CxO Leadership for Enterprise AI and the Digital Economy

Managing AI Agents Is Now Everyone's Job: Salesforce's Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 21:37:50 -0400

Salesforce's Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer argues that whoever assigns work to an AI agent is its manager. Responsibility for the agent lies with the "human at the helm."

Why Enterprise AI Agents Lag Outside Engineering: Box CEO Aaron Levie

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 22:58:56 -0400

Box CEO Aaron Levie says AI agents took off in engineering because users were technical, the output was more or less verifiable, and agents had access to the codebase. Knowledge work has less of each; the gap will take years to close.

Why AI Vendor Lock-In Is Already Here: Mozilla's CTO

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 22:58:49 -0400

Most enterprises rent their AI from big platform companies, and most cannot switch when they try, says Mozilla's CTO. He advises using several models, running some locally, and evaluating them on your own workloads.

AI Transformation Starts With Skills, Not Hiring: Atlassian's Chief Product and AI Officer

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:14:59 -0400

Atlassian's Chief Product and AI Officer argues that large companies must train existing staff rather than hire only AI-native people. At Atlassian, that means a training week every quarter and token budgets judged by what engineering ships.

Why AI Agents Won't Replace Enterprise Software: Atlassian's Chief Product and AI Officer

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 21:37:31 -0400

Atlassian's Chief Product and AI Officer joined during the SaaSpocalypse and never believed agents would kill software. Vibe-coded replacements fail at enterprise scale, and agents are becoming users of the products themselves.

Why AI Guiderails Come First: Snap's Head of Engineering

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 22:16:15 -0400

AI agents at Snap plan, write, and review code. Guardrails are a huge investment and allow agents to write the company's code safely.

Atlassian Chief AI Officer: Building Products for Agents and Humans

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0400

AI agents can now take on assignments, operate within business systems, and complete work once handled by people. The difficult questions belong to leaders: which work suits agents, what these systems need to succeed, and who is accountable when they fail. Tamar Yehoshua, Chief Product and AI Officer at Atlassian, has led product organizations at Google Search, Slack, and Glean and now directs AI strategy for software used across most of the Fortune 500.

CXOTalk episode 930 examines how to build products and workflows that enable people and AI agents to work together.

What we will cover:

Strategy for building products intended for both humans and AI agents, and how agents change the way work is done in large organizations.
Where agent adoption stands in the enterprise, the common obstacles, and how tokenomics and rising AI usage costs affect planning.
What context means in practice, what an agent must know about your organization, and how to prepare data and workflows.
Security and privacy risks of sharing organizational context with agents and external vendors.
Assigning work to agents as you would to a person, handling tasks that still require human sign-off, and maintaining accountability when an agent gets it wrong.
Advice for business leaders introducing AI agents into enterprise workflows and what comes next for AI agents at Atlassian.

Join this interactive session with Tamar Yehoshua live on Friday, August 28, 2026, at 1:00 PM ET on CXOTalk. Subscribe for key takeaways from every episode and advance notice of live shows.

Episode Participants

Tamar Yehoshua is Atlassian’s Chief Product and AI Officer, driving the company’s vision for the future of teamwork in the age of AI.

Michael Krigsman is a globally recognized analyst, strategic advisor, and industry commentator known for his deep expertise in business transformation, innovation, and AI leadership.

Snap: Agentic AI Software Development at Scale

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Most engineering organizations can demonstrate AI adoption, but few can articulate the specific changes that follow the implementation of AI coding agents in their daily workflows. Saral Jain, SVP, Head of Engineering, and CIO at Snap Inc., manages engineering for an app with nearly a billion monthly users. His team built the internal agent system that the organization now depends on.

CXOTalk episode 929 explores how Snap organizes, assesses, and oversees this operational model.

What we will cover:

What agentic AI software development looks like day-to-day at Snap, starting with the golden path, its managed set of agents for code generation, review, incident triage, and crash resolution.
Casper, the autonomous coding agent, can be invoked by any team at Snap from a Slack conversation, and AI agents help Snap compete with far larger companies.
How Snap measures the value of agents, what still requires slow manual coding, and where the capacity freed up by faster building went.
Where agents act on their own, when human review is required, and whether engineers read and understand all the code being created.
How the engineer role, technical interviews, and the junior talent pipeline change when agents handle routine work.
Advice for CTOs and CIOs on building an enterprise AI operating model, what worries Jain most, and what comes next for AI agents at Snap.

