Eye On A.I.

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 user workflows, may offer a path forward. It also dives into emerging risks like prompt injection and autonomous agent behavior, and...

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 physical world than most technology companies appreciate. The conversation...

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 deleted someone's emails while they were actively asking it to stop, and Rubrik's own...

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 platform that cleans messy clinical data, runs causal analysis to map disease pathways, and then ranks competing drug...

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 to access to do real work. Pan explains why traditional data warehouse and lake house architectures...

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 while quietly creating another we've never resolved. The conversation inevitably turns to AI: could a large language model ever be...

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 patients need follow-up CT scans. The result is a detection rate of 54 positive patients out of 100 flagged as...

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. The other 88% are somewhere between experimenting and stalled, and the most common culprit isn't the technology or the C-suite. It's what Vohra and his clients call the "...

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 22 languages. But she's careful to add that the AI race...

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 transformation from a notification tool into what he calls the ChatGPT moment for the enterprise, an AI that doesn't just understand...

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 Zendesk's best customers, it's already resolving 70 to 90% of incoming tickets autonomously, up from the 10 to 20...

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 to. Whether it's what you intended is another matter, and when an agent can act across Salesforce...

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 they are better than your average one. They never get frustrated. Their...

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 human designer would have anticipated, that emerge routinely from the evolutionary process. Miikkulainen is a professor at UT Austin and VP...

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 each user, tracking steps, sleep patterns, and medication adherence over time to identify the subtle...

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 what gets in the way: you cannot pour AI into a legacy architecture and expect transformation, and cloud-only AI doesn't solve the latency or data sovereignty...

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 with Craig Smith, he turns that dual perspective on ChatGPT, and what he finds is...

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, Machine Learning & AI at Proton, who has spent his career at the intersection of data, security, and visualization to explore what's really happening to...

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 by blockchain, and powered by surplus cheap energy wherever it exists. After nine months of research, the system can reproduce baseline...

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 challenge than anything the AI hype cycle is currently acknowledging. In this conversation with Craig Smith, Gardner walks through why cloud...

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 feels both achievable and terrifying. The episode is worth your time because Dial doesn't hype. He explains...

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 hype suggests. In this conversation with Craig Smith, Lovejoy walks through why IT service...

AI has fundamentally changed the cybersecurity threat landscape, not by inventing new attack types, but by collapsing the timeline. The same tools that make software developers more productive are now being used by attackers to move from vulnerability disclosure to active exploit in a matter of hours. That shift, argues Loris Degioanni, CTO and founder of Sysdig, changes everything about how defense needs to work. In this episode, Craig Smith talks with Loris Degioanni about why human-centered security is becoming a structural liability, what "headless cloud security" means in practice, and why the coding agent (tools like...

What if the most competitive exam in the world is also the most destructive? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Professor Andrew Thangaraj, faculty at the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Madras, to explore how one of India's most prestigious institutions is quietly dismantling the system it helped build. Andrew lays out the honest reality of higher education in India. Two and a half crore kids reach college age every year. Only 90 lakh make it to college. And the IITs, the most coveted institutions in the country, take...

What does the quantum industry actually look like right now, beneath all the hype? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Celia Merzbacher, Executive Director of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), to break down the real state of quantum technology in 2025. From market growth and enterprise readiness to the growing intersection with AI, Celia brings a grounded insider perspective on where the industry stands and what comes next. Celia explains why the quantum market is growing faster than even the companies inside it predicted, with revenues rising roughly 27% year...

What if you could train a frontier AI model without building a single data centre? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Steffen Cruz, co-founder and CTO of Macrocosmos, to explore a radical alternative to the way AI models are built today. Instead of billion-dollar GPU warehouses, Steffen is training large language models using idle compute from devices distributed around the world, coordinated through the Bittensor blockchain. Steffen breaks down why the centralised data centre model is heading toward a wall. Projects like Stargate and Colossus cost tens of billions...

What if your child already has a data profile, and they haven't even been born yet? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Eamonn Maguire, Director of Engineering for AI and ML at Proton, to explore one of the most urgent and underappreciated questions in the age of AI: who owns your data, who is building a profile on you, and what can actually be done about it? Eamonn brings a rare combination of depth and range to this conversation. With a PhD from Oxford, a postdoc at CERN, and...

What if the country that trains the world's engineers finally built the infrastructure to match its talent? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Amith Singhee, Director of IBM Research India and CTO of IBM India and South Asia, to explore where India actually stands in the global AI race and what it will take to close the gap. Amith gives an honest, ground-level assessment of why India has been slow to compete. The talent has always been there. But until recently, the investment, the compute infrastructure, and the institutional...

What does it actually take to prove that AI delivers real value in the industries that keep the world running? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Debdas Sen, CEO of TCG Digital and Joint Managing Director of Lummus Digital, to explore what serious enterprise AI looks like when it is applied to some of the most complex, high-stakes problems on the planet. Problems like compressing years of catalyst research into weeks, predicting refinery failures before they happen, and accelerating drug development timelines that could determine how long a life-saving medicine takes...

