Eye On A.I.

In 2023, General Cherry started making 10 drones a month. Today they're approaching 100,000. Marko Kushnir, communications director of one of Ukraine's top-five drone manufacturers, joins Craig Smith for one of the most operationally specific conversations available about what drone warfare looks like at industrial scale, from the daily feedback loops with front-line units that drive product iteration, to the $2,000 interceptor drone that can destroy a $100,000 Shahed, to the on-device AI targeting model that guides an interceptor to impact at 70% accuracy after the operator activates it and steps back. The conversation's most important insights are structural rather than technical. Marko...

A Ukrainian entrepreneur who spent 14 years building cameras for pets pivoted to building cameras that down Shaheds, and is now building the autonomy software that could define how wars are fought for the next generation. Yaroslav Azhnyuk, co-founder of Fourth Law, joins Craig Smith in Kyiv to explain why Ukraine has become what he calls the Defense Valley or the Florence of Defense: a dense, fast-moving ecosystem of founders, engineers, and military operators who are building, testing, and iterating on autonomous drone systems in real combat conditions, with a feedback loop that no defense contractor in the West can...

The most consequential arms race in the world right now isn't nuclear, it's software. Craig Smith speaks with Alexander Palamarchuk, an engineer in the R&D department of Ukraine's Azov Brigade, calling in from approximately 18 kilometers from the front line in the Pokrovsk region. What emerges is one of the most technically candid accounts available of what drone warfare actually looks like from the inside: how Ukraine went from homemade reconnaissance drones in 2014 to AI-guided systems being developed and tested in real combat today, how the jamming arms race has forced his unit to develop custom frequency systems spanning 100...

It takes a few hours to build an AI agent. It takes six to seven months to get it into production. Manoj Saxena - the executive who commercialized IBM Watson - built TrustWise around one thesis: intelligence without control is not deployable. In this episode, he joins Craig Smith to explain why 95% of enterprise AI agent projects are stalling between pilot and production, and why the answer has nothing to do with the quality of the underlying models. The bottleneck, Saxena argues, is the absence of an entirely new class of infrastructure, something that can evaluate every tool call...

Most humanoid robot companies are still running curated demos in replica environments. Foundation Future Industries is running 150 robots on real automotive production lines in Georgia, and heading to Ukraine this year to deploy on the battlefield. Mike LeBlanc, the co-founder of Foundation Future Industries - currently the only company supplying humanoid robots to the US Department of Defense, with contracts across the Army, Navy, and Air Force, joins Craig Smith to explain why the race is moving faster than almost anyone in the industry believes, and why the companies that are moving cautiously are about to be left behind...

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 responses, and the memory bandwidth limits of GPU-based systems create a structural ceiling that purpose-built...

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, not because the technology isn't there, but because companies are storing their data in Microsoft file...

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 hardware, without touching a data center. The evidence is already there: Tether's team built...

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 responses, and the memory bandwidth limits of GPU-based systems create a structural ceiling that purpose-built...

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 transforming IT service management from a reactive, human-driven process into something closer to a self-healing system, and why doing...

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 enterprise Blackburn works with operates at just 5 to 6% efficiency, meaning employees spend only...

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 platform that could eventually replace every molecule civilization currently extracts...

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 to drive the marginal cost of creating video to zero, which changes not just how content...

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 to drive the marginal cost of creating video to zero, which changes not just how content...

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 platform that could eventually replace every molecule civilization currently extracts...

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 platform that could eventually replace every molecule civilization currently extracts...

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 governance needed to run it safely and efficiently. Six in ten enterprises, the study found, cannot automatically identify root...

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...