Join this interactive session with Saral Jain live on Friday, August 21, 2026, at 1:00 PM ET on CXOTalk. Subscribe for key takeaways from every episode and advance notice of live shows.

Episode Participants

Saral Jain is SVP, Head of Engineering and CIO at Snap Inc., after nearly a decade leading engineering teams at Amazon Web Services; he is tasked with redefining how a platform with nearly a billion monthly users ships in the AI era.

Michael Krigsman is a globally recognized analyst, strategic advisor, and industry commentator known for his deep expertise in business transformation, innovation, and AI leadership.

AI Agents and Systems of Record: The Battle for the SaaS Interface

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 23:35:00 -0400

Seed investor Ed Sim says AI agents may not need the software screens enterprises pay for, and the fight over what replaces them has already started. He maps the battle, the new tolls, and where the pressure lands.

Why Enterprise AI Now Has to Prove Its Return: A VC Investor Perspective

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:02:50 -0400

Token bills arrived simultaneously with cheap substitutes, and Ed Sim, founder of boldstart ventures, states that this pairing is reshaping how companies purchase AI. The security concern he emphasizes is not related to models.

Why Mission Drift Follows Success: Eric Ries on Structural Integrity in Business

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:16:39 -0400

Eric Ries argues that mission drift is a structural failure, not a moral one, triggered by success. His evidence runs from a retailer its own investors liquidated to Costco, which kept the same formula.

Why Enterprise AI Adoption Stalls After Deployment: An IBM Consulting Perspective

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:16:31 -0400

IBM Consulting's senior vice president explains why adoption, not deployment, decides the value of AI initiatives. One internal AI tool was running at a $25 million compute cost within six months; a rebuild brought it down to about $2 million.

Why Trust Limits AI Agents in Banking: Oliver Bussmann on the Controls That Must Come First

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:16:23 -0400

The former UBS group CIO says one hallucinated report can erase a bank's reputation in minutes, and explains the risk classification that decides what an agent is allowed to do.

Why AI Pilots Fail: Nate B. Jones on What to Do Instead

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:13:29 -0400

Nate B. Jones tells leaders to stop running AI pilots and fund work meant for production. His case, in his own words: pick a project that matters, level with people about jobs, and know when to walk away.

Top VC Perspective: Where Enterprise AI Is Headed

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Enterprise leaders are making AI commitments now, and their value depends on where the technology goes. The earliest view of that future belongs to investors who fund AI companies before a product exists. Episode 928 features Ed Sim, founder and general partner at boldstart ventures, who has been ranked the number one seed investor twice in Business Insider's Seed 100 and is an inception backer of Snyk and Protect AI. The conversation maps what current early-stage investment reveals about where enterprise AI is headed.

What we will cover:

Where early-stage AI investment is flowing and what those bets predict for enterprise technology over the next three years
Rented versus owned intelligence: when to rely on frontier model APIs and when to build specialized models from your own data
What the rise of open-weight models means for cost, control, and vendor lock-in
Security for the agentic era: how autonomous AI agents change enterprise risk, as seen through an investor's map of the security market
The coming AI vendor shakeout and how to judge which startups will still exist in three years
AI economics after the subsidy era: token costs, ROI per workflow, and what AI really costs at scale

Watch episode 928 with Ed Sim live on Friday, August 7, 2026, at 1:00 PM ET on CXOTalk. Subscribe for key takeaways from every episode and advance notice of live shows.

Episode Participants

Ed Sim is the founder and general partner of boldstart ventures, an inception-stage investor in enterprise software with more than $1.1 billion under management. This is his third appearance on CXOTalk.

Michael Krigsman is a globally recognized analyst, strategic advisor, and industry commentator known for his deep expertise in business transformation, innovation, and AI leadership.