What if the country that produces the world's top AI talent finally figured out how to keep it? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Professor Mausam, one of India's leading AI researchers, AAAI Fellow, and founding head of the Yardi School of Artificial Intelligence at IIT Delhi, to get an honest and unflinching diagnosis of why India has fallen so far behind the US and China in artificial intelligence and what it will actually take to close that gap. Mausam breaks down the structural story behind India's deficit. A...

Why IBM Is Betting Everything on Small AI Models In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Sriram Raghavan, Vice President of AI at IBM Research, to explore one of the most important debates in enterprise AI right now. Do you actually need a massive model to get world class results? IBM's answer is no, and Sriram breaks down exactly why. Sriram explains why IBM chose to train its Granite models directly using reinforcement learning rather than distilling from larger models like most of the industry. The reason goes beyond performance...

What if the country that trained the world's engineers finally decided to keep them? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Abhishek, the civil servant leading India's $1.2 billion national AI Mission, to explore how one of the world's largest and most diverse nations is mounting a serious challenge to US and Chinese dominance in artificial intelligence. Abhishek breaks down the honest story behind India's late start. World-class talent, but no research ecosystem to retain it. Digitization without AI-usable data. Compute so scarce that the entire country had fewer than 500 GPUs...

Most enterprises are excited about agentic AI. But very few are actually deploying it in production. In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Adi Kuruganti, Chief AI and Development Officer at Automation Anywhere, to break down why agentic AI is so hard to get right in the enterprise and what it actually takes to move from a promising pilot to a mission-critical deployment. Adi explains why the future of enterprise automation is not agentic AI alone, but the combination of deterministic and agentic systems working together, and why companies that...

What happens when AI writes code faster than anyone can test it? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Dan Faulkner, CEO of SmartBear, to explore one of the most underappreciated risks of the AI coding boom. As tools like Claude Code and Codex push software development to unprecedented speed, the systems built to validate that software are being left behind. Dan makes a distinction that every engineering leader needs to hear: clean code passing unit tests is not the same as an application that actually works. Dan introduces the...

This episode is sponsored by Modulate. Most voice AI focuses on transcription. Velma takes it further by actually understanding conversations, analyzing tone, timing, stress, and intent using its Ensemble Listening Model architecture. Explore the live preview: https://preview.modulate.ai/ What does it actually mean to build a foundation model for robots? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Sergey Levine, co-founder of Physical Intelligence and professor at UC Berkeley, to explore a fundamentally different approach to building robots, one inspired not by programming a single...

AI has been trained like software. But what if it should be grown like life? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Sebastian Risi, professor and leading researcher in neuroevolution and artificial life, to explore a fundamentally different approach to building intelligence, one inspired by how nature evolves, grows, and adapts. Sebastian explains why traditional AI systems are limited by fixed architectures and one-time training, and how evolutionary algorithms can create systems that continuously learn, self-organize, and even grow their own neural structures over time. They...

AI has been trained like software. But what if it should be grown like life? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Sebastian Risi, professor and leading researcher in neuroevolution and artificial life, to explore a fundamentally different approach to building intelligence, one inspired by how nature evolves, grows, and adapts. Sebastian explains why traditional AI systems are limited by fixed architectures and one-time training, and how evolutionary algorithms can create systems that continuously learn, self-organize, and even grow their own neural structures over time. They...

Quantum computing has been "5 years away" for decades. So what's actually holding it back? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Izhar Medalsy, Co-founder & CEO of Quantum Elements, to break down the real bottleneck in quantum computing today and why the future of the industry may depend more on classical systems and AI than quantum hardware itself. Izhar explains how digital twins of quantum systems are being used to simulate real hardware, generate massive amounts of training data, and solve one of the biggest challenges in the field...

AI is changing more than just productivity. It's changing what we can trust. In this episode, Kevin Tian, Co-founder and CEO of Doppel, breaks down how AI is enabling a new wave of social engineering attacks—from deepfake phone calls to impersonation across LinkedIn, YouTube, and search engines. The reality is this:Deepfakes are just one part of a much bigger problem. Attackers are now operating across multiple channels at once, using AI to manipulate people, not just systems. And as these attacks scale, the real risk isn't just fraud or...

This episode is sponsored by Modulate. Most voice AI focuses on transcription. Velma takes it further by actually understanding conversations, analyzing tone, timing, stress, and intent using its Ensemble Listening Model architecture. Explore the live preview: https://preview.modulate.ai/ Baris Gultekin, Head of AI at Snowflake, breaks down how enterprise AI is actually being built, deployed, and scaled today. From running AI directly inside governed data environments to enabling natural language access across entire organizations, this conversation explores the shift from experimentation to real-world impact. You'll learn why Sn...

