AI Impact

Adoption without accountability is just expensive experimentation. Smriti Kirubanandan, Managing Director of Enterprise AI Transformation at Innovaccer, reframes the question every enterprise leader spending on AI should be asking.

Smriti tells Russ how her team cut a 32% claims denial rate to 11% in 14 months, recovering $23 million in one year. She breaks down why data quality must come before model performance, why ...

Getting tens of thousands of employees to adopt AI comes down to trust, skills built for each role, and change that moves top down and bottom up at the same time.

Matthew Smart, Director, AI Strategy & Business Transformation at Cardinal Health, joins Russ to break down agent hype, why token pricing broke ROI math, pitching value over cost savings, and treating data readiness as the real work under every AI use cas...

Fanatics runs 1,000 websites on a single platform, scaling to peak orders per minute when a team wins a championship. Sashanka Vishnuvajhala, SVP of Engineering, tells Ameya how AI reshaped the way his teams organize, ship, and review code at Fanatics.

Three-person triads now tackle complex customer-facing projects in rapid iterations. Intent specs replaced traditional JIRA tickets, and the increased throughput exposed...

Pinching pennies on AI tokens is how AI transformation fails. Michael Laudon, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Quest Software, argues the real question is whether that spend produces measurable output, and no single metric answers it.

Michael joins Russ to unpack how Quest runs its AI transformation, from a dedicated AI center of excellence to a governance model tied to business objectives and a deliberate break with the past...

Coinbase drove its token usage up while cutting inference costs by more than half. Kyle Cesmat, who runs Coinbase's Agent Experience team, explains the architecture behind it, from an internal LLM gateway that routes their inference to cache hit rates held above 85 percent.

He walks Ameya through his goal of moving 60 percent of engineering work to cloud agents, treating them as auditable service accounts inside a regu...

Most AI deployments stall because leaders treat the tool as the whole investment. Priyanka Vergadia, argues technology is only 20 percent of the equation, and the returns show up once you fund people, training, and change management.

Priyanka, Senior Director of AI Transformation at Microsoft, breaks down her 10/20/70 budget split, why documenting processes beats chasing tools, and how hackathons surface the use cases that actually ...

Iain Hassall sorts AI spend into three buckets, and the trickiest is AI embedded in your own product, where cost basis and margins get murky. His warning to finance leaders is to lock in pricing and packaging before shipping AI features, or risk buying a dollar of inference and selling it for 80 cents.

Iain tells Russ how Netlify went from 14,000 to 40,000 daily signups, why multi-year deals have all but disappeared, a...

Tope Iluyomade has been working in AI since 2004, starting with robotics and reinforcement learning, and has spent two decades advising and leading technology inside large enterprises as both CIO and CISO before moving into executive advisory work. In this conversation, he breaks down why most AI governance fails at the cultural level rather than the technical one, how the CIO-CFO conversation has fundamentally shifted from deploym...

Vertiv builds the power and cooling infrastructure that makes the AI boom physically possible — their hyperscaler customers spend hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure every year. So what does the CIO of that company think about AI inside his own organization?

Russ Fradin talks with Mike Giresi, CIO of Vertiv, about what AI adoption actually looks like inside a company with 30,000 employees in over 100 countries.

Mike has r...

Bask Iyer has held the global CIO seat at Johnson & Johnson, Honeywell, VMware, and Dell, and now advises over a dozen AI companies including Zoom and ThoughtSpot. In this episode, Russ gets into how enterprise technology decisions actually get made, and how AI is exposing the real cost of CIOs, CFOs, and heads of HR operating without a shared accountability model.

Bask makes the case that most AI pilots are theater, that cost a...

Dan Zhang has been CFO of ClickUp for five years, with an unusually broad remit spanning finance, accounting, legal, HR, and operations. That vantage point shapes everything he shares here, from his 2x2 vendor evaluation framework built around autonomy and attribution, to his three-bucket system for measuring AI ROI across a finance team, to the exact methodology his team used to shift skeptical analysts from "I don't...

Jesse Vincent is the creator of Superpowers, the most installed skills framework for Claude Code, with over 100,000 GitHub stars in its first five months. Superpowers isn’t a prompt or a collection of tips—it’s a complete software development methodology built for a world where agents do the building. Jesse has been shipping open source for 30 years—he created Request Tracker, led Perl 5, built K-9 Mail (now...

Karl Mosgofian built his career in IT from the ground up, starting as a teenager and eventually serving as CIO at Gainsight, where he watched AI reshape what the CIO role actually means inside a company. In this episode, he and Russ Fradin get into the mechanics of how great CIOs operate, why the CFO relationship matters more than reporting lines, and what changes when agents start doing real work inside your org. The conver...

Ajay Sabhlok, CIO and Chief Data Officer at Rubrik, runs one of the more disciplined AI governance operations you'll hear about from a practitioner at this level. He set up a formal AI council with his CFO, co-founder, head of engineering, and general counsel to review every tool request coming into the organization, and he walks through exactly how that structure works in practice, including how Legal now publishes a list of condi...