Why AI Pilots Stall: How to Make Enterprise AI Work

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Most enterprise AI pilots never survive the transition to production and scale. Even when interest is high, obstacles remain because pilots often don’t reflect real-world workflows, financials, permissions, or accountability scenarios.

In Episode 927, AI strategist Nate B. Jones examines why pilots stall and how to make enterprise AI work in production.

Jones led product for Amazon Prime Video and now advises Fortune 500 companies, growth-stage startups, and global banks on AI strategy. He publishes AI News & Strategy Daily to more than 300,000 subscribers on YouTube and nearly 500,000 followers on TikTok. This is his third CXOTalk appearance, after conversations on the AI vendor landscape in May 2025 and on prompting in June 2025.

What we will cover:

Why AI pilots stall before production, and the difference between a successful demo and a system that endures real-world work
What AI needs to survive in production: context, memory, reusable procedures, and review gates
Why companies cannot switch to a cheaper AI model even when it wins on price
How accumulated prompts and rules become procedural debt that quietly degrades results
Who owns an AI agent in production, and who is accountable when it drifts
What business and technology leaders should measure to ensure their pilots remain on track

Watch Episode 927 with Nate B. Jones live on Friday, July 31, 2026, at 1:00 PM ET on CXOTalk. Join this interactive discussion and ask your questions!

Episode Participants

Nate B. Jones is an AI–first product strategist and advises large organizations on AI strategy and is a popular influencer on social media with hundreds of thousands of followers and subscribers. This is his third appearance on CXOTalk.

Michael Krigsman is a globally recognized analyst, strategic advisor, and industry commentator known for his deep expertise in business transformation, innovation, and AI leadership.

Palo Alto Networks EVP: Securing AI Agents in the Enterprise

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Enterprises are adopting AI agents faster than security teams can find them, making agentic AI security an urgent CISO priority in 2026. Agents hold credentials, call tools, and act autonomously, so one exploited agent operates with its user's full access at machine speed. In episode 926 of CXOTalk, Anand Oswal, EVP of AI and Network Security at Palo Alto Networks, describes a practical sequence: discover every agent first, then apply identity, runtime, and governance controls through a centralized AI gateway.

What the conversation covers

The four surfaces where agents run: enterprise, SaaS platforms, endpoints, and the browser
Why vibe coding agents and third-party MCP servers expand the supply chain attack surface
How browser agents holding live sessions and cookies enable identity impersonation
New runtime threats: prompt injection, memory poisoning, tool misuse, and model denial of service
Agent identity: deciding what an agent can connect to, with what permissions, for how long
Why a centralized AI gateway and a unified platform beat stitched-together point products

Episode Participants

Anand Oswal is the Executive Vice President and General Manager of AI and Network Security at cyber security leader Palo Alto Networks.

Michael Krigsman is a globally recognized analyst, strategic advisor, and industry commentator known for his deep expertise in business transformation, innovation, and AI leadership.

Agentic AI in Financial Services: Former UBS and SAP Group CIO

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Agentic AI in financial services faces a deployment challenge: banks run dozens of pilots, yet almost no agents operate in production. The gap is in controls, not model capability: an agent operating within a regulated institution needs identity, permissions, audit trails, and human accountability. In Episode 925, Oliver Bussmann, former Group CIO of UBS, explores where agents add value and the conditions that must be met before granting them write access to critical systems.

Bussmann ran technology for UBS when it was the world's largest wealth manager and led the bank's early blockchain work. Today, he advises financial institutions and boards across Europe and writes a weekly executive briefing on agentic AI in finance. This is his third CXOTalk appearance, after conversations on the CIO role in 2014 and on fintech and blockchain in 2016.

What we will cover:

Why banks have dozens of AI pilots and almost no agents in production
The controls an agent needs before it can act in a regulated institution: identity, permissions, audit trails, and a human accountable for what it does
Why agent deployment is a governance question long before it becomes a technology question
Where agentic AI is delivering in financial services today
What conditions must be met before an agent gains write access to critical areas

Watch Episode 925 with Oliver Bussmann live on Friday, July 17, 2026, at 1:00 PM ET on CXOTalk. Subscribe for key takeaways from every episode and advance notice of live shows. Join this interactive discussion and ask your questions!