This episode is sponsored by tastytrade. Trade stocks, options, futures, and crypto in one platform with low commissions and zero commission on stocks and crypto. Built for traders who think in probabilities, tastytrade offers advanced analytics, risk tools, and an AI-powered Search feature. Learn more at https://tastytrade.com/ This episode dives into why Pathway's Baby Dragon Hatchling (BDH) might mark the beginning of the post-transformer era in AI. Zuzanna Stamirowska, Pathway's CEO and co‑author of BDH, explains why today's transformer-based LLMs hit a wall on lon...

AI often looks fully automated. But behind the scenes, a huge amount of human judgment is shaping how these systems actually work. In this episode, Craig Smith speaks with Phelim Bradley, co-founder and CEO of Prolific, a platform that connects millions of real people with researchers and AI labs to evaluate and improve AI systems. They explore the hidden human layer behind modern AI, why traditional benchmarks are becoming less reliable, and why AI companies increasingly rely on real human feedback to measure model performance in the real world. ...

AI is not just getting smarter. It is getting faster by learning how to optimize the hardware it runs on. In this episode, Sharon Zhou, VP of AI at AMD and former Stanford AI researcher, explains how language models are beginning to write and optimize their own GPU kernel code. We explore what self improving AI actually means, how reinforcement learning is used in post training, and why kernel optimization could be one of the most overlooked scaling levers in modern AI. Sharon breaks down how GPU efficiency impacts the cost of training and inference...

This episode is sponsored by tastytrade. Trade stocks, options, futures, and crypto in one platform with low commissions and zero commission on stocks and crypto. Built for traders who think in probabilities, tastytrade offers advanced analytics, risk tools, and an AI-powered Search feature. Learn more at https://tastytrade.com/ Artificial intelligence is reaching a turning point. Instead of building bigger and bigger models, what if the real breakthrough comes from letting AI evolve? In this episode of Eye on AI, David Ha, Co-Founder and CEO of Sakana AI, explains...

In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith speaks with Amanda Luther, Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group and global lead of BCG's AI Transformation practice, about what their latest 1,500-company AI study reveals about the widening gap between AI leaders and laggards. Only 5% of companies are truly "future-built" with AI embedded across their core business functions. These firms are seeing measurable gains in revenue growth, EBIT margins, and shareholder returns. Meanwhile, 60% of organizations are either experimenting or struggling to extract real value. Amanda breaks down how BCG measures AI maturity across 41 capabilities, how...

This episode is sponsored by tastytrade. Trade stocks, options, futures, and crypto in one platform with low commissions and zero commission on stocks and crypto. Built for traders who think in probabilities, tastytrade offers advanced analytics, risk tools, and an AI-powered Search feature. Learn more at https://tastytrade.com/ In this episode of Eye on AI, Nick Frosst, Co-Founder of Cohere and former Google Brain researcher, explains why Cohere is betting on enterprise AI instead of chasing AGI. While much of the AI ind...

This episode is sponsored by tastytrade. Trade stocks, options, futures, and crypto in one platform with low commissions and zero commission on stocks and crypto. Built for traders who think in probabilities, tastytrade offers advanced analytics, risk tools, and an AI-powered Search feature. Learn more at https://tastytrade.com/ Voice AI is moving far beyond transcription. In this episode, Carter Huffman, CTO and co-founder of Modulate, explains how real-time voice intelligence is unlocking something much bigger than speech-to-text. His team built AI tha...

This episode is sponsored by tastytrade. Trade stocks, options, futures, and crypto in one platform with low commissions and zero commission on stocks and crypto. Built for traders who think in probabilities, tastytrade offers advanced analytics, risk tools, and an AI-powered Search feature. Learn more at https://tastytrade.com/ AI is changing how software is built, but it is also quietly breaking how security works. In this episode of Eye on AI, host Craig Smith sits down with Subho Halder, co-founder and CEO of App...

Construction is one of the least digitized industries in the world, and not because it resists technology. It resists bad technology. In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Olek Paraska, CTO of Togal AI, to break down why construction productivity has barely improved in 50 years and why pre-construction is the real bottleneck holding the industry back. Olek explains how most estimating and takeoff work is still done manually, why automating this phase can unlock massive efficiency gains, and how AI works best in construction when it acts as a perception...

In this episode of the Eye on AI Podcast, Craig Smith sits down with Steve Brown, founder of CureWise, to explore how agentic AI is reshaping healthcare from the patient's perspective. Steve shares the deeply personal story behind CureWise, born out of his own experience with a rare cancer diagnosis that was repeatedly missed by traditional medical pathways. The conversation dives into why modern healthcare struggles with complex, edge-case conditions, how fragmented medical data and time-constrained systems fail patients, and where AI can meaningfully help without replacing clinicians. The discussion goes deep into multi-agent AI...