 56 min
The Global AI Summit just happened in New Delhi, and the message from India was clear: this country is no longer just writing code for the rest of the world. It's becoming an architect of the global AI order. Ivana Bartoletti, Chief Privacy and AI Governance Officer at Wipro and Council of Europe advisor, joins Craig Smith to unpack what that shift actually means. Her frame is the sharpest line of the episode: Europe writes the rules, the US writes the checks, and India is writing the code, in 2…
The New BRAIN Of the Enterprise | Ryan Gavin
Ep 356 · Jun 13, 2026 · 53 min
One company now has more AI agents deployed in its organization than it has human employees. Slack's CMO Ryan Gavin dropped that stat into a conversation with Craig Smith, and then immediately identified the secondary problem it creates: when your digital workforce outnumbers your human one, how do employees know which agent to call for which task? That orchestration problem, and the conversational interface that solves it, is what this episode is really about. Gavin describes Slack bot's transf…
AI Is Already Resolving 90% of Customer Service Tickets - and It's Getting Smarter | Shashi Upadhyay, Zendesk
Ep 355 · Jun 12, 2026 · 57 min
Zendesk went private two weeks before ChatGPT launched, and the moment it came out, it was obvious that customer service would never be the same again. Shashi Upadhyay, head of product, engineering, and AI at Zendesk, joins Craig Smith to explain what the company has built since: a self-improving AI system that doesn't just resolve tickets but learns from every failure, studies what the human did to fix it, and gets measurably better over time. He calls it the resolution learning loop, and for Z…
Every Enterprise Is About to Have a 100,000 Agent Problem | Oren Michaels of Barndoor AI
Ep 354 · Jun 6, 2026 · 60 min
AI agents can now connect to every tool your employees use. The problem is that connecting them and trusting them are two completely different things, and most enterprises have figured out the first without solving the second. Oren Michaels, co-founder and CEO of Barndoor AI, joins Craig Smith to explain why that gap is the defining challenge of the agentic enterprise era. His framework is simple and sharp: agents are like enthusiastic interns. They will absolutely do something when you ask them…
More Customers Chose the AI Agent Than Anyone Expected | Tom Chen, Aircall
Ep 353 · Jun 4, 2026 · 57 min
Every time you hit a phone tree or a chatbot with canned answers, you're experiencing the gap between what AI can already do and what most companies are still delivering. Craig Smith sits down with Tom Chen, Chief Product Officer at Aircall, to explore why that gap is closing fast, and what it means for any business that relies on voice as a customer communication channel. Tom makes a case that is both practical and counterintuitive: AI voice agents aren't better than your best human rep, but th…
Why the Future of AI Isn't Just Bigger Models. It's Models That Evolve | Risto Miikkulainen of Cognizant
Ep 352 · Jun 2, 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
Most AI systems follow a gradient, a mathematical slope that tells them exactly how to improve, step by step, toward a known goal. Neuroevolution doesn't follow any gradient. Instead, it runs hundreds or thousands of competing solutions simultaneously, spreads them across the space of possibilities as broadly as possible, and lets the best ones recombine, the same logic that drives biological evolution. The result, as Risto Miikkulainen explains to Craig Smith, is creativity: solutions that no h…
How AI Is Reinventing Elder Care | Chia-Lin Simmons of LogicMark
Ep 351 · Jun 1, 2026 · 53 min
One in four people over 65 will experience a fall, and for most of them, the technology designed to help is a device that hasn't meaningfully changed since the 1980s. Chia-Lin Simmons, CEO of LogicMark, joined Craig Smith to make the case that this gap is both unnecessary and solvable, and that AI is finally making it possible to shift personal safety from reactive to predictive. Her company's Freedom Alert Max doesn't just detect falls after they happen, it builds a personalized digital twin of…
The App of the Future Is Voice — Not a Screen. Mitel's CTO Luiz Domingos Explains Why.
Ep 350 · May 28, 2026 · 55 min
Luiz Domingos has spent 25 years watching enterprise communications evolve, from IP telephony to cloud to AI, and his assessment of where things stand now is unusually concrete. Companies have moved past the strategy deck phase. AI is being embedded directly into contact centers, compliance workflows, and communication pipelines, and the question executives are asking has shifted from "which model is smartest" to "which deployment reduces friction and stays compliant." Domingos is direct about w…
Is ChatGPT Conscious? A Pioneer of AI Explains | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Ep 349 · May 28, 2026 · 57 min
A fly with 100,000 neurons can fly, find food, and reproduce. A $100 million supercomputer cannot. Dr. Terry Sejnowski used that observation to silence a room full of MIT AI researchers in the 1980s, and it remains just as sharp today. Sejnowski is one of the foundational figures in the history of deep learning, co-inventor of the Boltzmann machine, and a professor at the Salk Institute who has spent his career studying both the brain and the machines we build to imitate it. In this conversation…
Your Child's Data Profile Starts Before They're Born | Eamonn Maguire of Proton
Ep 348 · May 28, 2026 · 56 min
Your child's data profile doesn't start when they get their first phone. It starts before they're born, the moment a parent emails a gynecologist or visits a fertility clinic website. That's the core argument behind Born Private, Proton's new initiative that lets parents reserve an email address for their child at birth, anchoring their digital identity in a privacy-preserving ecosystem before the profiling machine gets started. Craig Smith sits down with Eamonn Maguire, Engineering Director, Ma…
Training AI Models Without a Billion-Dollar Data Center | Steffen Cruz of Macrocosmos
Ep 347 · May 25, 2026 · 47 min
Training a frontier AI model today requires hundreds of thousands of GPUs, months of compute time, and a budget that only a handful of companies on earth can afford. Steffen Cruz, co-founder and CTO of Macrocosmos, thinks that model is about to break, and he's spending his time building what comes next. His project IOTA, operating within the BitTensor blockchain ecosystem, uses distributed training to split large language models across thousands of devices located around the world, coordinated b…
The Single Biggest Barrier to AI Adoption Isn't the Technology — It's This | Errol Gardner of EY
Ep 346 · May 22, 2026 · 55 min
Errol Gardner has spent 35 years advising the world's largest organizations through major technology transitions, and his assessment of where enterprise agentic AI actually stands is one of the most grounded you'll hear anywhere. His number: less than 1 out of 10 on a maturity scale. Not because the technology isn't ready, but because deploying agentic AI across an organization doesn't tweak how it works, it requires rebuilding how it works. And that is a fundamentally different kind of challeng…
Oliver Dial of IBM: Quantum Advantage Is Happening This Year
Ep 345 · May 19, 2026 · 51 min
IBM's VP of Quantum Systems, Oliver Dial, has spent his career building quantum computers from the ground up, and he's unusually direct about what they can and can't do. In this conversation with Craig Smith, Oliver Dial walks through where the field actually stands in 2026: quantum utility was achieved in 2023, quantum advantage is the target for this year, and a fully error-corrected machine capable of tackling the hard problems is on IBM's roadmap for 2029. That last milestone, Dial says, now…
Why Agentic-First Startups Won't Disrupt Enterprises as Fast as Everyone Thinks | Kris Lovejoy
Ep 344 · May 15, 2026 · 57 min
Kris Lovejoy, Global Strategy Leader at Kyndryl, has spent her career at the intersection of IT infrastructure and security. Right now, she's one of the people enterprises call when they want to move from AI experimentation to real deployment. Her diagnosis is clear: agentic AI is a bullet train sitting on tracks built for 30 miles per hour. The technology is ready. Most organizations aren't, and the gap between a successful pilot and a production system running at scale is far wider than the hy…
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