Episode Participants

Oliver Bussmann advises enterprises, top-tier consultancies, and financial services companies looking to stay ahead of the digital disruption curve. He has held influential CXO roles across industries, including at UBS, SAP, Allianz, Deutsche Bank, and IBM.

Michael Krigsman is a globally recognized analyst, strategic advisor, and industry commentator known for his deep expertise in business transformation, innovation, and AI leadership.

The First Wave of Enterprise AI: What the Pilots Got Wrong

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:19:00 -0400

Almost every AI pilot succeeds; almost none survive production. Drawing on CXOTalk interviews with leaders at Deloitte, Mozilla, and Insight Partners, we trace the four gaps that stall enterprise AI at scale.

IBM Consulting: The CIO Agenda for AI

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Every CIO is under pressure to move AI from experiments to daily operations. In episode 924 of CXOTalk, Andy Baldwin, Senior Vice President of Consulting Offerings and Growth at IBM Consulting, explains what technology leaders at the world's largest companies are telling IBM and what should be on the CIO's AI agenda for the next 12 months. Baldwin co-authored IBM's forecast that by 2030, AI will not simply support the business model; it will be the business model.

Baldwin oversees AI-enabled offerings across IBM Consulting, a $21 billion business. Before joining IBM in 2025, he spent more than two decades at EY, where he led global client service operations spanning more than 200,000 professionals across 154 countries.

What we cover:

What CIOs of the world's largest companies are telling IBM they want from AI, and the obstacles they keep hitting
Where AI is paying back at scale today, with real examples
The CIO AI agenda for the next 12 months, working backward from IBM's 2030 forecast
What to do about the control gap: IBM finds two-thirds of CIOs accountable for AI systems they do not fully control
How to stop agent sprawl and shadow AI without killing the speed the business wants
How to buy AI capability: asset-based consulting from the buyer's side, build versus rent, and keep the exit door open

Episode Participants

Andy Baldwin is Senior Vice President of Offerings and Growth for IBM Consulting. He leads the company’s asset-based consulting transformation, focused on advancing its AI-enabled offerings and scaling its go-to-market engine.

Michael Krigsman is a globally recognized analyst, strategic advisor, and industry commentator known for his deep expertise in business transformation, innovation, and AI leadership.

Can You Build an Incorruptible AI Company? A Conversation with Eric Ries

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 08:00:00 -0400

An incorruptible AI company stays true to its mission as it grows, rather than drifting toward easy money and squeezing its customers. That's hard for any company, but the pressure is sharpest in AI, where outside capital, fast growth, and the race to monetize all pull against the mission. Eric Ries, creator of the Lean Startup method and author of the new book Incorruptible, has spent decades teaching companies to resist that pull. CXOTalk Episode 923 asks whether an AI company can be built to last.

Ries originated now-standard practices, including the minimum viable product and the build-measure-learn cycle. He co-founded the AI research lab Answer.AI and founded the Long-Term Stock Exchange, a market built to counter short-term pressure on public companies. He has advised AI labs on building mission protection into their corporate structure.

What we cover:

Whether an AI company can take outside investment and still stay independent of its investors' demands
Financial gravity: why business success pulls companies toward extracting more from customers and employees
How to lock a mission into a company's legal structure, and whether those protections hold under real financial pressure
What the mission structures of companies like Anthropic reveal in practice, and where such protections fail
What enterprises should examine in how their AI vendors are funded and governed
Whether mission-driven companies outperform, or whether we only remember the ones that won

Episode Participants

Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology, practiced by individuals and companies around the world. He is the author of New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, The Startup Way, The Leaders Guide (funded by one of the top Kickstarter book campaigns of all time), and Incorruptible.

Michael Krigsman is a globally recognized analyst, strategic advisor, and industry commentator known for his deep expertise in business transformation, innovation, and AI leadership.

McKinsey on Agentic AI: How to Create Business Value

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 08:00:00 -0400

The value of agentic AI comes from redesigning work, roles, and accountability, not from better tools. In CXOTalk Episode 922, Alexander Sukharevsky, Global Leader of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, joins Michael Krigsman to examine why so much AI investment has yielded limited measurable value. The discussion explores how companies can move from pilots and automation to AI-enabled operating models that deliver business impact.

Sukharevsky also takes on the leadership choices behind agentic AI adoption: where workflows must change, how human roles evolve, and what CEOs must own directly. For senior executives, the key concern is not just the power of AI agents but whether the organization can deploy them with sufficient trust, control, and speed to make an impact. an impact.

What we will cover:

Why agentic AI value remains hard to measure despite heavy investment
What leaders misunderstand about capturing value from AI
How to redesign workflows around AI agents rather than attach AI to existing processes
Why AI capability cannot be outsourced
How agentic AI changes professional work, entry-level roles, and the path to expertise
What CEO ownership of AI looks like when balancing trust, control, and speed

Watch CXOTalk Episode 922 with Alexander Sukharevsky, Global Leader of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey.

Episode Participants

Alexander Sukharevsky is a global leader of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, which helps organizations redefine business models and improve performance through the responsible use of AI and technology

Michael Krigsman is a globally recognized analyst, strategic advisor, and industry commentator known for his deep expertise in business transformation, innovation, and AI leadership.

Box CEO Aaron Levie: CIO Advice on Agentic AI and the Enterprise

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:00:00 -0400

AI agents work in demos but stall in production, break existing permission models, and run up costs that CIOs never planned for in traditional IT budgets. Agentic AI in the enterprise has become a direct test for Chief Information Officers.

Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, works with many Fortune 500 companies on exactly these problems and has become a clear voice on what it takes to integrate AI agents into real business workflows. In CXOTalk episode 921, the conversation examines what agents mean for enterprise software, security, and the CIO.

What you will learn:

Why AI agents stall in production, and how to spot the ones that are ready
Why your data and permissions matter more than the model you choose
How agents change enterprise security, and who is liable when one goes wrong
What CIOs should do first, and what to avoid
How to control AI costs as agent usage scales

Episode Participants

Aaron Levie is Chief Executive Officer, Cofounder, and Chairman at Box, which he launched in 2005 with CFO and cofounder Dylan Smith. He is the visionary behind the Box product and platform strategy, incorporating the best of secure content collaboration with an intuitive user experience suited to the way people work today. Aaron leads the company in its mission to transform the way people and businesses work so they can achieve their greatest ambitions. He has served on the Board of Directors since April 2005.

Michael Krigsman is a globally recognized analyst, strategic advisor, and industry commentator known for his deep business transformation, innovation, and AI leadership expertise. He has presented at industry events worldwide and written extensively on the reasons for IT failures. His work has been referenced in the media over 1,000 times and in more than 50 books and journal articles; his commentary on technology trends and business strategy reaches a global audience.

Mozilla CTO: Open Source AI Agents and the Fight for Control

Mon, 25 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400

AI agents operating today inside enterprise systems access data, execute workflows, and make decisions. But the organizations deploying them often have limited visibility into what those agents are doing or whom they serve. It’s a security and privacy nightmare waiting to happen.

Raffi Krikorian, Chief Technology Officer at Mozilla, argues that the platform choices executives make today will determine whether their organizations own their AI infrastructure or become permanently dependent on a small number of technology companies that do.

Krikorian brings an unusual mix of credentials to this conversation. He rebuilt Twitter's core infrastructure at scale, led Uber's first commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles, and served as CTO of the Democratic National Committee before joining Mozilla, the organization that built Firefox and challenged Microsoft's control of the early web. Mozilla is now applying the same open-source strategy to AI agents that it used to break open the browser market two decades ago.

What we will cover:

Why AI agents create a different category of enterprise risk: unlike every prior software tool, agents initiate action rather than wait for instructions
The strategic cost of building agent infrastructure on closed, proprietary platforms, where the vendor controls behavior, memory, guardrails, and roadmap
What Claude Mythos revealed by finding vulnerabilities in critical open-source software, and why the most exposed organizations are not always the best equipped to respond
The governance and permissions gap: no mature standard yet exists for defining what an agent can access, what actions it can take, and how those boundaries get enforced and audited
Why the frontier model race may be the wrong question: how small, locally deployable models running on enterprise hardware change the build-versus-rent calculus for CXOs
What Mozilla is building and what a credible open-source alternative to Big Tech's agent platforms looks like today

Episode Participants

Raffi Krikorian is the Chief Technology Officer at Mozilla, where he leads the organization's open-source AI strategy. His career spans some of the most consequential technology deployments of the past two decades: VP of Platform Engineering at Twitter, Director of Uber's Advanced Technologies Center, where he launched the first commercial self-driving fleet, and first-ever CTO of the Democratic National Committee. He also writes Owners Not Renters, a Substack on open source AI, and contributes regularly to The Atlantic.

Michael Krigsman is a globally recognized analyst, strategic advisor, and industry commentator known for his deep expertise in business transformation, AI, and leadership. He has presented at industry events worldwide and written extensively on the reasons for IT failures. His work has been referenced in the media over 1,000 times and in more than 50 books and journal articles; his commentary on technology trends and business strategy reaches a global audience.

CIO Playbook: Agentic AI in the Enterprise

Sun, 10 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Agentic AI in the enterprise is changing the CIO's role faster than most governance models can keep up with. Systems that plan, act, and call tools on their own now sit within workflows the Chief Information Officer no longer fully owns. Meanwhile, boards continue to expect the same level of accountability for security, risk, and value.

CXOTalk episode 919 offers a practical guide and playbook for CIOs on AI strategy, governance, and enterprise transformation. The conversation pairs technical depth with CIO operating experience to address a specific question: what should a Chief Information Officer do this quarter and this year to lead agentic AI?

What we will cover:

How the CIO mandate shifts from running systems to governing autonomy in an agentic AI enterprise
Managing trust, data, and control when the middle layer of models, agents, and vendors is opaque
A realistic response to shadow AI and "vibe coding" that protects the business without blocking it
Designing human oversight that works at machine speed, before, during, and after AI operates
Building the operating model, governance, and culture for continuous AI disruption
Monday morning moves: concrete actions CIOs can take this quarter

Watch episode 919 with Anthony Scriffignano and Tim Crawford live and ask your questions!. Subscribe to the CXOTalk newsletter for the full schedule of upcoming conversations.

Episode Participants

Tim Crawford is a strategic CIO & advisor who works with large global enterprise organizations across a number of industries, including financial services, healthcare, major airlines, and high-tech. Tim’s work differentiates and catapults organizations in transformative ways by leveraging technology as a strategic lever. Tim takes a provocative, but pragmatic approach to the intersection of business and technology.

Anthony Scriffignano, Ph.D. is an internationally recognized data scientist with experience spanning over 40 years in multiple industries and enterprise domains. Scriffignano has an extensive background in advanced anomaly detection, computational linguistics, and inferential methods, and leverages it as the primary inventor on multiple patents worldwide. He also has extensive experience with various boards and advisory groups.

Michael Krigsman is a globally recognized analyst, strategic advisor, and industry commentator known for his deep business transformation, innovation, and leadership expertise. He has presented at industry events worldwide and written extensively on the reasons for IT failures. His work has been referenced in the media over 1,000 times and in more than 50 books and journal articles; his commentary on technology trends and business strategy reaches a global audience.

Autonomous Software Development at Enterprise Scale: Inside a 1,000-Developer Pilot (with Blitzy)

Tue, 05 May 2026 22:30:00 -0400

Autonomous software development is moving from lab demonstrations into production at large enterprises, and the operating model for engineering organizations is changing with it.

In CXOTalk episode 918, Enrique Ibarra, CIO and head of business transformation at GNP, Mexico's largest insurance company, describes a pilot that delivered 5-10X engineering velocity and completed 80-95% of work autonomously. The conversation covers legacy modernization, change management, and what the shift from coding to prompt engineering means for a 1,000-person developer organization.

GNP runs a mainframe-based core system that has operated for more than 20 years, with a COBOL talent shortage and cost pressures driving the modernization agenda. Ibarra's team tested the Blitzy autonomous development platform across backend migration, frontend upgrades, new feature creation, and security remediation against live code in GitLab and CI/CD pipelines.

In this episode:

How GNP structured an autonomous software development pilot across four distinct use cases
The practical difference between co-pilot "vibe coding" and autonomous agentic platforms
Measured results: 5-10X velocity and 80-95% autonomous task completion
Embedding security, governance, and architectural guardrails inside prompts
How developer roles shift from writing code to directing, editing, and orchestrating
A phased, human-in-the-loop roadmap for CIOs scaling AI-native engineering

Episode Participants

Enrique Ibarra Anaya is CIO and Director of Systems, Transformation, and Business Transformation at GNP Seguros, Mexico's largest insurance company, where he leads enterprise-wide technology, AI, and business transformation initiatives built on a 30-year career in senior roles across insurance, financial services, and telecommunications. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Civil Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from UNAM

Michael Krigsman is a globally recognized analyst, strategic advisor, and industry commentator known for his deep business transformation, AI, and innovation expertise. He has presented at industry events worldwide and written extensively on the reasons for IT failures. His work has been referenced in the media over 1,000 times and in more than 50 books and journal articles; his commentary on technology trends and business strategy reaches a global audience.

AI-Enabled Software Development: AI coding at Global Scale, with Blitzy

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Autonomous software development creates a dilemma for leaders in regulated industries: adopt AI coding at scale or fall behind on product velocity without compromising auditability and code quality. In CXOTalk episode 917, Kris Tokarzewski, Group Chief Technology Information Officer at Vitality, describes how a 14,000-employee multinational insurer is rebuilding its software development life cycle around AI.

Recorded at Blitzy's headquarters, the conversation examines the importance of deterministic code generation, legacy modernization, and the shifting bottlenecks that surface as throughput accelerates.

In this episode:

Why regulated industries require deterministic code, not probabilistic output, from AI coding systems
How Blitzy’s infinite code context (ingestion of codebases, standards, and rules) creates high-quality software
Reverse-engineering legacy systems with autonomous AI and measured 5x acceleration
Optimizing end-to-end SDLC throughput rather than local efficiency
How the roles of requirements engineers, software engineers, and product teams converge
What executive sponsorship and measurement look like when AI spans the entire delivery pipeline

Episode Participants

Kris Tokarzewski is Chief Information Officer of Vitality. Prior to Vitality, he held a CIO position at Discovery Health in South Africa, where he was responsible for the health division and group enterprise systems. Prior to Discovery, Kris held the position of CIO at Netcare Limited for seven years. Kris has 15 years of healthcare experience, 23 years of IT and 32 years of business experience.

Agentic AI and Enterprise Software in 2026

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Agentic AI is reshaping enterprise software faster than most CIOs, CFOs, and software vendors are prepared for. Buyers want to know what actually works in production. SaaS vendors want to know whether their business model survives the shift. On CXOTalk episode 916, Praveen Akkiraju, Managing Director at Insight Partners, joins Michael Krigsman to examine the state of agentic AI across enterprise deployments, pricing models, and software architecture.

Praveen has led more than two decades of enterprise technology operating and investing work, including prior CEO roles at VCE and Viptela. At Insight Partners, he focuses on automation, data platforms, DevOps, security, and infrastructure software, with direct visibility into dozens of agentic AI companies now reaching first renewal cycles.

What we will cover:

What is working in production today across support, finance, IT, and coding use cases
How agentic AI is pressuring traditional seat-based software economics
Which SaaS categories are most vulnerable to disruption, and which remain durable
Why fewer than 10% of enterprises have scaled agents to real value, and what separates pilots from production
How pricing is evolving across seat-based, usage-based, and outcome-based models
What buyers and builders should expect from the 2026 agentic AI shakeout

Episode Participants

Praveen Akkiraju is Managing Director at Insight Partners, where he invests in companies challenging the status quo in agentic AI, data platforms, DevOps, security, and infrastructure software. Earlier in his career, he served as CEO of VCE, a cloud infrastructure company that became one of the fastest to reach $1 billion in revenue, and as CEO of Viptela, where he grew the enterprise SaaS platform to over $100 million in run-rate revenue. Before his operating roles, he worked at Cisco on foundational protocols and platforms underlying the modern internet.

How AI Swarms Weaponize Disinformation

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Malicious AI swarms pose a direct threat to information integrity, institutional trust, and the reliability of AI training data. These coordinated networks of autonomous agents, built on large language models, have moved from research concern to documented reality: influence campaigns using AI-generated content targeted elections in Taiwan, India, and the United States in 2024.

CXOTalk episode 915 explores the impact of AI swarms with Daniel Thilo Schroeder, Research Scientist at SINTEF Digital, and Jonas R. Kunst, Professor of Communication at BI Norwegian Business School.

Schroeder and Kunst co-led a 22-author study published in Science in January 2026 that maps these threats and outlines specific defenses. Their framework explicitly distinguishes between what is empirically established and what remains uncertain, strengthening its value for decision-makers.

What we will cover:

How AI swarms differ structurally from earlier bot networks, and why previous influence operations are an unreliable baseline for assessing current risk
The "LLM Grooming" threat: how adversaries flood the web with fabricated content designed to corrupt AI training data at the next model retraining cycle
How platform business models create misaligned incentives, where inauthentic accounts inflate engagement metrics that drive revenue, sustaining the threat and complicating governance
Why disrupting the commercial market for influence operations is more effective than regulatory mandates alone, and what platform providers and enterprise technology buyers must do in response to these threats
What defensible AI governance looks like in practice: detection mandates, provenance standards, and the specific risks of government-controlled counter-messaging tools
How synthetic consensus exploits the psychology of social proof, making executives, employees, and citizens vulnerable even when they believe they are skeptical

Episode Participants

Daniel Thilo Schroeder is a research scientist working at the intersection of AI, computational social science, and digital risk. His research examines how emerging technologies reshape information ecosystems, democratic resilience, and societal security, with a particular focus on coordinated AI-mediated influence operations and multi-agent dynamics in online environments. He combines large-scale social media and behavioral data analysis with simulation-based approaches to study how coordinated campaigns spread, how influence systems evolve, and how institutions can respond.

Jonas R. Kunst is Professor of Communication at BI Norwegian Business School and Professor of Cultural and Community Psychology at the University of Oslo. His research examines misinformation and conspiracy theories, violent extremism, and the psychological implications of artificial intelligence. He previously was a Fulbright scholar at Harvard and a postdoctoral fellow at Yale. His work has been published in Science, Nature Communication, Nature Human Behavior, PNAS, Psychological Science, and other leading journals.

HPE's CFO: Making Agentic AI Work in Finance

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Making agentic AI work in finance involves addressing a core challenge: finance relies on precision and control, while AI depends on probability and constant adaptation. At HPE, the CFO's office has advanced AI from purely advisory dashboards to actively handling real financial tasks, such as accounts payable, credit, and collections. In CXOTalk Episode 914, Marie Myers, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, explains how her team established the governance, trust frameworks, and talent development necessary to make this shift successful.

Myers led the development of Alfred, HPE's internal agentic AI platform, and oversaw the reskilling of 3,000 finance employees to build and operate AI agents. Her experience offers a practitioner's perspective on what it takes to move from AI experimentation to AI execution within a global finance organization.

What we will cover:

Where agentic AI can act independently in finance operations, and where human oversight must remain
How to establish trust in AI-generated financial outputs when models produce probabilistic rather than deterministic results
What accountability looks like when a system, not a person, performs the work
How to allocate capital to AI when technology evolves faster than the investment cycle
Whether industry AI demand reflects real economic value or circular financing among major players
How to develop the next generation of finance leaders when AI handles the analysis that junior staff once performed

Episode Participants

Marie Myers joined Hewlett Packard Enterprise as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer in January 2024. She is a strategic and visionary CFO known for making financial decisions that fuel innovation and performance. Marie most recently served as CFO of HP Inc. since 2021, where she led the company’s Finance organization and was responsible for all aspects of financial operations. Marie previously served as CFO at robotic process automation company UiPath and was HP’s finance lead for the 2015 separation of Hewlett-Packard Company, which resulted in the creation of HPE.